The future direction of gaming, the next evolutionary step or the current innovative trend for the industry. However you hear it described, you still can’t believe that this service is meant to see the light of day at the end of the year. It could be all of these things and more but it could be a case of ambition that outweighs the technical limits of today. One thing you can’t deny OnLive of being is a brilliant concept but how much of that is a fools notion. Nevertheless there are a few issues that need to be touched upon and I’m not talking technical.
For those that didn’t check out that mammoth coverage of the event, last week at GDC we witnessed an announcement that could change the future of gaming as we know it. Now you’ll probably want to stop me because how many times have we heard that about single games that rarely offer anything innovative but this actually is an impressive conception.
In a nutshell, various server farms will process everything and stream it directly to you via video. On a basic level you can’t fault it for it’s simplicity but despite being in a world where most places have internet access not many of them have enough to handle the bandwidth of constant streaming video along with constant uploading of inputs. But I’m sure you’ve heard enough about pipes, bandwidth and how fast a connection you need. What’s really interesting is a sense of ownership and that the critics seem to be ignoring the obvious non-internet related issues.
Now I’m sure regular readers of the site will be board by another notion of a physical object easily outweighs a downloaded virtual one, but that’s where this is going. The idea of turning around and looking at a shelve full of my whole collection with hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth on it is brilliant. Sure half of it is to show off how big my quote unquote game penis is but generally I love the idea of actually owning a physical item.
What OnLive does is purge the concept of ownership. By everything being server side you never feel like you have anything to show for your devotion and investment. Then what happens in a few years when you want to revisit a few forgotten classics that aren’t on the server anymore. Literally wiping out back-catalogs of games the second they age. Still all this is speculation and we’ll have to wait and see how OnLive will manage the every increasing library of games. But surely we can’t expect it to run every single game released because with time the servers will be clogged up with needless clones and forgettable cash-ins. Although for every nine of these there is one niche game that you can really get behind. Eventually that will go too.
Also if for whatever reason OnLive did go out of business then your games would be lost and some titles along with it. Despite being inherently different from other mediums you can accept that the music and film industries support their older titles better. OnLive might be a little bit more precious over server space and making money than actually keeping a prestigious back-library of titles. But again this is nothing more than a considerate hunch on how this might play out. OnLive probably do have the industries and gamers hearts and mind at the end of the day.
Despite these quibbles you can’t deny OnLive of it’s originality in thinking but you can imagine the launch either not happening this year or not being technologically viable in the present day. Games might be heading in this direction for the elitist or hardcore but not everyone is set up to receive the medium this way. If you want more speculation then I’d say that Valve will buy it and call it Steam 2.0 but hey whose to know?
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