Tag Archives: cloud

OnLive’s been in Beta for a bit now, and has PC Perspective posted a preview of the service.

Turns out, it’s a very fast and impressive with download times, but latency issues were a problem.

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Some screens for OnLive were released today, showing images of its micro-console and controller.

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Microsoft’s Neil Thompson has weighed-in on cloud-based entertainment services, saying Xbox 360 will be “in the mix and active participants” should the industry become all things streaming.

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Big Dave Perry’s Gaikai game service has raised $5 million in venture capital funding, according to a US SEC filing uncovered by Gamasutra.

According to the doc, Mitch Lasky, a former Activision exec and current partner at tech-investment firm Benchmark Capital, is a contributor.

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European Xbox Live boss Jerry Johnson has seen what streaming videogame services like OnLive and Gaikai have to offer, but – despite their potential ability to send his main moneymaker packing – he’s not too worried.

“Streaming technology is something that the industry is betting on longer term… right now I don’t believe that technology can scale out against the experience we can offer on a local machine,” he said during the London Games Conference.

“The technology will continue to improve. As an industry we’ll have to accept that and move with it – but I don’t think it’s on an accelerated timeline for the foreseeable future,” he added.

Thanks, TechRadar.

More through the link.

Is Lightning the female version of Cloud? Is there more that meets the eye with the pair of them? Lets ask Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase.

“There might be some very superficial similarities in that Cloud and Lightning are really cool and composed characters, and also they both have a military background. Those are the only two things that are really similar about them.

“Otherwise, if you really get to know Lightning, she has a totally different story. Once you play the game you’ll find out more about her.”

During the same interview at GamesCom, Kitase confirmed to us that they’re aiming to have a minimum of three DVDs for the 360 version of FFXIII, which will sim-ship next spring in the US and Europe on PS3 and 360, according to him as well.

Final Fantasy XIII was dated for Japan tonight for December 17 for the PlayStation 3.

Puzzle-platformer Trine got a new patch over on Steam yesterday evening.

It allows players to save their game to Valve’s Steam Cloud service.

Now you can play it at the mistresses, at the dentist, on the train, or even during Uncle Woody’s funeral.

Other patch features include the addition of European languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish), and the fixing of “mystery developer keys” for non-regular keyboard buttons.

Thanks, EvilAvatar.

Realtime Worlds boss Dave Jones has just delivered a bunch of new information on MMO APB in his Develop keynote, confirming the game will have up to 100 players per server and will automatically match enforcers with the bad guys on a dynamic basis.

Jones showed extensive customisation options for both characters and cars in this morning’s speech, as well as a long new trailer detailing the game’s ideals.

Music tools were shown, including a creation system on the lines of CuBase. You can attach music jingles to your deaths – including a Mario theme Jone demoed.

No release date, though.

Get the full liveblog transcript here.

David Perry says that gaming should be more convenient for players and the limitless power of cloud computing could help consumers get games easier and eventually lead to less clutter on shelves at home.

“Facebook is a really good example of how data ownership is changing,” Perry told attendees at Develop. “People don’t really care if they own a version of Texas Hold’em or Yoville as long as they can access it easily.

“YouTube didn’t try and drive everyone to their portal. Instead, they allowed videos to be distributed across the web. How many videos would you watch if you had to register with every video maker? How many videos would you watch if you had to download the entire video first? And yet that’s something we ask our consumers to do.”

To demonstrate this, he used World of Warcraft as an example. While commending Blizzard for the realively small download, he took the audience through the thirty-one clicks it takes to start playing the game.

“I get twenty clicks in before I see a play button; but then I still get another legal agreement.” he said.

Perry then stated that Gaikai would allow users to start playing with just one click which he says is absolutely critical and gaming companies need to get behind it.

“If Eidos wanted to do this, they couldn’t cover the world in game servers,” he said. “But if all our companies worked together, we could.”

We have a video interview with Big Dave which will be posted later.

Meanwhile, get more regarding his streaming games philosophy via Gamasutra.

Like Verizon, AT&T has plans to offer games via a digital download service.

The company’s executive director of gaming, Glenn Broderick, has said that with cloud computing expected to “take off in the next 5-10 years”, AT&T wants to offer the same sort of streaming game service that OnLive is planning.

“The way we look at it is we have between everything almost 100 million customers, and we are evenly distributed demographically, so there will be lots of people who just want to play Bejeweled but there will be others who want to download Call of Duty,”  he told IndustryGamers. “We need to accommodate them all.

“The customization work we’re doing combined with our customer relationships will enable us to put together a service that is relevant to the customer, so that if I’m a mom of two who plays Bejeweled, when I go to the [portal] I’m not going to see an ad for the next Call of Duty or something.

“We’re putting a ton of money into back-end systems for both mobile and the broadband site… We’re making serious investments in the games space because it’s now seen as a huge strategic initiative for AT&T. And before it just wasn’t; it wasn’t on the executive agenda.”

When asked how much the company plans to spend on the service, Broderick said that it was “more than a million and less than a billion.”

Fair enough.

Thanks, BigDownload.

Warren Spector convinced Will Wright at GDC that Cloud gaming’s going have a giant impact on the trade.

The famed developers went toe-to-toe on the issue during the Luminaries Lunch at the Californian show last month.

“For the first time in my life, at least, I actually got Will Wright to admit that I was right about something we were argued about — specifically, the big impact Cloud computing was likely to have on games and game development,” Spector said, writing on his blog.

“I think it’s going to be huge and he, at least at the start of the discussion, didn’t think it would change things at all.”

Wright told VG247 after the Lunch that, “In the future, if people are really browsing these things, it’s a great opportunity.”

There’s a full update on Warren’s first GDC day through the link, there.

In an essay on why now’s an exciting time to be involved in the games industry, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi’s stuck his leg in the sand on Cloud gaming – he reckons it’s pretty much a done deal.

“OnLive doesn’t have to kill the console makers to succeed,” said the journo.

“It will become a wildly successful company if it can simply establish video games on demand as a viable channel. And even if OnLive itself doesn’t make it, it is almost inevitable that game cloud computing will thrive.”

OnLive “expects to launch a games on demand service in the fall that is very much like Xbox Live,” Takahashi added.

“You will be able to play high-end games on low-end computers. That’s unbelievable. Many people have reacted to this by saying it is impossible. But it is no more impossible than 2D-Boy creating The World of Goo and getting a bestseller out of it.”

OnLive was announced at GDC this year to general disbelief that the service can work.

2K Games founder and president, Christoph Hartmann, has told GI that he believes Cloud gaming is to play a key role in the industry’s future.

“What we think the future will be is the market will shift to more server-based games – similar to the movie business where most people just rent instead of view films in the cinema,” said Hartmann, speaking at MI6.

“We’re looking into that. But given that we’re a boutique powerhouse and really only focus on one thing at a time, we’re not going to do it like other big people and place five bets. We’re going to pick the right opportunity and go after it. The whole market is shifting online and it’s the direction that we want to take.”

Maybe OnLive wasn’t so mental after all. Full thing through the link.

OnLive boss Steve Perlman has told Joystiq that people had “damn well better be skeptical” about the Cloud-gaming service, but has insisted in a lengthy interview that the concept works.

“They damn well better be skeptical. When I set out to build this thing, we looked at it and said, ‘Look, in theory it’s possible to do, but in practice we just didn’t know if it could actually be done,’” he said.

Perlman went on to talk about the process behind OnLive’s development, claiming he knew people would question the service when it was announced.

“We knew people were going to be skeptical,” he said. “And they should be, you know? But they would go and say, hmm, we’ve got nine of the top publishers behind this thing; do we really think these guys are gonna take their top titles, commit them for release the same retail window as you know, the titles when they come out for the consoles, and they’re gonna let us show games on the floor here, which are actually just being released the day that the OnLive booth opens, you know?

“The only reason they’re going to do that is, obviously, they’ve gone through tons and tons of testing as well.”

Hit the link. Well worth it.

Spore-creator Will Wright has told VG247 that he believes Cloud will work if supported properly by developers and publishers, and that the concept represents a “great opportunity” for the industry.

“In the future, if people are really browsing these things, it’s a great opportunity,” he said, talking of Cloud-based systems like OnLive, which was announced this week at GDC.

If Cloud gaming’s successful, however, Wright said it wouldn’t affect the way he develops games.

“No, not really,” he said when asked if a surge in Cloud popularity would change his content.

“With hardware I really don’t care if it’s Xbox, PC or Cloud.”

OnLive caused quite a stir earlier this week with its remote-play concept, a theory apparently debunked yesterday by tech specialist Richard Leadbetter.

Acclaim head David Perry has confirmed he’s working on a Cloud gaming system similar to the OnLive service announced at GDC yesterday.

Perry was to announce the venture at E3 this year, but the OnLive announcement forced his hand, he said. The exec has told VentureBeat that the company putting the scheme together has nothing to do with Acclaim.

OnLive caused a major stir yesterday when it detailed its service for the first time, saying it will allow subscribers to remotely play high-end games at 720p60 via a fast broadband connection and streaming video, without the need for anything other than a bog standard PC or Mac.

The service will require a 1Mb download to play via a browser. Perry said his service won’t even need that, and will be able to work on any computer with a broadband connection.

There’s no solid detail there on when Perry’s to show the service running proper, or when it’s expected to launch.