One of the industry's biggest cloud gaming companies may be in turmoil, but CiiNow has launched its own service anyway, and is taking a different approach that could help it avoid the financial problems OnLive faced.
CiiNow's technology delivers streaming games through PCs, set-top boxes, tablets, and mobile devices. Its platform can be installed on existing hardware in its partners' data centers, and doesn't require the company to build new and expensive data centers.
Expensive infrastructure costs contributed to the recent shake-up at major cloud gaming service OnLive last month, which saw the company laying off all of its employees and selling all of its assets to investor Lauder Partners.
Like Gaikai, another notable cloud gaming platform that was acquired by Sony earlier this year, CiiNow offers a white label service that its partners (retailers, publishers, and service providers) can rebrand and offer to their customers.
CiiNow announced on Tuesday morning that it secured an undisclosed amount of funding from AMD Ventures, the investment arm of chipmaker AMD. Its platform is built around AMD's Radeon technology.
The tech from OnLive and other cloud gaming firms is decent. It isn't quite where it should be for a lot of higher end gamers though. At work here I have an insanely high speed connection but OnLive still came in pixelated and choppy. Secondly there is a licensing issue I've had for a long time. If I "buy" a copy of a game I don't own it. It doesn't sit on my hard drive or even some cloud storage space where if I decide I don't like OnLive, or a similar service, and want to build my local PC up to handle said game, I can't install it there. All this for the exact same price as a retail copy. For me it is like paying full price for a DVD to watch it on Netflix. I really do like the idea of Cloud gaming, but I just don't think the technology and/or market is really there yet.
Agreed. I plugged my laptop into my TV via HDMI and the fraction of a second of added response delay was too much for me. If that sort of thing can bother a gamer, these streamed games become unplayable for someone like me.
I dont' see much space for cloud gaming. For casual games, even phones and tablets get more and more powerful and for core gamers sufficient graphics quality and low lag is very difficult to achieve.
Also, the business model probably would have to change. Playing in the cloud should be more like going to the Arcade. You log-in and you can choose to play any game from the library and you just pay for the time you spent there.
Also, the business model probably would have to change. Playing in the cloud should be more like going to the Arcade. You log-in and you can choose to play any game from the library and you just pay for the time you spent there.