March 29, 2009 4:01 pm

Onlive.com Looking to Make 'Cloud Gaming' a Reality by End of Year

Since the glory years of PlayStation 2 and the limited challenges to its dominance by the first generation Xbox, action in the gaming world has been made up of the “console wars” on one side, and PC gaming, in a seemingly ever-diminishing role in the other. It wouldn’t be long before the money making juggernaut that is World of Warcraft would come along and make it clear that barring technical limitations or excessive game system requirements, millions of gamers all over the world would not only game on their PCs and Macs, but would be willing to pay to do so on a monthly basis. That was great news for Blizzard, and a few other developer/publisher teams, but the fact was that in very large part the tremendous growth that the gaming industry would experience would be based on the horsepower of gaming consoles.

Fast forward a few years. The broadband revolution on which online gaming services like Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network and to a much lesser extent the channels of the Wii platform were built on were also helping to further cloud computing technologies. No need for ultra powerful computers if your applications actually live in a data warehouse somewhere. Again, no change to a burgeoning gaming industry focused on competition between the big three hardware players. Then a funny thing happened. At the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) this week in San Francisco, exhibitor Onlive dropped a bombshell. They are projecting to have a ‘cloud gaming’ service up and running by the end of the year and they already have a lineup of game publishers on board pledging simultaneous availability of games on the service as they hit retail, and they have an initial list of confirmed titles. Through their service players with sufficient bandwidth (1-5Mbps) will be able to rent or buy games, which run on Onlive’s ultra low latency servers, that are playable on entry level PCs or Macs, or TVs and HDTVs via a mini console device. The result at GDC was a mix of excitement, disbelief and a fair bit of worry in some parts of the console and PC gaming sectors. This was a HUGE claim, with so many caveats: feasibility of a ‘there-and-back’ signal even at 5 Mbps, features, pricing, continued cooperation by the publishing industry, possible lack of game modding ability, and much more. Is this deal for real? Well, their Beta is scheduled to start this summer in preparation for a holiday launch. My name is already in the hat for it. There will be A LOT of eyes on this, and if it succeeds, even partially, there could be huge fallout in the industry. I though that PC gaming would experience a resurgence this year, but not in this way.

I glazed over a lot of this stuff, much of which will rightly give naysayers a lot to point to. In the end though it will work or it won’t. There are two videos below featuring Onlive CEO Steve Perlman. He fills in a lot of the gaps I left and is pretty convincing. Check these out and take a look at the Onlive site as well.

Part 1

Part 2

–Tom Milnes