Re: Gaming as a service: OTOY/OnLive and the N900
 

It would take quite a bit of cloud power, but that's where the service aspect comes in to play. The user pays a fee (likely monthly) gets an account, and access to some games. In order for the company to be profitable, they would have to structure their costs to offset their equipment/power/facility/etc expenses (like any other company).

Of course, if this were a free service, it would be more challenging to achieve profitability. ;)

Which is one of the cons: the cost.

I could very well see myself using this system if it was a pay-per-hour service (ie. buy chunks of prepaid time) and reasonably priced (through the life of a game, I'd spend roughly the same amount as having owned it -- given a very generous playing time), or a pay-per-play setup.

I don't see myself gaming long enough to justify this as a monthly expense. However there may be one or two titles that I'd like to pick up and have a go on my N900 and/or Desktop. It's a tossup.

In either case, I would love to see an OnLive/OTOY/Whatever client on the N900. It would be a great way to make the N900 a legitimate gaming system, so long as the price is reasonable.

Sadly, without this, I have little faith in the N900 for modern gaming.

}:^)~

Re: Gaming as a service: OTOY/OnLive and the N900
 

You can get an 8 core monster for ~0.50$ an hour on Amazon EC2 as a mere mortal (and probably less as a dedicated large scale customer). And just one of those suckers can probably take care of dozens of users.

It's not exactly witchcraft to make a dual model, subscription (for hardcore gamers) and PAYG (for casual gamers) ;)

Re: Gaming as a service: OTOY/OnLive and the N900
 

But sadly, amazon EC2 has yet to offer GPU processing -- great for hosting tradewars though :D. I suspect that GPGPU it is a service that's around the corner (to complement their hadoop-esque service: map reduce) as the scientific community/graphics community would love to have hourly access to thousands of 'stream' processors for simulations/rendering and possibly gaming. Until then, for games, us mere mortals are at the mercy of the game-streaming-greats, or all-you-can-eat at EB or some other game boutique.

This would be a dream come true. Gaming on my notebook and optionally taking my game to-go on my N900.

Of course, if you have a fast enough connection you can always do it yourself with StreamMyGame: http://www.streammygame.com/smg/index.php


};^)~

Re: Gaming as a service: OTOY/OnLive and the N900
 

Ok, so I'm a bit late to the party, but in looking at OnLive, apart from the obvious shrinkage of the viewing area which could be alleviated using the TV out, the only other item holding it back could be the plugin. If the PC one is an ActiveX component we'd fail, and I couldn't tell you what the Mac plugin would consist of, but it may be the easier one to port. All it wants is a browser for our (N900)scenario. It is cloud computing turned gaming service. It is designed to be broadband-utilized, so forget 3G. Maybe down the road 4G will let it fly to mobiles.

And would a bluetooth controller be entirely out of the question for those games that would play better with one? I don't know.

As for trying out games- they'll have "rentals" or demos to try. Will it be independent from their standard monthly model or will you have to subscribe first, I can't tell, at first glance I would guess no, you'll need a subscription. But try it for a month and cram all your demos in during that period, might be worth $5/game, assuming they aren't console ones you can already rent or PC demos you can download elsewhere for free.

I threw my hat in the ring as a potential beta user for OnLive. Maybe I'll get an invite, maybe not, but definitely worth following.