The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Online Gaming'
Friday, October 02
By Brad
As with music and journalism, the multi-billion dollar video games industry is facing changes due to the spread of high-speed Internet. Already, Sony has started making the shift to download-only games with its new handheld device the PSP Go, and now OnLive, a new service that kicks traditional game discs to the curb in favor of “cloud gaming” has received a jolt in funding from the likes of Warner Bros. entertainment and AT&T. Reports the Wall Street Journal:
OnLive has developed technology that it says will allow consumers to play graphically rich videogames without owning high-end PCs or consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that are normally required for such titles. Instead OnLive plans to run games on powerful remote servers in data centers and pipe high-definition game graphics over the Internet to consumers, who can play them on low-end PCs and Macs or through an inexpensive OnLive device connected to their televisions.
Questions remain about whether OnLive will be crippled by bandwidth issues—certainly a concern, given the amount of data-intensive services already challenging Internet providers. But traditional video game stores such as Gamestop, which count on the used games industry for a substantial amount of their revenue, are surely paying close attention to OnLive’s progress.
Thursday, September 24
By Brad
Online gaming is big — and getting bigger all the time. And now a new startup is hoping to make a splash in the lucrative gaming market by doing away with pesky discs and taking everything online. Reports Ars Technica:
MIT is playing host to Technology Review’s EmTech conference, which focuses on up-and-coming companies and the new technology they’re bringing to market. Steve Perlman, the founder and CEO of the OnLive gaming service, was given the chance to demonstrate his company’s cloud gaming service, and took some time to explain the technology backing it. OnLive is gaming’s answer to cloud computing: the applications run on hardware in a server farm, while users only need low-end hardware (including OnLive’s own mini-console) and broadband Internet to connect in and play.
While the service certainly has the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry, streaming games over broadband isn’t without it pitfalls — namely, pipes capacious enough to make the experience smooth and, well, playable.
Monday, June 01
By Brad
Sony has announced a new version of its handheld gaming device the PSP. Called PSP Go, one of the things that makes the upgrade in hardware notable is the fact that it’s the first gaming device to ditch the traditional game discs and instead focus entirely on downloadable games.
Broadband has already made playing games online a popular idea. Now it’s poised to shake up the entire video game industry.
Monday, April 13
By Brad
Two interesting (and fairly wonky) articles covering broadband stimulus, underserved vs. unserved, and national broadband plans worth checking out. First up, Ars Technica:
As the National Telecommunications Information Agency allocates a big share of the stimulus dinero through its Broadband Technological Opportunities Program, it must consult with the FCC on how to define three terms and two concepts key to the Recovery Act. The terms are “broadband,” which is supposed to flow to “unserved” and “underserved” areas. The concepts are “the non-discrimination obligations that will be contractual conditions of BTOP grants” and “the network interconnection obligations that will be contractual conditions of BTOP grants.”
The Commission is also charged with advising the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service about these same questions. That’s the agency to which the FCC’s Jonathan Adelstein will soon relocate.
The feedback has been flowing in since the FCC released this proceeding in late March, but perhaps the most interesting and unexpected input has been the counsel offered by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and some of the big telcos. NCTA’s attorney told the Commission that it should define “non-discrimination” as “adherence to the principles contained in the FCC’s August 2005 Broadband Policy Statement” (more often called the agency’s Internet Policy Statement).
The second article comes from the video game site Gamasutra, kicking off a planned series of articles on a national broadband strategy:
For the games industry, the national debate on broadband is an opportunity. The industry drives a lot of broadband adoption today and can do so in the future as well. When the FCC asks how to define “broadband” for purposes of its plan, the industry should have a lot to say.
I am encouraged by the fact that the FCC, for the first time I’ve seen, is seriously asking whether it should be more nuanced in its definition of “broadband.” It asks, for example, whether latency should be included along with bandwidth as the measurement of broadband. This could go a long way toward solving one of the persistent problems facing online games – inequality of play due to differences in broadband capabilities.
Alternatively, the FCC asks whether to define broadband in terms of the ability to perform certain acts within a certain amount of time. Traditionally, this has been stated as the ability to download a movie within x minutes, but what implications would follow if broadband were defined as the ability to conduct real-time voice and video collaboration among large groups of simultaneous users? That would offer a boon to MMOGs, but also to online poker, video conferencing, distance learning and a whole host of other applications.
Tuesday, March 24
By Brad
While Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo duke it out for video game console space in living rooms, a new start-up is hoping consumers will ditch game boxes altogether. Via the New York Times “Bits” blog:
Steve Perlman wants you to throw away your video game console.
Later on Tuesday, Mr. Perlman, a Silicon Valley veteran who is a former principal scientist at Apple and the founder of WebTV, will unveil his new company, OnLive, which he says has the potential to radically transform the $46 billion worldwide video game market.
When it begins operations later this year, OnLive will offer subscribers a selection of video games that are hosted online and can be played on at any time, on any television or computer — Macintosh or PC — including low-cost computers without sophisticated graphics chips. (To play on the TV, people will need a small, hand-size micro-console, which OnLive says it may give away free.)
Digital distribution of video games — long desired by game developers, since it would pretty much kill the lucrative used games industry that they receive no revenue from — has been coming for a while now. OnLive might just kick the shift into high gear.
Wednesday, March 04
By Brad
Last weekend an Internet milestone was reached, and unless you spend your free time fragging enemies in online first-person shooters you probably missed it. Halo 3, the latest installment in one of the most popular video game franchises ever, hosted its one billionth online match. In crowing about the achievement, the game’s developer, Bungie, crunched the numbers and all those games roughly amount to 2,023,153,340,764 seconds—or the equivalent of spending 64,109 years shooting others online.
That’s a lot of fragging.
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