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March 24, 2009

This seems a bit hard-to-swallow (, , )

by fluffy at 10:18 AM
Yet another hand-wavey "cloud" video game console, like the Phantom except this one doesn't even have any game processing in the console itself — supposedly it'll somehow have all the games playing on a remote server farm and have the video streamed in realtime to the console. Call me skeptical.

Also, money quote, from "Sid:"

Can you imagine living in a futuristic society where men don't need PS3s and Xboxes to play insanely gorgeous games? Someone pinch me, I feel like I'm living in a George Orwell book.
I don't think Sid has actually read any George Orwell.

Comments

#11855 03/24/2009 11:18 am
This is like a irony in songs, right?
#11856 03/24/2009 11:42 am
This likely comes from an "anything is possible if you try!" marketing types. In a few years, he'll be telling his investors that his failure to deliver is due to the technical staff's incompetence.
#11857 03/24/2009 11:53 am
Key points:

- Claimed lag of under 1ms, even over the Internet. Good luck with THAT.
- The CEO was one of the cofounders of XBAND.
#11858 03/24/2009 02:10 pm
You can already play Crysis or any other PC game "on" a PS3 using software that essentially uses the PS3 as a glorified video output device. (The name escapes me right now.) It is, of course, completely unusable on anything but a gigabit LAN.

My suspicion is that the demo for these journalists did something much like that.
#11860 03/24/2009 02:15 pm
Not to mention that something has to be playing the actual game. You've got to have Crysis running somewhere, and that somewhere has to have the hardware to do it. You're not going to be serving video to hundreds of users per server! Which calls into question the business model...you're going to be spending as much money, per user, on servers as a damn console would cost in the first place.
#11866 03/24/2009 10:28 pm
Neillparatzo:
- Claimed lag of under 1ms, even over the Internet. Good luck with THAT.

Not sure where you got that from, but (according to the announcement tonight*) it's wrong. The 1ms latency is what's introduced by the video encoding, not the total end-to-end latency.

*: All the people who were publishing stuff about it earlier today? Yeah, they weren't supposed to be talking about it yet.
#11869 03/25/2009 12:37 am
This is some first-class probably-bullshit right here. It'll be really awesome if it turns out to be real but I am, obviously, more than a little skeptical.
#11873 03/25/2009 03:42 am
I actually know a couple of the people involved. It's quite real.
#11874 03/25/2009 08:04 am
I'll believe it when I see it.

They may think it's real and they may think they've solved many difficult problems but until it's actually deployed and running in real life I have no more reason to believe in it than to believe in [insert thing which a lot of people are excited about if it's true but the jury is still out as to its truthfulness].
#11876 03/25/2009 11:39 am
I see three fundamental problems with this:

1) The bandwidth required to transfer video data from a running game to a screen is far too large for most current ISPs. (From my home, standard SD video services like Hulu fill up my available bandwidth.)

2) The lag between the servers and the average home will always be significant. (For instance, from my home, I get 100 ms of lag from Google, who presumably has the best servers in the business.)

3) The processing power to run games is high. Who pays for all the servers?

Those problems seem to me insurmountable. You are never going to achieve what a console can do with local processing power and the bandwidth of an hdmi cable.
#13461 10/13/2010 08:21 am
So, OnLive has been out for a while, and at least from installing the client, the video streaming aspect of it seems pretty good. I haven't tried playing a game on it yet, though (I'm not going to pay $5 for a 3-day rental, but I'm not going to pay $50 for a full game either). They need free samples and demos and such.