Middleditch Littlebitch

OnITSALIVE!

Where have I been?  Why did I not know about this?  Why has no one been talking more insanely about OnLive?  I think maybe I heard about it last year at GDC 09 and thought it was just some lame monthly subscription thing for second rate crapware games that only noobs and mothers would buy.  But now?  Now I’ve done my research and now I’m officially excited, skeptical, and undeniably curious.

So.  OnLive.  What is it?  For those of you who want to see for yourself, watch last year’s demonstration and conference here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGdecNDDr9g

If you didn’t watch it or did and need someone to recap it, here’s what OnLive is.  OnLive is a service in which you pay a monthly fee to access remote computers/servers that let you watch you play a game you’re playing somewhere else.  Say what?  Chill, baby, imma essplain.  

So, you sign up for this service.  They have a bank of computers and servers somewhere in the country with a library of games installed and ready to play.  Connecting to your account, you can rent or buy these games.  That doesn’t mean you download them, order them, install them, or anything like that.  That means those remote computers elsewhere in the country play those games and stream the footage directly to you.  You’re inputs are sent to that computer, and the repercussions are sent back in compressed video.  So literally, it’s like watching yourself play a video game.  Welcome to the fucking future.

The whole thing is completely dependent on broadband internet.  So much so that you’ll need at least a 5mb connection so you can get a full HD quality feed (capped, by the way, at 720p).  The guy in the video explains it the best, but essentially up until now, the algorithms used in standard compressed video (like you streaming a video from the internet) have been inefficient and poorly designed from the beginning.  So what these jokers did was create new code, new software, even new hardware, to allow an ultra fast rate of compression and the streaming of data with lags completely imperceptible to humans.  Microsecond lag, whereas before you’d experience up to 3/4 of a second lag as you wait for your video to load.  They’ve been working on this, by the way, for a mere seven years.  What does that all mean?  Madness.  If it works like they say it does, total and unbridled madness.

That means that their own suped up computers will play all the games you could ever want.  That means that you can play any 360 game, any PS3 game, and PC game you want.  And get this: you can play it on an entry level computer.  Any computer.  Mac included.  Since your computer isn’t actually playing the game, since you’re just watching and interacting with what you’re watching (because it’s being actually “played” on another computer), you can play these games on anything that’s capable of downloading and uncompressing video at the required speeds.  So that means you can play Crysis on your MacBook.  They even have a little mini-console that you can buy that’ll hook up to your TV so you can game in the living room.  Not only that, it has these “cloud servers” that store your content and saved games, so that if you’re playing your game on your TV console, you can save and later load that very same game up on your laptop.  And, because the SKU (the “language which OnLive speaks) is so simple, it only takes a few weeks to transfer any existing game you know and love into the OnLive required format.  So that makes the addition of yet another platform not really a hurdle for game developers, as the transition is all very easy, and there is no new creative software or code anyone would need to learn.  And as soon as developers start making games custom made for OnLive things could get even more intense.  Why?  Because when things start to get streamlined and refined for a specific system things always get better, and also the developers will be programming a game designed for the amazingly fast computers that OnLive has stored on-site, not your mom’s Dell.  It also eliminates piracy completely because all the games have to go directly through the OnLive service.

This means that you won’t need to buy that new console.  This means that I won’t need to buy that $7000 super gaming computer.  This means you can play those top shelf video games on high settings without buying any more hardware.  This means that I will lose even more of my life to video games.

Now, all this doesn’t come without a major degree of “yeah right”.  I’ve been conned by hype before.  I remember when the Wii was coming out, I was quoting Satoru Iwata bullshit of how graphics don’t matter and how the Wii was going to put players inside the game, and what video games are really about is quick accessible fun without any actual depth and actual fucking GAME.  FUCK YOU NINTENDO!  All you do is rehash tired brands and do sequels based on cheesy characters — your only gift to gaming was getting 80-year-olds and children to play half-baked dime-a-dozen party games that don’t deserve to be set on fire and shoved up your kitschy Japanese asshole!!!!!!  

Sorry.  Off-topic.

But seriously, there’s a lot to be concerned about it.  First, will it really work the way they say it will?  We’ve all tried streaming a movie on Netflix, and most of the time the video quality is like a bad YouTube clip, with blocks and pixels a plenty.  They say it’s completely different, but either they’re lying or we’re about to embark on a completely new age of gaming.  Also, I doubt the big three consoles are going down without a fight.  Competition will most likely come back fiercely once everyone’s played catch-up.  Will this impact the industry like they say it will?  Will everyone just drop their beloved consoles and PCs to come rushing to this new service?  Not if it doesn’t work exactly the way they say it does.  I’m a hard core gamer, but even casual players would scoff at graphics that appear less vibrant than their console counterparts, or if even very rarely things got a little blocky due to compression.  That bugs a lot of people.  That’s why people shell out the extra thousands to get 1080p resolution and BlueRay drives and all sorts of shit.  We’re a high fidelity bunch, us humans.  And when there’s something that’ll give us the same thing in a better way, even if it costs more, we’ll probably go out and buy it with our big American novelty-sized dollar bills.

But.  If it does work…man.  We are literally on the cusp of everything changing.  Of a singular and unified way of gaming, across all income levels, all players, all platforms, all over the place.  There aren’t a lot of jokes and zingers in this post because dammit, this shit is for real.

To lighten to mood let me leave you with a picture that may be yesterday’s news but to me is the best thing I’ve seen all day, maybe ever in my life: