NEWS ANALYSIS: ONLIVE & THE CLOUD
cheap box to stream the data to, or a pre-existing device. Who needs 2013’s next-generation when it arguably already exists, and won’t require the manufacture of expensive consoles?
BT, which bought a stake in OnLive last year, is hoping to make the service even more attractive – its customers get the PlayPack free for three months, no contract. BT is promoting the service alongside its others such as high-speed Infinity broadband and Vision video on-demand. Over here, OnLive is very much a BT product: it’s using the brand to sponsor consumer events and more. It’s an added push that something like Xbox Live and PSN have never really had.
READY TO SERVE
But the immediate innovation of the cloud isn’t OnLive’s real talking point. Cloud gaming is an inevitable part of games’ future, and it has been for ages. Most of us are used to having data or digital possessions stored on a remote server somewhere. Email, music, video; these mediums have had cloud counterparts for ages. Gmail, Spotify, YouTube. Amazon has been selling cloud storage to businesses for years; Social networks are based in the cloud; PSN and Steam are just two games services already offering cloud storage for save files. For OnLive the obvious next step is widening out the service to include music and movies. That’s a given, and
Who needs 2013’s next-generation when it arguably exists on servers, and won’t require expensive consoles?
“
only a matter of time, either through partnerships with things like Netflix or LoveFilm, or simple viable alternatives. But think about the foundation
OnLive’s growing network of servers is laying. The collective might of them servers can run content much more detailed than that on a ‘normal’ home console. Technology from sister firm Mova, which helped animate CG faces in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonand The Incredible Hulk, is already built into OnLive, promising ‘a level of realism that is indistinguishable from live action’. In that sense OnLive is building up, in plain sight, what could amount to the next-generation of gaming – high-end visuals rendered in real time, but created on data centres. No console needed, except maybe a
‘RETAIL IS NOT GOING AWAY – BUT IT MUST EVOLVE.’
MOST LOOK at OnLive and see it as another service undermining retail. Not so says Steve Perlman, co- founder and CEO of OnLive and one of the minds behind its core technology. To prove it, last week at the service’s UK launch he announced a massive coup in retail partner GAME. The Group will sell OnLive products first through the GAME and Gamestation websites, and in-store later in the year. “We’ll be selling our hardware as well as store value cards, and also letting them take part by using their loyalty systems,” Perlman told MCV.
www.mcvuk.com
Online services, he added, are in fact the answer to many of the problems both retailers themselves and publishers have with the High Street. “Right now the margins are ruined when it comes to retail releases thanks to things like piracy and pre- owned sales,” he said of boxed games. “But retail is not going away – the retail stores that will do well are the ones that will evolve. The ones that don’t… well, they are the ones that will end up like Blockbuster,” he said. “The best example is the company that has been most successful in selling
content through the cloud: Apple. Apple has been buildingretail stores but they do not look like typical retail stores. The look and feel is very different and they offer reliable advice. “Most retailers would like to be the Apple store. And they are figuring out how they do that. When they speak to other online companies they are told ‘we don’t need you’. But our view is very different. That’s just not the way to think about it at all.
“I saw retail evolve into what it is
today – and expect to see it evolve beyond that.”
September 30th 2011 25
RIGHTS & OWNERSHIP Another issue OnLive is challenging isn’t technical – it is emotional and conceptual: the issue of ownership. When you buy a cloud game, what do you own? Nothing physical, not even the centimetre of space the gigabytes are etched onto. But you are buying the right to access them. In the US, OnLive and Square Enix tested this with free codes for the OnLive version of Deus Exin the boxed PC game. It famously upset GameStop, but conceptually was a turning point. Here was the biggest games retail release of August, but when you bought it you got more than the disc.
While common in movies, where ‘triple-play’ packs of Blu-ray, DVD and iTunes code are commin, this is an issue not even that readily applied to music (where it’s easy to rip a physical purchase into something digital). It’s even rarer in the games industry, which is plagued by paranoia about piracy and enforces IP protection at times to a preachy extreme. Yet these are issues our industry – an industry built digitally, not originated in analogue like vinyl, film, or print – needs to face. By acting as advocate OnLive makes us address these thorny conundrums. Because you can bet Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren’t yet brave enough to do it themselves.
LIVE FOREVER So far reactions to OnLive can be
split into three very specific and opposing camps. There’s the cynics, who since the technology’s surprise unveiling at GDC 2009 have said that this just can’t work as well as claimed. Poor internet latency, they say, will cause lag between controller inputs and the video relay. They also purport that video compression can’t render at decent HD resolution. Then there’s the sceptics. They buy into the technology, but not the commercial element. They don’t see how the business model works with a catalogue of games that are already available elsewhere – often cheaper – and with no physical component. Lastly, there’s believers. They’re impressed with the tech and have signed up and paid for a game. They tolerate the valid criticisms from cynics and sceptics (one specific point being that there is clear visible video artefacting at times).
The people in charge of rival cloud services – Gaikai, or the GameStop- owned Spawn – will be watching how people discuss and dissect the service. How the reaction settles down, and the debate over whether consumers will themselves settle for what OnLive has to offer, signals the next step not just for OnLive, but its competition, and anything else that might spring up from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft or an unknown format- holder in the making. For the rest of us, the real issues to watch are those technical and philosophical ones. Many say OnLive’s introduction signalled a revolution. But chances are the biggest changes it heralds are yet to be realised, and could run deeper than the introduction of a ‘fifth console’.
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