Friday, April 3, 2015

The Death of OnLive (and what it can teach us)

The articles that inspired this post can be found here:

            Once upon a time, there was this newfangled gaming thing called OnLive.  OnLive was somewhat of a unique specimen in the video game industry: it is referred to as a pioneer in the world of “cloud gaming” services.  It was a video game streaming service, and probably the first big one; it’s sort of like Netflix, but instead of movies and television shows, it offered games.  It was an interesting prospect, but one that raised plenty of questions and doubts.  Streaming movies and TV was one thing; you were just being fed video and audio as fast as the internet could provide it to you.  But games are something different.  You constantly have to control what happens in games (for the most part; games come in all sorts of varieties, after all), and that is a complete non-issue when you have the full game at your disposal; whether it’s gently nudging a disc into your PS3, downloading games from Steam onto your PC, or blowing the dust out of your NES cartridges until they work, video games are, traditionally, “all there” when you’re playing them.  But a streaming service is feeding you bits and pieces of…well, whatever it is you’re streaming…directly from the internet.  If you’re getting bits and pieces of a game at a time, and something goes wrong with your connection, or even if there’s the slightest hiccup, the experience can be ruined.  Sure, there’s playing PC and console games with friends over the internet.  Everyone knows that while playing online, games can succumb to lag and freezing; but even then, you still have the full game at your disposal.  This kind of service wouldn’t even give you the whole game at one time, so a lot of people were wary about this new format; as a result, not too many people paid mind to OnLive.  The things you stream don’t really take up space on the hard drive of your computer or console, so that’s a plus, and applying this to games would sure be fancy; but maintaining constant control over the type of entertainment that REQUIRES constant control can’t really be guaranteed with the streaming format.
            If you look around on the internet, you can see that OnLive has had quite an interesting history, and has lasted a surprisingly long time, even despite the fact that not too many people seemed to utilize it.  But just recently, it was announced that the service would be discontinued – and since the service revolved entirely on streaming, that means that everything must go.  Like with the Netflix queue, OnLive users could amass libraries of the games they enjoyed playing on their account; now, all that money put into the monthly subscription fee, and all the hours put into those games (some of which were actually full, modern games, also available on PC and consoles), will be gone forever.  They also had some original hardware, an eponymous microconsole with a wireless controller; and with the death of the service, this hardware effectively will become useless.
            OnLive was an interesting experiment in its own right; but now that the time has come for it to stop receiving support, its greatest flaw – the flaw inherent in all streaming technology – has fully manifested itself.  If your access to it is cut off, the Cloud is completely intangible to you.  When they stopped making cartridge- and floppy-based games for the Commodore 64, did your console suddenly implode?  When Nintendo stopped releasing games for the Wii, and only left the Wii Shop Channel open so Wii U users could still buy things from it while operating in a special backwards-compatible mode, did all of your game discs disintegrate, and did all of the games you downloaded delete themselves from your console?  Of course not.  Because the games were “all there”.  Whether on a variation of the compact disc, a cartridge, a floppy disk, a cassette tape (look up the Starpath Supercharger add-on for the Atari 2600; I always thought these were a funny concept), or the hard drive of your computer or console – or heck, even your phone – you bought the game, so it was given to you in its entirety.  Streaming from the Cloud won’t give you the game in its entirety.  Furthermore, the contradictory wording I’ve come across makes the details kind of fuzzy, but it seems to me like some OnLive games could be – or had to be – purchased in full before being streamed.  Apologies in advance if I’m mistaken on this, but if this is indeed the case, this is a huge problem; and if not, then the money blown on subscriptions and dedicated hardware isn’t really insignificant either.
            The thing I take away from this is the fallibility of relying on streaming services.  They can discontinue, but whatever digital copies you have of movies, TV episodes, and video games will live on as long as your computer or console does, and whatever hard copies you have will continue to carry out their function for ages until they somehow physically expire.  Streaming isn’t entirely unreliable; I don’t think Netflix will be going anywhere.  But the truth of the matter is, while your computers and consoles will belong to you for as long as you want, the Cloud will never be yours to own.

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