Haven’t heard of OnLive? I hadn’t either. Apparently they have been in operation for 7 years without anyone knowing of their existence. That is one tight-lipped company. Check out their site: OnLive.com
Not to start the hype machine, but I knew this day *could* come, if the right people got together. I follow the technologies area closely for my day job and knew that this type of service could become a possiblity one day, but honestly didn’t see it happening yet. It appears that this *may* have happened and the entire games industry could be on the verge of a massive change. OnLive video game service just took the hardware out of gaming and could completely kill console and PC gaming. Well, that is not entirely true, but I’m sure some people could get very scared. More specifically, it can take the majority of hardware requirements out of gaming. I do not need to go into specifics about the service, I will let it speak for itself. Take a look at this:
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/?series=on-the-spot&event=on_the_spot20090324
If they are actually able to do what they showed, the implications are mind boggling. Quick 3am speculation:
- Publishers could go away and turn completely into developers because all publishing happens from the service.
- Developers can focus on truly one platform. No need to target specific consoles or otherwise. If you can make a game that works on their server cloud, then it can be distributed to the entire world.
- This is an awesome leap for indie developers. If they can make a game (World of Goo was shown) and get OnLive to recognize them and place their game on the service, then it could become just as popular as the iPhone games got when they were hot (but even more, since the install base could be literally the entire world).
Wow, just wow. I’m in love with the concept. Since I run server farms at work, and a large part of my job is keeping an application running at peak performance, I know quite a bit about cloud computing. In the very least, I know quite a bit about current technologies. We use Cisco, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, with their respective technologies and this could just blow that away. Essentially, they have just come up with a Citrix server for games, and will be selling access to it. As a technology nerd, this is just freakin cool.
Here’s hoping they pull it off. I want in, and I want my games to be published on it 
. Since I’m not at GDC, I don’t get to go to their booth and see for myself. I’m sure the blogosphere will be pumping out hits all the rest of this week about it.
UPDATES:
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/45740/OnLive-Forces-Dave-Perrys-Hand - a competitor surfaces who thinks they can do OnLive one better. We’ll see if either of them can pull it off. Bandwidth and latency are going to be the obvious gotchas to either/both.
http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/44269/PC/Crysis/Trailer/OnLive-Video-Presentation - A video with the OnLive COO and CEO.
http://www.stevestreeting.com/2009/03/24/onlive-an-idea-that-deserves-to-work-eventually/ - Here is what Sinbad thinks about it.
