Official Site Bumtion Network

In another piece of game related news (sorry Chaps!), the screenshot above could very well be the future of gaming. Called OnLive, this new video game on demand service was recently unveiled at GDC09 (Game Developers Conference 09) and opened the prospect of playing known CPU killers like Crysis on your TV set / netbook without the need for expensive hardware.

Claiming to have perfected a method of video compression that takes less than a second to encode, commands from the gamer will be sent upstream, while the visual feed of what's actually going on in the game will stream back to you via a microconsole that's hooked up to either a PC or a TV set and a broadband connection. Apparently, this video compression method is so quick that gamers will experience virtually no lag.


There isn't a price pegged to this service or the microconsole just yet, nor is there any other definitive information from any official sources, but word on the net is that OnLive will retail for cheaper than the price of a Wii (US$250).

Of course, playing games off a thin client such as OnLive will present a fair share of problems, with the first and most obvious one being the quality of broadband that we have here in Malaysia. Even with the newer options that have opened up recently, data caps will pretty much kill the whole concept.

There's also an issue of ownership. Would you be willing to commit your gaming experience to a service that's entirely virtual? People with no internet connectivity won't be able to partake in this unique experience for the obvious reasons, but the people who do won't be able to walk away with a physical copy of the games that they play. Why rent when you can buy?

On paper, OnLive is an immensely interesting concept. It will open up the prospect of gaming to a wider audience and will help to combat piracy, but somehow, I forsee an epic fail if it is indeed made available to the Malaysian public.