Soderlund: Crysis and BFBC2 look just as good through OnLive as "the highest end PC"

EA senior VP Patrick Soderlund has seen how games like Crysis and Bad Company 2 look using OnLive, and he feels the games look "exactly like they would" on the "highest end PC".

Speaking with CVG, Soderlund said EA's keeping an eye on OnLive and other Cloud gaming systems and feel it's a "brilliant idea as long as it works", but there's still a few latency issues.

"The thing with that is, it doesn't matter how powerful the game is or what graphics you're running on," said Soderlund regarding OnLive. "Everything is handled somewhere else. The stream and the mechanism that controls the stream, that's the problem right now, getting the latency down so that it feels like you're playing on your TV at home rather than a server somewhere else.

"I've tested it myself I've played high-end games like Crysis or Bad Company 2 and they looked exactly like they would do on the highest end PC. They still have some minor technical challenges to overcome in terms of transferring data to you to have the same experience but this is very impressive technology and these companies - there are several of them - are on to something really big I think.

"If I were Sony and Microsoft and I was looking at building a new machine I would absolutely look at options like that for my services for sure, why not?"

OnLive announced yesterday it'll begin shipping its MicroConsole on December 2 and are currently taking pre-orders.

Meanwhile, Gaikai is set to launch in "probably mid-December" and there'll be no beta, just "‘go ahead and play".