At this week's Game Developers Conference, a new "cloud gaming" service called OnLive was unveiled. Basically, it's intended to make gaming consoles and those frequent PC upgrades a thing of the past by providing gaming services remotely. The idea is that you would actually run the games upon OnLive's high-end hardware (wherever they may keep it) and simply stream the video and audio to your computer directly, or to your TV screen by way of something called an OnLive microConsole (which feeds the AV inputs to the TV), all accomplished via your high-speed Internet connection. Input from you (keyboard, mouse and/or gamepad) would similarly travel to OnLive over the magic of the Internet, allowing you to control the game as you would locally.
It's definitely an interesting concept for those of us who tire of paying for new hardware every few years. But if you read the comments at the bottom of the article, you'll also get a sense of some of the less positive reactions to this news, including a lot of concerns around pricing models, performance capabilities when ISPs are tending to restrict network throughput more and more, and what a drag it would be to not be able to game at all if your Internet connection was down (or even just significantly sub-optimal). Proponents of the technology are already declaring console gaming to be dead as of the current generation, but personally I think that's very optimistic and extremely premature. A better viewpoint for the short term, I think, is that this new technology provides a new and potentially attractive option for those people who are more the casual gamers and really don't want to invest in hardware because they wouldn't use it enough to make it worthwhile.
Long term, though? Who knows!
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