Dissipated Cloud

This last week saw the closure of OnLive, the cloud gaming service which stubbornly held on longer than I would have given it credit for even under the best of market circumstances.  Roughly two hundred employees arrived at work, went to an all-hands meeting, and were told that they were no longer employed.  They would get no severance pay.  Their stock options weren't worth the paper they were printed on.  As a business entity, OnLive had been obliterated, the name now only an echo in the graveyard of tech startups.

As somebody who spent a long and ugly period being unemployed relatively recently, my heart goes out to all those guys.  I went through a similar experience fairly early in my tech career, though not quite as brutal, and I know that the job market is still a desolate wasteland compared to a decade ago.  But for all my sympathies and hopes that they do find work quickly, I remain convinced that all of that talent, all of those wonderful minds, every last one of them was fucked from Day One.

The central premise behind OnLive was, on the surface, an intriguing notion.  Instead of having to tediously muck about with hardware swaps and settings on a PC or buying some bloated chunk of plastic from Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo, all you had to do was plug in a happy little device about the size of a radar detector and just let games stream across the Internet straight to your TV or PC.  How?  The magic of the cloud!  Sit back and relax!  We'll handle everything for you!

This was the first clue that things were doomed to failure.

"The Cloud" has been the big damned panacea for the last few years in the tech industry.  Not enough server space?  Put all your data in "The Cloud."  Not enough processing power?  Offload your cycles to "The Cloud."  I think the only reason its champions don't come out and proclaim that "The Cloud" will cure cancer is because the public isn't quite that gullible.  What far too many people don't understand about "The Cloud" is that it's ultimately a parlor trick.  Cloud computing makes promises about saving people money and resources, intimating that since everything is online, they'll never need hardware of their own.  But what seemingly escapes people is that there's still hardware running somewhere.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as a purely virtual environment.  The virtual server in a cloud environment exists only because it is part of a physical server in a datacenter somewhere.  Multi-core processors, RAM, drive space, all of those are allocated chunks of a physical server, or even multiple servers.  You may not have to have the hardware on your premises, but that doesn't mean there's no hardware involved.  It's the apotheosis of outsourcing.

OnLive was not the first to suggest the premise of games without media and without any overhead on the part of the gamer.  The Phantom console from Infinium Labs promised that players only had to buy the hardware and then they could download titles to the console "on demand" (another buzzphrase that needs to die a quick and painful death).  That one was quickly exposed as utter bunk, though the company has since been reorganized.  Strangely enough, they've been selling wireless keyboards and mice under the name Phantom Entertainment with some OnLive-focused sites recommending the hardware for OnLive customers.  The level of meta in this scenario makes my head hurt.

Then you've got Gaikai, the direct competitor to OnLive, the guys who just got bought by Sony for almost $400 million.  Same premise, streaming games on demand, only no hardware to buy.  Everything is browser based.  This might well have saved a lot of money for Gaikai, since OnLive had their "mini-console" hardware which you needed to buy and they had to produce.  However, I think Sony grossly overpaid for Gaikai, and I wouldn't be surprised if the current officers are gone within six months or so.  There is some suspicion that there will be tighter integration between the PSN and the purported PS4 when it comes out, potentially being something similar to the Phantom console.  I really hope not.  That would be beyond stupid, for reasons I shall address shortly.

To some extent, Valve's Steam service has been doing stuff like this for years now, letting people install games with physical media and then just linking them to Steam as part of the install process (Skyrim, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Civilization V all come to mind as good examples).  Recently, they've been pushing the Steam Cloud as a place to store all your save games and what not, though thankfully it's still only an option and not an absolute requirement. Gabe Newell may seem to have difficulty counting to three, but he's smart enough not to alienate his customer base like that.  Steam has had an offline mode for a while now.  For folks who don't want to have a Diablo III-like experience, that's been a truly attractive feature.

The big problem with OnLive, Gaikai, and other services like them is that they're dependent upon the Internet to function.  And as much as I like the Internet, as truly useful as it is, it too relies upon hardware.  More than servers and routers, it relies upon telecommunications hardware. It relies on phone lines, fiber optic trunks, telecom satellites, and cellular towers.  Each and every single one of those elements can and will cause problems.  Satellites, even in geosynchronous orbit, can be affected by terrestrial weather patterns and solar interference.  Fiber trunks get cut.  Cell signals are nowhere close to uniform in strength, as the presence of dead zones even within a single building can demonstrate.  Even the humble little POTS line can be all too easily disrupted.  Streaming games require a fat pipe constantly, and one that is burdened with almost no errors or technical failures.  Some of us have that pipe ready to go.  All too many of us do not.  And the presence of the pipe is no guarantor of successful utilization of the pipe.

At E3 this year, I was invited to a press briefing on cloud gaming and streaming services.  We were treated to a demonstration of OnLive and some of the new features they were rolling out.  For those of you who have never been to the Los Angeles Convention Center, it is a massive structure, and as such it likely has a pretty respectable data pipe.  Even with that pipe, there was some latency and some lag in the demonstration.  And while there are doubtlessly some OnLive users who had no trouble with the service, there have likely been folks who've had nothing but since they signed up for it.

There is no such thing as a free game platform.  Fifty years from now, something like OnLive and Gaikai might be practical and effortless.  But in the here and now, they are not.  As long as they invoke "the cloud," there will always be smoke and mirrors involved.