BFWGaming

Last week’s reveal of the upcoming OnLive streaming online gaming service remains a hot bed of discussions on the Internet. Most of that discussion revolves around opinions that the service won’t work as advertised by its founders. One of the companies who expressed doubts this week is Sony. In a chat with Edge Online its Playstation RP rep Patrick Seybold asked, “What will be sacrificed when you [put OnLive] into a real world environment where multiple devices are plugged into one broadband connection?” He also questioned what the final price would be for OnLive to the consumer.

Gamesindustry.biz also has comments about OnLive from outspoken Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli who states that they investigated if such a service could be launched a couple of years ago. However due to current barriers in technology they determined such a service wouldn’t be viable until 2013 at the earliest.

For its part OnLive’s founder Steve Perlman understands the doubters, saying, “They damn well better be skeptical.” In a chat with our sister site Joystiq he says, ” . . . we knew people were going to be skeptical. And they should be, you know.” However his claims that their seven year development time in stealth mode allowed them to develop the video compression technology and servers to make OnLive work. He added that this summer’s planned beta test for Onlive should allow the public to discover the technology for themselves.

Go to Source: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/04/02/onlive-continues-to-get-skeptical-comments-founder-still-confid/

Play advance games with high end graphics like Crysis at full features in a regular PC. What’s the catch? You need a really fast internet connection. Read on for more…

There’s yet another entry in the already crowded list of PC game online services that will be formally introduced at the Game Developers Conference this week. However info about the service, called OnLive, has already started to hit the Internet. And from the looks of things this venture, if it is successful, could change the face of PC gaming and perhaps console gaming as well.

VentureBeat reports that OnLive has developed a variation on “cloud computing” that will enable PC owners with broadband connections to play advanced PC games with high end graphics with little to no downloading. All of the processing for the game itself is handled via a server farm and is then sent to a PC with an advanced compression technology (although exact details on how all this works is still something of a mystery). The service is scheduled launch before the end of the year with a monthly fee (a la Xbox Live) and a number of publishers such as Electronic Arts, THQ, Take-Two Interactive, Codemasters, Eidos, Atari, Warner Bros., Epic Games and Ubisoft plan to offer games for the service.

The big question is: Will this actually work? The company plans to show 16 games played live using the OnLive service at GDC this week. If this takes off not only could console companies be concerned but also high end PC game rig companies might be affected. Since PCs with even poor hardware could run high-end games via OnLive there may not be a need for such rigs anymore . . .

Source: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/03/24/gdc-2009-will-onlive-change-pc-gaming-as-we-know-it/