Has Cloud-Based Gaming Reached a Tipping Point? By Knife Fighting OnLive, GameStop Sure Seems to Think So

GameStop, the massive retail chain for games, was recently caught trying to prevent its customers from using OnLive, the cloud-based game streaming service. The company is soon planning to launch a cloud service of its own, and has been ordering its employees to remove OnLive coupons from the boxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. (A game that's currently taking forever to download on my Steam account, which frankly, makes me much more personally interested in cloud-based streaming.)

For New World Notes readers, this news is important for at least two reasons: As I wrote a couple months ago, cloud-streaming could help immersive 3D virtual worlds reach a mass audience (which is why Linden Lab was experimenting with one of them), but so far, the industry has been waiting for a large enough market to embrace cloud streaming. GameStop's fairly desperate move against OnLive, which it describes as a "competitor", strongly suggests that we are indeed at that tipping point.

The second reason? Well, remember what OnLive CEO Steve Perlman once told me about his service (or for that matter, any cloud-based streaming service): "You could design the next Second Life on this!"

Comments

[Scarp Godenot]

I don't know how the economics of cloud streaming second life could work. There is far too much processing involved, isn't there? LL would have to massively increase their servers. How would that be paid for?

[Marco Mugnatto]

I think the way they did with the Gaikai client was not the best. Probably they where only connecting Gaikai servers and SL servers from distance because there still was lag. What would really make a difference is if streaming and rendering was running on the same datacenter, then you could put dozens of users on the same region each one with a big viewing distance without lag and without having to wait for the vector rendering, like if they where playing on a local network.

[Mr. Ed]

There is a technical (or rather economical) problem at the user end too. ISPs are increasingly enforcing monthly data caps as well as streaming caps, and that will put a stop to purely cloud based gaming pretty quickly, I would think.