14 DAY TRIAL // By now, a lot of people, especially gamers, have heard of OnLive, a service that promises to take the concept of cloud computing and adapt it to gaming, making it possible for people with even the lowest end-computer connected to the Internet to run high-end video games.
Since its announcement, the opinions found in the media have been biased, with some journalists defending it and others highlighting the many things that will make it fail, in the end. We've even heard Crytek, one of the leading video game developers, say that it has tried the concept, but it hasn't been feasible.
Now, one of the founders of OnLive, Steve Pearlman, talked about it and went on the defense, saying that it would work, even though a lot of respected websites and media channels said that it wouldn't.
“We have nine of the largest game publishers in world signed up,” Pearlman told the BBC. “They have spent several years in some cases actually going and reviewing our technology before allowing us to associate with their company names and allowing us to have access to their first-tier franchises.”
He also revealed that, “tens of thousand” of work hours had been invested by the developers in order to develop the algorithms that were needed so as to make the technology possible. “The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds. We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds.”
OnLive has generated quite a lot of controversy, with many gamers proclaiming that its launch will bring forth the end of the console industry and that everyone will adopt it at its release, while others are very reluctant and say that it will fail quite badly. What do you think? Is a technology like OnLive feasible? Let us know by leaving a comment.