When you hear the words ‘the future of gaming’, what instantly springs to mind? The PlayStation 4? The Xbox 720 (or whatever the hell it’ll be called)? Whatever you think, I doubt you’ve ever thought that gaming in the next decade was entirely void of disks, did you?

Me neither. Turns out that I was wrong. I would like to introduce you, with a great sense of pride, to what is being tagged as the killer of consoles – OnLive.

How it managed to remain under the radar for so many years of stealth development, I’ll never know. OnLive is a gaming service. Obviously. However, it’s unlike any you’ve ever seen before. OnLive users connect to the servers using either an entry-level PC or Mac, or a ‘console-style’ box plugged into the TV to find and play on almost any game imaginable. Streamed from the internet. I know, that’s what I was like.

Announced at GDC last month, OnLive will apparently run on broadband connections of as little speeds as 1.5Mbit/s, although speeds between 1.5 and 4Mbit/s will reduce the image quality to that of the Wii, in order to preserve speed and allow users with slow connections to still access the service with relative ease. 4Mbit/s and higher will provide users with 720p, 60fps HD visuals.

The innovation, apart from the fact that ‘FFS, It’s on-demand gaming!’, lies in OnLive’s image compression methods. For the ultra-geeky, like me, OnLive will provide the HD visuals at only a 1ms latency. For the much less geeky, this means that visuals will be sent across the internet at blazingly-fast speeds and displayed on your monitor almost immediately. Which means literally no lag.

However, some concerns have been voiced over OnLive’s concept. For one, due to all the data being kept on OnLive’s servers, the mod community would not be able to bring out homemade mods for any of the games. Also, if OnLive went under, it’d take all the games and access to the games with it.

Big developers and publishers are already sitting up and taking notice of what is bound to be the biggest event in the gaming industry since… well, ever. EA, Take Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Atari are amongst the ten gaming companies already signed up to have their games made available on the service. Which means that, when the service launches, games such as EndWar, the Battlefield series and GTA will be available for you to play to your heart’s content.

The idea is ambitious, even with seven years of development already behind it. However, the fact that the service is already in closed beta, with plans for an open beta this spring/summer shows to us just how optimistic and confident the developers are about this service.

The service is currently slated to launch towards the end of this year. GGTL will keep you up-to-date on all the latest developments and news as OnLive is gradually rolled out to an already-gagging public.

Linford

Labels: GDC, Hype Train, OnLive

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