Today was the last day of the Conference here in Cologne, and I attended only one seminar. TomDuBois from OnLive held it and I think that it was the most important one of the conference.

Two companies have been discussed here as Cloud Gaming providers, Gaikai and OnLive. I’ve always frowned upon the idea because of hardware and bandwidth consideration but the demo he made really turned me into a believer.

Let me explain shortly: a cloud gaming provider has a huge server farm where you play your game. In order to gain HD quality gaming your client needs to have about 5Mbit bandwidth. You send input signals from the keyboard or some other device to the server, and the server provides you with the rendered image.

This means that there’s no need for you to have a very powerful pc or console yourself. You only need the input devices and I guess a simple OnLive client that handles the communication. You’ll be able to rent games for a few days or decide to purchase them permanently. You can watch other people’s feeds as well if they allow you to because everyone playing is basically on TV. It’s a bit like spotify for games.

The demo was very impressive and apparently they already have it up and running in the US. I assume it will be working well here in Europe in a year or two. I wonder if there will be any new consoles released in the markets where there’s broadband and this is in place or if we’ve just seen the last generation of high end gaming consoles.

The good news is that there’ll be a lot of incentive to create really good high budget games for this platform as it removes a lot of problems that the business faces such as second hand market, piracy and various client hacks. And since you can play the same game on your handheld devices as well as on your PC or TV it’s good for the consumers as well.

Anyways, then we walked around on the GamesCom. Guild Wars 2 and Castlevania got most of my attention. I expect to play Civ 5 a lot as well but I didn’t have a lot of time testing it. Before we went home I took a free ride in one of those chairs that propels you 10-20 yards into the air using rubber bands. I have a very strong voice and I heard myself screaming from fear in some weird guttural way that I didn’t recognize and most people in the area stared at me. Now Andreas/Zcul mimics that scream now and then when he thinks it’s a good idea which I usually don’t.

(8 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...