Oops forgot to respond to this. I would like to hear from someone who uses and likes OnLive too, although I would rather hear from someone who also pays for the service (they're giving it way for free now). It's not because I am unwilling to believe this is a good service, I just don't understand who their target market is and what that market is actually thinking and wanting.

Very true, well said, Nesrie. It sounds like you know how to get a lot for your money, and that's what ultimately matters for us consumers.

I suspect Raven, like me, is rather a bit of a technophile. I know I spend a disproportionate amount on electronics and games. Not that I'm preaching; everyone expects something different from their personal computer and will draw there own line. There is certainly no right or wrong.

That said, I think we can agree on a definition for "platinum gaming computer," which I think could safely said to be a computer that is powerful enough to play demanding games for a few years to come. For a computer like that you can easily spend $2,000.

I built one just about 2 years ago with dual 9800 GTX cards, a quad core, a good sound card, water cooling, and a 750gb storage. The cards were top-of-the-line at the time, but the rest was a bit older and cheaper. Roughly, this worked out to a bit over $2,000 CAD, with the cards making up around 40% of the price. It's still alive and kicking, though my wife has banished it from the office because she doesn't like the way it looks and sounds, and frankly doesn't trust my craftsmanship! So now it lives it what is essentially a large closet.

Back ON topic though... or not...

Who remembers the Sega Channel. I remember a buddy of mine trying it out for a few months when I was 13?

Really back on topic, though. What kind of bandwidth is OnLive going to require to stream (even compressed) these visuals? We like to think of our bandwidth as unlimited here in NA, but that's not exactly true. If OnLive becomes popular and starts clogging the tubes we might see ISP start restricting bandwidth or imposing a premium on usage after a certain point. Or just increasing prices in general.

You're dead on with the "Technophile" part, my friend. I'm what you'd call one of those snobby "Tech Connoisseurs". I'm not a rich man, not by a long shot. Hell, some years I'm plain out Poor and barely make enough to cover my bills and be able to buy 4 or 5 good games in 6 months time. Other years I make BANK..through my investments and other strings of good luck. I put money back when I can and when it comes time to buy parts every 3 to 5 years I do my research, Deep Research, into the parts I want and what's the best performance for my money.

I more or less spend my Entire Life sitting in front of this damn monitor when I'm not spending time with my wife or at various doctors. My Computer is far more then a "Game Machine". It's my Whole Entertainment System. It ties into my TV, and with it and my Router I can even stream DvD's from my PC to my Moms computer on the other side of the house to play on her TV if I want. I use my PC for games, movies, TV shows, music....pretty much every facet of my life can run through my computer, and that's Not Counting all the uses my PC provides when I get the odd Tech Job or Beta Testing Gig (the kind people get money for) I still get from time to time.

You know, if it's just sitting in the closet gathering dust, I know this Great Charity you can give it to. They'll even cover the cost of postage to ship it for you. It's called the "Raven Needs More Hardware for His Home Network Foundation".

PM me for further details .

It's a Very Worthy Cause, my friend. Don't pass up this opportunity to help those who are less fortunate then yourself .....namely ME!!!! LoL J/K brother.

Many of those things are one time purchases. One of my two monitors I've had for 10 years, and the other is over 3 years old. Mouse and keyboard are also not new, I replace them when they wear out (or the cat spills orange juice on them).

When you're upgrading a computer for games, there are many pieces that don't change. I'm going to be getting a new system soon (my wife's died, by getting a new one I give her mine and then we can both play Starcraft 2 happily), and to do that I'm just buying a case and necessary components from a custom builder and swapping it in. None of the external stuff is changing.

So I'm with the others on this. 720p is actually crummy by PC standards, and has been for a decade. If that's the best it can do, my wife's $800 laptop can match it in most games, and my 3 year old desktop easily beats it. My new machine would flatten it so much that I really don't see the point.

(Plus, Wow is one of my favorite games, and I play a raid healer. Raid healers really can't deal with input lag, given that split second delays mean life and death.)

IMO it's not hard to get a good computer capable of running the latest games (albiet not on the highest settings in every case) for a low price, without needing to build it yourself. I usually pick up a computer from ebay with a good processing speed and good RAM capacity (it doesn't have to actually have good RAM though since it's fairly cheap to get), where the motherboard+power will support a good graphics card. I then purchase the graphics card separately, and have a computer that's better than many of the ones sold in shops for a fraction of the price. Took me a bit of shopping around, but it means I can afford to upgrade my computer every few years without being unable to play the latest games.

I just can't see OnLive catching on with their current model. Assuming they were able to get good enough hardware to allow me to play on a game with decent graphics, and for internet speeds generally to improve enough for lag to be minimal, I'd still have an issue with how it's priced. I'd either want to buy games on it for 1-off costs and be able to play them whenever I wanted without any subscription (which wouldn't really work since many of their costs would be ongoing especially if people are playing a game for years to come) or to pay a monthly subscription to get to access various games - either 1 subscription for all games, or possibly also a cheaper subscription with access to older games but not the latest releases (or even a 'pick+mix' type subscription system). Having to pay a monthly subscription just to allow me to 'buy' a game which I then can't play as soon as I stop paying the subscription just doesn't work for me.

The biggest problem I see with this though is that even if the system works, the market base just isn't there at the moment - in order to get a fast enough internet to use it effectively I'd have thought it'd be restricted to only a small % of people. These people will themselves have presumably in most cases paid significantly more for the internet in order to get that little extra advantage in online games and/or for gaming generally - these aren't the sorts of people I could see being attracted by a 'save a bit on hardware costs at the cost of performance/lag'. Maybe if very high speed internet becomes much more widespread and affordable this sort of model could have more of a chance of catching on, but at the moment I don't think it has the slightest hope of working.

Oh, well, I'm rather in there gathering dust with it most days

Like you, I spend much of my time in front of one computer or another, so I decided to make the most of that and I've switched majors from Classical Studies to Computer Sciences. I'm halfway through my first semester and I'm enjoying it so far, and in all honesty, the job prospects are infinitely better than what I would face with a BA or Masters in Classical History, even considering the increasing foreign competition from nations like India.

My Whole Entertainment System might not be up to your standards, though! I mainly stream shows/music/etc off one of my computers to the PS3, but we will sneaker-net it with a USB-key from time to time because my wife can never quite figure out the streaming program. It used to be a bit slow and prone to connection errors until I ditched my ISP's modem for a nice Chinese one. I'm getting a lot more out of my expensive internet package than I ever was before.

I'm starting to agree with what a lot of people here have said: OnLive is aiming itself at the wrong crowd. For many PC gamers, it IS a step down. Some of them might make the switch instead of purchasing a new computer when their old one just isn't cutting it anymore, but even that is a rather ingrained habit now.

Man, if not for the fact I'm reasonably sure time travel and human cloning are still a little beyond our reach I'd say you were either me from the past come to the future to make a better future for me, or a cloned me from the future, sent to the past to learn and to warn me of future events.....freakin scary. It's like looking in a mirror and seeing me in my early 20's.

We have much more in common then you know my friend...lol.

Whep I've tried to post yesterday and gave up, we'll see if this one goes through.

Yep Raven, I am relatively frugal although if you ask my family, many of which use me as a source for tech info, I spend way too much on computers, video games and little tech goodies. Heh, 500-750 is nothing to sneeze at really, and can be a lot of money in certin circumstances, but in terms of it being my primary entertainment, it tends to be cheaper than going out to movies every week (I go once  month if there is something that interests me) or out to dinner or a lot of other things people do more frequently than I do. They buy lobster, I get a new mouse every couple of years when the one I use wears out.

Hey I thought you techno loves were supposed to be playing with 7-10k rigs, the kind Maximum PC likes to tinker with

As for online, I could see maybe if someone's primary computer turned out to be a netbook you could wind up wanting to game through this thing, but if you are using a netbook for cost reasons, as in you couldn't fork out a little extra for evena  pre-built to play games (and some of those pre-builts clearance very, very cheaply), it seems unlikely to me you are going to have that broadband speed you need. In the USA, broadband still isn't cheap nationally. To get one fast enough for gaming here, it's 60 dollars a month, 70 if you don't attach a phone or TV package to it since you need at least what a 1.5 download and the lite they offer here is 1. So that's around 100 for the internet and some other feature with a promotion you have to haggle with yearly (as in pay one month of outrageous prices and then qualify for another promo price argh).

Well, when I built my computer, I fired up the Dell website to see what sort of a difference in price there would be if I had them make it. For roughly the same computer (No water cooling, slightly worse HDD) Dell wanted about $5,000 for. So I suppose I could claim it's a $5,000 computer, after a fashion.

But my love of technology is still constrained by my budget. And again, everyone has their personal line. I'd love a 100% top-of-the-line super-mega-ultra computer. But I can't justify to myself, let alone my wife, spending 10-15 thousand on one, especially the way tech deflates in cost with time. I'll be able to pick that same computer up in a year for a fraction of the price. Some people can justify the cost, and others balk at spending $1,000. It's all a mater of preference.

I think you have it backwards. I traveled through time to ask you for upcoming lottery numbers.

I hear you there on budget and preference. I can't see myself declining an expensive computer that happens to fall into my lap, but I can't see myself buying one unless, of course, those lottery numbers work out and it can be split a few ways .

I don't really get it myself.  If you shop around, you can assemble a pretty respectable gaming PC for under $1000 that will run anything out there better than Onlive.  And unlike Onlive you get to keep whatever games you pay for, your computer can do far more than play games, and you're not limited to Onlive's very small game selection.  It might be more expensive up front for the PC, but you get a lot more for your money and don't have to keep paying.  You could probably get away with a $600 PC if you're willing to settle for older games or medium-low settings.

Or you could just as easily go the console route and still be better off.  Like Nesrie, I'm really at a loss as to who would be interested in paying for this service.

Amazing technology really. I would have never thought this was even possible giving the size of todays current games and the hardware required to run them. I don't understand how they do the rendering server side then stream the data back at any decent rate. It just seems impossible in my brain for it to work as well as I would want it to. Hell if all I had to do was pay a monthly fee and have a dumb terminal to run games I would be interested. I just don't see the quality being equal or better than owning the actual hardware myself. I don't like being at the mercy of a server farm that needs an upgrade etc. Who knows maybe it will take off and 5 years from now I'll be blown away. Would suck if you lose your internet then your hosed.

Cloud rendering is another hot topic lately. Still waiting for that next EPOCH in PCGAMING or consoles for that matter. The games floating around in my head would need some serious technology and backend to support them.