In this article you can see that Warner Bros. is backing a new DDS (Digital Distribution System) that streams games live via the Internet.  The system is called OnLive and its to be shown at GDC on Tuesday.  Lets see whats wrong here.

First off, if your Internet goes out your screwed.  Even steam allows you to play offline so its not so bad with that.  But with this you can’t even play games offline.

Second, the American broadband infrastructure is not ready for the amount of bandwidth its going to take transfer this data.  You basically have input coming from the user, traveling to where ever, and then sending a video signal back with the reaction.  This is not going to fly on fast paced games like CoD or Unreal Tournament.

Third, you have networks doing QoS (Quality of Service) that are notorious for putting game traffic on the lower end of the spectrum (talking to you Level 3).  What happens when our traffic has to go through these networks?

Fourth, several broadband providers are limiting the amount of data that you can send/receive a month.  I know with Comcast I can’t transfer more than 250gb a month, which I think is reasonable.  Of all the caps that I know of its the highest.  Games are at least 4gb a pop.  With newer games we are talking closer to 8gb and then with Blu-ray we may be talking 20gb or above.  That mixed with your normal browsing and downloading might have a lot of people hitting their caps.

Fifth, many PC games are supported by the modding community.  Mods need to be installed on the clients machines in most cases.

Sixth, you are confined to this subscription service with no return at all.  If you drop the service you lose all the games.  And on top of that, you put all this money into this service, but then you get no return in the form of trade-ins or anything.  Its kinda like renting an apartment vs buying a house.

I’m all for Digital Distribution, however, this is not a good way to implement it.  At least not yet.  I’m calling it right now.  This will likely go the way of the Sega CD, N-Gage, Nomad, 32x, 3Do, and Lynx.