In addition to chatting about BioWare's upcoming MMOG Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA CFO Eric Brown took a shot at cloud-based gaming service OnLive during his presentation at the UBS Annual Media and Communications Conference in New York. Unfortunately, he didn't get his facts in order before pointing fingers.
"As I understand it, OnLive costs you $10 to $15 a month, then you have to buy content on top of that," he said. "So if it's $15 a month, you're down $180 at the end of the year. That's about the price of a discounted high definition console. And the library out there for the HD consoles is extensive."
That of course is incorrect. As previously reported, accounts are free, however members can choose from three models for each game: a 3-day pass, a 5-day pass, or basically purchasing the game in the form of a "Full PlayPass." OnLive is also working on an all-you-can-play subscription service for $9.95 per month, however it's currently in beta for stand-alone OnLive console owners.
Despite the pricing error, Brown brought up an important factor that could make or break OnLive's service: latency. He pointed out that online delivery of games is different to online delivery of movies via Netflix. "You can buffer up linear media," he said. "If you have a slow connection you can download for two or three minutes in advance and buffer any slow-down of the connection so you have a smooth viewing and entertainment experience."
"When it comes to videogames, particularly first person shooter games, anything less than a response time of 30 or 40 milliseconds is unacceptable and by definition anything going through a streaming platform is going to go through a series of switches etc," he added. He then questioned if the latency can be overcome in the long term, noting that the current response time might be sufficient for certain genres that are more turn-based or slow-paced.
Previously Digital Foundry discovered that OnLive was actually hovering right at the boundary of what's considered as acceptable lag during intense gameplay and often exceeded it, however that report was presented back in July.
