Known Locations of OnLive Servers

During the course of the recent interview with Joystiq, Steve Pearlman leaked the location of some of the servers. During GDC 09′ we knew they were using a server system 50 miles away, located in Santa Clara, CA. There is however some gaps in the system as whole. If you live in what I can only assume is the north-eastern corner of North Dakota, your out of luck. But, hey, you can add that to your list of reasons why rural North Dakota sucks.

Current Known Server Locations

1. Santa Clara, CA
2. Virginia — East coast server center
3. Texas — Currently being outfitted

Excerpt From the Joystiq Interview

We’re not gonna be able to get server centers much further away than 1,500 miles, and that’s only if you have something like fiber. If you have cable modem or DSL, then the servers need to be within about a thousand miles of your home. And because of the speed of light through fiber. Theoretically, we could set up low orbiting satellites, because the speed of light through the air is faster than through fiber, and then I guess we could go maybe three thousand miles. I don’t think anyone’s going to erect that; I think we’re going to be using fiber that’s already in place through the internet. So, in practice, and what we’ve told people, is that you really need to be within 1,000 miles. So, right now, for beta, we have a west coast service center in Santa Clara and an east coast service center in Virginia. We’re literally right now outfitting one in Texas. And then we’ll be setting up a couple other ones in the US. And then when you look at the location of the five service centers, and you draw a thousand mile radius around them, you get coverage of the entire US. I think there’s a little corner up North Dakota that we’re outside of the 1,000 miles radius somewhere

Turns out my hypothesis about low-orbiting satellites would actually work in theory, ha!

Source: Joystiq

OnLive’s Steve Pearlman Wants You to be Skeptical

Steve Pearlman, founder of OnLive.

In an interview with Joystiq, Steve Pearlman, the founder of OnLive states he wants you to be skeptical. There is a level of marketing genius in creating a product that seems to break the moral laws of convention. In the same respect it would almost be unnatural to not question a new technology to some extent. As far as we know this is the only application for the technology.

“They damn well better be skeptical”

They damn well better be skeptical. When I set out to build this thing, we looked at it and said, “Look, in theory it’s possible to do, but in practice we just didn’t know if it could actually be done.” You know, Rearden [Labs] is an incubator. You guys covered Mova, when we did the facial capture stuff, and you know, you saw it come out with The Incredible Hulk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That also was a very ambitious thing, we said, “I don’t know if we can really [get] the face with that level of realism, where you can’t tell that it’s a real person.” Well, jeez, Brad Pitt was nominated for Best Actor. For a person, for a performance, but it was a computer-generated face for most of the movie, right? So we overcame that. It took over five years to get to that technology.

Source: Joystiq

Game Executives React to OnLive

Rumor spread fast that the OnLive demo at GDC 2009 was a hoax. That there was no way games could possibly have been streamed from 50 miles away. OnLive’s booth used a connection from Verizon, the XO service allowed for a 24 megabit-per-second Internet connectivity to their booth. Which was split up into four different sections.

Despite being called a fraud from virtually every executive under the sun, Perlman had this to say:

“As an inventor, it’s a compliment to have someone say an invention is impossible,” said Perlman. “But, as a CEO of a startup, it’s frustrating.”

OnLive has actually filed about 5000 pages in pending U.S. patents. Surely, something in that labyrinth of legal jargon will spark debates, and infuriate innocent Napster using grandmothers. Personally I look forward to those days of nitpicking through legal documents. Where once again everyone will know at least one person that claims to be an expert in patent law. Ahh those are the days…

Well, on to what the executives have to say:

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America:

I haven’t spent any time up close to understand their opportunity. But from Nintendo’s perspective, what drives this category are the games. Mr. Iwata said it on stage. We’ve said it many many times. And for us, Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros., Brain Age — that’s what drives the consumer to enjoy our industry and that’s what drives our growth. None of those franchises are going to be on a competing platform. Based on what I’ve seen so far, their opportunity may make a lot of sense for the PC game industry where piracy is an issue. But as far as the home console market goes, I’m not sure there is anything they have shown that solves a consumer need. What’s the better experience in what they have described. It’s going to be interesting. It’s going to come down to what are the actual economics. Until that’s disclosed, it’s awfully tough to comment.

Todd Hollenshead, chief executive of id Software:

I have not spoken to the OnLive guys. I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on it. I’m trying to figure out what it is and how they do it. I wasn’t aware of it beforehand. The idea is very interesting. Where the rubber meets the road on this stuff is implementation. Latency is always an issue with online games. If they are going to put massive banks of servers all over the country, that would be a tremendous infrastructure expense, based on our own experience with Quake Live. It requires a diversity of server locations to support everyone. That leads to a lot of costs.

Neil Young, chief executive of Ngmoco:

There are forces at work that want nothing more than to make this happen. If you are a cable company, you want nothing more than to charge $10 a month extra, where you can charge someone to have low-latency games. I personally think that this is really interesting. I don’t understand speed of light issues.

Will Wright, designer of Spore and Sim City:

Will it change the way I do things? Not really. It’s going to be providing the same game experience as on the consoles. On the business side, it will change things. On the creative game design side, the 10 percent

Warren Spector, head of Disney’s Junction Moon Studio:

New distribution methods can have an effect on game design. I am sick and tired of the movie model that we have adopted as a business. Frankly, all we get to do in mainstream games is tent-pole games. We do summer blockbusters. That’s crazy. It’s a terrible business model. We should be thinking more like television with serialized content. With this, there is a direct conduit between me and my players. I can get at lower commitment gaming, where players can drop in and play an episode of a game. You have to think about how you would do narrative in a different way if you do a serial narrative that has to keep people hooked for a long time.

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets:

OnLive a promising step toward on-demand gaming. One of the developments generating significant interest at the well-attended Game Developers Conference (GDC) was OnLive, a new distribution platform under development with the backing of Time Warner, Maverick Capital, and AutoDesk. At the conference, we met with co-founders Steve Perlman and Mike McGarvey, and we were able to demo the platform. OnLive delivers real-time rendering of game-play to TVs, PCs, and Macs from the Internet “cloud.” Overall, we were impressed by the system and can imagine on-demand gaming becoming another viable distribution channel.

David Perry, chief creative officer of Acclaim and CEO of OnLive rival Gaikai:

Imagine if you could play Crysis but didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars for the gaming PC. You could play it on your little Netbook computer and get a taste of it. There’s a company called Trion World Network that has raised $100 million plus to do this. Structurally, the design is such that they can add new servers at any time. They have artificial intelligence servers. They have a flaw where every time you add a server, you have to make a jump from one server to another before you go back to the gamer. It adds to the latency problem. The smart way is if they can build fast-enough machines that can switch quickly.

Source: TheStandard

Nintendo ‘Scoffs’ at The Prospect of Onlive

Nintendo seems to be completely arrogant at the prospect of new comer taking market share. “We’re not worried”, Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the service. Which is something you should expect from a seasoned Media executive.

With the amount of game publishers live Electronic Arts, THQ, and Ubisoft behind OnLive, Nintendo can not afford to be relaxed. Let us not forget the duty of every executive, to calm to fears on investors and customers.

Source: WSJ

Sony to Compete With OnLive

Ahh, it seemed as if it was all silence from the big three after OnLive was announced. Recently, Sony Trademarked “PS Cloud”. Which comes as no surprise. Console makers lose money on every console the sell. They hope to make up the loses on software purchases. That is one of the reasons why Sega gave up on consoles. They figured they could make more money if they just produced games, and they were right. There is no way to determine when “PS Cloud” would become available. They haven’t even announced it, so, there is the possibility that they trademarked it to stay in the game.

Here is a quick excerpt from the Trademark application:

CLOUD COMPUTING DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE; COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE FOR CONNECTING INTERNET RADIO; COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE FOR CONNECTING INTERNET RADIO FOR HAND-HELD GAMES WITH LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAYS; COMPUTER GAME PROGRAMS; COMPUTERS; CONSUMER VIDEO GAME CONSOLES FOR USE WITH AN EXTERNAL DISPLAY SCREEN OR MONITOR; DOWNLOADABLE ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION IN THE NATURE OF MAGAZINES, BOOKS AND NEWSPAPERS IN THE FIELD OF MUSIC, VIDEO AND VIDEO GAME; DOWNLOADABLE IMAGE FILES VIA THE INTERNET; DOWNLOADABLE MUSIC FILES VIA THE INTERNET; ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS AND CD-ROMS, ALL ENCODED AUTOMATIC PLAYING PROGRAMS FOR ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; GAME PROGRAMS FOR HAND-HELD GAMES WITH LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAYS; GAME PROGRAMS FOR MOBILE PHONE; GAME PROGRAMS FOR CONSUMER VIDEO GAME MACHINES; HAND-HELD DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYERS; METRONOMES; PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANTS; PHONOGRAPH RECORDS FEATURING MUSIC; PRE-RECORDED VIDEO DISCS AND VIDEO TAPES FEATURING MUSIC, COMEDY, DRAMA, ACTION, ADVENTURE OR ANIMATION

If you would like you can continue reading the trademark application here.