The Broken Circles

I believe it was last year there was a big hooplah about this new company unveiling On Live at the Game Developer’s Conference.  The premise is this: all the processing for games is what keeps PC gaming not-as-popular as console gaming.  Sure PC gaming could theoretically have better graphics, but its almost entirely dependent on how pimped out your machine is.  Sure Crysis is the way of the future but you need a time machine to go into the far future to play it on medium settings.

All this is now going to be put to the test.  On Live promises that the only piece of hardware you need is a PC (and not that powerful a PC at that).  You hook up up the little doo-dad to your PC and all of the processing will be done via remote server.  The company is boasting a consistent 60 fps for each game which is enough to play an First Person Shooter (FPS).

And then there are the naysayers.  There are a LOT of them.  Understandably so, because of the power the remote servers need to run each game for each client for each account is just…mindboggling astronomic.  How they will succeed in this is a big question.  Certainly this is a big boon for PC gaming, much to the chagrin of console gaming, but we’ll have to see.

Interesting article’s saying why it won’t work:

http://nerdalertnerdalert.blogspot.com/2009/04/so-even-if-onlive-system-works-client.html

http://doublebuffered.com/2009/04/05/why-onlive-wont-work/

http://www.netharuka.com/games/why-onlive-wont-work/

Since it’s only in Beta, information on the product or gaming experience is virtually nil.  It’ll be a while before they hammer out a price.  The system might crash in burn in the first couple months due to lack of support.  We shall see!

-lb.