OnLive brings the cloud to PC gaming

Wow a whole story O.O

What if you could play all those great PC games that take full advantage of the latest hardware... without having the latest hardware? PC gaming can be an expensive hobby, especially if you play the latest and greatest games, but OnLive has the solution: allow them to do the computing for you-you just buy the games. Welcome to using the cloud for your gaming needs.

OnLive has generated a significant amount of buzz at GDC 2009; the company's booth was packed with interested writers and industry professionals. It works something like this: you install a client on your PC or Mac and log into the service with an impressively slim 1MB client. The game is played at OnLive's headquarters, using their hardware, and the image is streamed to your television. If you don't want to use your computer, the company also offers a tiny "microconsole" that will handle the streaming for you. That way you get to enjoy all the fine graphics with none of the cost of the hardware, not to mention the upkeep that normally comes from PC gaming.

The games looked and played great at the booth, with titles like Burnout Paradise and Crysis showing off what the system can do, but what kind of pipes do you need to get all this madness running? "All you need is 5MB download speed and we can deliver games running at 720p at 60FPS," a company representative said. Don't have a connection that fast? OnLive can lower the resolution and framerate to match your speed. All over the booth people were happily playing games, and they look great on the service. Is this really the future of PC gaming?

It's hard to say, and details are slightly tricky to come by. Will the service be subscription-based? "You'll subscribe to the service, but we're not really talking about pricing yet," we're told.

Are the games we're playing all set to launch with the service? "The games we're showing now, we have deals to show them at GDC," the spokesman says. In other words, these games may or may not actually be coming to OnLive.

The company will only be as good as the games it is able to bring to the service, and one representative tells me you'll be able to demo the games before you buy them. Is it possible that there will be a subscription fee on top of game sales? "We're looking at a few options," they say.

While the demos were impressive, the possibility that this is all smoke and mirrors remains; there could easily be a top-of-the-line PC hidden in the booth, running the game for you. If it works as advertised? It's possible that you could be playing PC games on your television quite cheaply, and very soon. OnLive certainly has people's attention, so now it's just a matter of getting the games, offering the service at a good price, and then delivering on the promise. That's a tall order.

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