April 20, 2009 • 24 mins
The phantom game console was designed to allow gamers to play any game from any system. The system hasn't panned out yet, but gamers still hope for cloud gaming capacities. Learn more about cloud gaming in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff works dot Com. Join Josh
and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know,
as they take a trip around the world to help
you get smarter in a topsy turv economy. Check out
(00:20):
the all News super Stuff Guide to the Economy from
how stuff works dot Com, available now exclusively on iTunes. Hello, everybody,
Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
the an editor here at how stuff works dot Com,
and sitting next to me, as usual at the text
Stuff News desk is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. No, we're
(00:45):
not talking about networking today. Well, we are kind of
kind of Yeah, I guess we can't get away from
that no matter what. Huh. No, sadly, but we are
here to talk about gaming. Yes, gaming, something I am
passionate about, despite the fact that I don't own any well,
I own a Wee that's the only current generation console
I don't need to know. Yeah, however, I'd like to
share anyway, we are talking about networks and gaming. We
(01:09):
did those go together again? Well, of course, networks and
gaming aren't new. We've been networking and gaming for years
and years now. But what we wanted to talk about
was a new kind of networked gaming where the network
is doing all the the the number crunching and graphics
processing and all that kind of stuff on its end,
(01:31):
and so you just need a very thin client to
access those games. So again, this is taking us back
to one of our favorite topics here at Tech Stuff,
that would be cloud computing. This is my wireless router.
There are many like it, but this nice, nice full
metal jacket reference because I'm not mistaken. Um, this is
(01:54):
my router. This is my gun. Okay, So uh, first,
before we get it too far into this, UM, I
wanted to kind of talk about reasons why some of
us are a little skeptical about the whole cloud gaming thing.
And um, it's because in recent years we've seen some companies,
UM One in particular, does really make a claim about
(02:16):
an upcoming console that it wasn't so much a cloud
computing console, but was a console promising these these really
big big results, and um and nothing ever came of it. Why, Jonathan,
I don't know what you could mean. I could mean,
the Phantom Game Console, one of the most aptly named
(02:38):
consoles ever to come out of anyone's imagination. Yeah. Honestly,
when you're when you're thinking about the Phantom Console and
how it never appeared, you would think, wait a minute,
did they know they were going to put one over
on me? Yeah, with a name like that, you're thinking
they did that on purpose, So at least I am.
The Phantom Game Console was an idea that out of
(03:00):
a company called Infinium Labs, and the basic concept behind
the console was that you would have a console that
was always hooked up to the the Internet, uh through
a high speed internet connection to broadband connection, and you
would download games from the Internet onto this console and
it would have all the software on the console necessary
(03:23):
to play games that were meant for PCs for other
game consoles I think they mentioned like the PS two
and the Xbox and all the Nintendo games. So it
was kind of this pie in the sky unified game
console where you could suddenly have access to all these
different games using one machine, which is kind of the
thing that a lot of gamers have wanted for a
(03:44):
really long time because despite the fact that you have
fan boys of every single gaming device out there, who
will claim to their to their grave that their favorite
console is the best one. Ultimately, every single one of
those fan boys has a game that he or she
I guess I could put fan girls in there too.
(04:05):
UH wants to really play, but it's on another console
like E T for the that Why are you trying
to trying to derail me? No one wants to play
ET for the twenty. If you do want to play
ET for the talk to me, because I might have
a copy somewhere, you know. I'm I'm very sorry that
(04:27):
those of you listening can't see the vein that throbs
for that game. I want a horrible game. No, no, no,
I'm talking about Okay, So let's say that I'm an
Xbox owner and I really want to access Oh gosh,
what's a good PS two game or PS three game
that's that's only for that system. UM. I was gonna
(04:50):
say Grand Theft Auto, but that change to Uh, I
might say Ratchet and Clink. Okay, Ratchet and Clink. All right.
Let's say let's say that there's a game that's specifically
for one console you own the other one. You would
have to go out and either buy or rent the
other console before you could play that game, which big bummer.
So the Phantom Game Console was promising, Hey, you're gonna
be able to play any game you want on this
(05:12):
one system, very very uh kind of enticing idea. Um,
there's a little problem. Oh yeah, there was no evidence
that the thing actually existed. There were some pictures, but
the pictures weren't really conclusive. Uh. Some people did some
investigating and found that the address for the company led
to like a little empty office building or I guess
it was actually an empty office in a strip mall.
(05:34):
And then it was I think it was like a
hundred square feet with um, a desk and two phones,
and that wasn't So people were immediately skeptical of this
and a lot of people were calling shenanigans and I
believe it was seconded so they got the brooms out.
Um that's a reference for the South Park fans out there.
So anyway, it did turn out that the the Infinium
(05:57):
Labs eventually kind of backed away from this whole game
console thing. They do have a product out now, Um
it's a keyboard, and they they change their name, yes,
And they apparently lost about sixty two point seven million
dollars between two thousand two and two thousand five. Yeah,
I'm betting that's not on that hundred square foot office space.
(06:18):
Probably not so. At any rate, there were a lot
of charges of fraud and stuff being bandied about during
that whole time, so that has understandably made people a
little skeptical about other gaming systems that aren't coming from
one of the big names. Um that you know, most
people think like, okay, either it's not gonna make an
impact at all, uh, it doesn't really exist, or um,
(06:41):
you know the guys crazy you know, Yeah, I mean
it's you know, You've got your your sagas and Nintendo's
and Atari's and people who you know have the wherewithal
and expertise doing this stuff. And then somebody else, like
say Microsoft, wants to join in. You go, well, okay,
sure they can throw hundreds of millions of dollars at
doing this, so okay, ye, I'll believe that they're doing that.
(07:04):
But you know, Joe comes up and say, yeah, I've
started Joe's games. I'll have a console out next year.
You're going, hey, okay, I'm sorry, who are you again? Right,
But in this case, we're talking about someone who actually
is well known who has come out with this, uh,
this new proposed gaming system. And we should add that
the one we're about to talk about is not necessarily
the only cloud gaming system in development right now. It's
(07:27):
just the one that's made the biggest splash as of
the recording of this podcast. Yeah, it's made quite a
few recent headlines, right and we're talking about the on
Live system, which was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco in March two thousand nine. And this
is sort of the brainchild of Steve Pearlman, who you
may know from such wonderful uh projects as web TV
(07:50):
and quick Time. So so not a non unknown no,
not not in the least his uh. His company reared
in UM I believe a reference to uh Atlas Shrugged, Yes,
got Old and rand Um and if if one thing
can make me matter than e T for the ay
(08:11):
it's an rand all right then let um. Yeah, it's
At one point the company was named Reard and Steele
and uh that was about the time that the Maxi
Digital video recorder was part of the company and is
now spun off. It is part of Digio. UM but
you know, these are these are some serious projects. This
is not an unknown quantity in the least and by
(08:32):
night operation. And if you look at the console, it's
very very simple. Actually it's not even tiny, not even
necessarily a console. It depends on which version you're looking at.
A micro console. Yeah, um, and that's again just one
version of it. So here's the thing, uh, he introduced
on Live UM at the Game Developers Conference UH and
said that it's been in development for UM for for
(08:55):
seven years. So there are three different versions of this thing.
There's one that connects to your television. Then there is
a software that you would have on your PC or
software you would have on your Mac. Thank you. So
for once, Mac users are not left out of the game. However,
I should point out only for max that have Intel processors. Well,
(09:19):
it's for all intents and purposes, the modern map, right,
If you don't if you own it, if you own
an old, old Mac, then you may not be able
to run this well work on my power book. Yeah,
you're gonna need an Intel based Mac running a current
version of the operating system. But otherwise you can run
this software on a PC or a Mac. And for
(09:40):
the TV because you can't run software on a TV.
Yet they have this little mini console. Yeah, it looks
about the size of a like an iPhone really, I
mean it's tiny. Well, it doesn't have any of the
parts that you would associate with a traditional console, with
traditional the modern console, so it's not It doesn't have
a hard on it. It doesn't have any moving parts.
(10:03):
Well I don't think there are any moving parts. It
doesn't have a hard doesn't have a disc player in it. Uh,
so you know you're not gonna be looking at a
Blu ray player. But then again, it's supposed to be
a lot cheaper, although they haven't really announced a lot
of pricing for the thing yet. Right so, right now,
it's got what what it does have the console that
is it um it has support for up to four
(10:23):
wireless controllers, Bluetooth, Bluetooth support for four headsets. Um it
has two USB ports for physical connections to a controller,
a keyboard or mouse or whatever. Um It's got U
an S optical output Ethernet port. That's of course, where
you would plug it up to your high speed Internet
(10:44):
UH connection, because like the Phantom, this requires an Internet
connection UH as a video audio outport, and a micro
USB power port. That's it. That's that, this little bitty box,
that's all it has on it. And then you if
you plug all that up and you hook it up
to your TV, you got hooked up to your internet
broadband service. Uh. Theoretically, you would then have access to
(11:06):
all the games that are on its system, and you
would purchase games the way you normally would accept. Of course,
you wouldn't own a physical copy of the game. You
would essentially own Yeah, you would own access to the
game really because you wouldn't have They wouldn't send you
any files. They wouldn't send you a CD or anything.
You would log into the system and you would access
(11:26):
the game that exists on these servers in the cloud,
and then you could play the game through that. And
all the graphics processing, all of the number crunching, all
of that goes on in the cloud. So it doesn't
matter how powerful a machine you have. If you have
a PC or a MAC that meets the minimum specifications,
which are really low, really minimal. I mean, if you
(11:49):
have just an old Windows machine that's running Windows XP,
you can use this. You don't supporting to on live.
You don't even have to, sorry, you don't even have
to have the latest Apple operating system. I believe it
runs on ten point four and and maybe even ten
point three. It does run on ten point three, so
I mean, we're not these are operating systems that are
several years old. Yes, So it's it's you know, it
(12:11):
doesn't have to have bleeding edge hardware for it to work.
And for for a lot of gamers, this is, um
this is kind of a dream come true. I mean,
I don't know about you, Chris, but I was a
big computer gamer when during the eighties and early nineties. Okay,
I really loved computer games. But right around the time
of the early nineties, that's when games started coming out
that required um uh a more um powerful video processor. Right,
(12:38):
so it started to feel like if you didn't go
out and buy a new video card every six months
or so, you couldn't play the latest games. And video
cards cost around two hundred bucks. So you're talking about Okay,
I'm going to spend two d sixty dollars to play
the sixty dollar game, because before I can play it,
I have to get a new video card. I was
not willing to do that. I that is the point
where I dropped out of playing computer games. So for
(13:00):
the last fifteen years or so, I haven't really been
playing computer games that often, at least not ones that
required a you know, high powered video card. So I
switched back to consoles, and a lot of people did
because console you know, you knew it was good for
a few years. Then you didn't have to worry about
upgrades and things like the the Xbox that we the
(13:21):
PS two and three, you can connect us to the
network and actually get patches through the network. So if
even in that case, you know your your machine is
getting upgraded, but you don't have to buy new components
for it to make it so, so that stays in
working condition. Right, So this thing with theoretically pull that
out completely because it doesn't. All it does is function
(13:43):
as a you know, I go between a proxy between
you and the cloud. It doesn't have to be updated
and at least, you know, maybe a little firmware every
once in a wheah. It's all. It's all updated on
the back end, like to say, and occasionally might get
a patch to whatever the software you're running on your
machine to in order to access this. I assume it's
something like a browser. Um, the thing is this has
This is right now, it's in internal beta. It's supposed
(14:05):
to go to a wider beta this summer, and then
according to on Live, it should be ready for for
consumers by winner of two thousand nine, which I'm really
excited about. I mean, the idea of being able to
play this on my television or on a computer. I
really like this idea. And and it supports networked games,
(14:27):
so you can play with or against other people online. Uh.
You know, all of this sounds great. They've got some
great partners. They've got e A Games, Ubisoft, Take Two, Interactive,
um Boy, Leaders of World of Google, Atari th h Q,
which by the way produced one of my favorite pro
wrestling video games of all time, WrestleMania two thousand and
(14:49):
uh for the sixty four and Um that's not that
I'm biased. Those were awesome video games. Okay. Anyone who
ever played any of those old in sixty four wrestling
games will agree with me anyway. So they have these
great partners there, and more will will surely join them.
Because think about this, guys. When you build a video game,
(15:10):
the expense of building it isn't just in the development,
it's in the production. I mean, you have to produce boxes.
You have to produce you know, whatever media you're going
to you know, encode the game on, whether it's a
cartridge and disc whatever, to pay for distribution. You have
to pay for distribution. Yet, yeah, exactly, there are all
these things you have to pay for. There's extra marketing costs.
(15:30):
This cuts out a lot of those considerations. So now
developers now they're like, well, this is great because now
we won't have to pay for all this this production.
We can get a larger return our investment. I wouldn't
necessarily expect this to make video games cheaper, because if
the market is going to bear a fifty dollar or
sixty dollar video game, there's no reason for them to
(15:53):
charge less. That's true, although they may do what some
of the other digital distribution markets have done in trim
the price a little bit. Uh, you know, because there
is still the matter of having to pay the developers. Developers, developers,
um and um. You know, there are there are a
lot of other costs overhead. You know, if you've got
(16:14):
a lot of people in one building developing, they require
a lot of mountain dew. Um, So there tabin mountain
dew and Frito's. Uh so. Um, so you know there
are some serious costs that that do have to be
taking care of, and of course then there's that whole
profit motive. Um, but you know they might trim that.
(16:37):
There is one neat advantage though, that this will have
that other game consoles don't unless of course, you're you know,
going to rent the video games, and that is that
they're going to let you try this out on the website.
It actually says, hey, you'll be able to try some
of these out and if you like to keep going
with that, you could purchase the game. Yeah, which is
which is great because you know, other than renting, until
(16:59):
renting became popular, and that was that was a real
pain in the neck. You found you spent fiftys in
a game and went, man, this thing is junk right.
And there are a couple of other really cool things
for developers too, if you think about it. For one, um,
you don't have to worry about resale. That's a big
thorn and computer game company sides right now is the
(17:19):
fact that people get tired of games, they can go
and trade them in for other games, and then those
those old games can be sold again. While the game
company doesn't see any of that money. You know, they
would rather sell a new game every single time. Well,
if it's all you know, you're accessing, If you're buying
access to a game, you can't resale, resale, resell that resale. Sorry,
(17:40):
I am from the South and occasionally looks through, um
and uh, you know it's the other nice thing is
that you only developed for one platform. You know, you
don't have to develop for the If you have a
game and you want to make it available to every
single console, that means you have to go through the
development process us well essentially three times if we're talking
(18:02):
about the three major consoles right right, that costs money exactly,
and that costs That costs money, and it takes time
and uh, you know you think about it, that divides
your resources by three or four amounts. You know. This way,
you're developing for one platform. Anyone who's using a PC,
Mac or television can access it. I mean there, that's
(18:24):
almost a no brainer. Plus you might be able to
uh go back and release older titles and continue to
you know, long tail it stuff over. Yeah, you might
even be able to find I mean our partner maybe
they'll release e t now why do you do this
to me? There's um, there are some problems. The biggest
(18:44):
problem is that if you do not have a reliable
internet broadband connection, you could experience what is called latency. Yes,
that's when you Latency is very bad. That's when you
try and do something in the game, and then a
second or two later, your character's movement reflect what you
just did. So, like you pressed the jump button and
then when one Mississippi to Mississippi Mario jumps. That's not good. Um.
(19:08):
It does not make for a fun gaming experience. You're
almost guaranteed to fail miserably every time you game. Um.
There are other problems as well. Some first person shooters,
when you have latency issues, the computer itself will allow
your character to keep running in whatever direction he she
was running in at the time, and then when you reconnect,
it will suddenly say, oops, he's actually across the map
(19:29):
on the other side, which immediately makes everyone on the
opposing team think that you cheated. Hey, what happened? Hey
what happened? Yeah? That uh, that happened to me. Actually,
that's how I stopped playing Xbox Life because my internet
broadband connection was so poor I couldn't maintain a game,
and uh, I had a lot of people accusing me
of cheating using standby, and I was not. I will
(19:51):
have I want to go on the record, it was
my lousy internet connection. So at any rate, if I
had this system, if I had the system at home
and my internet connection was acting up, then my experience
would not be very pleasant. The other big problem is
if anything major happens to on Live, like the company
goes out of business, Uh, you've lost all those games.
(20:14):
If somehow Sony went out of business tomorrow, you would
still have your Sony PS two or p S three
and all the games you had bought, and you could
play those for as long as the machine would run
and as long as those disks could could. You know,
we're in good shape. But if on Live goes belly up,
then you have no more games. So there are some risks,
(20:35):
and those are common throughout all cloud computing applications, not
just gaming. It also is a is bad news for
the PC market because, um, what you know, gaming rigs,
that's what some of the highest end computer systems that
that are that are available for personal computers. Right. Um,
if suddenly the demand for that drops through the ground, Uh,
(21:00):
companies aren't don't have the incentive to develop these really
super fast processors. Um, and so we might actually see
Moore's law come to an end. Yeah, because you think
about it, like, if all the computing is being done
on the cloud and I don't need a powerful computer,
you stop fueling into that cycle of let's develop even
faster processors. There would be no financial incentive for them
(21:20):
to do so. And then cats and dogs living together
mass hysteria. How many more movie quotes are we gonna
squeeze into this post? That's gonna be it, because I'm
gonna I'm gonna move on to listener mail. Okay, totally
caught in one. That one. Okay, So today's listener mail
comes from Sonny, and Sonny says, I recently subscribe to
(21:42):
your podcast and have just caught up with all of
the episodes. In the recent episode on how nanotechnology works,
a listener asked if either of you had run Lennox
or BSc. One of the concerns you had in regards
to partitioning was in regards to partitioning and the subsequent
difficulties that one might encounter when doing so if you're
not already familiar with it. Ubuntu comes with an installer
(22:03):
called Wooby that will install Ubuntu alongside your Windows installation
without the need for partitioning, and it gives a link
and is tossed by being very simple and straightforward. And um,
you know one of us has used a Buntu actually
uh yeah, And as a matter of sin sence your
send your email. UM, we acquired a test computer, UM
(22:26):
from the the ranks of the um hobbled old machines
here the bowels of how storks dot com. Yeah. Yeah,
we had to fight off some rog Yeah I was
gonna see it works, but yeah, that's fine. UM anyway,
and uh yeah, we installed actually we installed a copy
of Windows seven the data and I said, you know what,
(22:47):
this is a brand new installation. I'm not going to
mess it up. I'm gonna go ahead and install the
latest version of Ubuntu. And you're right. It worked. It
was smooth as glass. And as a matter of fact,
that old beat up PC I had at home, UM,
I did the same thing. And uh you know, I
had it had some information on there that I was
a little nervous about. But it did fine, and it
works perfectly, and it just it goes where you you
(23:08):
wanted to go and installs alongside beautifully and it works great. Yeah,
thanks a lot, Sunny. So if you want to check
that out, you can go and search for Ubuntu and
and it's free, you know, so it's want to get
get your hands on a on a free operating system.
It's got all the essentials in it, you know. Definitely
check that out. Excellent. So if any of you have
any further questions, concerns, comments, you know, corrections for those
(23:33):
few times we get something wrong, send it to us
tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember, we
also have the blog tech stuff Live. You can find
access to that at our home page at how stuff
works dot com, as well as articles about everything from
cloud computing to video gaming. And we will talk to
you again really soon for more on this and thousands
(23:53):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff works dot Com. Join Josh
and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know,
as they take a trip around the world to help
you get smarter in a topsy turv economy. Check out
(00:20):
the all News super Stuff Guide to the Economy from
how stuff works dot Com, available now exclusively on iTunes. Hello, everybody,
Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
the an editor here at how stuff works dot Com,
and sitting next to me, as usual at the text
Stuff News desk is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. No, we're
(00:45):
not talking about networking today. Well, we are kind of
kind of Yeah, I guess we can't get away from
that no matter what. Huh. No, sadly, but we are
here to talk about gaming. Yes, gaming, something I am
passionate about, despite the fact that I don't own any well,
I own a Wee that's the only current generation console
I don't need to know. Yeah, however, I'd like to
share anyway, we are talking about networks and gaming. We
(01:09):
did those go together again? Well, of course, networks and
gaming aren't new. We've been networking and gaming for years
and years now. But what we wanted to talk about
was a new kind of networked gaming where the network
is doing all the the the number crunching and graphics
processing and all that kind of stuff on its end,
(01:31):
and so you just need a very thin client to
access those games. So again, this is taking us back
to one of our favorite topics here at Tech Stuff,
that would be cloud computing. This is my wireless router.
There are many like it, but this nice, nice full
metal jacket reference because I'm not mistaken. Um, this is
(01:54):
my router. This is my gun. Okay, So uh, first,
before we get it too far into this, UM, I
wanted to kind of talk about reasons why some of
us are a little skeptical about the whole cloud gaming thing.
And um, it's because in recent years we've seen some companies,
UM One in particular, does really make a claim about
(02:16):
an upcoming console that it wasn't so much a cloud
computing console, but was a console promising these these really
big big results, and um and nothing ever came of it. Why, Jonathan,
I don't know what you could mean. I could mean,
the Phantom Game Console, one of the most aptly named
(02:38):
consoles ever to come out of anyone's imagination. Yeah. Honestly,
when you're when you're thinking about the Phantom Console and
how it never appeared, you would think, wait a minute,
did they know they were going to put one over
on me? Yeah, with a name like that, you're thinking
they did that on purpose, So at least I am.
The Phantom Game Console was an idea that out of
(03:00):
a company called Infinium Labs, and the basic concept behind
the console was that you would have a console that
was always hooked up to the the Internet, uh through
a high speed internet connection to broadband connection, and you
would download games from the Internet onto this console and
it would have all the software on the console necessary
(03:23):
to play games that were meant for PCs for other
game consoles I think they mentioned like the PS two
and the Xbox and all the Nintendo games. So it
was kind of this pie in the sky unified game
console where you could suddenly have access to all these
different games using one machine, which is kind of the
thing that a lot of gamers have wanted for a
(03:44):
really long time because despite the fact that you have
fan boys of every single gaming device out there, who
will claim to their to their grave that their favorite
console is the best one. Ultimately, every single one of
those fan boys has a game that he or she
I guess I could put fan girls in there too.
(04:05):
UH wants to really play, but it's on another console
like E T for the that Why are you trying
to trying to derail me? No one wants to play
ET for the twenty. If you do want to play
ET for the talk to me, because I might have
a copy somewhere, you know. I'm I'm very sorry that
(04:27):
those of you listening can't see the vein that throbs
for that game. I want a horrible game. No, no, no,
I'm talking about Okay, So let's say that I'm an
Xbox owner and I really want to access Oh gosh,
what's a good PS two game or PS three game
that's that's only for that system. UM. I was gonna
(04:50):
say Grand Theft Auto, but that change to Uh, I
might say Ratchet and Clink. Okay, Ratchet and Clink. All right.
Let's say let's say that there's a game that's specifically
for one console you own the other one. You would
have to go out and either buy or rent the
other console before you could play that game, which big bummer.
So the Phantom Game Console was promising, Hey, you're gonna
be able to play any game you want on this
(05:12):
one system, very very uh kind of enticing idea. Um,
there's a little problem. Oh yeah, there was no evidence
that the thing actually existed. There were some pictures, but
the pictures weren't really conclusive. Uh. Some people did some
investigating and found that the address for the company led
to like a little empty office building or I guess
it was actually an empty office in a strip mall.
(05:34):
And then it was I think it was like a
hundred square feet with um, a desk and two phones,
and that wasn't So people were immediately skeptical of this
and a lot of people were calling shenanigans and I
believe it was seconded so they got the brooms out.
Um that's a reference for the South Park fans out there.
So anyway, it did turn out that the the Infinium
(05:57):
Labs eventually kind of backed away from this whole game
console thing. They do have a product out now, Um
it's a keyboard, and they they change their name, yes,
And they apparently lost about sixty two point seven million
dollars between two thousand two and two thousand five. Yeah,
I'm betting that's not on that hundred square foot office space.
(06:18):
Probably not so. At any rate, there were a lot
of charges of fraud and stuff being bandied about during
that whole time, so that has understandably made people a
little skeptical about other gaming systems that aren't coming from
one of the big names. Um that you know, most
people think like, okay, either it's not gonna make an
impact at all, uh, it doesn't really exist, or um,
(06:41):
you know the guys crazy you know, Yeah, I mean
it's you know, You've got your your sagas and Nintendo's
and Atari's and people who you know have the wherewithal
and expertise doing this stuff. And then somebody else, like
say Microsoft, wants to join in. You go, well, okay,
sure they can throw hundreds of millions of dollars at
doing this, so okay, ye, I'll believe that they're doing that.
(07:04):
But you know, Joe comes up and say, yeah, I've
started Joe's games. I'll have a console out next year.
You're going, hey, okay, I'm sorry, who are you again? Right,
But in this case, we're talking about someone who actually
is well known who has come out with this, uh,
this new proposed gaming system. And we should add that
the one we're about to talk about is not necessarily
the only cloud gaming system in development right now. It's
(07:27):
just the one that's made the biggest splash as of
the recording of this podcast. Yeah, it's made quite a
few recent headlines, right and we're talking about the on
Live system, which was unveiled at the Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco in March two thousand nine. And this
is sort of the brainchild of Steve Pearlman, who you
may know from such wonderful uh projects as web TV
(07:50):
and quick Time. So so not a non unknown no,
not not in the least his uh. His company reared
in UM I believe a reference to uh Atlas Shrugged, Yes,
got Old and rand Um and if if one thing
can make me matter than e T for the ay
(08:11):
it's an rand all right then let um. Yeah, it's
At one point the company was named Reard and Steele
and uh that was about the time that the Maxi
Digital video recorder was part of the company and is
now spun off. It is part of Digio. UM but
you know, these are these are some serious projects. This
is not an unknown quantity in the least and by
(08:32):
night operation. And if you look at the console, it's
very very simple. Actually it's not even tiny, not even
necessarily a console. It depends on which version you're looking at.
A micro console. Yeah, um, and that's again just one
version of it. So here's the thing, uh, he introduced
on Live UM at the Game Developers Conference UH and
said that it's been in development for UM for for
(08:55):
seven years. So there are three different versions of this thing.
There's one that connects to your television. Then there is
a software that you would have on your PC or
software you would have on your Mac. Thank you. So
for once, Mac users are not left out of the game. However,
I should point out only for max that have Intel processors. Well,
(09:19):
it's for all intents and purposes, the modern map, right,
If you don't if you own it, if you own
an old, old Mac, then you may not be able
to run this well work on my power book. Yeah,
you're gonna need an Intel based Mac running a current
version of the operating system. But otherwise you can run
this software on a PC or a Mac. And for
(09:40):
the TV because you can't run software on a TV.
Yet they have this little mini console. Yeah, it looks
about the size of a like an iPhone really, I
mean it's tiny. Well, it doesn't have any of the
parts that you would associate with a traditional console, with
traditional the modern console, so it's not It doesn't have
a hard on it. It doesn't have any moving parts.
(10:03):
Well I don't think there are any moving parts. It
doesn't have a hard doesn't have a disc player in it. Uh,
so you know you're not gonna be looking at a
Blu ray player. But then again, it's supposed to be
a lot cheaper, although they haven't really announced a lot
of pricing for the thing yet. Right so, right now,
it's got what what it does have the console that
is it um it has support for up to four
(10:23):
wireless controllers, Bluetooth, Bluetooth support for four headsets. Um it
has two USB ports for physical connections to a controller,
a keyboard or mouse or whatever. Um It's got U
an S optical output Ethernet port. That's of course, where
you would plug it up to your high speed Internet
(10:44):
UH connection, because like the Phantom, this requires an Internet
connection UH as a video audio outport, and a micro
USB power port. That's it. That's that, this little bitty box,
that's all it has on it. And then you if
you plug all that up and you hook it up
to your TV, you got hooked up to your internet
broadband service. Uh. Theoretically, you would then have access to
(11:06):
all the games that are on its system, and you
would purchase games the way you normally would accept. Of course,
you wouldn't own a physical copy of the game. You
would essentially own Yeah, you would own access to the
game really because you wouldn't have They wouldn't send you
any files. They wouldn't send you a CD or anything.
You would log into the system and you would access
(11:26):
the game that exists on these servers in the cloud,
and then you could play the game through that. And
all the graphics processing, all of the number crunching, all
of that goes on in the cloud. So it doesn't
matter how powerful a machine you have. If you have
a PC or a MAC that meets the minimum specifications,
which are really low, really minimal. I mean, if you
(11:49):
have just an old Windows machine that's running Windows XP,
you can use this. You don't supporting to on live.
You don't even have to, sorry, you don't even have
to have the latest Apple operating system. I believe it
runs on ten point four and and maybe even ten
point three. It does run on ten point three, so
I mean, we're not these are operating systems that are
several years old. Yes, So it's it's you know, it
(12:11):
doesn't have to have bleeding edge hardware for it to work.
And for for a lot of gamers, this is, um
this is kind of a dream come true. I mean,
I don't know about you, Chris, but I was a
big computer gamer when during the eighties and early nineties. Okay,
I really loved computer games. But right around the time
of the early nineties, that's when games started coming out
that required um uh a more um powerful video processor. Right,
(12:38):
so it started to feel like if you didn't go
out and buy a new video card every six months
or so, you couldn't play the latest games. And video
cards cost around two hundred bucks. So you're talking about Okay,
I'm going to spend two d sixty dollars to play
the sixty dollar game, because before I can play it,
I have to get a new video card. I was
not willing to do that. I that is the point
where I dropped out of playing computer games. So for
(13:00):
the last fifteen years or so, I haven't really been
playing computer games that often, at least not ones that
required a you know, high powered video card. So I
switched back to consoles, and a lot of people did
because console you know, you knew it was good for
a few years. Then you didn't have to worry about
upgrades and things like the the Xbox that we the
(13:21):
PS two and three, you can connect us to the
network and actually get patches through the network. So if
even in that case, you know your your machine is
getting upgraded, but you don't have to buy new components
for it to make it so, so that stays in
working condition. Right, So this thing with theoretically pull that
out completely because it doesn't. All it does is function
(13:43):
as a you know, I go between a proxy between
you and the cloud. It doesn't have to be updated
and at least, you know, maybe a little firmware every
once in a wheah. It's all. It's all updated on
the back end, like to say, and occasionally might get
a patch to whatever the software you're running on your
machine to in order to access this. I assume it's
something like a browser. Um, the thing is this has
This is right now, it's in internal beta. It's supposed
(14:05):
to go to a wider beta this summer, and then
according to on Live, it should be ready for for
consumers by winner of two thousand nine, which I'm really
excited about. I mean, the idea of being able to
play this on my television or on a computer. I
really like this idea. And and it supports networked games,
(14:27):
so you can play with or against other people online. Uh.
You know, all of this sounds great. They've got some
great partners. They've got e A Games, Ubisoft, Take Two, Interactive,
um Boy, Leaders of World of Google, Atari th h Q,
which by the way produced one of my favorite pro
wrestling video games of all time, WrestleMania two thousand and
(14:49):
uh for the sixty four and Um that's not that
I'm biased. Those were awesome video games. Okay. Anyone who
ever played any of those old in sixty four wrestling
games will agree with me anyway. So they have these
great partners there, and more will will surely join them.
Because think about this, guys. When you build a video game,
(15:10):
the expense of building it isn't just in the development,
it's in the production. I mean, you have to produce boxes.
You have to produce you know, whatever media you're going
to you know, encode the game on, whether it's a
cartridge and disc whatever, to pay for distribution. You have
to pay for distribution. Yet, yeah, exactly, there are all
these things you have to pay for. There's extra marketing costs.
(15:30):
This cuts out a lot of those considerations. So now
developers now they're like, well, this is great because now
we won't have to pay for all this this production.
We can get a larger return our investment. I wouldn't
necessarily expect this to make video games cheaper, because if
the market is going to bear a fifty dollar or
sixty dollar video game, there's no reason for them to
(15:53):
charge less. That's true, although they may do what some
of the other digital distribution markets have done in trim
the price a little bit. Uh, you know, because there
is still the matter of having to pay the developers. Developers, developers,
um and um. You know, there are there are a
lot of other costs overhead. You know, if you've got
(16:14):
a lot of people in one building developing, they require
a lot of mountain dew. Um, So there tabin mountain
dew and Frito's. Uh so. Um, so you know there
are some serious costs that that do have to be
taking care of, and of course then there's that whole
profit motive. Um, but you know they might trim that.
(16:37):
There is one neat advantage though, that this will have
that other game consoles don't unless of course, you're you know,
going to rent the video games, and that is that
they're going to let you try this out on the website.
It actually says, hey, you'll be able to try some
of these out and if you like to keep going
with that, you could purchase the game. Yeah, which is
which is great because you know, other than renting, until
(16:59):
renting became popular, and that was that was a real
pain in the neck. You found you spent fiftys in
a game and went, man, this thing is junk right.
And there are a couple of other really cool things
for developers too, if you think about it. For one, um,
you don't have to worry about resale. That's a big
thorn and computer game company sides right now is the
(17:19):
fact that people get tired of games, they can go
and trade them in for other games, and then those
those old games can be sold again. While the game
company doesn't see any of that money. You know, they
would rather sell a new game every single time. Well,
if it's all you know, you're accessing, If you're buying
access to a game, you can't resale, resale, resell that resale. Sorry,
(17:40):
I am from the South and occasionally looks through, um
and uh, you know it's the other nice thing is
that you only developed for one platform. You know, you
don't have to develop for the If you have a
game and you want to make it available to every
single console, that means you have to go through the
development process us well essentially three times if we're talking
(18:02):
about the three major consoles right right, that costs money exactly,
and that costs That costs money, and it takes time
and uh, you know you think about it, that divides
your resources by three or four amounts. You know. This way,
you're developing for one platform. Anyone who's using a PC,
Mac or television can access it. I mean there, that's
(18:24):
almost a no brainer. Plus you might be able to
uh go back and release older titles and continue to
you know, long tail it stuff over. Yeah, you might
even be able to find I mean our partner maybe
they'll release e t now why do you do this
to me? There's um, there are some problems. The biggest
(18:44):
problem is that if you do not have a reliable
internet broadband connection, you could experience what is called latency. Yes,
that's when you Latency is very bad. That's when you
try and do something in the game, and then a
second or two later, your character's movement reflect what you
just did. So, like you pressed the jump button and
then when one Mississippi to Mississippi Mario jumps. That's not good. Um.
(19:08):
It does not make for a fun gaming experience. You're
almost guaranteed to fail miserably every time you game. Um.
There are other problems as well. Some first person shooters,
when you have latency issues, the computer itself will allow
your character to keep running in whatever direction he she
was running in at the time, and then when you reconnect,
it will suddenly say, oops, he's actually across the map
(19:29):
on the other side, which immediately makes everyone on the
opposing team think that you cheated. Hey, what happened? Hey
what happened? Yeah? That uh, that happened to me. Actually,
that's how I stopped playing Xbox Life because my internet
broadband connection was so poor I couldn't maintain a game,
and uh, I had a lot of people accusing me
of cheating using standby, and I was not. I will
(19:51):
have I want to go on the record, it was
my lousy internet connection. So at any rate, if I
had this system, if I had the system at home
and my internet connection was acting up, then my experience
would not be very pleasant. The other big problem is
if anything major happens to on Live, like the company
goes out of business, Uh, you've lost all those games.
(20:14):
If somehow Sony went out of business tomorrow, you would
still have your Sony PS two or p S three
and all the games you had bought, and you could
play those for as long as the machine would run
and as long as those disks could could. You know,
we're in good shape. But if on Live goes belly up,
then you have no more games. So there are some risks,
(20:35):
and those are common throughout all cloud computing applications, not
just gaming. It also is a is bad news for
the PC market because, um, what you know, gaming rigs,
that's what some of the highest end computer systems that
that are that are available for personal computers. Right. Um,
if suddenly the demand for that drops through the ground, Uh,
(21:00):
companies aren't don't have the incentive to develop these really
super fast processors. Um, and so we might actually see
Moore's law come to an end. Yeah, because you think
about it, like, if all the computing is being done
on the cloud and I don't need a powerful computer,
you stop fueling into that cycle of let's develop even
faster processors. There would be no financial incentive for them
(21:20):
to do so. And then cats and dogs living together
mass hysteria. How many more movie quotes are we gonna
squeeze into this post? That's gonna be it, because I'm
gonna I'm gonna move on to listener mail. Okay, totally
caught in one. That one. Okay, So today's listener mail
comes from Sonny, and Sonny says, I recently subscribe to
(21:42):
your podcast and have just caught up with all of
the episodes. In the recent episode on how nanotechnology works,
a listener asked if either of you had run Lennox
or BSc. One of the concerns you had in regards
to partitioning was in regards to partitioning and the subsequent
difficulties that one might encounter when doing so if you're
not already familiar with it. Ubuntu comes with an installer
(22:03):
called Wooby that will install Ubuntu alongside your Windows installation
without the need for partitioning, and it gives a link
and is tossed by being very simple and straightforward. And um,
you know one of us has used a Buntu actually
uh yeah, And as a matter of sin sence your
send your email. UM, we acquired a test computer, UM
(22:26):
from the the ranks of the um hobbled old machines
here the bowels of how storks dot com. Yeah. Yeah,
we had to fight off some rog Yeah I was
gonna see it works, but yeah, that's fine. UM anyway,
and uh yeah, we installed actually we installed a copy
of Windows seven the data and I said, you know what,
(22:47):
this is a brand new installation. I'm not going to
mess it up. I'm gonna go ahead and install the
latest version of Ubuntu. And you're right. It worked. It
was smooth as glass. And as a matter of fact,
that old beat up PC I had at home, UM,
I did the same thing. And uh you know, I
had it had some information on there that I was
a little nervous about. But it did fine, and it
works perfectly, and it just it goes where you you
(23:08):
wanted to go and installs alongside beautifully and it works great. Yeah,
thanks a lot, Sunny. So if you want to check
that out, you can go and search for Ubuntu and
and it's free, you know, so it's want to get
get your hands on a on a free operating system.
It's got all the essentials in it, you know. Definitely
check that out. Excellent. So if any of you have
any further questions, concerns, comments, you know, corrections for those
(23:33):
few times we get something wrong, send it to us
tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember, we
also have the blog tech stuff Live. You can find
access to that at our home page at how stuff
works dot com, as well as articles about everything from
cloud computing to video gaming. And we will talk to
you again really soon for more on this and thousands
(23:53):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry.
It's ready, are you
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Karah Preiss
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