Nvidia Still Betting Big on Cloud Gaming
In a recent interview Phil Eisler, general manager of GeForce Grid Cloud Gaming at Nvidia, said that the setback at OnLive did not discourage Nvidia to back away from cloud gaming. He believes that there will be a comeback for the technology next year.
Eisler said that, while Nvidia supported OnLive, "think a lot of their problems were of their own doing." He conceded that "naysayers certainly had a field day with the demise of OnLive", but that would not change the way Nvidia thinks about cloud gaming as a future opportunity for the company. He said that Nvidia still sees "a lot of potential for the vision of cloud gaming", but they would not have done "some things the way that OnLive did".
As for the time frame when consumer cloud computing could get its next shot, Eisler said that he believes there will be "a lot" happening "next year". According to the executive, Nvidia is sampling products to its partners addressing this market segment, but he noted that much of the traction is not in the U.S., but is led by Asia. "We’ll see [consumer cloud gaming] gain momentum throughout next year," he said. "But if I look out five years, I think it could be a significant portion of the way people play games."
Even though Gaikai and OnLive have both dramatically changed since their inception, Eisler said that Nvidia will continue supporting the cloud gaming companies.

I'll stick with my home desktop and hardware.
Translation = The U.S. internet infrastructure is sub-par to the rest of the civilized world.
I'll stick with my home desktop and hardware.
Translation = The U.S. internet infrastructure is sub-par to the rest of the civilized world.
Maybe if the "next gen" cloud gaming goes a 100% rental system. You pay only when you play. Or maybe get deep discounts when you buy a month block of play time. The moddle will only work if a customer can walk away from the product and any time. Also at no point spent the kind of money that would make one feel that you bought something. Hence you feel like you are owed something.
It is actually cheaper to render on location than render at a server and stream the data to the consumer. As time goes on, and hardware becomes cheaper and more power efficient, this reality will grow even bolder. Internet providers charge for increased bandwidth usage, because streaming gigabytes of data isn't free. It costs money and power.
The only meaningful application that I can see for cloud gaming is services is things like demos on the fly etc. Streaming endless gigabytes to your PC will never be more efficient than buying a graphics card. And graphics cards will keep going down in price a lot faster than internet infrastructure.
cloud gaming could be applied for mobile device, but for home gaming entertainment,, locally is the better experience (bigger, crispier, faster, hassle free).
If they can figure out how to get rid of the lag I experienced when playing multi-player basketball over onLive and allow higher graphics settings (don't see why the can't) over the connection, they'll have something very viable.
The only way I can see a hardware company thinking this is a good thing is if the hardware company itself is looking to provide the services in the future using their hardware to render the imagery passed over the network making this type of gaming possible.
Seems cloud computing... especially cloud gaming, is highly flawed.
Next title..
Nvidia failing big on cloud gaming.....
10$ a month, you companies want o make multiplayer the main focus of your game, make damn sure its good enough that i will spend more than 1 month playing it.
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on a side note, i could see cloud rendering a future option, like you pay a certain amount of money, and you get a highly demanding task done off site, and it gets sent back, because say it all you want, most people cant afford a 4cpu board and a fully decked out server with quad gpus, but when we could use it, it could be at our disposal, because some time soonish, it would be faster to transfer 20gb of files and re download them than it would be to render them on site.
"Steam was unable to to sync your files with the Steam Cloud"
apparently steam cloud saving is down.. but i still can play the game, torchlight2. ingame login is functioning too.
I can't see people playing single player games "in the cloud" for the same reasons why people are annoyed or angry with always-on style "DRM" with single player games. The biggest issues being, you lose the ability to play when you want and where you want, even when you have no internet access and there is less modding support or none at all.
The game publishers seem to be trying to snuff out modding in their games so they can keep milking people with dlc or next years version with only a minimal amount of changes to call it a "new" game.
cost roughly <$30 USD a month for 50/10mbs, <$40 for 100/20mbs with no caps or restrictions. Latency to domestic servers are always below 20ms, typically below 10. This is why cloud gaming will be possible in smaller countries, particularly developed Asian countries as well as most European ones. The internet infrastructure in the US isn't behind technologically, though it is limited by actual distance and most of all, corporations.
While of course the optimal gaming experience is locally computed, you have to remember that high end gaming computers don't exist for most families. Many purchase ultrabooks not knowing the difference between them and regular laptops. Many don't even know why desktops are faster. This is the target that Nvidia and Onlive (as well as others) are aiming for, to tap into a market where higher demanding games never reached. People who browse these sites (enthusiasts) will never touch this, they know that and obviously aren't targetting you, you can keep buying their hardware while they expand into other markets.