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| [Aug 18, 2012, 1:50 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
Joystiq has a rundown of what went down during a final meeting with the staff of OnLive before they were all fired, clarifying the report that the entire staff was being let go as part of some sort of reorganization. The company has undergone an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, or ABC (a form of bankruptcy), and will continue under the ownership of a venture capitalist. Word is only "the essential" portion of the company's 150-200 staff will be rehired going forward as the new owner attempts to bring the cloud gaming service into profitability.
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| 20. |
Re: OnLive Layoffs Follow-up |
Aug 18, 2012, 17:10 |
NKD |
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There are too many insurmountable technical issues with this kind of service for it to enter the mainstream any time soon.
Bandwidth usage is a biggie. Streaming HD video of any kind of useful quality eats a lot of bandwidth, and most people who game spend a lot more time gaming than movie buffs do streaming movies, for example. Heavy gameplay on OnLive, combine with your normal internet downloads and usage would quickly burn out a 300GB Comcast cap. To say nothing of the less generous caps of other ISPs.
Latency is another problem. To keep it low, they have to have locations all over, and even then, network latency combined with video encode latency is just too much for anyone trying to land a headshot. Even slower paced multiplayer console shooters like Halo can be really annoying on a high latency system, whether it be from network latency, or input latency (either from OnLive, a slow HDTV with a lot of filtering/scaling or whatever).
The issue of many spread out datacenters also raises another problem: Community fragmentation. It may be in many scenarios that you simply would not be permitted to play with people who are connected to different streaming hubs because of the latency differential.
This technology relies on best-case-scenario bandwidth and latency, which is mostly out of their hands to do anything about. They can optimize their video encoding, and try some predictive algorithms for input, but at the end of the day they are dependent on ISP routing and the simple factor of distance.
On top of all that, they can't charge very much without making it more expensive than simply keeping a mid-range gaming rig up to date. ($500 a year can keep you perpetually in the mid-range, which is $42 a month approx.) |
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| If you don't like where gaming is heading, stop giving your money to the people who are taking it in that direction. |
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