Email: Onlive

Mr. Malstrom,

You’re probably sick of all the emails you’re getting regarding E3, and while I find the collapse of the hardcore fascinating I’ll spare you my perspective on that.  What I want to talk about is something that seems to have flown below your radar, and that is the OnLive service.

The service itself launched a few days ago and is supposed to allow you to play games remotely – the video is streamed to your PC while your input is sent to their servers.  This entire service is so ludicrous that it will probably fail spectacularly for several reasons.

Not only is there going to be terrible control delay as most peoples’ latency would probably be upwards of 100ms, but the video quality will be low as streaming video takes up ridiculous amounts of bandwidth even when compressed.  I suspect the lack of quality will chase away all but the most diehard early adopters.

Those are just technical concerns, however, and they could be resolved by new technology in the future.  The real reason I think the service will utterly fail is because it completely removes control from the consumer.  Since these games are installed remotely and you’re paying a monthly fee to access them you lose the ability to modify your game in any way, from simple .ini tweaks to total conversion mods.  The other critical problem is that they can close your account at any time – you are paying a monthly fee to access your games, plus full retail price for the games themselves, and if your account is closed you lose everything you’ve paid for.  Not to mention that they apparently only keep games for three years, and when that happens you lose whatever you paid for.

I still play games from the 1980s and 1990s to this day.  If I can’t replay a game three or four times it’s not worth buying, especially with today’s showy cutscene heavy games that usually only have 10 hours of gameplay (the fact that people accept that when games 10 years ago could have 60 hours of gameplay is in itself ridiculous but that’s a topic for another email).

The entire idea is so ridiculous that I can’t even believe anyone would buy into it aside from publishers, who love the idea of controlling piracy and removing all control from the customer.  If the customer can’t install mods, there’s no Hot Coffee scandal!  No retroactive adjustment of ESRB ratings of games due to nudity mods!

I’m really starting to see the wisdom in your “cult of technology” article from several months ago.  At first I was a bit skeptical, but everywhere I look there seems to be more and more evidence.  Services like this are utterly pointless and likely doomed to failure, and only someone completely obsessed with technology would think otherwise.

Is it no surprise the big companies want the future to become a type of Digital Feudalism? Just as the peasants didn’t own the land they worked on and had no property rights whatsoever, so too will consumers of the future not own the product they consume or have any property rights to it whatsoever.

OnLive will fail. I don’t think that is any story.

But here is what will happen. After it becomes clear the market keeps rejecting Digital Feudalism, the big companies will instead go to Congress. “Make Digital Feudalism into law or else we cannot compete!” And so OnLive forces its way into the market by the legislator’s pen. Woe to the customers!