Rumor: Sony Announcing Cloud Gaming Deal at E3 2012

[Indy_aka_Rex]

Dropbox works. But cloud-based gaming is very much in its infancy because accessing pictures of your friend's vacation and having a lag-free gaming experience are two very different things.

Have you used OnLive or Gaikai? Lag isn't an issue. They both compensate for input lag by scaling to bandwidth. There is SOME input lag in both, but neither is unplayable. Unless your gaming consists solely of twitch shooters, fighting games that require zero-lag, and online MP... Input lag is pretty much a non-issue.

They certainly could. I was implying that Sony has traditionally not been good at making separate divisions work well together. The Bravia/Vaio etc. people want to do one thing and the Playstation division another and it usually ends up in a clusterfuck.

Sony. Not Sony Computer Entertainment, the division that now owns Gaikai. If anything, SXony's recent actions show there's aa far greater deal of cohesion between its electronics divisions (maybe not its film/music divisions, though) than in previous years.

You are right about this, I was wrong. But I have my reservations about what the fate of those deals with other CE manufacturers will be.

Maybe they'll end, or maybe they'll continue on in some form.

They will simultaneously try to sell you powerful hardware and also offer a service that (optimistically) renders the hardware you own irrelevant.

At no point does cloud gaming render hardware irrelevant. Cloud gaming is an option and a tool, a useful one to boot. It opens up the ability for Sony to enter an entirely new means of distributing games to consumers that could greatly undercut companies like Gamefly, Blockbuster or even Steam itself. A PS+ variant subscription with playable PS1, PS2, PSP, PSV, PS3 or even PS4 games rentals (which is the same thing OnLive does, except with PC games) would benefit the PS4 and Vita, not hurt it.

Right, because we 've never seen a promising start-up lose its way after being acquired by a tech giant.

That happens all the time, when a company wants to transform the basic ideas of a service into something unlike what it bought. But the fact that Sony bought Gaikai outright implies they WANT people that know how cloud gaming works, and they want it as an advantage on their hardwre.

[CorruptedDragon]

Suddenly cloud gaming rocks! Yay Sony! Rah Rah!

[Badger3920]

No thanks, streaming games is awful.

I don't think its that big of a deal

I wouldn't call this a megaton. It's unproven technology and Sony will inevitably screw it up anyway.

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Suddenly cloud gaming rocks! Yay Sony! Rah Rah!

I think your summarizing skills may need adjustment. New flux capacitor perhaps?

[michealo]

Have you used OnLive or Gaikai? Lag isn't an issue. They both compensate for input lag by scaling to bandwidth. There is SOME input lag in both, but neither is unplayable. Unless your gaming consists solely of twitch shooters, fighting games that require zero-lag, and online MP... Input lag is pretty much a non-issue.

Onlive is awful and lag is mostly the reason.
Bandwidth doesn't help when every command or screen action has to travel to their servers or back, which is infinitely longer than locally. That button press has to be sent out, processed and then sent back, every ms counts.
Plus the graphics are horribly diminished.


I don't see it going anywhere with the core audience for those reasons, as witnessed by onlive's struggles.
They gave any free consoles and it still isn't catching on.

[Indy_aka_Rex]

Suddenly cloud gaming rocks! Yay Sony! Rah Rah!

It always has?

[Badger3920]

It always has?

I think you're in your own boat on that one, at least for the purposes of this thread.

[CorruptedDragon]

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I think your summarizing skills may need adjustment. New flux capacitor perhaps?

I summarize with my own smackdown spin on it. 1 person liking something does equal everyone in smackdown.

[Badger3920]

I summarize with my own smackdown spin on it. 1 person liking something does equal everyone in smackdown.

That's a very interesting scale, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter

[Indy_aka_Rex]

Onlive is awful and lag is mostly the reason.
Bandwidth doesn't help when every command or screen action has to travel to their servers or back, which is infinitely longer than locally. That button press has to be sent out, processed and then sent back, every ms counts.
Plus the graphics are horribly diminished.


I don't see it going anywhere with the core audience for those reasons, as witnessed by onlive's struggles.
They gave any free consoles and it still isn't catching on.

I've used both, and they've never given me game-killing lag, even on 3-5mbps connections. OnLive does scale back visuals to compensate, and it's noticeable. But Gaikai doesn't (granted, this thing isn't running at max PC settings, but some of the games look mid-to-high-end PC titles).

[CorruptedDragon]

That's a very interesting scale, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter

You must already get my newsletter, everyone gets it.

[Almril]

I've used both, and they've never given me game-killing lag, even on 3-5mbps connections. OnLive does scale back visuals to compensate, and it's noticeable. But Gaikai doesn't (granted, this thing isn't running at max PC settings, but some of the games look mid-to-high-end PC titles).

Gaikai is better than Onlive but not by much. And it only really works as a novelty. Playing a long game on those services is pointless since you'd use less bandwidth to just download it. But for demo's and instant access, where you don't need the highest fidelity, it has it's uses. But the amount of hype around the net about it is hilarious, gaf especially seems to be living in dreamland. It's back to the old Sony hype machine, I like it.

[Favelle]

Plus the graphics are horribly diminished.

Sooo...like a console then basically?

[Dennis M.]

Have you used OnLive or Gaikai? Lag isn't an issue. They both compensate for input lag by scaling to bandwidth. There is SOME input lag in both, but neither is unplayable. Unless your gaming consists solely of twitch shooters, fighting games that require zero-lag, and online MP... Input lag is pretty much a non-issue.

No, I haven't because neither is available to me and even if they were I'm not sure I'd care. But you 're in a small minority when you say that lag isn't an issue. Every review I've read (also every comment here, except yours) suggests that lag is a major issue and that 60fps games in particular are unplayable.

At no point does cloud gaming render hardware irrelevant. Cloud gaming is an option and a tool, a useful one to boot. It opens up the ability for Sony to enter an entirely new means of distributing games to consumers that could greatly undercut companies like Gamefly, Blockbuster or even Steam itself. A PS+ variant subscription with playable PS1, PS2, PSP, PSV, PS3 or even PS4 games rentals (which is the same thing OnLive does, except with PC games) would benefit the PS4 and Vita, not hurt it.

But the technology itself means that you don't need a PS4 to play those games. Onlive works with a "console" the size of a cigarette pack, because the only thing it needs to do is decode the H264 stream.
I think that a service like that would be a cool way to sample certain games (as you said yourself no FPS, driving sims or fighting games, all of them major genres) but I don't see it as a selling point.

[michealo]

Sooo...like a console then basically?

Hating on any platform is lame?
Let's not forget that the death of consoles was predicted when onlive launched, the sales gap has widened since then even more.

[Ergo-Proxy]

Onlive is awful and lag is mostly the reason.
Bandwidth doesn't help when every command or screen action has to travel to their servers or back, which is infinitely longer than locally. That button press has to be sent out, processed and then sent back, every ms counts.
Plus the graphics are horribly diminished.


I don't see it going anywhere with the core audience for those reasons, as witnessed by onlive's struggles.
They gave any free consoles and it still isn't catching on.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...ikai-vs-onlive

Here is a small comparison between the two services. I guess the problem you are experiencing with Onlive is the fact that you are in the USA and the actual service is located in Luxemburg? Not sure if they have servers in the US too.

But it appears at least that Gaikai has a noticeably much better image.

Some of the reasons why Onlive doesnt seem to be so popular should be the fact that not everyone has the bandwidth, it is not something you can find in any store, people are unsure about the service, probably the company itself doesnt want to grow faster than what their servers cab sustain, it is not a product familiar to everyone, and people already own PC's and consoles which are proven products.

Now if one such service is implemented on a console, those owners automatically have potential access to the service. Every console owner will be a GaiKai device owner automatically. People will surely get to know the service and some people who would have never tried it will give it a chance.

So I believe this move is going to grow the gaming cloud market and improvements will be coming faster

I expect that MS and Onlive will have an agreement to offer a competitive service too