Evangel

He's talking 2mbit, which is different to 2mb, 2mbit is about 0.25mb or 250kb. Multiplied by 3600 and you get around 900mb. His claim of HD video being about 2mbit is complete BS anyway, unless he's got a compression algorithm that's vastly better than what the best of the best have made.

...You do realize that Halo gets gameplay footage in 5MB because it just records key items, it doesn't actually record a video stream, right? It still needs to re-render the scene when you're playing that video back, it's also how you can move around the scene and see things from a different angle.

If OnLive were doing that, then you'd still need a powerful computer/console to play games, only then you'd get added lag, OMG FUN!

They are sending a HD video stream from their servers to your computer. They are not just sending positional data.

I wasn't talking about client-side bandwidth, that's relatively easy to get (we have 24mbit here in Australia, although with ridiculously small caps that would give you about a days worth of game time with this service) but with the server side and infrastructure. A few hundred people would strain a network, a few thousand would cripple it. Simply put, this will not scale well at all.

Assuming you could get an infinite amount of bandwidth and the infrastructure to send petabytes of data across the country, you'd still have to deal with the power to actually render that data.

Oh, standard definition video (576x432) is 2mbps. Still prohibitively expensive.

Not going to work.

A 720p video is 6mbps, conservatively. For 100 people, you're looking at 600mbps + whatever controller input/protocol overhead. Considering it'd be burst speed, presumably during peak time, you'd be paying a premium for that aswell.

I run a reasonably powerful computer on 550 watts of power, for the aforementioned 100 people, you'd need 55 kilowatts of power, just for the computers alone. Add in networking gear, backup systems and cooling and it's becoming pretty damn expensive.

Then there's the licensing fees for all the games they'd need to support.

Please, please stop spreading your idiocy.

If you don't like PC games, don't buy them, don't acknowledge them. You don't like the PC platform because you've had bad experiences with it, I happen to love it because some of those bad experiences you've had with it are my favourites. I love finding out new things to do with my computer (Rule 34 this shit), I love messing around with it, I love breaking it because I know that fixing it is a whole new adventure (and because I ghosted my hard drive with a clean install so it's next to no work for me).

The rest of your argument is just opinion. I can't stand a controller yet a keyboard and mouse are natural for me. I love RTS games (even though I'm not very good at em) and you just could not get that level of control on a console. Space sims are another genre I love, a joystick would be wonderful but there aren't enough out for me to justify buying one (although, if Beyond the Red Line is any good and I spend time playing it, I might get one) but a keyboard and mouse work for me. There simply aren't enough buttons on a controller for me. I like my WASD controls, you like your thumbstick controls. Which one is better?

None, neither of those are superior to the other. It's all about personal preference.

/rant

One of the problems with PC gaming is those damn Intel integrated chipsets. They run 2D fantastically but can't do 3D for all the electrons in the world.

From what I've seen, nVidia and ATI's new integrated chipsets are fairly decent and completely shit all over Intel graphics chipsets.

Get rid of Intel's graphics chipsets and you'll find every 3D game actually runs.

Mr Khan, it's from a time when you used to be unable to get the most space from a hard drive unless you used multiple partitions. I'm not sure why that is though, so don't ask me :P

The lack of copy protection helped, but the reason Stardock is enjoying success as a publisher is because their games scale well (they look beautiful on high end rigs, they run fast on low end rigs) and because their games are incredibly good/fun.

The games that need copy protection are typically the games that people will ignore because they suck. The games that succeed will succeed whether or not they have copy protection. The degree of success will depend on how good it is and how intrusive the copy protection.

I don't like to point at steam as an example, but they've done incredibly well because, partly, their copy protection (despite every game they've released being cracked and on your favourite torrent site) is rather non-intrusive, but mostly because their games target a wide audience, scale well and are fun.

Because PCs are too hard for everyone to get working, I mean, you have to actually ASK someone for help if you can't follow instructions.

And didn't you know that they also cost a minimum 2 grand to play even a 5 year old game? 10 grand if you wanna play anything from 3 years ago.

Sarcasm, people, sarcasm.