The death of games consoles – coming soon! A brand new online service promises to serve games to your living rooms, LIVE, and without the need for an expensive console or a high-powered personal computer. It’s the future of gaming and – potentially – the death of traditional gaming devices as we know and love them. OnLive – say it softly and not within earshot of Sony, Nintendo and co – circumvents the need to trudge to the shops, hand over your hard-earned cash and trudge all the way home again with the latest hot game. Instead, this ‘cloud’ service will deliver top games direct to your PC or TV screen instantly, using a small receiver unit that hooks up to your existing broadband connection. All the heavy work, so to speak, is performed by powerful remote servers using clever compression routines. Players simply provide the required inputs using a joypad, as normal. The results of their efforts are then streamed back with almost non-existent lag. OnLive will run on a network of server centres placed so that no user is more than 1000 miles from one. In broadband terms that’s just down the road, figuratively speaking. OnLive is set to launch on 17 June in the USA, with a worldwide rollout expected to follow shortly thereafter. Users will pay a $14.95 (£9.99) subscription fee each month, plus the cost of either buying or renting each game. In this regard OnLive has several very significant advantages: there’s no need to invest any further in a game you’re not enjoying; you can sample all the latest releases with minimal costs; and you’ll be able to remove some of the clutter from under/behind the telly and clear a bit of shelf space into the bargain. OnLive also enjoys the support of many high-profile games publishers – removing the need to manufacture and physically distribute games is an obvious and lucrative benefit to them. Big-name titles such as Borderlands, Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed are among the launch games announced so far. Perhaps understandably, the big three console manufacturers are rather cooler on the whole idea... http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/9173/
$180 a year for the service THEN you have to buy or rent games... how is this better/cheaper than consoles? i predict this is gona fail worse than the gizmodo
$14.95 is way too expensive in my opinion.. But then again, it's cheaper than my home phone that no one uses in my family... However, I personally prefer hands on materials, a CD, a Console, just the sense of owning feels good -_- *Well that sound kinda disturbing... ANYHOW The only way this would work is if they set the monthly subscription to around $1.99 or Free if possible b/c games are meant to be long term and not short term and at that cost, I find it hard for people to shift. Maybe they could adjust the price on the games such as original cost of the games + a fee so that the producer make profit while onLive make profits at the same time.
sounds wild big investments, A simple receiver that hooks up to broadband doesn't sound like it can produce high end graphics gaming comparable to PS3? just look at the size of files you need to download.... many doubts
perhaps once you buy a game within your subscription, you can keep the game even after your subscription expires? it's a neat idea, but ultimately i don't think it'll have as much success as sony, microsoft, or nintendo.
to play the game you have to connect to the network which costs the subscription fee of $180 each year, im sure you keep your games though, its like steam in that sense, you pay for your games and you keep it forever or as long as the service lasts which probably wont be to long
LOL i thought it was going to be a PC > consoles thread... but im going to have to say yea... this is going to fail
Agreed with the price... What if the servers crash... your in the middle of a tough secret boss and then BOOM! Server crashes, something that is beyond you're control... FUCK!
That's gotta be a real selling point, LOL... Seriously, IMHO, unless they can out wow, WOW; I doubt that they would even attract enough subscribers to gather the momentum that they would need for such a paradigm shift. What they would need of course, is to have a killer game (like warcraft or starcraft) that is only available on their system, and one that they can sustain and expand over time. No matter how great the tech, if there's isn't anything good or exciting on it, then the new tech alone isn't going to be that compelling. Especially if it's at a tune of nearly $200 bucks a year.
