OnLive Might Change the Gaming Industry with Cloud Computing

I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, but I'm serious when I say that a company you have never heard of, called OnLive, may have come up with the best innovation the gaming industry has seen in a long time. This Palo Alto-based company has created a way for you to play games that require a lot of graphics and processing hardware, but without said hardware. They've made it possible to run the newest, graphics-intensive games on something as simple as a netbook or just a TV.

So the next question you'll be asking is "HOW?! WHEN?! And for HOW MUCH?!"



Well OnLive answered one of those questions (okay, one and a half) at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco where they showed the OnLive system in action playing 16 high-end titles. And before you ask, yes, Crysis was one of them and it looked good too.

The OnLive system is a small box that connects to the OnLive servers via a broadband connection. OnLive runs the games on their servers, with all the hardware needed to run the games at max levels, and then uses their special video compression magic to send it to your TV, computer, netbook, whatever. OnLive can even display at 720p HD quality. Your computer doesn't need a nice graphics card, a big hard drive, tons of memory or any of the other hardware staples associated with gaming.
Here's some video of OnLive where you can see Crysis playing on a simple Dell Studio 15. Head's up: it's really long, but the interesting stuff happens about 15 minutes into it.



Of course, you do need a good internet connection that's both fast and reliable, but we're talking about speeds that most people have by now. In order to get HD resolution your connection needs to be at least 5 megabits per second, but for standard video feed you only need 1.5 mbps, which is well within the reach of most Americans.

Another advantage of the OnLive system is that both Windows (XP and Vista) and Mac users can use it. You give the inputs via gamepad, mouse, keyboard, etc. and OnLive does all the processing on their side and just sends the video back to you so it seems like you're playing the game right on your TV or computer. Basically, OnLive has taken all this talk about cloud computing and applied it to gaming. Yes!

While OnLive skirted questions about price and release date, we know that the device will cost less than a Wii ($250), might possibly be free with an OnLive service contract, and will be out some time in winter. And one of the most exciting parts of the whole deal is that many of the major game studios (EA, Ubisoft, Atari, Eidos, Warner Bros., THQ, Take-Two, Codemasters, Epic Games) are on board to offer games, so the catalogue should be pretty good.



OnLive envisions their gaming system rivaling the major gaming consoles out there and offering a new online interactive experience by allowing people to game with each other online without anything more than an internet connection. This sounds fantastic for PC gamers because it means they don't have to keep up with the ever increasing hardware needs of new games. However, I question whether this will affect the console industry because people with a console can already play with other people with nothing more than an internet connection. This will be a great way for people who don't yet have a console to get in on the gaming for much cheaper, but OnLive will have to have a huge user base and a massive game library to convert the hardcore Xbox and PS3 gamers.

Regardless, OnLive certainly looks to create quite a splash in the gaming world.

For more information on consoles, see the video game consoles review site. For more tech and entertainment news, check the TTR Tech News Blog:

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