Eurogamer on “Why OnLive Can’t Possibly Work”

Ready for a good dose of skepticism?  Richard Leadbetter over at Eurogamer has more than a few things to say about OnLive and the “inevitable” failure that is inherent in its conception.  He obviously knows his stuff and makes many intelligent points about the viability of being able to achieve OnLive’s claims.

The first point touched on is simply being able to power the graphics behind the scenes under heavy user-demand time periods.  In the case of graphically intensive games such as GTAIV, for example, with many people clamoring to play it immediately upon release “the computing and rendering power we’re talking about is mammoth to a degree never seen before in the games business, perhaps anywhere.”  What it basically comes down to is OnLive needs to essentially buy a high-end rig for each player without introducing queues.

Another big problem, maybe the biggest of all, is the task of serving near-lagless 720p HD resolution video at 60 frames per second. Putting things in perspective, “…bear in mind that YouTube’s encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.”  This is an extremely bold claim and that is exactly why OnLive has so many in the gaming industry excited, but doubtful about its viability.

It’s not all doom and gloom though.  The application of presumed technology has a high probability of success if things are just taken down a few notches.  Reduce the quality down to 480p at 30 frames per second and the prospect “is intriguing and has a much better chance of working out.”  An example of what this might look like is provided.  But this is really removes a lot of what excites about the service.

Leadbetter’s video examples of the current video compression quality provides some good insight into his grounded apprehension about OnLive’s technological claims.  He also offers a few of potential solutions, none of which seem ideal or even likely.  Let’s hope OnLive really does have some streaming and compression technology the like of which we have yet to see.

[Via Eurogamer]