OnLive: "Do we need boxes anymore?"

[wraggster]

OnLive's executive producer Tom Dubois has predicted the death of home consoles, believing that cloud gaming will ultimately replace them.

"It's been a long time since a major console shipped," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "They're all kind of refreshing now, with Kinect and Move and so on. But what are they going to do next?

"We're gonna get another box, but after that, do we need boxes anymore? The bandwidth at homes is gonna be there, the cost of computing continue to decrease..."

Explaining that OnLive's forthcoming Microconsole was fundamentally little more than a video decoder in a small box, he felt that such technology would eventually be built into televisions. "The TV and some sort of controller, and you're good to go."

The producer also disputed claims that most broadband connections were not sufficent for OnLive – going on to demonstrate a prototype of the service on iPad.

While he would not be drawn on a release date, he confirmed that the service could run on 3G.

DuBois also predicted games built specifically for cloud services, rather than the streaming of titles designed with console hardware in mind.

"Game designers have been constrained by the platform and the hardware; if you think about a game designed for the cloud, it's a different exercise.

"You could design a game that ran on multiple servers, used tons of memory, could be 500-person multiplayer... The constraints are removed."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-09-08-onlive-do-we-need-boxes-anymore

[nyder]

hmm, lets see.

The graphics are substandard with Onlive compared to owning the game.

And you pay a subscription fee, plus the cost of the game, and then you don't even have a personal copy of that game. If they decided to remove it, your SOL.

Sure, from a content owners perspective, it's the ultimate DRM. You control the servers, the content, and you suck your customers dry of their money.

While Onlive isn't a bad idea, and I'm sure it will find a niche, it's not the end all. It's like a box of wine. Sure, you'll find people that are happy to get their wine in boxes, but you'll find that a lot of people prefer it in bottles.

What Onlive isn't thinking about it seems, if MS, Nintendo or Sony decides this is the way to go, Onlive won't stand a chance in market against them.

Not to mention you got the ISP fighting against us having decent bandwidth for stuff like this, movies streaming, and what not.

I can see Onlive being very good for hotels, motels, schools, even arcades.