OnLive: Opening Gaming to the Masses, or Just The Lucky Few?

OnLive gaming has recently launched here in the UK and is designed to bring instant access to video games without the need for a console or installing games. Quite a bold claim, but they are having good success in the US markets. We’ve tested the service on my high-speed connection and on Debbie’s rather more prosaic 3.5Mb connection to see how well it performs.

Speedy Rich

I was lucky enough to get one of their OnLive consoles during the Eurogamer Expo launch last week, although it was a massive queue. So, what’s the hardware like? It’s a very small unit, around the size of two packs of smokes next to each other lengthwise. There’s also a controller that’s very similar to an Xbox one, although not quite as slick. It includes not just a battery pack but also two normal batteries to use as well. A really nice touch is that the box includes an HDMI lead too.

Installation takes only a few minutes. You literally plug in the leads, add an Internet connection, quick update and away you go. This highlights two of their main selling points – simplicity and speed. Within 20 minutes you’ll be logged in and looking at the main interface. It really is that simple and makes a nice change from complicated setups.

Let skip to the main bit: how does this work as a gaming console? I’ve a 40Mb internet connection (BT Infinity via wholesale), 46” TV and it’s all connected via wires. How does it function? Simply, it works and very well at that. I’ve been playing Borderlands and Dirt 3 via their trials. Graphics are not quite PC quality, however they are very good for a streaming system. I was particularly impressed with the frame rate while racing around in Dirt3. I did suffer occasional stutters in both games, I’ve yet to figure out whats causing that.

So how about the controls? While playing both games I found the system very responsive and reacting exactly when I clicked a button. I did see Borderlands drop some video quality, giving minor artifacting but while this happened the controls still responded as quickly as before. I guess the system sacrifices picture over control. This, to me, is a very valid choice. I’d hate to die just because the system wanted to keep the picture looking good!

One feature that is pretty unique is the ability to watch other people playing a game in real time. You can spectate, and if the other person allows, talk to the player. It’s a bit voyeuristic, however it does become addictive. A nice side effect of this, you can see later levels of a game you might be debating buying to see if you’d like it or not.

Now the only real concern, data usage per hour. During my 30 minute Dirt 3 session I managed to go through 1.3 Gb of data. This is quite a bit a total of 19.5 Gb for 15 and half hours of game play a month at the highest quality level. So if you are considering it, and have a family who are avid gamers, it might be time to ensure you are on an unlimited Internet connection.

Now over to Debbie, who has been trying to use the OnLive platform on a much slower Internet connection.

Slightly-Below-Average Gamer Debbie

All well and good on Rich’s high-speed connection. With Ofcom reporting that the average UK broadband speed in November/December 2010 was 6.2Mbit/s, it’s clear that most users won’t have anything like the performance that Rich gets. BT hasn’t yet fibred up my building, so we’re stuck with a paltry 3.5Mbit/s download speed – sometimes even lower.

For those of who more interested in the technical side of things, Digital Foundry published a comprehensive analysis of OnLive using the European servers over the weekend. Here’s a section of an earlier post from him last week, just after the UK launch:

On our benchmark latency test – Unreal Tournament 3 – we got exactly the same lag measurement [as on the US servers] of 150ms, but it’s fair to say that just as with our US experience, the latency tests were all over the place, with the worse case situation being over 200ms on DiRT 3…

…In terms of what Unreal’s 150ms latency actually means, let’s compare it with some local lag measurements from the Xbox 360: the same game weighs in at 100ms, so feels significantly better, but Bulletstorm and Mirror’s Edge give us 133ms – so effectively in these situations, OnLive is just 16ms – or one frame – “slower”. It’s actually on a par with Killzone 2 running locally on PlayStation 3, which is remarkable. Unfortunately, on the other titles we’ve tested, the parity simply isn’t there and lag remains an issue to differing degrees. How impactful it is on actual gameplay changes on a game by game basis
– Richard Leadbetter, OnLive: Assessing the UK Launch (registration required)

Look like our biggest fear of latency was unfounded, thanks to the technical wizardry behind OnLive. Still, when it comes to streaming video, my home broadband isn’t quite up to the task. Here’s a demo of Duke Nukem Forever as played across OnLive on my PC.

As you can see, it’s playable but a little jerky and sometimes suffers from serious artifacts in the picture. I captured this footage at 11pm on Tuesday night – not exactly peak time for internet usage. With games like Warhammer 40k Space Marine available at £3.45 for a 3-day rental, I’d be happy using it for single-player games but on my connection, there’s no way I’d get the framerates or reliability required for any serious multiplayer gaming.

Test your own broadband speed over at ThinkBroadband or Speedtest.net. You can sign up to OnLive for free on the UK website.