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[Column] General: The Death of OnLive
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
You might have heard this week that Sony bought OnLive, the streaming service for games and desktop tools, only to announce that the service will be shut down around April 30th. OK, so maybe many of you expected such a thing, and I am sure that anyone who had tried the service thought it might not last very long. I was a sucker for it from the beginning, simply because I also knew that streaming music and video is the future, so why not streaming games? The service had issues earlier in its life and closed down before, but I still held out hope that the technology would grow further. I still believe it will.
Read more of Beau Hindman's A Casual, Cornered - The Death of OnLive.
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Comments
This was not technically feasible to accomplish while being able to charge an amount that will make it sustainable and it still isn't. Unless we freeze all graphical and interactive upgrades it not will be feasible for possibly decades.
Yes you can make the tech work and yes if an end user has a super awesome connection it can work for him, but it does not scale for what most would consider paying for. It is just like thin clients. The platform and content is irrelevant.
Soe has been a terribly run business from as long as i can remember.They had me fooled for a long time but now everything they do makes no sense because they don't have any.
Did SOE really buy this or do more like they did with Vanguard and just bail somebody out on a whim or needed some tax right offs.
Soe put little to no effort into VG after getting it,they shut down their TCG with little to no effort and the closing came VERY swiftly and as a shock to most players.
They put no effort in to that kids game after the yreleased it,they simply said here is what we offer buy it or leave it.They seem to have a real cheap ,lazy approach to follow up on their ideas.
Btw this kind of tech is on the verge of taking off,other developers will prove it is a viable industry just as Blizzard proved the tcg is viable opening right after SOE shut down their's.
iMO after seeing amateur hour SOE studios for so long,SOE head office was extremely intelligent in selling them off.On whole i think it is more than obvious SOE is closing down a ton of overhead.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
i played just cause 2 using onlive and wasnt that bad
was just trying the thing...
the idea was good , but yeah tech isnt there yet.
Sony. Not SOE. /face palm
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.
SOE is not even a thing anymore. They're Daybreak.
I wonder how much hate has been misdirected over the years when Sony announced something silly?
Darn that SOE! lol
Beau
Onlive went down coz they demanded from publisher the exclusive rights to stream their games.
many publishers denied that right and thus onlive was stuck with a range of older games. in the end that is waht made onlive simply not worth keeping.
I have found in my lifetime, that the beauty of hating stupid people is, that it crosses all racial boundaries.
Potato...
Bacon?
I seriously shaking my head- All day ive been reading this story and I thought this thing failed years ago... Really, Onlive was still a thing last week?
And I call myself a gamer. =/
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I think they should've focused on slow-paced, probably cheaper titles like various turn-based games. They went big and tried to focus on AAA, but AAA titles are expensive, hard to license and fast-paced. Imagine streaming Divinity:OS on a tablet. It could work very well.
It did fail years ago, but didn't go away completely.
If you think so, be sure to take a snapshot of your CD collection and post it in the comments. Oh, I forgot… no one uses physical media anymore.
What's up with this gross generalization regarding physical / digital media. I can take a snapshot of my PS4, or PS Vita games which most of them are physical copies. Yes CDs are out but that doesn't mean that all forms of physical media are out. Far from it as evident by Xbox One failure to push for digital copies of games.
The reason for OnLive's failure is pretty simple: when you try to fight against physics, physics wins. Everything else about the failure is just details.
If you want a more technical explanation, computational power is cheap. It's bandwidth that is expensive. The reason for this is simple enough to understand: do you expect it to be harder to move data a few millimeters across a chip, or a few hundred miles across the Internet? If you're developing a game and have a choice between doing 10,000 floating point computations locally or transmitting a single float across the Internet, it's a no-brainer that you do the 10,000 computations locally because it's massively cheaper. So what does OnLive try to do? Consume massive amounts of bandwidth so that you won't need so much local computational power.
There's also the problem that OnLive will intrinsically give you a low end gaming experience, and there's no way around it. Transmitting a 1080p image at 32-bit color depth and 60 frames per second means you need about half a GB per second. Monitor cables can do that just fine, and SATA 3 can handle that sort of bandwidth, barely. But even gigabit ethernet only offers about 1/4 of that, and typical broadband connections have only a few percent of that bandwidth.
That necessitates extremely lossy compression--and hence terrible image quality. Ultra settings on OnLive's servers will probably end up looking worse than medium settings rendered locally. And that's ignoring latency, which is another killer problem. Video compression depends very, very heavily on compressing across time, and if OnLive does that at all, it adds considerably to the latency.
The story says that OnLive was too expensive. But the reason it had to be too expensive is that they were trying to do things in a wildly inefficient manner. If your competitor builds widgets for $50 and sells them for $80, and it costs you $100 to build widgets and you sell them for $110, setting your price too high isn't fundamentally your problem. If you cut prices, you lose money on every item you sell. The costs the consumer pay are intrinsically linked to the cost of producing things, and OnLive is simply a very expensive way to render games.
And no, focusing on tablets doesn't fix it. Game streaming to mobile devices over a LAN can be viable, as if you've got a dedicated 802.11ac connection between your desktop rendering the game and your tablet, the added latency and reduced image quality aren't that bad. (Control scheme might be a bigger problem, depending on the game.) But over the Internet, as OnLive tried to do? Not so much. They were trying to fight against physics. And physics won.