The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independent. The attention grabbing headline refers to the potential threat OnLive offers to the current gaming industry by removing the iconic, chunky hardware boxes from gaming.

OnLive aims to cut the need for hardware by using the upper limit of internet bandwidth to stream any game to a display of the users choosing. This would fundamentally alter the marketing war between games consoles that has existed for years, it will essentially cut the need to upgrade hardware in order to play new, more advanced games. Instead of buying new, OnLive will merely upgrade their servers, making gaming far cheaper for gamers; and accessible only to those with fast enough internet access. The above video seems to endorse this as the graphically heavy and admired PC game Crisis is streamed to the iPhone. With constant internet access being a key factor OnLive also allows users to view exactly what games their friends are playing, opening enormous possibilities for multiplayer games. Laptop and smart-phone access for cloud gaming is apparent in their built-in access to the internet, TVs will also be able to have OnLive access as they release a ‘microconsole’ flatter and smaller than a standard console controller, connecting the large display to a modem and streaming the game information to the TV.

While there is excitement about OnLive, the one repeated criticism, even before its release is that offsite servers may causes skewed gaming experiences with slight lags on controller response to display, yet this is largely based on bandwidth and with internet speeds set to increase exponentially in the next decade it seems if OnLive go ahead with their plans then it may be the way that gaming is heading. Sony’s UK boss Ray Maguire has gone on record as shunning services like OnLive saying that “when it comes to delivering an entertainment experience on par with the quality consumers have come to expect and that they demand, dedicated games consoles remain the only systems powerful enough to do this.”

Yet on the day OnLive officially announced themselves in 2009, Sony happened to register the name ‘PS Cloud’. While the gaming industry does not yet appear to be quaking in its boots, technology trends of the last decade indicate that if the service is ‘good enough’ it will succeed. The console heavy gaming sector is only just waking up to what the music industry has had to deal with for the last decade in digital distribution becoming the dominant method. While technology experts have negatively stated that they fear the ‘decade of the gadget is over’ the positive upspin on this is that an integration of information will be taking place within these gadgets as differentiated services and internet access/speed becomes a more central component.

Youth behaviour will define further which of these services are fully adopted as they defined the last decade with the adoption of cheap, accessible ‘good enough technologies’ to become the dominant consumer electronics of the last decade. While vinyl is in the midst of a cult revivial amongst young people, there is no denying that MP3 players and laptops have long over taken record and CD players as the main mode of listening to music. While the sound quality of these newer technologies is inferior, the accessibility and cheapness has clearly won over many young people. This will be the same with books, as a New York Times writer recently noted in that his daughter called his Amazon Kindle ‘daddy’s book’ instead of an electronic reader . Tech Tribe 2009 clearly shows that young people have fully adopted this ‘good enough technology’ which has suddenly come to outline consumer electronics for the last decade in online films through laptops, digital photos, eReaders and Skype. If OnLive is cheap, accessible and good enough, young people will almost certainly adopt it, evidencing how youth are possibly the driving demographic sector in how consumer electronics develop.

For a more detailed overview of how ‘good enough technology’ has been adopted and spread through consumer electronics see Robert Capps’ great article from Wired .

For a more detailed overview of how OnLive will work after it’s full release later in the year, watch the detailed presentation below. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also available on Youtube.