Hands On: OnLive's Streaming On-Demand Version of <cite>Mirror's Edge</cite>

SAN FRANCISCO -- "But is it going to work?"

I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people at this year's Game Developers Conference about OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand subscription service set to launch later this year. The pitch is that you'll be able to hook up a tiny little box to your TV, or just use any cheapo low-end PC, and stream games to your set that are being run on remote servers. It all sounds fantastic in theory, but... well, you know.

So OnLive knew they had to at least demonstrate, in the impossibly ideal conditions of a convention hall, that they can stream games. I was told that the servers were located in Santa Clara, about 50 miles from San Francisco's Moscone Center. To test the service out, I decided to pick out the fastest game I could find in the lineup, something I knew that would be ruined by lag: Mirror's Edge.

In a nutshell: Mirror's Edge felt slightly different than the console version. Not worse, exactly. Different. In the same way that ports of games across older platforms like Super Nintendo and Genesis would sometimes feel a little bit different. If I hadn't played the console versions of Mirror's Edge I probably wouldn't notice how the gameplay felt just a tiny bit slower, a tiny bit choppier. But I could feel it having the frame of reference.

The graphics were also just a little bit blurrier, due to the compression. OnLive's remote servers there in Santa Clara, as I understand it, are doing all the computation, then compressing each individual frame of graphics, then beaming it out to the set-top box or PC, which then decompresses it and splashes it up on-screen.

So it's a little jumpy, a little blurry. It's still the same amount of fun. Given what the OnLive system is doing, is that a fair tradeoff? If you can sign up for games-on-demand with little to no up-front cost -- that tiny box might cost under $100 or it might even be subsidized just like your cable box -- is it worth it? I think it will be to many people. The question, of course, is whether OnLive can replicate the ideal conditions that I tried here, when it's working with my home internet connection and I'm sharing the servers with a million other people, not just the few on the GDC floor.

Actually, that's not the only hurdle this needs to clear. I will quote at length from your friend and mine Bill Harris:

Publishers, at the same time they have been screaming that current piracy rates represent the apocalypse, have also told us over and over again that game prices would be cheaper if it weren't for pirates. They've also been screaming that the resale market is just absolutely killing them.

Well, if this service actually launches, we will all see if, to put it delicately, they were full of shit. They have every reason in the world to want this technology to succeed, and one of the ways it has a much, much better chance of succeeding is if they reduce the price on games sold through OnLive. I don't mean $5 off a $59.95 game--I mean at least $15, and preferably $20.

I mean, they should, right? They're keeping $23 more per unit!

Games cannot cost $60 on OnLive, especially when you consider that what you're doing is analogous to renting, not buying. Even if you download a game today, you at least have a file that sits on your hard drive no matter what. If you use OnLive, your games are only as good as your internet connection and your subscription to the service. The prices need to reflect that.

Image courtesy OnLive