On-live to beat piracy?

A while back I wrote an article talking about the Chrome OS from Google. In it I discussed the opinion that the infrastructure of the world, especially the rural part of sunny Scotland that I inhabit, isn't anywhere near approaching readiness for such a futuristic concept as a totally online, cloud based computer operating system.

Such a luddite attitude is fairly backwards thinking, I wasn't saying there is anything wrong with the concept. I quite like the idea of a thin client that I hold in my hand and the heavy grunt work of securing and storing my data being done by a corporation that is to be heavily penalized for lack of security and loss of data. After all if I store my stuff at home on hard drives they might be susceptible to failure or accidental formatting. Recently one of my friends mistook my two terra-byte storage drive for the two gigabyte SD memory card I asked him to format. It also means that software and media is held and maintained by the companies who produce it. This means you can buy rights to use it, but don't have to install, update and otherwise maintain it on your machine. Your upgrade to a new machine is also less of a chore as you only have to sign into your new machine and everything will be as you left it on the old one.

Chromebooks aren't setting the world alight as far as i can tell, the fact that I can’t tell is telling. Google, Samsung and Acer aren’t disclosing sales figures, what figures that are floating around indicate around the 50,000 mark. Which can’t be pleasing Google or their hardware partners all that much.

I am usually in the queue to try out a new operating system and it's associated hardware. The desire to this isn’t as strong with Chrome OS. It simply presents the user with the Chrome web browser as it runs on almost every other operating system. the only difference is that there is no way to quit to anything else, the idea being that everything runs in the browser. I tried some of the early builds of chrome compiled by a tinkerer called Hexxeh to run on my Asus EEEPC and found it fairly agreeable. As previously mentioned I still find myself moored in the realms of the physical. Having your data on a drive that is physically present is too ingrained to let go of easily.

Last time I wrote about cloud services, I talked about how music and video content producers must see the cloud. The possibility to give the user the same experience as watching a movie or listening to a music track, without them physically having a copy is their golden ideal. If the user never gets to keep a copy, they can't make a copy, at least not as easily. It is no wonder then that content producers want us to move in this direction.

As mentioned earlier this is not a one way street in favor of the content producer. The user is freed from buying storage and organizing it, freed from worrying about backups and data loss when devices break down. They don't have to clutter their house with cases filled with DVD's, or physically deal with discs and players. They just buy gadgets that fit their cloud platform of choice and are then free to access all their purchased music and movies where-ever they are.

The real point of writing this article was to consider the future of the games industry in the face of the increasing removal from reliance on physical hardware that the cloud represents. The games industry is already in a state of flux at present, the changes in fashion in computer hardware of late are making the crystal ball of the future very cloudy (pardon the terrible pun). Tablets, smart phones, Chromebooks, traditional netbooks and laptops are making the traditional model of a desktop PC seem quaint, somehow, antiquarian.

Into this mix comes cloud gaming services like OnLive, which promise PC quality games on a plethora of devices, including your HDTV via a small black box, or your phone or tablet. Basically just a controller and software with a need for a display, Onlive runs the games on a server somewhere in the cloud and streams the video to you, relaying your inputs as you make them. To me this sounds impractical and likely to lag badly, yet I am keeping my opinions to myself here, as I have not actually tried it out for myself in own home.

The advantages, as long as the internet provider you have can supply the bandwidth, and not penalize you for the amount of data marathon games sessions will involve, are legion. For the user, there is no need to go out and physically buy and install the game or for that matter download gigabytes of game content. Also no need to update the game with patches as they become available, that will be done on the server end by the games developers. Traditional PC gaming is an expensive affair, with a steep technical learning curve. With onlive you get the benefits of the best hardware, upgraded at no cost to you, without having to wrestle with graphic card drivers and other PC and windows mysticism.

For the games publisher the real dream advantage is that the games code doesn't ever leave the safety of server farms. I realize that this is a long way from being the present day reality, there are still going to be console and PC discs on the shelves, which are an avenue for piracy. What the industry executives see is the future where you don't ever have the games code on your own piece of hardware, only see the video of your play-through. You can't copy a game that you never have a copy of in the first place. You also can't resell your copy of the game to one of those leech like game store chains, who greedily take more profit for themselves from the second hand sales of games.


Not owning what you purchase is a difficult concept for many people, music and movies are never yours, that has always been the case. Buying a movie only gives you the right to watch it in your own home. Your rights to do much more with it are still severely restricted. I am beginning to wonder if this is the reason we are not seeing new consoles from Sony and Microsoft just yet. Are they waiting to see how the early pioneers of cloud gaming fare before they commit themselves to the road? The problem with that is that they might miss the boat and leave the market to Onlive or one of their competitors. I feel that it will be a long slow battle to change the mindset of the public beyond the early adopters and technophiles who eat up these kind of concepts. It is almost like some sort of Buddhist anti-possession philosophy, versus the capitalist hoarding of modern society. Interestingly enough Onlive are offering a free trial, maybe it's time to see if it works out?