Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/5219
15 www.hplusmagazine.com onlive: sign of a Revolution, or dead Before Release? EvAN NEWTON Sign up for the Onlive Beta and get further details at: http://www.onlive.com/ resources 15 THE MicroConsole™ + ConTRoLLER IN RECENT YEARS, SONY, NINTENDO, AND MICROSOFT REINvENTED GAME CONSOlES WITH THE PS3, WII, AND XBOX 360. The new consoles enticed game studios away from the chaos of PC game development by providing a mass market for advanced games on low-cost, standardized platforms. However, as great as this strategy was from a business perspective, it is still susceptible to the passage of time. Technology that was considered pretty decent several years ago has now locked games into a hardware cage, preventing true innovation that is the heart of the developer's survival code. Onlive Inc. holds a new silver bullet for the original hardware vs. accessibility issue — killing it with a pseudo cloud computing strategy. Currently in beta, it solves the problem in a new way, by running the games on a state-of-the-art server cluster. The server streams the video of the game through a small receiver attached to your Tv or computer. The server streams the video of the game through a small receiver attached to your average Tv, Mac, or PC. As long as you can stream decent video with a 1.5mbps connection or better, you can run Onlive, playing games at the highest possible quality. The idea is mind-blowing: using your Grandma's 5 year old Mac? Not a problem. You can play anything you want. Onlive critics, however, have raised an important point. The controller is in your hands — and if you press a button from your couch and the signal has to go several hundred miles and back before something is seen on screen… wouldn't that be too slow for a gamer? CEO Steve Perlman insists that the turnaround time is near-instantaneous, and he seems pretty confident. Onlive's pending release is scheduled for this winter. Steve is a visionary, and like most visionaries, he will either re-invent the game industry or he will fade away like many before him.