Games in the cloud.

Edit: Apparently, they're using 720p video. Which really isn't high enough. That's about 4Mb/s... see below

If you're a nerd, you may have heard the big gaming news recently. A company called OnLive claims to have a completely new take on gaming. Basically, instead of installing a game on your PC, and running it on your hardware, you just stream video of it. So your control inputs are transmitted to them, and the video is piped back to you. Presumably, they have a way of compensating for the lag in transmitting your control actions to their servers, and then sending the video back. I have to say, this is interesting.

As I referenced previously, I don't like the idea of being entirely dependent on the cloud for my PC to work. But any geek that's spent hundreds of dollars on a video card, only to see a game come out a month later that completely owns the brand new card, is a potential customer here. Because all the rendering and such is being done off site, your PC only needs to be powerful enough to display hi-res video (you can also use a TV with some little streaming box they have). Of course, you'll also need a crazy fast internet connection. These days, even on an online game, you're only transmitting a small amount of data; all the textures and physics are being produced on your machine or console.

That's the problem though. Most people's connection won't be able to cut it. A serious gamer will want HD level resolutions. That's what you get used to when you buy these expensive graphics cards and run games locally. Most gamers these days are running wide screen resolutions with 1050 or 1200 lines (sort of like how HDTV is 1080 lines). Transmitting that amount of video data takes up about 9-10Mb/second. That's a lot. I just don't think you'll be able to get gamers to accept a lower quality image; especially if you are promoting all these cutting edge games. Take away the eye candy, and honestly, a lot of them aren't very compelling.

With various internet providers clamping down on "excessive" usage, this whole idea may be dead before it gets off the ground. As an example, Comcast has a 250GB/month usage cap. A sustained 10Mb/second stream of video (i.e. 1.25MB/s) means that you'd use about 4.4GB per hour of play. After about 50 hours of game play, your cap has been reached for a whole month. That's not even including ANY other usage. Comcast has a fairly generous (but still lame cap). Some ISPs have lower caps like 100 or even 50GB. At that rate you'd run through you cap (if you don't do anything else on the connection) in 22 and 11.3 hours respectively. A serious gamer could easily run through even the Comcast cap. When you add in other normal uses of a connection, the picture becomes grim.

I signed up for the beta anyway. I'm just interested... even though I'm skeptical.

Update: They say that they're using 720p, so at 4Mb/s that's less data. And also much less impressive looking. You're looking at about 125 hours of just game play on the Comcast cap. More reasonable, but still a lot of data when you figure in other uses. I don't know that a lot of gamers will be willing to go down to 720 lines from 1050 or 1200.