If you haven’t read my preview article of the upcoming OnLive Gaming Service today, you definitely ought to! 

The whole gaming world has been talking about OnLive since it was first announced back in March of 2009 and we finally were able to spend some time with the online gaming service beta to see how it fared. We walk you through the user interface as well as creating some side by side comparisons of gaming with OnLive against local versions of the same games.

Introduction and Setup

The whole gaming world has been talking about OnLive since it was first announced back in March of 2009 and we finally were able to spend some time with the online gaming service beta to see how it fared. We walk you through the user interface as well as creating some side by side comparisons of gaming with OnLive against local versions of the same games.

I have posted a couple of updates on the last page, including my response to a response that OnLive made to our article on 1/22/10.  Click here to jump right those updates!

Introduction

In March of 2009 when OnLive was first announced, it was deemed to be a questionable but potentially revolutionary change in the direction gaming was headed.  OnLive’s vision is to instantly connect gamers to games via a broadband connection only – no need for gaming consoles or expensive gaming PCs.  The explanation that OnLive gives on their website seems honest and straight forward enough:

1. Connect to OnLive with your TV, PC or Mac
2. Your game runs in a state of the art game server center
3. OnLive connects you to game servers through the Internet, instantly sending your controller actions upstream and the results back downstream at blinding fast speeds
4. Enjoy ultra high-performance gameplay on your TV or entry-level PC or Mac

Of course things aren’t always as easy as they seem.  Immediately after the 2009 announcement technology and game journalists began to wonder how the game service could work as easily and and as effortlessly as OnLive claimed.  By far the most troubling question was regarding latency – how would a service like OnLive deal with the input latency (time between data leaving your PC and arriving at the data center) of a mouse, keyboard or controller?  With as much as 100 ms of delay between servers on the Internet, that is a potentially long time between your mouse movement and your mouse movement appearing on screen. 

Well, obviously looking for answers, I found a login for the closed OnLive beta and decided to sit down for a couple of weeks and give the service a thorough evaluation.  In this article we’ll look at both the ease of use of the service as well as the real-world experience of playing a few of the games.  I think you will find the results to be interesting!

Setup of the OnLive Service

The installation of the OnLive client is really about as easy at it gets.  After downloading a small 8MB file and running the very basic installer you are sent back to the OnLive.com website.  Clicking on the large “Launch OnLive” button launches a new window (either in windowed or full screen mode depending on your last usage) where the interface begins. 

At first glance this might seem like a browser plug in though because it works with IE and FireFox, as well as Mac OS X systems, we can assume it is just a very thin and light client-side application.  If you access OnLive through the desktop link it actually just opens up your default browser where you hit the “Launch OnLive” button before the program will load.  The obvious answer here is that OnLive will want its customers to be constantly checking for updates and upgrades on the OnLive.com website and this is the easiest way to facilitate that. 


I do wonder why OnLive hasn’t integrated a browser into the client much like Steam has done – perhaps they will once they get past the early beta stages.

Client Footprint

Besides a very small installation footprint, the OnLive client is just as easy on the hardware as they claimed to be: