Dean Takahashi put a very interesting story up on VentureBeat today:
I’ve heard a lot about this type of service in the past, but the technology has always been sucky Citrix type bullshit that could not support proper modern games with high frame rates. This sounds different.
Highlights:
Perlman, a serial entrepreneur whose startup credits include WebTV and Mova, says his Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has developed a data compression technology and an accompanying online game service that allows game computation to be done in distant servers, rather than on game consoles or high-end computers. So rather than buying games at stores, gamers could play them across the network — without downloading them.
Big game publishers and developers — Electronic Arts, THQ, Take-Two Interactive, Codemasters, Eidos, Atari, Warner Bros., Epic Games and Ubisoft — have agreed to distribute their games through the OnLive network, bypassing traditional retail game sales in an effort to reach people who don’t buy game consoles or expensive game computers.
The problem with this server-centric approach, which has been talked about for a long time, has always been that the computing power required to process a game has been growing by leaps and bounds, while the ability to compress data hasn’t been growing at nearly the same rate. By vastly improving compression and reducing the computing power required to do compression, Perlman has turned the situation around.
The concept was originally evangelized as the “telecosm” by George Gilder in the pre-bubble days of the 1990s. Gilder thought that the Internet would “hollow out” the PC, meaning that Intel and Microsoft would become less important because their products would become commoditized.
But Gilder’s idea could now make a comeback, thanks to OnLive’s ability to compress data 200-fold, as well as the fact that broadband is more pervasive and the demand for ever more powerful computers has stalled. (We know that last point is true in part because $400 Netbooks, which aren’t full-fledged laptops, are selling fast).
Last week, Perlman showed me a demo of the technology. He was playing Crysis, one of the most demanding 3-D shooting games ever made, running on a simple Mac laptop and also on a rudimentary game console, known as a micro-console, which does almost no computing but merely displays the images on a TV in either standard or 720p high-definition. The graphics ran smoothly.
The secret sauce in OnLive’s technology is its compression algorithms. On the home device, the only software component OnLive needs is a one-megabyte plug-in for a standard Internet browser. That code is enough to decompress the data and display it. Normally, decompression takes much more hardware.
Perlman hasn’t said much about exactly how it works. One clue: the algorithms change the structure and order of Internet data, or packets, so they can sail through the Internet. A packet can make an entire round trip in 80 milliseconds, a very short amount of time compared to other Internet traffic that travels through hardware that either compresses or decompresses the data.
To address naysayers who think this can’t be done, given all of the Internet’s trade-offs, OnLive will show 16 games being played live on the floor of the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. The game service is expected to be available before the end of the year. If this sounds to you like the interactive TV hogwash of the 1990s, like Time Warner’s Full Service Network, it is indeed very similar. The difference this time is that this looks like the real thing.
It may seem hard to believe. But I’ve seen it work. Perlman’s got a good track record. He has invested heavily, as have some very big media companies. The game publishers are behind him. And he’s showing off 16 working games this week. Perlman has a grand plan. But the little pieces of it that he has already shown are going to turn the game industry, and perhaps everything else, upside down.