More details emerge on streaming game service OnLive

Come winter, Onlive will be released. Onlive is a service that allows people to play high end games on low end PCs. This provides a solution to eternal upgrading race that PC owners face when they want to play the latest games on the highest settings. Onlive achieves this by taking care of all the necessary computations in its own server farms.

The player’s input is streamed to these servers and the game’s output, the video and audio data is streamed back to the player.

Because of this trait, Onlive is called a cloud gaming service. This name refers to the computing not taking place in the user’s facilities but is instead outsourced to a third party (the cloud).

While computing power is no longer an issue, access to bandwidth is. To play a game on high definition quality, you need an Internet connection of at least 5 Mbps.

Furthermore, to not be troubled by latency, Onlive found that servers should not be further away than 1500 kilometres from the player. For the time being, the service will only be launched in the US, where four server farms are being erected. Plans to expand to Europe have not been voiced.

As players need a subscription to play and will never own a copy of the game, neither virtual nor physical, piracy is essentially a non-issue in this service. And, also good news to game producers but less so for gamers, Onlive will do away with the second hand market.