On OnLive

By now, every person even slightly interestedn in video-games should know about OnLive. Those who don't, would do well to read a bit on it and its competitors. Those in Nort America might even try it out, if their internet connection allows it.

In brief: OnLive is a remote gaming system. A player can start a game from the service in a not too powerful machine, and play, ideally, as if the computer was a modern monster. The game itself is executed on OnLive's computer cluster, in one of their machines. The player receives a video stream of the screen, and the input is sent back to OnLive to process inside the game. If the internet connection holds up, the experience should remain a close match to playing on your own PC.
The limitations this system imposes are in resolution (the stream is limited to 1280x720), the artifacts caused by the video compression and the time passed since the player sees an image (or hears a sound) and the game receives the player's response.

Then, what is so important about OnLive? It is, obvlously, an industry changing concept. The PC and console markets have been led by power hungry machines, paid for by the players. Now, costs can be sustained by an external party, theoretically reducing the cost of playing the latest and biggest games.
It is also relevant as an innovative distribution method: there is just no distribution. A client pays for the right to play a game. No installation files, disc, activation any more. And no more patching on the player's side. And you can play anywhere, on any PC.
Unfortunately, the games are associated to a single account, so you can no longer share a game with your brother, friend, partner... without sharing the whole account. Unless multi-person accounts are offered, obviously.

For developers, on the other hand, OnLive could imply a console like environment for PC games. OnLives machines can be tested, avoiding the hell of multi-configuration set-ups. And, at the same time, can always aim for the best possible graphics, without taking into account the number of high-end computers in the market. Of course, these points are irrelevant as of now, given the low penetration of OnLive in comparison to world wide PC games sales.

But what are the potential effects of such an environment on the whole industry? In the coming years, as internet connections improve, hardware gets more robust and OnLive and similar companies finetune their core systems, things will start changing. It might not be OnLive, but it is undeniable that someone, some day, will  triumph with a similar scheme*.

Trying to predict future market movements is considered by many a great exercise, even if you get everything wrong. So, what are my predictions for gaming, in the light of this technology?

1. The next generation of home consoles, along with downloadable titles and disc based content, will include a game streaming service. Probably through a partnership with one or more of the OnLives of the future, due to the huge costs of creating such supercomputers and maintaining them. Exactly the same as happened in the 360 and PS3 with NetFlix, Hulu, Mubi and the likes.
2. The possibility of this happening on portable consoles depends on improvements on wireless connections and international regulations, and will probably be delayed one generation more.
3. There will be at least three subscription types: play a game forever (30-40€), play the latest games for a month (30€) and play over a year old games for a month (10-15€). Of course, there will be many offers mixing them around, including a complete subscription for everything.
4. Episodic games will be way more common, and signed to one of the competing services, the same way series are now to specific channels. A new 4-5 hours long episode would be released every one or two months, giving clients a reason to remain loyal to a service. This interests developers, since they can start paying their initial inversion before having the whole game finished, and players, since design flaws (and, of course, bugs) can be fixed as the story progresses. However, developers must meet the datelines, by properly planning everything. Valve would have a serious problem with this.
5. Valve's Steam will present a competing service in less than 2 years.
6. 10 years from now, disc based games will be gone. This, episodic games and affordable yet powerful engines will considerably reduce the average cost of high profile games development. Most companies will work in at least two games at once, debunking the current trend of placing all hopes in a multi-million project.
7. Graphics card evolution will significantly slow down 5 years from now, if these systems prevail. The demand for high end graphic systems will be limited to fanatics, OnLive and similars, and console systems. The push from computer gaming top gamers lost, the costs of developing übercards will be unrecoverable in the short term, so there will be less GPU releases per year (less than one, I'd say), and the differences will be much more pronounced than now, to give OnLive a reason to upgrade. NVidia and AMD (its ATI branch) will, however, remain in the market thanks to CUDA and other developments for the scientific community, plus video decoding, in which they have more competitors.
8. If things remain the same in three, five and ten years I'll be very, very sad.

Let's see how things have worked out 3 years from now!

* The biggest issue will be internet connection caps, if they are still prevalent 3-5 years from now. Playing for an hour could easily consume half a gigabyte of your monthly maximum: 1280x720 means 3 GiB uncompressed video per hour, which could be compressed down to 200 or 300 MiB; one hour of 192kbps in ogg is 80 to 100MiB; plus the input and synchronization info, which can be up to 100MiB, too.