This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Credible alternatives to music piracy may have come too late for record labels -- British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) figures reveal that in 2010, 76 per cent of tracks downloaded in the UK were obtained illegally. However, the video-game industry, which is worth around £30bn globally, is hoping to avoid a similar fate by heading to the cloud.
OTOY, OnLive, Happy Cloud and Gaikai are cloud-based services offering consumers a way to access games without downloading software or buying it in shops. Instead they stream games to desktop computers, tablet devices and TV sets (with additional hardware), much like LOVEFiLM's online service. And because the games don't exist as files on a disk, they're harder to crack and distribute illegally over filesharing sites. "Eliminating piracy is a win for developers," says Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of OTOY. "But developing a game once and having many devices run the same version of that game is a huge win for both gamers and developers."
OnLive, which launched in the UK in September, offers full play passes for new titles such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution for £34.99. Expected next year, OTOY is yet to announce its pricing, but they'll likely mirror US numbers -- up to 25 cents (16p) per hour of streamed gaming. Lag is an obvious concern, but Urbach claims it shouldn't be an issue with OTOY. "We developed our own codec from scratch, specifically to handle cloud rendering at thousands of frames per second," he says. "The resulting lag is not really perceptible."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
