Unfettered Blather

I made a prediction back in December that PC gaming as we know it would end. The new OnLive service seems to support my vision of the future.

What I haven’t seen yet is the real potential of a service like OnLive, but when people talk about “A new way to play games on the PC” they’re thinking too small. If all the heavy lifting is done on a server somewhere, why would this be limited to a PC?

Let’s get a few things out of the way, I’m well aware of the technical limitations right now. At some point in the future someone is going to figure this out and make it work. Maybe it won’t be OnLive, but this is a direction the industry has been looking at for awhile. OnLive is possibly just the first to really make a go. We already have browser gaming thanks to GameTap, so the ability to deliver content through a browser is possible and happens already. What OnLive introduces is more reliance on the server side and a true thin client. Honestly, lots of non-gaming applications already do this. The question now is “when” not “if” they can get it to work.

When OnLive, or whatever, finally becomes available there is nothing that says you will actually need a PC to make it work. They might be saying it now, but all you really need is enough processor to handle the content and rendering graphics. A console with the ability to interact with OnLive could do this, a blackberry hooked up to a monitor and keyboard like I suggested in my original article could do it if it had the rendering capabilities, older PC’s in need of an upgrade suddenly become viable. The possibilities are endless.

Not only that, but it’s not really a bold and daring idea. On demand content is already becoming commonplace with movies. This fits the general public’s expectations just fine. The only thing holding all this back is that the infrastructure may just not be ready to handle this kind of service on a massive scale.

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