Games on Demand Service OnLive Working Smoothly at D.I.C.E. 2010 Demo

When OnLive was first introduced nearly a year ago at the Game Developers Conference, the industry immediately recognized its potential. A cloud-computing service that can stream high-end video games to anyone with a broadband Internet connection without the need for continual hardware upgrades could be revolutionary, possibly even bringing about the "death" of consoles as we know them. Skeptics have said that latency issues would ultimately drag the service down, but so far the signs have been encouraging. OnLive was in an open beta for months and more recently entered a closed beta. Today, at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, OnLive founder Steve Perlman demonstrated the service and, according to VentureBeat, it "worked without a glitch."

While demoing OnLive, Perlman was connected to a server in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company believes it should be able to cover the country with just five data centers, which they intend to update with new hardware every six months or so. In this way, gamers never have to worry about hardware again, so long as OnLive keeps upgrading. “Consumers are buying the game experience, not the console,” Perlman said.

Unreal Tournament and Burnout Paradise were shown off to the audience; since one game is a shooter and the other a racer, these are genres that latency would be quite important to. Thankfully, the titles appeared to be running quite well. That said, it's still not the same as running an entire network throughout the U.S., but we remain cautiously optimistic that latency will be kept to a minimum once the service finally launches.

Interestingly, Perlman also demonstrated the OnLive service working on iPhone. Playing a game as detailed as Crysis on an iPhone seems mind-blowing.  Perlman believes OnLive is the perfect opportunity for the video game industry to really take control of the digital revolution. The music industry failed, and the video and film sectors seem to be moving too slowly. There's an opportunity for the games business to do it right. “The games market is ripe for OnLive,” Perlman said. “If we don’t create one, believe me, someone else will. Let’s use this wonderful Internet we have to mitigate piracy.”