Steam is in trouble

[BobTD]

if this turns out to work as well as it says it does:

OnLive Game Service Overview

You can... play games instantly? No download required? How does that even work? And how can you watch other people playing games on this? Is it being played and the data being stored on another computer somewhere?

Someone should research this. I might have to try a month flat rate, because this is scary.

[LiNuX]

They have the game on an external server, so I guess that's why you don't need to download. But I don't know how good the gaming experience will be then. And what do you do when you don't have internet? You have no game.

Looks and sounds cool though. I might try and see how it is for myself.

[Synge]

From what I hear, unless it's been improved vastly in the last couple months, the games look like **** for the majority of users. Plus, if I recall correctly, you don't own the games you buy; You own em for the duration of your subscription, but if you quit the service you lose your games.

I don't think Steam is in any danger yet, in the future if Onlive improve the service, maybe. But people use Steam for the awesome deals and service overall, and people with powerful PCs are gonna use that power, not let their net connection determine the quality of their gaming.

[Ilyich Valken]

Steam's in no danger. You have to stream the games you "buy" in order to play them. This means, unless you have top-tier internet, and never experience any trouble and never plan on playing without an internet connection, it's perfect. But, since that never occurs... Yeah. Games are laggy and have issues since they're streamed.

Good idea, bad execution.

[ROFLBRYCE]

OnLive has been popping in and out of attention for 2 years now. They aren't going anywhere, and Steam is in no trouble whatsoever.

They have an awesome idea, but it's not gonna work out :/

[Fr0stByte]

if this turns out to work as well as it says it does:

OnLive Game Service Overview

You can... play games instantly? No download required? How does that even work? And how can you watch other people playing games on this? Is it being played and the data being stored on another computer somewhere?

Someone should research this. I might have to try a month flat rate, because this is scary.

The game would be hosted on another server so you dont need a download....might have to try this out even though I wasnt a user of STEAM

[Havoc]

To say steam is in trouble because some fancy gaming service popped up, is like saying Christianity is in trouble just because some new religion popped up.

Really, steam is a behemoth, and unless gaben gets drunk and urinates on the main servers, I don't see anything bad happening to it anytime soon.

OnLive is a fancy idea, but its like adding lag to singleplayer games.
Being able to play games in full detail on a pc that would not out-of-the-box be able to run them, is great, but it requires to basically stream HD video in real-time with only a few milliseconds buffer.

The key problem is that the lag would be different from your default MMO or FPS lag.
In those games the lag causes the synch between player to be slightly off, which can be compensated or doesn't even matter at all if its under 60ms, hell you can play FPS just fine with 100ms.

In MMOs you get a little rubberbanding if the lag is really high. 200ms+

But OnLive has to transmitt your inputs into the game your playing with the, if you're lucky, 30ms delay, then oh dear god the HD, at least 720p video(and even here the game still would look kind of defecated), for a PC game preferably 1080p, this would have to get streamed back to you with no more than 30ms delay.

Do the math because this will hardly ever run as well in reality as it does on paper.
You'd need a monster internet connection, and a semi-decent computer to playback such high-resolution video.

[paecmaker]

One off the only countries that this might work is south corea.

[EpsilonX]

This is like the 4th Onlive topic on GF. The games are played on servers housed by the onlive people, and instantly streamed to you.

it's not doing too well from what i hear. I don't even know where to buy the freaking thing

[Ilyich Valken]

This is like the 4th Onlive topic on GF. The games are played on servers housed by the onlive people, and instantly streamed to you.

it's not doing too well from what i hear. I don't even know where to buy the freaking thing

You just download the program and buy the games from that.