Perlman: OnLive critics are ignorant

With seemingly the entire games industry lining up to pour doubt over the lofty claims and aspirations of freshly revealed streaming games service OnLive, the company’s founder Steve Perlman has spoken out in defence of the company.

We have nine of the largest game publishers in world signed up,” Perlman told the BBC. They have spent several years in some cases actually going and reviewing our technology before allowing us to associate with their company names and allowing us to have access to their first-tier franchises.”

He also went on to dismiss Eurogamer’s much-discussed detailed technical breakdown of the firm’s claims, stating: It’s a very ignorant article. We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense.

It has taken tens of thousand of man hours to develop the algorithm, but it’s not perfect. You will sometimes see little artefacts on the screen. Video compression is part science and part art. Every time you present new material to it, you will see something it does not compress so well. We note those and correct the algorithm.”

Perlman explains that over the course of OnLive’s development the company has slowly been able to upscale its compression methods. First of all it was a postage stamp size screen with no latency over the internet. It looked like the silliest kind of game because the screen size was smaller than a cell phone but nonetheless there was no lag.”

The firm now claims to be able to stream 720p HD visuals at a seemingly astonishing 60fps over a 5MB internet connection with barely noticeable lag.

Perlman also rebutted claims that the expense needed to employ the numerous high-end gaming machines to get the service up and running had been over-exaggerated: Most games run fine on dual core processors. What you really want is a high performance graphics processor unit.”

Alongside Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter, Nintendo and Sony have both voiced their doubts about OnLive. However, the firm allegedly enjoys the backing of high-profile publishers such as EA, Ubisoft, Take2, Eidos, Atari, Codemasters, Epic and THQ.