Gaming in the cloud

Forget about the Xbox, Playstation and Wii. In the near future these silly gadgets will only be found in museums. No, gaming will not have died out - it will be healthier than ever - but the way games are played will have changed radically. Instead of buying (or pirating) a complete game and installing it on your computer, all you will need to do is connect to the Internet and play whatever game you like through ‘the cloud’. No more downloads, discs or patches.

As Internet connections continue to get faster, cloud-based computing is becoming more popular. Simply, cloud-based computing is when the actual processing takes place on another computer and the results are sent to your computer via the Internet. This means you don’t have to worry about having a supercomputer with the latest graphics card or a massive hard drive to store all your data. Web-based e-mail systems like Yahoo and Google’s applications such as Google Docs are excellent examples of applications on the cloud.

For many years people have been able to play small games on the Internet, from Solitair to Super Mario. However, bigger games have been a huge problem and it’s taken some major technical advances to enable users to play large games through the cloud. Notably, breakthroughs in compression software and video streaming had to be made before graphics intensive games would work.

The biggest player in the cloud-based gaming industry is currently OnLive, which has only been going for one and a half years but was officially launched on 17 June (the other player is InstantAction, which offers a slightly different service). To play a game, all you need is a relatively powerful computer with the latest web browser and a fairly good broadband connection. OnLive’s hardware does all the rest. Loading a game takes less than 20 seconds, and there is only a very slight loss of image quality. The system remembers where you saved your game, so you can log off mid-game on one computer and log again on another and pick up where you left off. So if you go travelling you can still play the same game wherever you are in the world.

At the moment, people can subscribe for a year for free and then pay $4.95 for an optional second year. Players can select from a bouquet of around 20 games with titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell. However, OnLive aims to have around 100 titles by the end of the year with assistance from its software giant partners Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.

There are many great benefits to playing games on the cloud. You can preview and try out new games without buying the complete item and you never have to worry about patching and updating your games or losing discs. With OnLive you can also look in on other people’s games, which is a great way of previewing and discovering new games, or helping you get through a tricky level.

There are many great benefits for developers and publishers too. There are no distribution costs, and production costs shrink. Piracy is completely eliminated because it’s impossible, and developers only have to worry about developing a game for one platform instead of having separate versions for PC, Mac, Xbox etc.

It sounds almost too good to be true. OnLive could single-handedly revolutionise the way people play games. However, they potentially face huge competition and rivalry from the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, who make huge amounts of money selling their different game consoles. These giants have the edge with their new motion-based controllers like the WiimoteKinect. Once companies like OnLive enable any control system to plug into their software, the sky will be the limit. As Internet connections improve, OnLive is confident that we will all be playing games off the cloud within the decade. and Microsoft’s