14 DAY TRIAL // Two services coming in the next year promise gamers the ability to play the latest titles even though they do not have a top gaming computer. OnLive will be installed as a client and will stream only graphics, sound and movement to the player’s computer while the videogame will be running on a distant server. Gaikai will be offered as a service to publishers, allowing them to deliver full games or sections of them, playable directly in a browser from a designated website. Both services are based on the idea of “cloud computing” and looking to the public for approval and feedback in beta stages.
The problem is that the PC has been here before. During the dot com bubble of the late '90's, a lot of people were talking about how soon computers would become just “dumb terminals,” which would receive all the graphics and data from far away server clusters that would do the hard work needed to crunch data and get results. It was in part a reaction against the perceived domination of the Microsoft – Intel duo on home computers but also a genuine belief that the “cloud” could manage things better than individual desktop computers. What that movement did not take into account was that users like to know that they “owned” things, that they had power in the their machines and that they had the applications they run close at hand.
The same instincts for ownership, power and closeness might actually be the undoing of OnLive and Gaikai. Digital distribution has taken off, even though it does not offer boxed copies of videogames, but there's still the somewhat tangible data on the player's hard drive that shows that it is their videogame that they can play on their machine. OnLive proposes just a thin client with the games being basically rented. Gaikai offers just a browser window, with videogames running on the servers of the publisher. Gaming is much less tangible and the audience might just not be prepared for something like this.
It's true that, if they work from a technological standpoint, Gaikai and OnLive have a lot going for them: they will be easy to use, will offer current gen gaming to those who did not have access to it and will likely attract a whole new audience, but the ownership instinct might prove too much for them to battle against.