World of warcraft
World of Onlive
16/03/10 20:42 Filed in: Industry
I just had an epiphany.
Ever since it was first announced, I have been extremely dubious about OnLive. There seems to be so many technical (and financial) hurdles to overcome that I have been unable to imagine a scenario where it can be successful that doesn’t require either magic or some sort of stock scam.
Anyway, I was just washing dishes when I realised that there IS a realistic scenario in which OnLive could work! One where all it’s drawbacks become meaningless. There is even synergy!
If OnLive was bought by Blizzard and the only game available through them was WoW (or Blizzard’s next MMORPG), then the whole thing starts to make sense.
WoW’s gameplay is already balanced for server-side lag, some additional client lag would probably be quite acceptable. In fact, if you put the world servers near the OnLive shards, you could reduce the server lag and possibly get an overall lag-win.
WoW already has user limits, too many people try to log into a world server and you get queues. So if the maximum number of OnLive shards are already in use when you try to log in and you have to wait to play, who cares? WoW players are already used to that no one is going to start demanding their money back.
Blizzard believes in having the minimum possible hardware needs to gain entry to their game, but secretly, you know they would love to really pull out all the graphical stops. With OnLive they get to do both! And Blizzard’s policy of not chasing the latest graphics card update will help stop OnLive’s shards from becoming redundant every year.
OnLive gets to build some dedicated platform specific clients for their streaming technology, so that a carefully crafted interface can be made for a PC game being played through an iPhone or a PSP, one that will give the player the best possible UI experience on those platforms.
Finally, the monthly cost of OnLive’s service would be rolled into the existing WoW subscription, (as a premium option, of course) something that many Wow players would find acceptable for the chance to play WoW on their iPhone / iPad / PSP / browser wherever they go.
Of course there are logistic hurdles to overcome, but it makes sense, I say!
Blizzard gets to open the games to an even wider audience, breaks into mobile gaming and gets the brute force to do a pretty major graphically update.
And OnLive? OnLive gets synergy, man. And who wouldn’t want that?
Ever since it was first announced, I have been extremely dubious about OnLive. There seems to be so many technical (and financial) hurdles to overcome that I have been unable to imagine a scenario where it can be successful that doesn’t require either magic or some sort of stock scam.
Anyway, I was just washing dishes when I realised that there IS a realistic scenario in which OnLive could work! One where all it’s drawbacks become meaningless. There is even synergy!
If OnLive was bought by Blizzard and the only game available through them was WoW (or Blizzard’s next MMORPG), then the whole thing starts to make sense.
WoW’s gameplay is already balanced for server-side lag, some additional client lag would probably be quite acceptable. In fact, if you put the world servers near the OnLive shards, you could reduce the server lag and possibly get an overall lag-win.
WoW already has user limits, too many people try to log into a world server and you get queues. So if the maximum number of OnLive shards are already in use when you try to log in and you have to wait to play, who cares? WoW players are already used to that no one is going to start demanding their money back.
Blizzard believes in having the minimum possible hardware needs to gain entry to their game, but secretly, you know they would love to really pull out all the graphical stops. With OnLive they get to do both! And Blizzard’s policy of not chasing the latest graphics card update will help stop OnLive’s shards from becoming redundant every year.
OnLive gets to build some dedicated platform specific clients for their streaming technology, so that a carefully crafted interface can be made for a PC game being played through an iPhone or a PSP, one that will give the player the best possible UI experience on those platforms.
Finally, the monthly cost of OnLive’s service would be rolled into the existing WoW subscription, (as a premium option, of course) something that many Wow players would find acceptable for the chance to play WoW on their iPhone / iPad / PSP / browser wherever they go.
Of course there are logistic hurdles to overcome, but it makes sense, I say!
Blizzard gets to open the games to an even wider audience, breaks into mobile gaming and gets the brute force to do a pretty major graphically update.
And OnLive? OnLive gets synergy, man. And who wouldn’t want that?
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