I've been intrigued by this start-up called OnLive for close to eight months now, and luckily, I get to use their service from June 17th for a year, FREE! I didn't get the chance to beta test their service, so all I've done is watch some of the presentations by Steve Perlman, their CEO.
His talk at Columbia University sometime back just blew me away. Apparently, they've been researching a video compression technology aside several other things, over the past 7 years, and after some 100+ patents, their service is finally ready (or is it?) to reach the public. Cloud gaming, as they call it, enables a person with an internet connection of at least 5Mbps who is within 1000 miles of their data centers in USA to play a game on his PC/MAC (Yes finally, the world is better for mac users) w/o using the quite old, CD/DVD distribution model. And since all the intensive graphics processing is done in their data centers with the ultra high end Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, one can actually experience the "real" deal, which is hidden from avid gamers most of the time, simply because they don't have the costly graphics cards that games nowadays require. Their innovative video compression technology goes away from the usual "group of pictures" paradigm that video compression has always used. What it is, I'd love to know, but that is OnLive's proprietary IP..Anyway, this completely shakes up the gaming scene if it becomes (and I really believe/hope it does..) a runaway success. The studio to publisher hand-off in gaming forms a huge chunk of the capital required to make an AAA game title. I don't quite recollect the figures, but it is really hard to make a good profit in the game industry. Generally, AAA titles take anywhere from 2 - 4 years to develop and since the return on investment is highly unpredictable, you find the game developers earning mediocre salaries when compared to other high-profile software/electronic companies.
Content creation, i.e art, cinematic, etc, form a huge chunk of the headcount when compared to the programmers/tool developers. Hence, the latter is expected to literally slog it out most of the time.. the crunch time never really ends; all this could change if OnLive becomes a success! The money that changes hands from studio to publisher would be a lot lesser, since OnLive essentially becomes the publisher. We've witnessed the music industry shift from cassettes to CDs to digital distribution, though with it comes the digital rights management headache.
The game industry on the other hand hasn't changed its distribution model that much. From the consoles of the 90s to the Xbox/PS/Wii's of today, not much has changed. PC gaming has always relied on CDs and DVDs though Valve's Steam has changed the distribution platform a bit.
The problem has always been thought of as "Games are so frigging huge, apart from LASER drives, what other distribution model makes sense?". But who really cares about "having the whole game".. all you care about is playing and having fun. The AAA game titles of today come with so much graphic content, that it almost feels realistic/fantasy-like. But you can't really enjoy them even if you own the game unless you have a monster number crunching machine. So the problem is two faced, graphics rendering issues and the distribution model.
With Internet speeds increasing at insane rates, TV going digital and wireless broadband speeds of 50+Mbps becoming a reality already, the stage is set for GaaS, Games as a Service. I really hope India skips past all the 3G chaos and jumps into 4G. Qualcomm has opened my eyes to the mobile space, something I had no clue (still do..) about.
Things are about to get a lot more interesting very soon..
