OnLive: It's Live!

By  |  Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 5:58 pm

Today, I played Unreal Tournament III on an iPad, thanks to OnLive. It was impossible to control, of course — it’s just a proof of concept that’s not available in the App Store — but it worked, proving that OnLive’s cloud gaming service can stream modern PC games to just about anything — but just Mac or PC for now.

Today, the service goes live, and at a price that’s making me eat my words.

Thanks to a sponsorship from AT&T, the first year of OnLive will be free. After that, it’s $50 annually. Now, that doesn’t include any full games, just the community features — spectator mode and friends lists, mainly — and the ability to try every game for 30 or 60 minutes. Still, $50 per year is the same as Xbox Live, a service that I happily pay for every year.

Games can be bought, for prices comparable to downloads through Valve’s Steam service ($10 for some indie titles to $60 for top-shelf games), or rented for three or five days at $4 to $10, depending on publisher. You can suspend service for up to a year without losing your collection. There are 23 launch titles, including hits like Borderlands, Just Cause 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Other developments are on the horizon. A standalone unit, which acts as a soft of home gaming console, is in development but probably won’t be available this year, according to Joe Bentley, OnLive’s director of games and media development. OnLive’s also working on a system for swapping players in and out of games, so you can get a remote friend to help you through trouble spots. Bentley also explained that OnLive owns Mova, a facial rendering company. The idea is that some day, OnLive will be able to perform powerful face rendering on its servers, allowing for a level of reality that home consoles and PCs just aren’t powerful enough to handle.

So, now you can lump me in with all the other critics who are impressed, but curious whether OnLive’s services can meet demand. During my play time today, I noticed a bit of choppiness during movement in first- and third-person shooters, and just a tiny bit of lag, but OnLive said the Internet connection they were using at the convention center could be partly to blame.

Fortunately, we’ve all got a year to find out for ourselves, in the real world. After I recover from a week of pulsating lights, thumping subwoofers and virtual explosions galore, I’ll get right on that.

 
6 Comments


Read more: , ,

4 Comments For This Post

  1. Cynthia J. Says:

    If Roku were to get in on this? Movies AND games without going through M$ and Nontundough or SUE-me? They’d be rolling in Dough!!!

  2. Bouke Timbermont Says:

    I posted this before so Ill keep it short: this does not reduce the required computational power (it even adds a bit to destribute the load in an efficient way) and requires huge amounts of bandwiths, while pings will be to high to play any game decently (inputlag will be about 100 ms, and then you still gave to add the regular ping for the onlive servers to connect to the gaming servers -> a minimum ping of 150 ms, probably 250ms when a lot of users are online).
    I cant see what kind of gamer would want this (serious gamers want low pings, while casual gamers don’t want graphically heavy games and thus don’t need this system:they get a wii or a iPad and buy casual games), and I cant see how OnLive thinks to turn a profit.

  3. Zip Says:

    best idea ever, pay full price for games you won’t own

  4. Cynthia J. Says:

    @Zip:

    Use Steam?

2 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. OnLive MicroConsole Costs $99, Subscription Option Coming Says:

    […] company first said membership alone, with no games, would cost $15 per month. At launch in June, it dropped the price to $5 per month and gave away the first year free. Then, it eliminated the monthly charge […]

  2. Apple is “Very Excited” About OnLive on the iPad (Says OnLive) Says:

    […] processors on its own servers to stream modern video games to less capable devices. The service launched a year ago on PCs, and is now available on a small set-top box that sells for $100. In addition, OnLive has a […]