OnLive has announced that it will be kicking off the closed beta testing phase of its real time streaming gameplay service.
The ‘cloud gaming’ service was originally announced back in March this year, when the company, formed by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey, announced that it had been working on the new platform for seven years.
OnLive plans to change the way people play and purchase games.
Instead of running from a user’s hard drive and making use of their individual system components such as the CPU, graphics card and memory to render the game, OnLive will run the game on an internet, “cloud”-like, server, effectively rendering the game on its own hardware and streaming it in real time to the user on the other end.
This means that users with low end PCs will be able to enjoy high-end games such as Crysis.
The OnLive system will not be limited to PC gaming and if implemented correctly, could replace all current generation consoles with a small OnLive transmitter and gaming controller.
It was originally planned that the public closed beta would begin in June after months of internal testing. The service was planned for launch in October this year, but a late 2010 launch now seems more likely.
In order to enjoy OnLive gaming, users will need a minimum connection speed of 1.5Mbps. In order to enjoy games on high settings at high resolutions, users will need to have an effective bandwidth speed of 5Mbps.
This means that it will be a long time before we see OnLive in South Africa, but places such as Korea will be able to take full advantage of the service using their high speed fiber internet infrastructure.
Journalist’s impressions of the service at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year indicated that it still has a way to go before it can compete with gaming in its current form.
Blocky compression and “splotchy” visuals apparently marred the experience, however, these impressions were very early and the technology may have come a way over the past few months.
MyGaming will be in London for AMD’s Next Generation Technology Summit next week, and will be sure to give the beta a good spin, if only to see Crysis running on a Lenovo Thinkpad.
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