OnLive shuts down

[Mavor]

In the proper high bandwidth low ping environment, the cloud offers better graphics for a lower price without having to care about anything except the keyboard and mouse.

Most of the time I don't have to screw around with my comp or it's hardware, but when I do, it's a pain in the ass (most of the time). Instead of that just push everything to the cloud and let someone else take care of it way easier due to efficiency of scale.

[Kageru]

Better 720p graphics in a tiny radius around expensive servers for a higher price than owning the product.

Computing power has never been cheaper, the idea of renting it makes no sense to me. Outside of a couple of niche cases which are insufficient to build a business on.

[Mavor]

I'm referring to the South Korean situation in regards to availability of bandwidth/computing power.... though I do see what you mean about not having to "rent" computing power... i'm sure that with current tech you could get the cost of "renting" down to much lower over time then what it would cost to run your own computing power (electricity and upgrades from time to time)...

[KallDrexx]

According to various articles OnLive was running 8000 servers even though they had a peak of 2k on at one time.  The problem with the whole model is it doesn't scale very well, and the problem with games is that 1 user has to take up a whole GPU for the duration of the game, so at a minimum you need 1 GPU per expected user at peak time.  Combine that with the CPU performance (You'd need at least 1 maybe 2 CPUs dedicated per use as well) plus a TON of ram per game, and it just isn't efficient.

[Lantyssa]

For computing power, this is one instance where I see virtualization being a huge boon.  Of course the rest of the business doesn't make sense, but if they were really doing a 1:1 server farm, that's pretty crazy.

[KallDrexx]

For computing power, this is one instance where I see virtualization being a huge boon.  Of course the rest of the business doesn't make sense, but if they were really doing a 1:1 server farm, that's pretty crazy.

You still need a 1:1 relationship for GPU, CPU and RAM per user to have acceptable performance (even before lag is taken into consideration).  Virtualization doesn't buy you much in these regards.

[Sheepherder]

Unless someone builds a game engine that allows a single machine to do scene rendering for multiple camera actors simultaneously to take advantage of being able to share memory allocated to primitives and calculate things that aren't point of view specific with massive performance gains scaling with the amount of players per map.  Presumably that would be a single physical machine, because I imagine large amounts of latency in retrieving primitives for rendering is unacceptable.

Of course, everything currently is programmed with the assumption that one process will be rendered to one display, because that's a sane thing to assume.

[koro]

Well that was fast.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/27/onlive-founder-ceo-steve-perlman-exiting-company/

OnLive CEO and head Steve Perlman is exiting the cloud streaming company, according to a press release, just days after he was reaffirmed as its leader. The company's former operations head Charlie Jablonski is taking over as chief operating officer and will act as interim chief executive officer, while venture capitalist Gary Lauder – and new owner of OnLive – becomes OnLive's new leader.

Amusingly, Perlman also has another startup going (since 1999 apparently, that he's now going back to), named Rearden. Yes, that Rearden.  

[Trippy]

OnLive lost: how the paradise of streaming games was undone by one man's ego

The one man being Steve Perlman obviously.

[Ingmar]

OnLive needed a physical machine for each concurrent player

Haha, holy shit. No wonder they died.

[Ratman_tf]

OnLive needed a physical machine for each concurrent player

Haha, holy shit. No wonder they died.

Eh. The article says they were trying to develop virtual machines to take the load, but it seems like Perlman managed the company into the ground.

[Ingmar]

VMs don't really do GPU stuff well at all, I'm guessing that was the hold up there.

[Lantyssa]

NVidia tried to give them a solution and Perlman told them to stuff it.

[HaemishM]

OnLive needed a physical machine for each concurrent player

Haha, holy shit. No wonder they died.

Yeah, that pretty much is exactly NOT what "cloud" and server-based gaming solutions are about. If you have to have one machine per user, what the fuck is the point of the service?

[Baldrake]

Given that not everyone plays every day, there is still big opportunity for savings. Only one person can sit in a seat in a taxi cab, but that doesn't mean that you need a taxi for every person in your city...

But yeah, dunce hats all round at OnLive apparently.

[Yegolev]

I think we are going to have to implement a counter for whenever anyone says "the cloud", then dole out punishment on intervals.

[Amaron]

Yeah, that pretty much is exactly NOT what "cloud" and server-based gaming solutions are about. If you have to have one machine per user, what the fuck is the point of the service?

I bet it's even worse than that.  It's not like server blades are built for GPU's.  They probably had to come up with some sort of custom solution that took up craploads of space compared to a typical server farm.

[cmlancas]

I think we are going to have to implement a counter for whenever anyone says "the cloud", then dole out punishment on intervals.

Make up a drinking game for that and web 2.0.

[Trippy]

Apparently they weren't totally dead but now they really are.

OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony

[schild]

Good. Fuck them.

[KallDrexx]

I wonder what kind of patents they hold.  They can't be that valuable if NVIDIA is able to have the exact same service.

[MrHat]

I wonder what kind of patents they hold.  They can't be that valuable if NVIDIA is able to have the exact same service.

Check the claims vs. filing dates if you're bored:

http://www.onlive.com/legal/patents

Here's a bunch off Google Patent Search. Since their patent page doesn't link through.