Microsoft ran a programming contest a few months ago called Code7 – the idea is you’d code up an app with specific support for Windows 7 – things like touch, location, taskbar improvements, etc. All you had to do was submit a (up to) 3 minute screencast of your app. The prizes were pretty awesome too, first place is trip to PDC09 + $17,777USD. Regional winners get trip to PDC09 + $7,777USD, and regional runners up get a $1000USD laptop.
Well, I fell into the latter category – that is, I was told I was a regional runner up – awesome eh? My entry was MahTweets, which has support for geocoding photos for Flickr using the Win7 Location platform, as well as taskbar enhancements.
When I say I was told I was a runner up, I mean that I was notified I’d win the prize if I completed certain forms, which I did instantly. Then I was told they’d send out the physical forms, since apparently electronically filling them in isn’t enough. Once the deadlines for submitting those forms came and went without the forms even arriving, I was a little concerned. Turns out Microsoft Legal Counsel decided it was "concerned about the use of the real status feeds from the various social media sites, use of the Flickr website" (emphasis mine – there was more stuff about logos of the various services featured, but that’s relatively minor)
Just to recap, I submitted a screencast of MahTweets, showing some of functions it does with tweets as well as uploading and geotagging a webcam picture (of my ugly mug) to Flickr. Because I featured my Flickr profile, Microsoft Legal Counsel was concerned that I didn’t have permission from Yahoo to use a screenshot of Flickr. Right. To be honest, it wasn’t until I started drafting up this post that I even noticed the Flickr crap – I’ve been more concerned with the "real status feeds".
Firstly, what the hell is a ‘real status feed‘? I asked for clarification on what they meant – and it took twelve days to get a response - turns out that’s just what normal people would call a tweet. I’d say ’social media network update’, but I only showed off Twitter functionality. MSFT Legal wanted permission from every identifiable twit in the video. "Okay, sure, that’s do-able" I thought, "there is only about eight or nine people who actually have tweets/avatars being shown off".
Turns out that no, I was wrong, they want not only consent from those people, but from any handle visible – so if XYZ wrote "hello @foo", I’d have to get consent from "@foo" as well – as well as all the names visible when I demonstrated building a group/column. Once I got the final bit of clarification, I just gave up, as the number of people I needed consent from was reaching 40+. A big thank you for those who did give me consent when I thought it was still eight or nine people.
The most frustrating bit about this is the way it was set up to be a disappointment – if they had of opened with "hey, if you can clarify XYZ legal situation, we’ll award you a prize" that would have been cool, but the "hey, you’ve won! fill in a form!" then waiting a few days (as it took that long for each email response) to find out there were more concerns just left a bitter taste in my mouth.
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OnLive has been making a big stir at GDC2009, but I think it will be a flop. The idea behind OnLive is being able to play your game whereever you are, with whatever devices you have, even if they’re not powerful enough to run said game (Crysis on a netbook would be a good example of this). OnLive achieves this by running the games on their servers ‘in the cloud’, and streaming it to you as a video.
Why it will fail in Australia/other countries
- Bandwidth
For 800×600, 1.5Mbit/second (1500kbit/second) or 187KB/s is needed. For 1280×720 ("720p"), 4.5Mbit/second or 562.6KB/s is needed turns out its 5MBit/s or 640KB/s.
On my previous 1.5Mbit ADSL1 connection, and with the ADSL/TCP overheads, I’m lucky to get 160KB/s. With larger monitors becoming the norm, I can’t see too many people wanting to revert back to lower resolution and lower detail.
- Quality
As mentioned above, a fairly insane amount of is needed to go to 720p. My monitor runs at 1680×1050 (it’s a 20" but 22" monitors also run at this resolution) – just under twice the amount of pixels. Stretching the image to almost twice its size isn’t going to look good, particularly when you factor in any ‘blocks’ generated by the encoding process.
If it has the option to choose your resolution, my monitors native resolution has twice as many pixels as the 720p option, meaning I’d need 1MB/s to play!
- Data allowance
Australia is known for slower speeds and smaller download quotas, and bandwidth intensive applications can be rather expensive For an hour of gameplay in 720p, I’d churn through just under two gigabytes*. If I was to play an hour a week, that’d be around 8GB/month. What if I’m not the only gamer in the house (and I’m not)? 16GB! On Telstra (not the cheapest, but biggest), that’d set you back a minimum of INSERT NUMBER
(by comparison, currently playing a game online usually doesn’t consume more than 100MB/hour, or 800MB/month in this usage scenario)
* 562.6 (rate per second) * 60 (per minute) * 60 (per hour) / 1024 (making it megabytes instead of kilobytes )= 1977MB.
- Latency
The biggest problem with gaming with international people is the lag, which is why there are lots of Australian based servers. When the game itself is being served from the US, that’s about a minimum of 250ms delay (make that 500ms – 250ms for you to send a keystroke/mouse movement, 250ms for the results to be sent back to you)
The obvious solution is to have local (at least "continent" level) servers. The downside to this is that it would likely drive up the subscription cost (I presume there will be a subscription to the OnLive service) to regions other than US.
- Cost
At the end of the day, its going to cost them money to be running the games, and that is going to hit users of the service in the form of subscription fees. Too low isn’t going to make them successful, too high and it’d really be a debate as to if its worth it when you consider the other problems with the server (mentioned above).
There has been no information released about price
So if it’s going to fail, why are publishers on board?
The biggest defence of the OnLive system has been "this is the next big thing because big name publishers are supporting it’. The market for this type of system is people who can’t afford (or refuse) to buy a computer capable of playing all the games they want. From a publishers perspective, even if OnLive goes bust after a month of operation, that is a market they wouldn’t have tapped even if they gave the game away for free.
My feelings are if it didn’t have the support of at least one major publisher, it wouldn’t even get past the ‘this is a cool concept’ stage, and would end up being like the Phantom console.
Good idea, wrong era
If we fast forward ten, twenty, maybe thirty years time, when everybody has a minimum of a single fibre connection to their house, all the limitations will disappear, and then ‘dumb terminals’ doing all the processing on ‘the cloud’ will be the way to go.
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