A novel concept.
Won't work, though. At minimum, you're looking at a 50-100ms ping to that service, and that's a ping packet.
Siding with Runefox here, as I made a similar response on a completely different forum. When your minimum round-trip latency is a
measurable amount of time, a lot of weird things can start to happen. Internet connection 'speeds' are measured by their one-way, asynchronous data transfer rate, they are not measured by the time it takse for your data to
physically get to and from the servers. Light speed travels at a rate of approximately one foot per
nanosecond.
If the server is even 3,000 miles away from your client end, a game of "ping"-pong (pun intended) would cap out at 30 fps because that represents the
physical distance it has to travel.
(Or in racing terminology, sure that car has a great top speed -- but what about its acceleration from a dead stop?)
You can't play a fast-paced game (such as FPS or racing, or even certain puzzle games) across an Internet connection where you have to make decisions in split seconds. Heck, in a game of Mario Kart a split-second can mean the difference between hitting a Fake Item Box vs. a real one, missing or hitting that green shell somebody lobbed at you, or drifting right into a banana peel on Rainbow Road causing you to slide right off the track into deep space.
Or an analogy I used on another forum: You've pulled out your sniper rifle and are scoping out a target at 10x zoom. You've taken everything into account -- range, wind, and the guard has stopped for just a moment. One shot, one kill, right? You pull the trigger, but in the 100ms that it takes for your game console to inform the server that you're shooting,
the damn guy sneezes. The server calculates that your bullet whizzed over his head by three inches and blew the head off a nearby fountain lion (pun intended). Joy. You've just given away your position, and pray that he doesn't have a sniper rifle of his own because if he does, he ain't going to miss.
Also, what happens if your connection momentarily blows out, or a packet gets dropped along the way? In a traditional online game, not much. Your opponents go out of sync (or suddenly vanish) for a moment, but otherwise
your gameplay is not affected. But in a 'streaming' videogame service, if a packet gets dropped then your gameplay vanishes
entirely until the next packet comes in.
If you want to know what OnLive would feel like with network latency taken into account, just go play Super Smash Bros. Brawl online for a little, where it takes a half-second for your onscreen character to respond to whatever buttons you press. This isn't because of the controls, it's because of network latency and that the game displays everything from the server's timeframe.
