Video games in the cloud, without consoles. That’s the vision of a new online video-game network introduced Tuesday by Rearden Studios at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Rearden’s OnLive Game Service will launch later this year, and will allow subscribers to play games on Windows or Mac computers, or on TV sets, from an online catalog of new and classic games.
New Kind of Compression
While users can currently get content that is server-based, these games would be played directly from the servers.
The games are stored on a network of OnLive servers, and, according to Rearden, will act with speed and personalization comparable to games loaded on a local console. According to news reports, the speed of play is dependent on a new kind of interactive video compression that the company has developed, with very low latency and video lag of about a millisecond.
The company said Far Cry from Ubisoft, LEGO Batman from Warner Bros. Interactive, and Mirror’s Edge from Electronic Arts are among the 16 games that will be available on the service.
Other game publishers participating include Atari, Codemasters, Eidos, Epic Games, Take-Two Interactive, and THQ. Video-game console makers Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are not among the participants, and industry observers speculate that, if the OnLive model works, the manufacturers may need to rethink their business.
Rearden is part of an incubator based in San Francisco and it’s owned by Steve Perlman, the founder of WebTV.
Price Point, Performance
For users who want to play on high-definition TVs, a small microconsole about the size of a deck of cards will be required. The microconsole connects to the user’s broadband network, and game controllers and headsets can connect to the microconsole through USB or wirelessly.
Some observers have noted that a microconsole connected to a TV sounds like a video…