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Onlive demoed on stage & on iPhone at DICE 2010

19.02.2010
The next version of Onlive's beta won't be available until next week, but the company's founder and CEO, Steve Perlman, showed off the latest build of the cloud gaming service to a packed crowd at DICE 2010. In a session called "Instant Gratification: Video Games In The 'Now' Era," Perlman not only describe the reasons that gaming needs to shift to a more consumer-friendly methods, but the features his service will use to cater to them.

Perlman noted that both the movie and music industry have struggled with making money off of online sales of their product--sites like BitTorrent and Napster have made the products available for free, while current, more legal methods like iTunes, Netflix streaming, and Hulu make little money for their respective companies. The gaming industry, Perlman described, has been lucky in that online piracy hasn't caught on as much amongst its audience, since users need the entire files to pirate games, and can't cut down download sizes in the way that music and movie pirates can create lower-resolution versions of their files.

The penetration of broadband is key to Onlive's launch, and Perlman presented the requirements needed to run the service. Player with at least 1.5 Mbps internet speed--currently accounting for 71% of internet users--can stream Onlive games in standard definition. The lucky 26% of Americans who can manage 5 Mbps will be able to play Onlive in HD.

With the reasons for and the means of Onlive's existence established, Perlman demoed the service with two fellow Onlive employees. The first person played on the large, 20-foot screen adjacent to the stage, while Perlman joined in on the large screen on the stage. The first game they demoed was Unreal Tournament 3. The version of Unreal on Onlive was customized with the service's development kit, allowing it to load instantaneously. "That's my favorite part of the demo," Perlman said.

The duo then went on to try Burnout Paradise, a game that doesn't utilize Onlive's SDK. The game had a normal ten second loading sequence to start, and played every bit as smoothly as Unreal. Perlman used Burnout to show Onlive's "Brag Clips," which will allow players to upload the last 15 seconds of their gameplay session to the service, and, publisher permitting, YouTube.

The third player utilized a much smaller screen, as Perlman pointed out than an Onlive employee in the office was using her iPhone to play Crysis. The video feed on the main stage of the gameplay in the audience was a little choppy, which may be indicative of the difficulty of getting a powerhouse PC game on the iPhone, or simply just a laggy video feed. However, the mere fact that a game that taxes most home computers was playing on a smartphone was pretty impressive.