Nexuiz, Pax, OnLive – Lee Vermeulen

Went to this year’s PAX to promote Illfonic’s Nexuiz, check out the end of this post for all the media sites covering it, and some screens of the booth (it was right beside the Portal2 booth, a lot of traffic)

PAX was pretty incredible – watching people try Nexuiz, talking to a number of other indie devs, trying up and coming projects, and mostly just enjoying the excitement there. Unlike GDC, where many of the developers view the convention as more of a job, PAX is entirely fans really passionate about games.

I made little brochures for Capsized to hand out to key people, mostly publishers and media. One possible route that seems interesting is putting Capsized on the OnLive service. OnLive is a streaming video game service that basically runs on the server and sends the frames to the client. When I first heard of the idea it definitely seemed too soon, even though it’s clear thats the future of gaming. It solves so many problems; you can charge by the time alike to classic arcade games, it completely stops privacy since only the OnLive servers have the actual executables, and you only have to develop for one platform and instantly it works on everything that OnLive supports. I love the idea, but it will take at least 5-10 years for the average customer to have the bandwidth needed for that, you need at least a 5 Mbps connection to have a playable game. What was surprising when trying the service though was how smooth a first person shooter was, you barely noticed the 10milisecond delay. While something like World of Goo, which uses a mouse, had very noticeable input lag.

I am also interested in the service because it means I can have a prerelease version of the game on the service without hitting anything else. So I can release the game publicly to a small market, while not being worried about a public leak. And since it’s a prerelease, I can update it whenever and all the OnLive players will be playing the updated version. The only issue is since it’s on one server, it wouldn’t be good for beta testing a wide variety of systems, which is usually what a public beta test is for.