Modern Culture Shock

Alas, the coming of the Video Game Messiah is at hand. It is called OnLive and it doth promises to put an end to purchasing consoles and high-end computers. Through its great power, OnLive shall bring gaming glory of the highest caliber straight to your low-end laptop or TV. Surely, we are blessed or so seems to be the attitude at the recent 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Yet, voices of dissent rise up and I am one of them.

Much like The Phantom before it, a console which promised to revolutionize the industry and then lived up to its name by never physically manifesting, OnLive makes fantastic claims. Instead of buying or downloading games, you install a small program which lets you connect to OnLive's servers and allows you to play the games remotely off of its computers. Or you buy the low cost MicroConsole, which plugs into a TV and is about the size of your hand. In either case, the need to buy expensive hardware is removed because you are now using its computers and harddrives to play the game, which is streamed over the Internet. All that is required on your end is a controller, a decent Internet connection, and a computer/TV. 

Publishing companies such as Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Atari, Codemasters, THQ, Warner Bros., 2D Boy and Eidos plan to have their games available on the service when it debuts this winter. All of this can be yours for a monthly subscription, assuming it works.

The first problem with this model is, of course, lag. Since the input from your controller needs to travel across the Internet and then back for video signal to reach your screen, even those of us with blazing fast broadband connections would inevitably encounter latency. Anyone familiar with online gaming knows that a moment of stutter can be the difference between life and death, and to be experiencing this in a single player setting would be a source of endless frustration. One also has to wonder if OnLive has the necessary horsepower in its machines to provide the kind of high-end gaming it is promising to the masses. Also, what happens when you play multiplayer on these games?

Then you'd be contending with not only the usual lag from other players, but the lag from OnLive and yourself.

Another issue is the loss of mods and custom levels, like those found in the PC version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or even Halo 3 on the Xbox 360. Without an actual copy of the game, no user-generated content can be shared by the community. The fact that people still buy Starcraft proves how useful this can be for increasing a game's longevity.
This raises an even bigger issue: ownership. In essence, you own nothing with OnLive. If the service ever goes down or you lose your Internet connection, you'd have squat.
So why so much hubbub from developers? Well, if you didn't know, PC gaming is in a lot of trouble. While consoles sell from $250 to $500, a high-end computer often costs double that or more, and the constant need to upgrade parts doesn't help.

Worse still, the PC format allows for easy hacking and distribution of games via torrents, making piracy unstoppable. Throughout the past decade, as consoles have come to dominate the video game market, PC game publishers have implemented several forms of DRM, Digital Rights Management, to combat piracy. Invariably these measures have been reviled for treating the customer like a criminal. It is also often the case that such measures force customers to visit hacker and piracy sites because the DRM on the game they bought cause installation problems that make it unplayable. 

PC developers long for the kind of piracy prevention that the console format naturally offers, and OnLive provides this along with the fact that you never own the game. Additionally, if OnLive was able to drive the other consoles into extinction then the console wars would end, vast swaths of the Internet would fall dead silent, and a uniform system of distribution, much like network TV, would be available. But if you ask me, the parts that look too good to be true probably are and the parts that look bad definitely are so I say "better the devil you know." At least you own it, horns and all.