Back in March of 2009 I took a look at OnLive and said that while it was a great notion, the technology was most likely infeasible, impractical, or only useful to a very narrow audience.
Now here is a talk from Steve Perlman at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, making the case that the idea works:
As an early critic, I have to make the following observations:
1) While the name Steve Perlman is new to me, I think it’s safe to say that he’s not a snake oil salesman.
2) If he was a snake oil salesman, he’d be giving these talks to investors and staying clear of roomfuls of engineers.
3) He points strike me as fairly persuasive.
Some of the points are still a bit hazy for me, but I am open – and perhaps even eager – to believe that I was wrong and that this is a thing that could be done in our universe.
I’m very curious about how the licensing would work. Initially it sounded like you would just purchase the rights to play a particular game. In this talk it seems more like a GameTap or Netflix type service, where you can just pay a flat fee and eat all the games you like, buffet style. I’d still rather treat games as books, but treating them like cable TV would be preferable to how it works now, where publishers try to sell you the rights to be hassled by a game until they get sick of your whining and shut down the authentication servers.
I still have a lot of objections, questions, and misgivings, but I’m no longer inclined to denounce it as crazy talk. However this plays out, it looks like smart people have an idea they think will work, and it sounds like it would be a welcome refuge for PC gamers.
Whether it ultimately works or not, I’m really curious how it will play out. I’m going to be following this one eagerly.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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