Further thoughts on OnLive

While the idea of PC gaming's barriers to entry (expensive graphics cards mainly) going away with the invention of the OnLive service, as well as a host of other pretty ingenious features like being able to pick up where you left off from any computer with out moving save files around, it does beg to question how all this will end up in the real world.

One of the features that OnLive promises is hi-defintion gaming on any console through the use of the servers that have embedded graphics processing chips. While they not only process the game data, they also handle rendering the graphics, something your computer used to have to do client side. But it only works if you have around 5MBps download speeds from your ISP. I do subscribe to Comcast for internet and I can tell you that I rarely get 5MBps speeds for my 6MBps subscription service. Tonight I tried a few download tests and got a couple 4.7MBps, a 5.2MBps and a 3.5MBps all using DLSReports.com. I have a feeling that if your computer's connection doesn't maintain the required bandwidth, your session could be topped out at the lowly S-Video-level graphics, a 480p resolution.

Secondly, a lot of ISPs like Comcast have started capping bandwidth since the days of online video services like Netflix have started eating up a lot of precious wire capacity. A game on a DVD can be as big as 7GBs. Assuming that you access everything on the disk once, that's around 7-9 GBs worth of data. In the real world of games, you play levels over, race tracks over and over and over, play online matches even more. The amount of data that an Xbox reads and re-reads off of a disk over a gamer's interest in the game must be pretty substantial. Comcast's monthly cap is at a beefy 250GBs, so that's about 45 fully packed games. But you throw in normal internet usage (we're on our laptops quite a bit during the evenings and weekends), Netflix streaming, our Vonage internet based phone service and whatever else we use the interwebs for and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few people out there get cut off and are unable to use the service (or their phone) for a couple days. 5MBps will eat up 250,000MB pretty fast when your talking about hours of gaming a day (347MB per day).

Right now, even Wikipedia's criticism section on OnLive is not making the company look very good. Extraordinary promises. Smoke and mirrors public presentation. Little information on their website. I want this product so bad and everything they claim to be so true. I'm still keeping my hopes up despite all the turbulence they are stirring up in the tech/gaming community.