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Confounding many of its detractors - including this columnist, I admit - the OnLive service is now up and running. Early users seem impressed by certain aspects, such as the community features, but nonplussed by others - most notably, the performance of the service in fast-moving, graphically intensive scenes, which has drawn criticism from most quarters.
As a result, OnLive presently seems like a pretty bad deal as a replacement for a games console or high-spec PC. However, the very fact that the service has launched at all and works in some contexts has struck a blow for the idea of cloud gaming. Internet speeds will continue to rise rapidly in the coming years, while the cost of powerful video decoding hardware for the client side will continue to fall, helping to eliminate two of the key bottlenecks which OnLive-style services presently face.
The extent to which those obstacles will block the popularity of cloud gaming in the coming years should not, however, be underestimated. Internet infrastructure by its very nature is plagued by bottlenecks. There are whole swathes of the planet which don't provide connections fast enough to operate OnLive even in its present state - and not just in poorer countries, either, with many developed nations (including large parts of the UK) still regarding 2Mb as a top-end connection.
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