OnLive

[A Black Falcon]

Those are some good concerns developer side too.

Lots of them. It'd be pretty amazing if this is actually pulled off as it says.

When it comes right down to it, the basic issue for me is that I don't want to pay monthly fees to play my games, excepting certain online services where that's understandable.

I most definitely agree. I would add that I actually like to own things.

Further, I don't want whether or not I can still play my game subject to whether the service is still there.

A very good point...

And, it's not just about if this service succeeds, there's the issue of contract renewals.

Another good point, like with how on those video services sometimes some company makes the service remove all their games, right? I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, that'd definitely happen, no question. "Sorry, you can't play any Ubisoft games now, we're in contract negociations..."

The point about dead companies, etc, is also a good one. How would that work, exactly? Do you just lose those games? I quite agree about the advantages of actually owning things. This is the major downside of online-only games... when they go offline, unless the developers release server software or the users manage to figure out how to hack the game to make one work no one can play them anymore. :(

Still though, I think the technical and developer limitations are the biggest ones. They're saying they have pretty much the best way to compress and send this stuff ever, and that's a bold claim that's hard to believe... and bandwidth limits are also huge limitations on this for a great many people, even if they were interested. This could catch on, sometime, but it'll be a while, and the limitations are huge.

As that article said... by the time it's cost-effective to actually make data centers like that, couldn't the chips just be in just about anything, making such centers irrelevant? :)

In the distant future, my way of thinking may well be a relic of older times as so many of these transhumanists going on about how cloud computing is humanity's next great step are claiming. Heck I hope we do get something in place that actually accounts for all these scenarios and guarentees my eternal playness of these games (without a fee if at all possible, but being transhumanists, this future would also use post scarcity ecomonics where money is meaningless and every job no one wants to do is done by robots). Until then, this is way way ahead of it's time and just not something I want to bother with.

Yeah, who knows what will happen in the future... maybe 'actually wanting to own things' will go away sometime, replaced with just 'online access to it'. But I just don't see the advantage of not having the computer yourself. Why rely on a far-off networked system you don't own or really have control over in favor of your own machine? I just don't get that, and not just for "I want to own it" reasons. The "I want control over it" reasons are probably even more important.

But yeah, I just don't quite see the point. There may be a market for this though, who knows... if it works at all that is. We'll see.