OnLive UK: The First 24 Hours

At Eurogamer Expo, OnLive were giving out what must surely be an unprecedented amount of free hardware. While you can play OnLive games on any PC or Laptop, the £70 MicroConsole that they were handing out enables you to stream games to a TV with the supplied gamepad.

It’s easy to see why the company would sink that cost to get an install base of as many people as possible at launch, because it’s subscriptions and PlayPasses (3 day, 5 dayand Unlimited rentals) that the service will live or die by. Thousands of people walked away with a MicroConsole, and many more with a voucher to get one at almost price of postage. Now I’m here to tell you how the first 24 hours of the service panned out, starting late on Sunday night.

21:01 – Finally back from my weekend Eurogamer and Surprised Man activities, I’m eager to give OnLive UK a spin for the first time. The package turns out to be very slick: a controller that feels sturdy, a tiny microconsole that sits easily amongst my other systems, a HDMI cable and even a short network cable should you need a spare; it’s everything you need to get started. The pad itself is somewhere between 360 and PS3 in design. It comes with a removable play and charge kit with a decent length cable which was part-charged right out of the box: Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Sony) could learn a thing or two from this little package.

21:05 – Set-up took less than five minutes and after connecting it to the Internet through a wired connection (which is what the service works best with currently, though an adapter is available for wireless), a brief and painless firmware update follows.

21:07 – Yowch. Initial results aren’t exactly promising. Stuttering video and complaints about network problems are frequent, and it’s difficult to say what the cause is. Demand has been higher than expected, so it could be the server struggling. Alternatively it might be my connection which is also being used for some multiplayer gaming at the time, and may just be suffering a little slowness.

21:10 – In this current state it’s unplayable. After signing in, the whole of the OnLive service is delivered via streaming video – even the menus. Lag is so bad that I’m having trouble selecting the correct menu options. In theory, my 8MB connection should be able to deal with what OnLive throws at it, and I have even had just-about-playable experiences with the US OnLive servers in the past, so something must be up.

21:12 – After a while, the network problems settle down, but only enough for me to view other people’s games at the moment. I tire of this after a while and decide to give OnLive a rest for a bit.

22:30 – It occurs to me that it would be nice to at least take advantage of the offer which gives you your first full-pass game for £1, and log back in to peruse the options. Menus seem to be complaining a little less now, but I don’t investigate any further because I’m on a mission.

22:45 – After some consideration and viewing of videos, I decide I’ll get Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. It’s not a game I’m particularly interested in, but I’ve heard it’s a decent shooter and it won’t annoy me too much to stop playing it if the OnLive experiment turns out to be a disaster.

22:48 – OnLive has informed me that I need to add a payment method to make the purchase, via the website. I go there and put in the details of my Visa Debit card, after which I am presented with a 404 screen. Strange, but I check and it seems the details were entered. Time to buy that game.

22:49 – When I press the buy button again, the interface has changed, no longer asking me to add billing details. But after a few seconds, the purchase fails, and a popup tells me to add a valid card. Grumble.

22:55 – After some re-trying and searching around, I’m getting very mixed messages. The one part of the site’s help suggests debit cards are not accepted, another says that they are. There also seems to be an implication that Chip and Pin cards (which are almost all cards in the UK) are not supported – it’s all a bit confusing and it seems as if the advice on the website has not been updated for UK customers, with respect to billing.

22:58 – I search Twitter and find a few other people reporting similar problems, but not a huge number, so the jury is out on whether this is a problem with OnLive or some weirdness going on with my bank. In either case, it seems like poor work on OnLive’s part to not be able to tell me where the payment process is falling down, leaving me confused and (more importantly to them) unable to make purchases. I write a quick note to their support to tell them I’d love to give them money but they aren’t letting me, then quit OnLive, too fed-up to try playing anything for the moment.

00:58 – I should really sleep soon, but before I do I decide to try OnLive one more time, using the free trials that let you play a game for a little while. Even in the menus, everything seems much more responsive now, leading me to think it was ISP troubles.

01:10 – As quickly as 10 minutes into Space Marine, I’m frequently forgetting I’m watching a video stream. High resolution textures and fiddly things like text are appearing without apparent artefacts, and while I can detect the tiniest of pauses between pressing a button and moving, it doesn’t affect gameplay in the slightest. If the boxed game played exactly like this, I wouldn’t have even commented on the controller lag in a review.

01:28 – After a small boss battle, the trial times out, and I am left in considerable awe of the flawless half-hour I just experienced. OnLive are most certainly onto something, and I am convinced that something like this will play a big part in gaming’s future. Then I remember the various issues that I was having earlier, and temper my newfound hope with the knowledge that there are still hurdles to be overcome. For now, sleep beckons.

13:00 – I called my bank to see what was going on with that payment that couldn’t go through. It seems like they were just being overly cautious, and I shouldn’t have any trouble registering the card now. That’s all very well, but time will tell – and OnLive need to fix the page that is supposed to tell me the card registration has failed.

13:58 – I realised that even though I can’t actually buy anything until I have access to OnLive at home, I can still try adding my card again during my lunchbreak at work. Another 404 error. Doesn’t bode well, and OnLive’s Live Assistance seems permanently busy.

18:50 – Seems my fears were misplaced. All my billing issues have been worked out (except for the weird 404 errors which someone at OnLive should really look into), and I successfully purchased Space Marine for £1. I thought this would be a good time to test the service in peak time. The first thing I notice is that it took a couple of minutes to log in, due to heavy traffic, said the MicroConsole. After that it appears that to be up to its old tricks, sluggish and occasionally cutting out due to network problems. But let’s see what happens in-game.

19:15 – Helpfully, I was able to resume right from where I left off during my trial game. Once in, things have improved markedly. The controller lag is more perceptible, but still a non-issue during play. The visuals remain crisp, though sometimes a few artifacts appear during fast-moving sections – but nothing distracting. I’m feeling pleasantly surprised! I think it’s about time to bust open my month trial of the Playpack, which is a subscription model that provides many games to play at no extra cost, and a 30% discount for the rest.

19:30 – Back in the menus, I feel like I’m on OnLive’s equivalent of Candid Camera. It’s back to being sluggish, and when using the onscreen keypad, it feels like the controller is possessed by a mischievous spirit who is determined to make these passwords not match. I’m trying to get into H.A.W.X, because it seems to me like a fast paced aerial combat game will put the system through its paces, but I do wish the interface elements were not tied to the same streaming video as everything else.

19:40 – And I’m in. That really was unnecessarily tedious.

20:00 – I’m not sure whether it’s that my connection has degraded in the last hour, but OnLive doesn’t seem nearly as happy with H.A.W.X as it was with Space Marine. It’s playable, barely, but no fun to control with around half a second of controller lag to contend with. To see where the problem lies, I’m going to get back to Space Marine.

20:50 – Yes, it seems like my connection just isn’t quite as good as before; I’m experiencing the same lag problems with Space Marine. It’s throwing off my game a little, but it remains playable and it’s consistent enough to compensate for. Still, it’s less than ideal.

Conclusion

Cloud gaming is a a viable technology. That perfect thirty minutes last night proved as much. But a lot has to happen before it can become a dominant technology. The infrastructure must be in place so that the player never has to worry about peak times and congestion – no small task, but it’s inevitable with time. Once bandwidth concerns shrink away, the benefits become obvious.

Think about what we’ve potentially got our hands on here: access to computers with state of the art graphics technology, which someone else upgrades for us and maintains, at no extra cost. A blurring of the lines between PC and console gaming, with a mouse/keyboard/laptop setup just as viable as a gamepad/MicroConsole one. Games with specs that far exceed what the average home PC owner could afford. The potential to take games with you without having to lug huge amounts of hardware around.

There are certainly downsides. With the technology in its infancy, unscrupulous publishers are bound to try to use it for greedy, anti-consumer ends. It’s the same old story that happened with downloadable music and with downloadable gaming, but like them it will improve over time. While you can’t completely stop publishers from misbehaving, the business models will twist and change gradually until it becomes something both customers and publishers can live with.

Then too, there are advantages to installed games which services like OnLive can never compete with: customisation with mods, offline play, a permanent copy that you have control over. There will always be a demand for these things, so while the landscape is shifting, cloud gaming is only part of the future.

It’s a question of whether OnLive have jumped in too early to make a success of it; as you’ve seen, my results have been hit-and-miss. Right now, that’s impossible to answer, but it’s as valiant a first attempt as we could reasonably hope for. It’s time to stop asking about if cloud gaming will break into the mainstream, and start asking when and how.