Streaming game service OnLive wants to change the way we game by moving most of our gaming experience to the cloud. To the cloud, saved data is lines of code stored on a hard drive. But to gamers, it's a piece of our identity. And they want to store us where?
--Steve Perlman, OnLive CEO
OnLive launched its streaming game service in June 2010 and only just got a patent for its streaming technology from the United States this week. In order to make any of the streaming system work, they need datacenters; lots and lots of datacenters in which to house the servers that store the data that they then stream to various devices like the OnLive Microconsole. But the thing that makes gamers nervous about OnLive -- or any system where our data doesn't live in our houses on our own devices -- is this concept of ownership that comes with a saved game. It's not just data to us; it's a little piece of us. A little piece of us that dies whenever we hit corrupt save data bugs or experience a red-ringed Xbox 360.
"You have to treat people's data like it's your own data," OnLive CEO Steve Perlman tells GamePro. "You got to think about it like, 'How would I feel if I was using this service and I had a business that was treating me this way?' You have to personalize it."
Perlman realizes it's a big risk to move so much of the video game experience to the cloud because even though the technology's been around more than five years, most people still get anxious about the thought of losing control of their own data. They also get anxious about losing their data -- a fear that nobody seems to understand better in today's cloud-obsessed world than iOS and social game developers.
"If [players] lose their data, that's like a shelf moment for them," Zynga's then-Lead Designer Amitt Mahajan told audiences at the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "They're not going to play your game anymore."
For Zynga and iOS developers, there's some protection from platforms like Facebook and Apple's App Store; but OnLive has no such reputation to trade on and a lot of skeptical gamers still raw about digital rights management and privacy issues. Getting through to gamers who want to keep their data totally secure takes time. And a lot of security.
Right now, your latest saved game lives on your console or PC's hard drive in your own home. The data on the hard drive is probably encrypted and the only way anybody has access to it is if they're actually using your device while signed into your profile. If you game through OnLive, though, your saved game lives in a hard drive inside a server within a bank of servers built to copy each other in case one dies. The servers live inside an unmarked warehouse in a town you'll probably never see, locked inside what datacenter manager Jim Poole calls a "cage."
Equinix and OnLive said they couldn't provide actual images of the datacenter interior because of security concerns -- but we imagine it looks a little like the server room level in Metal Gear Solid 4.
"These are not places that you can simply walk into," Poole says. As General Manager at Equinix and a former PC gamer himself, he's one of few people who actually knows which companies databank with him -- most companies like Zynga won't make that information public. To them, it's a security risk because they don't want people trying to physically assault their servers (which can happen the way it went down with Lineage II); but to OnLive, announcing that they databank with Equinix encourages user trust -- because no datacenter sounds safer than Equinix's.
"They're basically maintained as anonymous sites, and most often where we do development we do them in warehouse areas," Poole says, giving us a verbal tour of our OnLive saved games' home. "So from the outside, they're indistinguishable from any other warehouse. There is no marking, we don't put our logo on the outside of the building. If you were just to walk up to it, the only thing you might notice are all the closed circuit cameras that look at the outside. To get in, you would need a code to get into the security lobby. Once you're in there, that's where the security guards are, and then there is a mantrap layer between the security lobby and the regular lobby. Where you have to go through a biometric security check."
--Jim Poole, General Manager at datacenter company Equinix
That's where they scan your handprint and ask you to enter a code -- very Mission Impossible. Counting that and condensing all 365 security guards in a facility into one "layer," Poole says there are usually five layers of security between the parking lot and the server cage where OnLive rents space from Equinix. "The security of a datacenter is far superior to anything that exists in a console under somebody's couch," he says -- and we completely believe him.
But even though the server that houses our saved game is physically safe from just about everything (seriously, Equinix even has HVAC physical hardening and seismic hardening if it's in an earthquake zone), there are still threats to saves that come from data-hacking or plain old identity theft. Basic data like your full name or birth date is all some people need to go find your bank account and con their way in. Console and PC games protect you from this because most of that data only lives on the console or PC -- or in a console-maker's headquarters where its servers live.
Perlman says OnLive worries about those threats, too. The company already uses data encryption so that even if someone hacked an OnLive server, they could never read the data -- but even beyond that, OnLive cracks down on video game developers and publishers to maximize security within their own games. Perlman said he even ordered two games pulled from OnLive very early in the product's beta phase because a part of the game clearly displayed the characters a player entered as a password -- and somebody using OnLive's spectator mode could've viewed that gamer's password.
"We pulled the games for what I would consider to be a modest privacy risk," Perlman says. "It took [the developer] maybe another three weeks to rewrite the code so that password was not visible, and to a fledgling startup introducing this service, that came at an enormous opportunity cost. [But I said] this is the way we're going to run this business from the get go, and we'll take it on the chin if we have to."
The bottom line is your saved game is as safe (if not safer) with OnLive as it is anywhere, not just because the systems in place protect it, but because the people running the service get it. That save is more than just data -- it's a gamer's time, money, and emotional investment.
"We have immense respect for people's data because we're like them," Perlman says. "We feel the same way they feel, and we want this to work. I hate to say it, but there's an ethical responsibility on one hand that motivates us, and people may not believe that [...] but they will believe this: We don't want to lose their trust because they're our customers."
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