PC Perspective may have broken the End User Licensing Agreement, a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and probably annoyed OnLive to no end when the site borrowed someone's beta account for a detailed write-up on the performance of the service, but with the testing done far outside the beta's supported area, the write-up has caused no small amount of controversy. Yesterday, OnLive responded to the criticism via its official blog.

Its defense: something about the speed of light.

Location, location, location

The final, production version of OnLive promises to adapt to your Internet connection and location every time you connect, but for now each beta account is linked to a single OnLive location, configured to your ISP and the client you're using. "If you change any of these factors, OnLive Beta may not even run, or if it does, the lag and/or graphics performance may render games unplayable," the company explains. "OnLive will try to detect these conditions and warn you, but when you are using OnLive in a different location, you are not providing us with usable test data."

The fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. "The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay ('ping' time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games." It's also a matter of optimization for your particular situation. "Your Beta account will only connect to the data center it was originally assigned to. So, if you are assigned to our West Coast data center and then try your Beta account from the Midwest or East Coast, you'll find the lag impaired to the point where most games are unplayable. And, depending on how your Beta account was configured for the characteristics of your home ISP, you may see degraded image quality or controller/mouse performance on a different ISP."

There's a reason there is a press blackout on coverage of the working service: it's all locked down to some very specific locations, and controlled for those circumstances. Shrout was well outside of the testing area when he played with the service, making his findings easy to dismiss. The question is how long he can fight off the legal attack to get the coverage removed.

Other beta testers come forward

We heard from many beta testers after our story went live, but few were willing to speak on the record... for the obvious reasons. One user did agree to give us his take on the service, provided we keep his anonymity.

"OnLive performance is pretty shoddy. Besides the resolution cap at 720p—which, mind you, doesn't look so hot on a reasonably sized monitor—anything you do on the service will literally cause a jitter. This includes moving the mouse and pressing keys." The beta tester also complained of performance while playing The Maw, which requires the player to turn the camera often to look around, which exacerbated the frame rate issue.

"Online play through Crysis Wars, which I briefly got to test just last night, has better performance, as expected, but not significantly. Sounds cut out whenever you do anything, and the screen jitters as well, though not as much." His teammates agreed that the game ran better on their standard gaming PCs, and he stresses that the title was nearly unplayable in his opinion. "And for the record, Crysis looked like crap, so I don't know what specs they were running on." Jeez, tell us how you really feel.

The problem is the number of variables at work here. With beta code, an experience tied to very specific conditions, and everyone operating under tight security, it's unlikely that we'll get a clear picture of how the service is shaping up until the actual launch. What's clear is that no one is going to be trading in their gaming PC for OnLive, although casual gamers may not be bothered by the limitations being described.

The best-case scenario? The ability to test the service in your home before purchase. A free month, or even week, would be the perfect thing to allow gamers to see what is being offered. For now, the demand for real-world performance information is strong, so expect more on the topic in the months leading up to launch.