Xtemulation Forums: Onlive Begins Public Betatesting - Xtemulation Forums

The concept is remarkably simple. The actual hardware generating the visuals and running the gameplay isn't owned by you. Instead it's held somewhere else in the world. That hardware then encodes its visual output and beams it to you over the internet. The player sitting at home simply uses an existing PC or Mac (or 'micro-console') to take the video stream over IP, beaming back control inputs to the server. The advantages are very straightforward - you don't need to upgrade your hardware, the people running the servers do. And that hardware can be state-of-the-art PC kit way in advance of what Xbox 360 or PS3 are capable of, and of course it's upgradable. You'll never need to buy a game again; you'll just rent time on the ones you want to play. You'll doubtless save money and the publishers will make more of it. Piracy will be impossible.

OnLive founder Steve Perlman has announcedthat the ambitious "cloud" gaming service, which runs games remotely and streams the video to your home over the internet, is ready to begin public beta testing.

OnLive has started sending out invites to people who've registered for the beta, and registration is still openMy link. However, you need to be resident in the US and aged 18 or over to be eligible. Initial testing will be done through PCs and Macs.

Perlman says testing will be done across a wide range of locations, internet speeds, broadband services, computer hardware, displays and input devices to make sure OnLive works in as many different situations as possible.

Our own Richard Leadbetter disputed that OnLive could work as promised when it was revealed at the Game Developers Conference in March this year, prompting a rebuttalfrom Perlman. So it will be interesting to see how the service peforms in the real world, to say the least.