I also believe there are some problems currently, not everyone will be able to use it.
But this is the future for sure. It is way more easy for gamers, they can even play on their TV. And it can be much more rewarding for developers. And I really like the idea to stop piracy.

The opposite direction of this will be mobile gaming and has a good chance to survive. Games for iPhone are a good choice for the future as an example.

But home entertainment could really become such kind of multimedia streaming. It can save a lot of investment for the pure gaming customers. And you can buy the cheapest office pc with 2d card and medium CPU, running very quiet, draining almost no power from the plugs. What a dream. This alone can pay the bill for the streaming service. At the and, the gamer can be the winner.

this wont revolutionize gaming...
what if the servers are down? what if you are going to a place where ther is no internet?
what if you dont have any internet at home?
what if there are bugs, hacker attacks and whatever?
this is just going to be an alternative for game developers, but its not gonna change much. its an addition if any...

im with frank on this one...
the future for multimedia... ive been calling that for years...
movies, songs, msuic videos... THATS the future

Yes. I also think there is still a place for traditional gaming. But as I already wrote: If yo do not have internet or if you are away from home then you can use mobile gaming. Dont underestimate it, these small gaming devices will get more powerful every year.
You can use a game console, able to stream and to run local games (like a hybrid system).

The point is: As you can see right now - publishers more and more develop for consoles and not publish on pc or release it much later. The reason is piracy. And if they will publish more for the streaming services then it will automatically win and it will be the future.

Local gaming devices will be smaller, mobile or aimed towards casual gamers, kids, fun (like the Wii).

If the streaming fee is just like a subscription to WOW then it will win anyway, you dont need expensive hardware and you have only little gaming fees.

At the end you will realize gaming like TV today. You pay your monthly fee, you have a selection of gaming channels and you play as much as you want.
Maybe there are channels for Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Family and mixed channels. Some are payed by advertising and might even be free.
It will be very professional, big publishers or distributors will sell or lend games to the channel providers. And indie developers will have to offer to small channels or some old pc gamers, some 60 years pensioner disliking the new world order

You can see it like watching TV / DVD today. You can pay for the TV channel and hope that the movie (game) appears there. But you also have the option to go for the DVD to own this master piece, given you have the right hardware (DVD-Player / game-console, PC).
But most people will just wait that it appears in their channel. They are paying it anyway and will play the game only once ore maybe twice. And if they really, really like it, then there is still the chance to buy a license for it.

And there will be an exclusive channel, something like a cinema theatre today. This channel releases brand new games, it will be much more expensive. You will not pay per month, you will pay per gaming hour. So this is only an option for games, you really like. Otherwise you wait until they appear to your subscription channel later.

Because of the huge amount of games available and given the limited time of the gamers, you will play only best of the best. High quality will be necessary. Game production will be very expensive.

This will happen, for sure.

There are many people that prefer to have something "physical" - a DVD, a CD, whatever.
Not everyone likes the idea of these concepts.
Take Steam and the whole drm discussion as an example.

"The point is: As you can see right now - publishers more and more develop for consoles and not publish on pc or release it much later."

Imo that´s nothing to worry about:
http://www.teut.net/Web-Site/Teut%20Talks_files/Der_5_Jahreszyklus_en.pdf

Yes. I agree. But again, look at the movie sector: You can go to cinema, buy the DVD and watch TV. Cinema and TV will not ship a physical product and many people are happy with it. And they buy only their favorite movies on DVD.

The same will happen with games.

Steam works fine now even without physical products. They have weeks with very low prices, some sales and they sell a lot then. I have read some articles about it. They have so much success this way that they even told, games are too expensive to be successful. And this will be solved with such subscription channels. Steam is only the beginning and could be a subscription channel as well in the future.

By the way: Most business software already comes without physical product. I sell my software with only delivering codes to unlock. I bought Modo, ZBrush and other tools as downloads only. It is called software and does not need space in my room, only on hdd.
If I want something physically then I buy a book and I indeed do that a lot.

It's true, it all depends on the developers jumping this train or not. And that was the same with Steam.
When it was just Valve selling their games through Steam, nobody believed in its success. Then suddenly publishers started to support it, and not just game by game, but they would put on their whole library and even the newest ones.

It really is the publishers that make this thing work or not. If it's replacing anything is a different question and depends more on how well the service works and the way you pay for your gaming time.
Since they're kind of the new generation and will probably be around for some time to make money, they could go in with very reasonable prices and service plans.

Looking at it from now and comparing it to what people like and prefer today won't matter in a few years.
I can well remember how I liked to physically own a music CD. Put it on my shelf and take it down to listen to it and having the cover and all. But it change a lot. Most devices built for music playback, like IPods, can't even play CDs. Digital musics stores have become numerous and it works well. I haven't bought a music CD in years, but bought trough Itunes mostly. Sure it was a slow change, but again, it was all about the publishers and how good the service works. You worry less about what happens to your owned product in the future, but rather how easy your access and storage has become.

And my guess is that they would add most old games to this service, so you can go back and play through gaming history. I'd like that a lot.

There are many physical problems right now - Massive clusters are needed to process the huge amount of data from thousands of users. Lags are a big problem for the gamers. Internet connections are a lot too slow (If i think of my 3Mbit connection ... ).

But some years in the future this might change. The computing problems will be solved by quantum processors, the internet connections will be unbeliebalby fast and completely free of lags by using physical entanglement. But we will have to wait about 10 to 15 years for these techs. So hold on and be patient

This cannot possibly work. No matter how well they compress video there will ALWAYS be lag. The lag will be doubled too, because first your device must send the inputs to the server before the server sends back the video frame.

Anybody ever use screen-sharing on a video chat like Apple iChat? Have you ever tried to play a game on someone else's machine over the internet this way? It doesn't even work at lower resolutions, so how can we expect OnLive to actually send the frames in time?

The only possible way to make this work would be if they had figured out how to use quantum entanglement for communication... and that sounds pretty far-fetched!

(on the other hand, the makers of OnLive must have reason to believe it works: they've got quite a bit invested into this idea.)

This service might work for online "Desktops" / Officwork,
watching movies and games with low reaction time (roundbased games, classic board and card games,)

maybe also for "low reaction time" games like WoW, RTS Games or
some racing simulations.
But not for quick-reaction time games as FPS.
No matter how advanced their architecture is, they
cant reach a latency-performance as on a local Lan.
The games will always feel laggy.

----

But nevertheless, such a service will be appealing to
"some times" players. As they dont need to invest into gaming hardware. Or people who want to check out a game and
see if they want to buy the real one.

---

To come around the problem of the lag, I have an idea:

The developers actually program a "gamelogic" plugin, wich
runs directly on the client machine.
This plugin calculates some of the gameaction on the client machine (given the userinputs), without the graphical calculation.
Then transmits certain gamestates to the server-"main" game.
This way it should be possible to resuce the lag somewhat,
as the userinput can be directly used to calculate a
part of the gamestate. Just the graphical feedback is slower
as it needs to go over the external server and back.

You have to keep in mind, this isn't some screen-sharing software using a generic video compression codec.. This is the people who created Quicktime, and who've been working 7 years on this special video compressor just for the purpose of extremely fast action content, such as video games.

I was sceptical too, but watch all 6 parts of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZfEWYt1fA and you may be convinced too as I was. Unless the hid some supercomputer in that GDC room, these guys were actually playing Crysis in 720p and highest settings on a cheap-o mac laptop, and it really seemed like the guy was playing the game locally..

We all knew that the time were all software would be installed on distant servers and we'd only need dummy terminals, would come sometime... I just thought it would still take 5 or 10 more years.. Guess I was wrong..

Simply, wow..