idk... but for such service, they will need a lot servers, probably they will set some contracts with large server companies. Theese companies has employees that maintain the server software and servers. great possibility that game or server software will leak to warez secene.

yeah, i know that is harder than pirating current games but this happens, if softwares that priced at 150k-300k ($) leak to warez scene this can happen too.

talking about piracy, valve announced a software protection technology to replace drm. it's some sort of unique executable per user thing.

i read about that ...
but i dont think this has a great future (at least at europe)...
(here at germany a fast answertime from a server is still a rare thing also with good bandwiths)
and also think of the big players in hardware industries - when no one will buy a PC or Console ...

and there the fact that they would be a big "Monopol" and can do what they want with the pricepolitics makes me think critical about it

(sry for the bad eng .. )

I am wondering how this can be achieved? Is it possible to transfer so much frames over internet to play a game in a resolution like 1680x1050? Or will it look like DIVX videos?

And what will happen to game engines? Do they need a lot of changes to work with this technology?

It might indeed be a revolution and a lot of hardware vendors might jump this train including Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo.

It's possible to transfer very high resolutions already with an average bandwith of today. They're talking about HD resolutions, whatever they mean exactly by that, but that basically means that it's already enough today.
And that's just going go get better. Especially because now internet providers have another reason to upgrade their infrastructure.

So the problem won't be the amount of data transfered, but how fast the response time of the servers is going to be. That's something that can only be made faster by having the servers closer to your home, or slightly by upgrading the wires.

As for the engines. Are they even going to make as big a difference as they do today?
My guess is that they will not visually, but there will still be a hand full of different engines, because it's also about the service and the tools that they come with.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are going to response to this. They could come up with something similar, I think they have to if they want to stay in the business.
Something like a console that can do both, run casual games by itself and stream high-end graphics from servers.

Yes, this sounds very reasonable to me. Something like a Wii console to play sports and family games and the hard core youngster can kill some monsters later via streaming in high resolution graphics if the girls are sleeping

Another thought about the future came up: Do you know that GarageGames with their Torque technology gets funded by Instant Action? They are bought from a company building a web platform to play games very similar like this OnLive promises.
If OnLive wins, and it is more certain because they just have the better games, then will Instant Action die and GarageGames dies with them. Torque technology could be history then, except another company buys it (maybe Conitec ).

I think Nintendo might be allright if it continues innovating through hardware of it's own(motion sensing, ect.). But Sony and Microsoft will have to adopt something similar in the future to survive, as they compete in the graphics and online market, where this new method eliminates the old ways of doing things. However, I still think it'll take at least a few years before this becomes really big to shape the industry, as there are many areas that will bottleneck it yet. Either way, this is power to the developer, and if piracy is killed, and publishers are eliminated, then it's a new golden age of sorts for us independents to do really well.

nothing more then copyright protection and anti pirating by making all tools fake "mmo" like. users wont gain one single advantage because of that.
what would be the benefits anyway?

cheers

- always playing on very high settings (if you had a pc before)
- playing everywhere, on every device that is supported, with exactly the same service and user profile
- lots of multiplayer possibilities. everybody can play against everybody
- almost no restrictions on how many players join a server

I think the multiplayer side has alot of potential once enough people are using the service. And they can render as many views and screens of other players together on one screen as they like. The data is all at the same place...

I see it like this so far.
Although it is somewhat scary to imagine that the industry (the hardware part) could change so drastically and that all the power would be at one place and one company, to me it looks like the advantages of
PC-Gaming and Console-Gaming are combined in this service.

Developers have a specific hardware they can go for, but customers have the freedom to use the display device of their choice and whatever input device they prefer. Like stay with mouse and keyboard or a controller or any special controller. But it could bring the two groups together.

It does bring a notion of one company ruling all. But in the end, this is very unlikely, as ultimately, the power lies in the developers hands, as you choose what you want to distribute your game on. And besides, there are already 2 other companies planning on doing this, but with different methods. Trion Inc. and if I remember right, there was another one showing their tech at CES for server-side gaming. And there will probably be many more when the big guys start up their own services.

-server latency time (click-send-receive-manag-render-manage-compress-send-receive) ever wondered why website dont pop up in realtime

-massive additional hardware needed to render the game (100+ realtime calculation on one machine are more power consuming then 100+ individual machines at home)

-data management neccessery, remote and in realtime for millions of users

-physical limitations of broadband internet connections (cables. nodes and and and)

-massive compression on one side requires massive realtime decompression on the other one.... ever tried to compress a 800/600 video in realtime...good luck!

-pricing, to be able to run the latest games on the rendercluster it needs to be updated frequently....somebody has to pay it

-privacy, monopolizm, data security, data management (what happens with my data), downtimes,......


chess, poker, scrabble, yes
more wont work....but i am happy if they can prove me wrong

cheers