Onlive thoughts - Will it fail, will it flourish? Game quality? Is it worth it?

I've been playing some games on Onlive (mainly only paid for games because they had a Labor Day sale, everything 50% off woohoo!!) and I have to say it's not too horrible in my opinion. I had my doubts about the service even working, but it seems these guys did they're homework, at least most of it. Very little lag from control input to action on screen, virtually unnoticable. Decent graphics, would look better in native resolution, but you know your only getting 720p when you sign up, which is about what you get from PS3 on most games anyway.

Having said that, is resolution really THAT important? Sure it will give you a crisp high contrast picture but the point of a game is to play, not too oogle over how many pixels you can push out on super high settings. Sure if you dished out 600 bucks on a new graphics card, it better be able to push out the goods, but if you sign up for onlive you wouldn't have even needed to pay for that over charged card in the first place. And I know there's an arguement about the saticfaction of building a hardcore gaming pc so you can be proud of your big, fancy, shiny, sparkling, light emitting, overpowered, piece of hardware that can play anything that comes out in the next 6 months, and I get that. But, there are lots of people who don't have the money, or prefer to not defer that much of their cash flow into a piece of equipment that has no return value, perhaps spending it on things like paying bills, or unpaid parking tickets, maybe even food.

Anyway, there are plenty of reasons people can't afford to invest in a high-end machine to which would likely benefit from this service, granted they would need a reliable broadband internet connection. To add on that last note, I've rarely noticed a drop in video quality due to loss of bandwidth, which will usually occur, most likely, during peek hours on your isp, generally the afternoon. But honestly what do you want from an actively compressed streaming video gameplay service? Anyway, feel free to argue with any of my points, and snarl your nose snobbishly at my opinions, or just add your own thoughts as you see fit.

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Knowing the onlive maker and that its really being pushed to be part of a IsP package (like getting bought by AT&T and be part of the Uverse package), I think it will fail in the US. ISP's do not like granting good connection to people even if they are paying for said connection. I tried onlive. Within 5 hrs of playing, my connection went to crap. Turns out I was bandwidth limited by my ISP (Cox cable) and my 8mb connection was cut to 2mb. All that upload and download you are doing is something ISP's hate. It just will not work well in this day and age in America.

On another note, graphically this is ok. It reminds me of watching a 720p youtube video. Sometimes it looks fine but others the compression of the video makes things look horrible. It would work nicely for rpg's or games without alot of movements but after trying dirt 2, it fails on the pinpoint movements needed. Its a service that is way ahead of its time.

Space out your words into paragraphs. People do not like a wall of text.

jedikevin2

Thank you.

Space out your words into paragraphs. People do not like a wall of text.

Knowing the onlive maker and that its really being pushed to be part of a IsP package (like getting bought by AT&T and be part of the Uverse package), I think it will fail in the US. ISP's do not like granting good connection to people even if they are paying for said connection. I tried onlive. Within 5 hrs of playing, my connection went to crap. Turns out I was bandwidth limited by my ISP (Cox cable) and my 8mb connection was cut to 2mb. All that upload and download you are doing is something ISP's hate. It just will not work well in this day and age in America.

On another note, graphically this is ok. It reminds me of watching a 720p youtube video. Sometimes it looks fine but others the compression of the video makes things look horrible. It would work nicely for rpg's or games without alot of movements but after trying dirt 2, it fails on the pinpoint movements needed. Its a service that is way ahead of its time.

jedikevin2

I agree the compression does get a bit frazzled with quick movements. I also agree that if the service is pushed into a package deal with a specific isp it will be a bad move, and I use Time Warner's Roadrunner as my ISP and have had few problems with bandwidth cap, which I beleive is like 10 or 12 MB/s. Oddly playing Mafia II driving through the city and all, wasn't as affected by the compression from what I could notice, but Borderlands in first person has some limitation.

Nobody even has plain old streaming video to the point where it's as good as dedicated television service and they think people want to play games that way. :lol:StopThePresses

I agree -- if we can't even watch a 3 minute long video on YouTube without some amount of loading, how can we hope to stream a live game video without lag?

The lag is going to cost the player -- say you're playing Halo 2 (or another game where you can die very quickly) on multiplayer, your video gets lag, and you wind up dead when it evens out.

It's ok, but kinda overpriced. I always thought their selling point was to let you run a game 'maxed' on any system. When I found out that it was only 720p and typically low settings, I was sorely disappointed. I got into the beta, but never purchased anything because it would have been a complete waste. I'm fairly certain a $400+ PC can easily run the same settings as Onlive, if not better. Unless they improve the quality of the graphics/resolution, I think Onlive will fall flat on its face.