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Denver, 7:36 PM
Tue Dec 1
65 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/15/09
You plug in your console into this box, you go away on holiday, now this box and a console are left plugged in for a couple of weeks in your house, creating a fire hazard, and you will only be able to play only 1 game that you left in the console.
So what's the point of this?
09/15/09
And as far as the game storage goes it is a little bit of an issue at the moment but games on demand for PS3/Xbox is rapidly gaining momentum. It's the biggest obstacle that they have but the console manufacturers seem to be going digital so for the long term it shouldn't be an issue in a few years.
Last, the point of the service is to connect you (the console owner) to your friends who don't have one but can play multiplayer with you over the service. Or you can use it to play games on your crappy $300 laptop while on a school break or vacation.
09/15/09
Oh...and both of them also allow me to play games I bought off of PSN or XBL. Sooo...yea, there's that one too.
09/15/09
You can use OnLive and Gaikai without a console or an actual game disc. Which you need for the Slingbox, at least you need a console.
09/15/09
This somewhat using that same idea will LET YOU control however YOU wish with less restrictions.
I still think all of them will fail. Why? Because the US internet infrastructure not attic-quite enough at this time.
09/15/09
But at the same time, they forget to notice that the internet is just barely capable to keep up with this machine. Like others said, too much lag can kill the experience.
Remember Dreamcast? It was the FIRST console that introduce online gaming but did poorly because everyone was still at 56k modem. And the one that successfully prosper was the original Xbox because the internet finally catch up with online gaming (minimum) requirement.
Or myspace vs facebook. Myspace was first mover, facebook was 2nd. Which one is prospering now?
09/15/09
We literally need net connections that are on the level of gigabit ethernet for this to become even plausible.
Personal Story that might lend perspective:
Back in 2002 I was with a company that had an old legacy app that they relied on, but that didn't scale really well. It was a mixture of VB, VC, SQL, and MS Access that when packaged together on a machine worked well enough, but it was a disaster to deploy and maintain.
They originally built it as a quick and cheap solution for 5-10 workstations in a single clinic (sub contractor for NASA). Like a lot "quick and cheap" solutions it kept growing over the years until this chicken wire and duct tape solution was running everything in the clinic. Of course when the company grew and landed more contracts, they won the contract on the basis of having this software system to manage their healthcare system, yada yada yada...
So anyways, they needed to be able to expand from 5 workstations to 50 over the course of a couple of years. There was no way they could support deploying this software, managing the data merges, and maintaining it on that many stations, so they looked for other solutions.
This was at the height of Citrix's popularity, and their salesmen descended on the company, eventually securing a half million dollar order to set up a couple central servers and then deploy this app onto thin clients.
Now this was still a controlled environment. There were a LOT more workstations, but they were all connected by either 100mb ethernet, or a dedicated T1 line for those stations that were offsite (but still within 2 miles of the servers).
6 months, a couple of the companies most expensive employees (including one of the co-founders), $500,000 dollars to Citrix and we got.... a piece of shit.
The lag was horrible, even when connected by ethernet. Load times made booting Windows NT 2000 look like a cheetah. Response to inputs was atrocious, reliability sucked (central servers went down all the time), and there were a thousand other issues/bugs that using it as a thin client created or made worse.
After a short time they went right back to deploying it on local machines, hired guys to do the extra support, and cut down the number of deployed stations from 50 to less than 20 until a web solution was developed that replaced it.
I'm not saying they can't do something better than Citrix did 7 years ago, but lets just say I'm REALLY skeptical.
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Push A - send to router 1 - route to hub 2 - error-checking for packet loss - display on PC - repeat process until the game reaches developer's servers - repeat again to display on everyone else's screens.
Working perfectly, I could definitely see some us in this type of product, but I'll be the one waiting on the sidelines until I hear something positive from a real-world source.
09/15/09
Ever tried using a word processor over something like Citrix or Remote Desktop?
Even something as simple as typing words sucks big time if there is even a half second of lag. And these systems suck even when done on a LAN (forget about over the web).
There's a very good reason that the miracle of thin clients hasn't really taken off.
09/15/09
Thin clients were used a LOT in the past, and mainframes are returning so I'd expect that they are bound to make a return in some area's.
09/15/09
They suck. Badly.
The usable solution that is somewhat better actually involves loading some of the program into local memory, but then that is outside the realm of what this device does. In those cases you have a "dumb" terminal that handles all of the rendering and UI processing, but the data and BI is handled by the mainframe. That works well enough, but again, that isn't what this device is doing.
09/15/09
Oh, and just as a side-thought, I'm doing this off of a WLAN at a public coffee shop. Citrix has advanced a hell of a lot in the last few years, maybe you oughta cut back on the pessimism a bit...
09/15/09
That said, you're still not talking about a high framerate or low latency application.
I can start and stop services and read logs using Remote Desktop, but I'm sure as hell not writing code on it or trying to watch video.
I may be playing the extreme devil's advocate here, but the fact is that there is not a solid demonstration of this being practical that is out there yet.
The closest comparison to what this is trying to do is Slingbox, and even as a tried and true technology it has shortcomings (like input lag to start/stop/pause) that would make gaming really really really hard to do.
09/15/09
How do engineers, with a straight face, tell the CEO's and investors of this company that they can create useful experiences with these things?
The *only* type of game I could see working would be things like Uno or Bejeweled that don't require any sort of consistent timing with the controls.
But that begs the question, if all you want to do are play games like that, then why not play the web browser version, or buy a DS?
I get more lag than I'd like for a good gaming experience with standard RoadRunner... I couldn't imagine the frustration of trying to play a jittery frame-locked and downsized version that then added in a minimum amount of control lag.
09/15/09
Remember the Phantom Computer Gaming Console? I have a beta test agreement from when the company was first starting out and had a supposed 10 million dollars in assets. This is from 6 or 7 years ago... needless to say it never went anywhere.
I don't really know what to think of this idea other than I have a MAJOR doubt that it will ever take off. History tends to repeat itself after all.
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Slingboxes are just taking the video feed, digitizing and compressing it, and then streaming it out.
There is a delay on doing things like pressing pause on the Slingbox that some people even find annoying ( [www.tvsquad.com] )
Having a second or two delay between the actual picture at home and what you see on your laptop doesn't matter for TV, but that seems like a nail in the coffin for games.
There is also a whole level of caching that Slingbox does to get the performance that they do ( [www.slingcommunity.com] ). Those types of things just won't fly if you are expecting sub-second latency.
09/15/09
While it may cost a bit, roughly 200 bucks is a lot cheaper than DevKits for PS3/360 platforms, last time I talked with some developers.
09/15/09
Dev kits can still only run one copy at a time, so it's not like you can run multiple devs/testers and save on the costs of kits.
If they *are* shared, the more likely scenario would be that you upload your build to the box, then walk over to where it is and do your testing. Or you just unplug the box and physically take it to wherever you need it.
If you need it for demo purposes, then you either burn a disc or use a slingbox and just stream someone else playing.
@mutedia: See my post above about how well Citrix works over ethernet (summary: not well).
They have more pipe, but it still isn't necessarily enough.
People complain about the 150ms control lag on games with wireless controllers, so how could you possibly play if you're adding in that delay plus a *minimum* of 300ms required for even an amazing connection. Then you aren't even counting the fact that somewhere this video has to be compressed and encoded into something that can be transported. That delay can mean several seconds...
It all adds up to implausible once you add all the parts together...
09/15/09
There would be latency in the matter, yes, but it still is another facet of how the device can be used, and if the person viewing isn't playing, the latency matter isn't even noticeable.
Also, there are some game companies where different divisions are in completely different buildings (I know some personally), so having a remote access like this internally is still somewhat useful.
09/15/09
300ms ? how did you come up with that number? are you still using dialup?
09/15/09
Look, I've worked in places that do TONS of video streaming, and it takes ridiculous amounts of hardware to get decent results.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it will be really hard to get it done with a cheap box that you set next to your 360.
Also, 300ms is pretty flipping generous. I don't know what ISP you have, but if I get 300ms between my opponents on xbox live, I'm lucky.
And remember, we aren't talking optimal environment here. For this to work I have to be able to play by xbox from 3,000 miles away. Try playing a PC shooter on a west coast server when you are on RoadRunner cable on the east coast...