Is OnLive the future of PC gaming?

[darkwarrior3007]

Motion controllers? Child's play. High-powered consoles? Waste of money. If bold startup OnLive has anything to do with it, the future of gaming is up in the clouds.
Nintendo 3DS

Not literally, of course. OnLive promises to relieve your computer of the onerous task of actually running one of its selection of triple-A games -- instead, it runs on one of OnLive's massive servers, away in the "cloud" of the Internet. Your inputs are sent to the server; it sends back a high-definition streaming video feed of your gameplay, relieving the need for any fancy gaming hardware. All you need is a machine that can display a high-def streaming video, which these days is pretty much anything.

Sounds like pie in the sky, and since its announcement last year, OnLive has been treated with considerable skepticism by the gaming community. Many commentators dismissed it as a technological impossibility, a pipe-dream that'd never see daylight.

But it turned out to be neither. Last week the service launched, and OnLive is now in the hands of subscribers dotting the lower 48 states.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/is-onlive-the-future-of-pc-gaming-/1403041

 

[thickster]

It definitley can be. I heard the games are cheaper then if you were to buy them off Steam or from the store. You have to pay a low fee every month, but if you buy a couple games it is worth it. The only thing people will gripe about is that they want their games with them or on their desktop. OnLive requires a constant internet connection. So it's better for your hard drive, but you can't play if your internet is down. Also we still have to see if the game is smooth because it will be streaming.

 

[shayd]

Most likely. Quake 4 has been cloud operated for almost a year already and it's free online. I think this is a wise move for the developers, as it gets their games out to more people, and typically for cheaper.

 

[lachemo]

Any word on how the thing is running yet? Lag, smooth, random disconnects etc.......?

 

[rockmandash]

nice idea. but in my country the broadband connection is still too
old and slow for a proper/good gaming experience .

( and i don't know if it's the same for other european countries )

 

[D-rock]

Sadly online gaming is probably going to be the future of PC games. I still think some single player PC games are some of the greatest of all time. In the future there will just be more MMOs and games you have to play online somehow. It might not be that bad if they still made many good single player games where downloading was a possible method of delivery now and into the future. (Of course assuming everybody has a decent connection to download them in the first place. That's also why we need a way to buy a physical copy of a game.)

 

[shayd]

Any word on how the thing is running yet? Lag, smooth, random disconnects etc.......?

Looks like the community is still pretty small, but so far so good.