Just been watching a video of OnLive, the new game service that was launched at GDC. Ive got to say, this could be a game changer. I read about it a few days ago and although I was intrigued, I was also a bit sceptical but watching the video and finding out what these guys had really come up with has opened my mind. There will be time for a PS4 and new Nvidia/ATI consumer cards and maybe even a PS5…but I think that could be the end of the current model for gaming.

What OnLive seem to have made serious attempts at cracking is video compression that is buffer and lag free (well, 1ms). When you split up what these guys are actually offering it seems all seem very plausible. Streaming games from a server isnt a new idea – streammygame.com has been around for a few years and although the results weren’t amazing even in a LAN, it was just using normal hardware – nothing custom there, just custom software. Then you think of steaming video. You may think of YouTube with its low quality videos and buffering but think of IPTV and Cable. Homechoice was streaming SD video over a broadband connection to my TV years ago, and now over Cable I can watch on demand HD video pretty quickly which is basically streamed across the fibre from their servers.

So if these guys have monster servers with custom hardware which spits out the compressed video as fast as it gets fed it, it’s not a leap of the imagination to have it streamed down to your TV with controls sent back the other way to change what happens in the game, and therefore what you see on your screen. The only issue here is guaranteed bandwidth with your ISP. I’ve got a 10mbps Virgin Media cable connection, but there are times this goes a lot slower – but that is Virgin Media’s choice. If they wanted to guarantee me a certain amount of speed and bandwidth to use something like OnLive they could do that. Homechoice used LLU at my local exchange, so they had more control over my broadband connection, which meant they could guarantee that at least 2mpbs was reserved for the TV signal which came down over the wire. If something like OnLive takes off, I can see this changing the way companies offer their services. Maybe you’d need to pay more for guaranteed speed/bandwidth to make it work and work well, but I’m sure an extra £10/month for the ‘Game’ service on top of my cable TV, phone and internet bill would be welcomed if it gave you the performance you needed.

Early reports from hands-on articles show that this is however in its relative infancy. The front-end does what it says it should – its slick streamed on a low end laptop. You can view other peoples games and launch your own game with ease. Lag is sometimes not noticable but other times it is there a bit – e.g. spinning round quickly in Bioshock. Hardcore CSS gamers etc.. will probably not touch it until that is ironed out. There are also evidence of compression on screen, e.g. patchy artefacts. It’s not enough to stop you playing – and I remember that kind of thing watching TV on Homechoice now and again – but it’s enough to make you want to be playing it on your own hardware where it’s all pinsharp! Again, as the technology improves I can see that becoming less and less of an issue, but how long that could take is anyone’s guess.

It may be there are two tiers of gamers for a while – people who want to just play a game casually and can put up with the odd bit of lag or artefacts and those who won’t touch it until it’s just as good as their console or powerhouse PC at home. Ulitmately though I can see games going the way of movies, which is what they are beginning to rival in terms of $’s. They are both a form of entertainment. When I get the latest blockbuster film on DVD, I don’t have to make sure I’ve stuck a new graphics card in my DVD player so I can see all the special fx – that’s all done by the film companies on their powerful servers when they render them and edit them together. Wouldn’t it be great with games where games companies only have to worry about getting the game to run exactly how they want you to see it on the OnLive servers – as for the consumers, we just want to be enterainted. We log on to a service such as OnLive, select the latest game, and we’re playing it and being entertained with no worry of hardware.

This is defintely the future, and I think I’ve just seen a glimpse of it. Other areas of computing are moving this way – virtual desktops, application steaming etc.. Why get a powerful PC to run the latest version of Photoshop, when I could run it in the cloud and have no difference in useability running on a little solid state device. Then it becomes all about what’s ultimately important to us as users – software. Hardware then becomes something which will compete on form and design, not function. The function at our end will be fixed. The development will happen at the back-end.

The whole issue of 3D graphics seemed to be the missing bit of the puzzle when looking at the movement of software into the cloud. OnLive has brought that vision a little closer to reality…