When the OnLive service was announced last year it basically promised implausible miracles– if you had a crappy computer or a netbook, you wouldn't have to worry about upgrading your computer to something more promising in order to play Crysis on its highest settings. Simply purchase the OnLive device and it would stream games, whether PC or console, from their servers to your home, requiring no further hardware and cutting out the need for the latest graphics card.
While this is obviously enticing for some reasons (least of which to the publishers of video games, as it would take a big dent out of piracy if OnLive's dream ever became a reality), most people have regarded this company with skepticism. Having used similar services on my own that stream a game from one powerful computer to another not-so-powerful one over my own LAN connection, I've seen first hand how this works and the experience was not pleasant or even playable.
Nevertheless, OnLive has promised the stars and has been conducting a limited beta test for some time now. While beta testers are under a strict NDA not to tell anyone about their experiences, Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective obtained access through slightly illicit means and wrote a rather scathing critique of the service last week.
Predictably this has generated a lot of controversy; for people critical of OnLive, this is confirmation that their product will never deliver on the promises it's made. For fans of the service, Shrout's complaints are easily dismissed because he used the login credentials of another beta tester outside of the beta "zone," which would invalidate his experiences because he couldn't possibly get the best performance.
While OnLive did not respond to Shrout's comments directly, they did take to their blog to make a sideways rebuttal:
While the production OnLive service will adapt to different configurations each time you connect, during Beta testing each user is setup only to test a specific computer configuration (or MicroConsole™ TV Adapter version), a single Internet provider and, most importantly, a particular location. If you change any of these factors, OnLive Beta may not even run, or if it does, the lag and/or graphics performance may render games unplayable. OnLive will try to detect these conditions and warn you, but when you are using OnLive in a different location, you are not providing us with usable test data.
The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay ("ping" time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games. As you can see in the above map, OnLive has 3 data centers for its US Beta test, with a blue circle around each showing the 1000-mile range. Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you'll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP.
Reasonable, but unfortunately invalidated by comments to Ars Technica (off the record, obviously) by other beta testers confirming that the experiences of Shrout are similar to their own even inside the beta testing zone and using the correct equipment and settings.
"OnLive performance is pretty shoddy. Besides the resolution cap at 720p–which, mind you, doesn't look so hot on a reasonably sized monitor–anything you do on the service will literally cause a jitter. This includes moving the mouse and pressing keys." The beta tester also complained of performance while playing The Maw, which requires the player to turn the camera often to look around, which exacerbated the frame rate issue.
"Online play through Crysis Wars, which I briefly got to test just last night, has better performance, as expected, but not significantly. Sounds cut out whenever you do anything, and the screen jitters as well, though not as much." His teammates agreed that the game ran better on their standard gaming PCs, and he stresses that the title was nearly unplayable in his opinion. "And for the record, Crysis looked like crap, so I don't know what specs they were running on."
In the end, PC Perspective looks to be facing legal action from OnLive for breaking both the NDA and the service's EULA; while cloud gaming is almost guaranteed to be a product coming down the pipeline in the next several years, I still hold onto my skepticism as to whether or not OnLive's service will be the method to facilitate that.
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