Photo: OnLive

OnLive launches in the UK today and with it the promise of a video gaming landscape that frees the gamer from needing to own and frequently upgrade expensive hardware to get the best experience possible. Below is a rundown of what it will set you back to get the OnLive UK experience.

Live is never free

The OnLive Game System – which is like a micro-console – will cost £69.99, and it ships with a controller and an HDMI cable. Attendees at the Eurogamer Expo happening this weekend can get it for free, but stock is limited, reports Eurogamer.

The streaming games cost between £1.99 and £39.99. The very first game you purchase, though, will set you back just £1, so it’s best to buy the most expensive game you’ve been eyeing. Oh, and we’d also advise buying a typically resource-heavy game to see if the company’s promise that performance will be good across the board is true.

Play that back

If you’re not interested in purchasing individual games for your OnLive UK experience, you can get access to OnLive Playback, a Netflix-like streaming subscription program, for £6.99 per month. While it doesn’t necessarily have all the latest titles available, you still get unlimited access to over 100 games that include marquee releases like Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition, Just Cause 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, World of Goo and Borderlands.

BT rewards

BT, OnLive’s official UK partner, will be rewarding its subscribers who sign up for the service, giving them the first three months of OnLive Playback access free of charge.

So if you’re a BT customer, are interested in OnLive UK and cloud gaming in general, you should do your best to make your way to the Eurogamer Expo this weekend. It’s easily the best way to see tons of games on display, as well as get access to the service.

Photo: SobControllers / Flickr

Cloud gaming service OnLive has been preparing for its big UK launch for some time now, having launched in North America in 2010 already. OnLive’s John Spinale says UK gamers will benefit greatly from this delay, saying the streaming games firm has learnt a lot in its first year of operations.

D-Day soon

OnLive UK will launch on Thursday, drawing plenty of interest in the process, particularly from gamers who are curious to see if the cloud gaming service – which is a technical achievement of the highest order – is as good as it claims. It’s one thing dealing with latency with online multiplayer games, but to have that same experience in single player games would be disastrous. And, given we expect some latency with our online experiences, overcoming this for gamers will be nothing short of magic.

It’s going to be really good

Speaking to CVG, Spinale, OnLive’s VP of games and media, said: ‘We haven’t really talked about OnLive much in the UK yet so I don’t think we deserve any credit, but soon hopefully we’ll get some good reactions.’ Explaining how the OnLive UK launch will differ from the US launch, he said that in the US, they ‘limped out with the fundamental architecture… but we didn’t have a fully robust feature set that gets everybody excited. Now we have a really robust platform so we have the ability to come out guns blazing in the UK and show everybody the opportunity is huge.’

We’re keen

We’ve been interested in OnLive and tracking the cloud gaming service since it became apparent the seemingly absurd technical accomplishment required was actually going to be achieved. So getting a chance to try OnLive UK for ourselves finally will be a relief. A little less conversation, a little more playing.

We’ll report back our experience once we’ve given the cloud gaming service a fair shake.

Photo: Keith Allison / Flickr

With major publishers often prioritising console gaming over PC gaming these days, seeing a PC version of a game come out several months after its console counterpart is not surprising. However, very rarely do you see the PC version of a video game gimped so much that it is barely representative of the console experience. This is exactly what outraged Tiger Woods 12 PC players have said about EA’s latest golfing game, with the publisher finally responding to the criticism.

What you don’t get

Tiger Woods 12 PC does not feature many of the single-player game modes found on consoles. Furthermore, the multiplayer mode has been replaced by three-month subscription access to Tiger Woods Online.

Eurogamer reached out to Electronic Arts to find out what the story was, with the publisher responding, saying that the PC version offered ‘a unique experience’. By unique, they meant it combined ‘some of the best single-player game modes of the console version with the accessibility and multiplayer offerings of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online.’ For PC gamers, the operative word in that sentence is ‘some’ of the single player modes, and not ‘all’ of the single player modes found on console.

You can have your money back

EA has initiated a refund program for Tiger Woods 12 PC for those gamers who feel what they were purchasing has been mispresented. The company says it addresses the customer service inquiries ‘on a case-by-case basis’ with customer satisfaction being a ‘top priority’. Again, PC gamers rightly believe releasing a comparatively incomplete game is not a good formula for so-called customer satisfaction.

My theory? Electronic Arts ran out of time preparing/porting the title, and made some cuts so it could make its planned release date. ‘Unique experience’ is a canned excuse if ever I’ve heard one. Good on PC gamers for taking it to the publisher’s doorstep.

Photo: popculturegeek.com / Flickr

As the critical ‘holiday period’ arrives, video game publishers and platform holders alike are ramping up production, marketing and other activities to give sales the desperate boost they need. Electronic Arts in particular is feeling really boisterous about the holiday period, with the publisher preparing the most ambitious release in its history – the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic.

We’re ready

On the eve of Gamescom, the biggest European video games trade fair, Jens Uwe Intat told Reuters that: ‘We think it should be a very attractive season for Electronic Arts as we have quite a few blockbusters in the pipeline’. As the head of sales and distribution for EA in Europe, Intat’s job relies on capitalising on this period, where the lion’s share of video game sales are made.
He added that Electronics Arts were particularly optimistic about the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMORPG it hopes will challenge World of WarCraft’s long unchallenged dominance. ‘We have lots of people who have been subscribing to newsletters and webpages so we are actually feeling very bullish about the game,’ he explained.

Big releases and changing times

Though the Star Wars MMO still has no release date, Intat said he hoped the company would be able to announce the release date before the holiday season starts. With holiday season sales typically spanning from late September through the end of December, Electronic Arts has little over a month to say when we can expect the release.

Electronic Arts posted better than expected quarterly results recently, with the company announcing that Apple’s iPad was – somewhat unintuitively – its fastest-growing platform. This earnings report represents a turning of the tide for a company that has been under pressure for some time. Star Wars: The Old Republic is just one piece in Electronic Arts jigsaw puzzle, as it tries to wrestle back industry dominance from Activision Blizzard.

Photo: juanpol / Flickr

At QuakeCon 2011 John Carmack, Id Software founder and video gaming industry icon, revealed his studio would release the source code for the groundbreaking FPS Doom 3.

Now you, too, can make Doom 3

The video gaming icon said that the Doom 3 source code – which is effectively the editable programming guts that powers the game – would be made freely available to the video gaming community when the company released its upcoming title, Rage, this October.

Speaking of Rage, Id Software founder John Carmack also revealed the source code to this title would one day be released, too, once his studio had moved on to its next gaming engine. Don’t get too excited just yet, though, with Carmack saying it could be a decade before his studio moves onto its next engine.

He said that his studio’s parent company Zenimax was supportive of the move, and also encouraged other video game development studios to release the source code for their older games.

Treasure trove of knowledge

He intimated that sharing the Doom 3 source code will benefit both non-professionals and independent studios. This, in the long run, will benefit the video games industry as a whole. Not only will seeing how the pros actually do it prompt those who’ve long been interested in game development yet too afraid to jump in give it a bash, but it will also expose various industry best practices, since few are better than Id at what they do.

Quite the pedigree

When it comes to video gaming icons, few are as revered as Id Software founder John Carmack. He all but invented – and popularised – the PC FPS games category, with Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein being Carmack’s most celebrated franchises.

His studio is hard at work on its newest videogame franchise – and engine – entitled Rage. Though Carmack remained tight-lipped on the progress of development progress of Doom 4, he did reveal that planning and work around Rage 2 was already under way.

It will be interesting to see what independent projects will come from the framework set out in the Doom 3 source code.

Photo: juanpol / Flickr

All-conquering and once seemingly unstoppable MMO World of WarCraft has seen its subscriber base drop for the second financial quarter running. While a slight dip happens time to time in any products sales cycle, the consecutive quarter-on-quarter dropped has prompted many to question if the popular MMO has its best days behind it.

All peaks are followed by valleys…

MMO World of WarCraft peaked with a subscriber base of 12 million players worldwide after unrelenting growth since it was first introduced in November of 2004. Those numbers have since dipped for the second quarter running, with the franchise losing 300k subscribers over the last financial quarter. This has led to leading industry observers to question whether this is the beginning of a very slow decline for what is still, by some distance, the most popular of all the MMORPGs on the market.

Yet all valleys are followed by peaks…

Speaking on these figures, Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime said: ‘It’s normal to see some declines, the team is currently working on our largest content update since Cataclysm, which will hit later this year.’

Related to this, Morhaime said: ‘As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content.’ He explained further: ‘And so I think with Cataclysm they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions, but that’s why we’re working on developing more content.’

Stemming the tide

Even though a decline for MMO World of WarCraft is cause for concern for Blizzard, the studio is hard at work on at least three new titles it will release in the coming months (or years – you never really know with that bunch). Diablo III is being readied for release, as is the second part of StarCraft II, as well as the company’s still unnamed incoming MMO. It will be interesting to see if their next MMORPG will be able to replace – or even replicate – the powerhouse that is WoW.

Photo: Steam

Valve Steam, the number one digital retail platform for PC games in the world has just gotten a notable infrastructure update. The Half-Life makers have announced that, through clever engineering, they’ve managed to boost the overall download speeds of content through its platform.

What’s in it for you

In the blog post noting the improvements, the Valve Steam team explained what the new content system was designed to do. ‘The new content system is designed to do two things: deliver better download rates in more places around the world, and also to simply streamline the publishing process on Steam, ultimately making it possible to ship more games than we would have been able to with the old system,’ the team wrote.

While the new content system is being rolled out slowly still, Valve noted that ‘Over time, more and more of the content on Steam will be delivered using this new system,’ and explained that ‘if you’d like to try out this new content system you can do so right now; if you download a 1280×720 (HD) trailer from the store, it will happen via the new content system.’

Competitive edge

Valve Steam was already the preferred digital retail platform for PC games, and improvements like this will only serve to make it harder for the service’s competitors to keep up. While a market for retail PC games is still thriving, with many people preferring physical media still, as digital sales continue to grow, so too will the competitiveness in the space.

And with companies like OnLive and Gaikai emerging steadily, the way PC downloads is understood and is approached could transform. What does not change, however, is the benefit a speed boost can have on an online service. Steam users rejoice – you’ve just gotten that.

Photo: isriya / Flickr

When the game-changing Intel Sandy Bridge processors were unveiled, everybody from workers who required high-end specialist software to do their work to gamers and even the average computer user rejoiced. Faster speed means markedly better performance.

The folks over at NotebookCheck ran a series of test to determine whether the number of cores – duo or quad – in your new Intel Sandy Bridge processor made a huge difference in the performance of high-end PC games.

How the tests were conducted

The test machine was the high-end P150HM Barebone notebook from Clevo. The laptop’s core specs were 8GB DDR3 RAM, a fast 80GB solid state drive, 750GB hard drive, and the extremely powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Since the Intel Sandy Bridge processor was what was being tested for, the guys at Notebook Check used five different ones.

A group of tests were then conducted on Crysis 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Dirt 3 – all high performance games that demanded much of computers when pushed to their limit.
The conclusion

After all these tests, Notebook Check writes: ‘This second look at Intel Sandy Bridge processors’ gaming performance leads us to just about the same conclusion as last time. As far as laptops go, the number of processor cores (holding clock rate constant) plays a minimal role in determining how smoothly games will run – the graphics card is the deciding factor here.’ They added that ‘Whether dual-core or quad-core, high clock-rated or low clock-rated: the minimum fps, maximum fps and average fps figures came out just about the same for all the processors.’

Smart test

People who build incredibly powerful computers do so for one of two reasons – they use incredibly demanding applications or want to run the latest PC games at bleeding edge levels. And since PC games are usually cheaper than specialist applications, while also requiring a mix of graphical capabilities and computational power, they make for good test subjects when determining the difference between high-end processors.

In this case, the difference in the number of cores found in your Intel Sandy Bridge processor made little to no difference.

Photo: Epic Games

Epic Games, makers of the incredibly popular Gears of War franchise, and owners of popular video game development middleware ‘Unreal Engine’ generally know what they’re talking about when they speak on a video gaming platform’s capabilities. So it came as validation for PC gamers when Epic VP Mark Rein said that the PC has surpassed consoles.

He told Eurogamer that the PC was very important in gaming’s future, saying: ‘We’re at the stage in the life of the consoles where the PC has shot by them in terms of capabilities.’ He continued, saying that the PC was ‘always the most important leading edge platform,’ insisting that one shouldn’t ‘forget every game that’s ultimately built is built on a PC. PCs are always going to be the tools through which all games get made.’

A graphically remarkable future

Epic games stole headlines at this year’s E3 after showing off its Samaritan Unreal demo, which graphically, looked unlike anything else on the market. Calling it a ‘love letter to hardware manufacturers’, Rein said that ‘We hope the console manufactures look at that and go, jeez, if we aim for that in our next consoles we’ll be competitive with what you’ll be able to do on a PC in a year, year and half from now. A reasonably priced PC – obviously you can do it on an expensive PC already.’

It’s all about price

PC gamers, who’ve often had their platform of choice marginalised by mainstream gaming, especially mainstream gaming publications, will see Mark Rein’s words as vindication for their commitment to the platform. Having said that, though, consoles, with their fixed life cycles and upgrade-free experience makes gaming on them that much easier and affordable for many gamers who don’t want to worry about the occasional upgrade, or the heavy up-front investment of buying a gaming PC.

Nevertheless, PC gaming is not dead and, to be fair, it won’t die either. It’s just nice to hear a company who is heavily invested in console gaming saying it, too.

Photo: Zynga

Zynga, which is making a fortune through the sale of virtual goods, and has just filed to go public, says that games and gaming should be free. This is what CEO Mark Pincus wrote to prospective investors when his company filed their S-1 form, revealing both the financials of Zynga, as well as many of the company’s philosophies.

The world, according to Pincus

On accessibility, Pincus writes: ‘Games should be accessible to everyone, anywhere, any time. From the beginning, we have strived to lower the barriers to play in people’s lives. We want to build games to play with our parents, our children, our co-workers and our best friends.’

This was just one of several interesting tidbits underpinning Zynga’s philosophy.

Social, free and good

Elsewhere the Zynga CEO writes: ‘Games should be social. Every week our teams test new features to make our games more social. Historically, our players have created over 4 billion neighbor connections. And, currently, our 60 million daily active users interact with each other 416 million times a day.’

What is the barrier to entry of making games social? Price, argues the Zynga CEO. Mark Pincus writes: ‘Games should be free. Free games are more social because they’re more accessible to everyone. We’ve also found them to be more profitable. We have created a new kind of customer relationship with new economics—free first, high satisfaction, pay optional.’

Games must do good

And, finally, to remind us that Zynga is not in it just for the money – though the money certainly makes it nice – Mark Pincus insists that games should do good, too. He writes: ‘Games should do good. We want to help the world while doing our day jobs. Through Zynga.org our players have purchased social goods, raising more than $10 million for those in need from tornado-stricken communities in Alabama to earthquake survivors in Haiti.’

This model is proving very difficult for traditional PC casual games publishers to replicate, so Zynga are coasting off of their momentum. Whether they will be able to sustain this approach to business and to making money remains to be seen, though. Suffice to say, we’ll see.