Be Excellent To Each Other

Just get OnLive then.

OnLive requires the download of an exe installer which is a no-no at work, whereas Gaikai is just a Java app so will at least get past the first hurdle.

Remember this?

Remember when they gave away Dear Ester free?

Remember when I couldn't get onto OnLive cause my fucking Internet connection.

Remember ... blah, blah, Virgin, blah, blah mega fibres.

Anyhoo, this is fucking AMAZEBALLS - I'm playing Dear Ester. For nowt! On my laptop! This must be what it's like to be AE. It looks lovely.

Pretty solid connection on wifi but a tiny loss of detail when moving about. I think if I'd gone wired it should be virtually spotless throughout.

Quite enjoyed my trip to OnLive.

Still in business then, I take it.

The corpse is twitching a bit, that's all.

Well I'll be the first to admit it lasted longer that I was expecting, but it's now officially dead.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015- ... this-month

And lest we forget following the original 'death' in August 2012 it was only relaunched in March 2014, so it lasted twelve months after that. (I called it at 6-9 months following the August 2012 death.)

It's a shame for the folks who've lost their jobs though, hopefully they can find alternative employment ASAP. But for me OnLive was always a crazy-ass idea that was just never going to be a commercial proposition. It'd be like working at a sand stall in the Gobi desert.

Three years later and both Microsoft and Google have launched games streaming services within a week of each other:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... that-works

Rumours are the next Xbox launches will offer a cheap streaming-only model as well as a traditional console. And given the success of the Switch and the mobile platform focus for the Xbox streaming launch, I wonder if it'll be a dockable portable device.

There seems to be a shitload of these things kicking around at the moment, I've seen adverts recently for another two that I'd never heard of before:

https://shadow.tech/gben/
https://liquidsky.com/

Eurogamer's writeup makes some interesting points on what's changed in terms of latency in video encoding since the OnLive days (significantly better), and why Microsoft and Google have advantages in this space that no-one else who's tried this so far have had (they both have planet-spanning server infrastructure, and Microsoft have a deep content catalog via Xbox. And deep pockets, too.)

Anything's possible, but I just find it really hard to imagine this. Regardless of how you slice it, it would mean something much less powerful than even the OG Xbone and is that really going to fly with consumers? People see 'new Xbox' and expect it to be more capable than the previous one. If they went down this route they'd need to brand it completely separately in order to stave off confusion and disappointment.

Whut? In this scenario it would be streaming Xbox Two [1] games. It wouldn't be "less powerful" in any meaningful sense, except that it'd need beast-mode internet.

[1] name made up for the sake of discussion

The latency issues will always plague these types of services. We just ain’t there yet with the technology to replicate even close to what we get with a wired/wireless controller.

This is only true until it isn't. GTA IV shipped with 200+ ms of latency between control input and game response visible on the TVs of its day. That's easily beatable with cloud gaming tech we have right now.

Really? Wow, that's... suboptimal.

That doesn't matter to STATZ NERDZ though.

I agree that there would be an outcry.

Yes, it was appalling, but that didn't stop it making All The Money anyway.

It played like wading through treacle though, no one would put up with it today.

I think this second wave of cloud gaming has a reasonable chance of enjoying some success, unlike the first wave which was clearly going to crash and burn right from the start.

If they get the pricing and the game library right, yeah, I can potentially see people going for it.

I'll give it a 50/50 chance of enjoyed modest commercial success if it's implemented properly.

Was there an outcry when the Vita was less powerful than the PS4?

Anyway, go back and read what Phil Spencer says here: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018 ... x-consoles and note he's quite open about a plurality of new consoles. I think the idea of a "big" local gaming Xbox and a "little" streaming-only Xbox makes sense when you revisit that interview in light of this week's announcement of Project xCloud.

Also note: 'That's what Yves Guillemot, boss of Assassin's Creed company Ubisoft, claimed in a recent interview. Speaking to Variety, Guillemot said: "There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us."' And Ubisoft is the launch partner for Google's Project Stream: https://news.ubisoft.com/article/Ubisof ... ect-Stream

I argue that lots of serious industry players are saying the time is rapidly approaching for this tech. These aren't little startups like OnLive was.

Considering the PS4 was two years away - I doubt it

An Xbtwo could do streaming as some kind of adjunct, but people--and technology--aren't ready for a streaming-only flagship console. Which means that if the base machine was a dockable mobile thing then it's going to necessarily be a technical downgrade.

Could they offer it on xbox ones? Or will it need some special magic chip to do the decoding? Because if the choice was you could use your current console to play the new games but you need a whole new one to play them locally and in 4K or whatever then I could see it being really popular.

Yes, almost certainly. The mobile devices Microsoft talked about can't do anything in terms of video decode that the current Xbox can't. Microsoft didn't talk about it yesterday, I think, presumably because it doesn't make much sense; the use case for streaming from an Xbox One to another One that could just play the game locally isn't compelling. But I'd imagine that would change with nextgen hardware.

Ah, fine.

OK, probably more relevant an analogy: was there an outcry when the Xbox S continued to exist after the X was launched? That's a direct precedent for a two-tier console product lineup and no-one seems offended that I can see. Now imagine the X becoming a "local gaming" Xbox Two Badass Edition at about the same price point and the S halving in price, moving to a Switch-style dockable portable form factor, and becoming the "streaming only" Xbox Two Lite. Same games. That's what I'm hypothesising. Why would that cause outcry?

You’re expecting people to act logically.