OnLive Dropping Monthly Fee from Service

Makes sense. I'm glad they've done this.

@snii

One thing you didn't mention is that developers now won't have to dumb down the quality of cutscenes because of disk space requirements. Anyone who bought Gears of War for the PC knows what I mean if they've seen the 360 version. This also means that there is less excuse to have smaller levels for load time or controls and AI that are dumbed down for consoles. It also means that developers like Valve can have all the free DLC and updates they want without having to pay M$ ti re-certify their game and drive up development costs. They can take the money they save and hire permanent QA employees rather than letting M$ farm it out to lowest bidder contractors.

In short, OnLive is a big waffle cone of WIN for developers.

Where the fuck is the Linux client? If i'm required to use a Windows machine, I'll just keep it traditional.

Translation:We're dicking you guys over so hard on the price of games, we realized we didn't even need to bother with the subscription thing. Enjoy paying 50$ for things that are 20$ in steam!

I'm hearing this is working surprisingly well.

I'm guessing the big 3 are waiting to see if this kind of platform could be viable. The potential profits could be massive since no special hardware is required and a TV version will be ready in the near future. Instead of having to buy dedicated hardware like a console or a high end video card there would be services from MS, Sony, Nintendo etc.

I don't blame any of them for not committing to a next gen system right now.

Onlive seems like it was designed to appeal to the producers and not the gamers. With a service like this, that had never been done before, they should've been able to negotiate with producers / developers on cost for games due to the following reasons:

1. 0% of piracy
2. 0% chance of lending
3. Elimination of used game sales
4. Increased potential audience since system specs are no longer a factor
5. Users lose access to the game if they cancel their account, so some people who do that maybe "buy" a game twice.
6. Decreased cost of distribution

With all that in mind, charging full retail price for a game (potentially more than what you'd even pay with Steam or retail), seems incredibly greedy. Add in a monthly fee just to use the service, which is still unproven, and you're really fucking pushing it.

The monthly fee is gone now, but the bad taste is still there. Onlive isn't concerned with giving gamers more for their money. First impressions go a long way.

Now that they aren't charging a monthly fee, what revenue stream will they have? Will they renegotiate with game producers for a piece of the action, float on investor capital, add in-game advertising? It doesn't look good, in my opinion. And it seems like they have it it completely backwards. Charge a monthly fee, maybe $15 or $30, and let users have access to as many games as they want.

Eh i could go on but football is starting

This is great news.

This thing will be great for Instant access to game demos and such. No lengthy download or installation required. Less than one minute from "hmm, I wanna play this" to "wow, I am playing this!"

It'll take some time for it to get to full speed, but you better watch out!

what happens to those purchased games when the service goes away? YOU CANT TAKE AWAY MY PHYSICAL MEDIA FUCKERS! heh no thx onlive.. at least with steam if it ever dies, god forbid, there will be a way to downloaded your games into a nice package and they will be patched so you can play without steam.. with onlive.. your just fucked..

It seems they have a very, very limited selection in games. I've played most of them games on my own computer with max graphics and without input delay.

Love the OnLine application link btw.

so i got in the beta/founders/whatever thing that theyre running now, and have played around with it and its just not quite there yet... or maybe im just not quite there yet, its hard to tell which. i have a 6 meg down / 768k up DSL connection, and the games work far far better than i would have ever expected, but certain games (fps in particular) suffer from a maddening lag. its small, but enough to make it not worth using for me. thing is, im not sure if this is an artifact of my connection, or of the tech in general. my brother has a beefy fios connection, and i need to remember to try it out next time i visit... if its just an artifact of the connection then i think the service probably has a bright future because fast internet only ever gets faster as time goes on...

unfortunately, the main appeal of the service for me isnt there yet: playing console games without the console. i dont have one of the current gen systems because (among other things) there are very few games that interest me on them... but, there are a few... and id love to be able to play them. i thought i remember reading that onlive was going to have 360/ps3 games as well as pc... but it could be im remembering wrong...

"We have detected a high latency connection to the Internet that will result in poor responsiveness"

And then you're forced to exit the program...so f*king lame!

1) click the "OnLive application" hotlink
2) shit brix

As soon as this technology is truly accessible, I see Steam becoming a hybrid version of this - being able to still download games to enjoy them at high resolution and latency free action, or using lower powered pc's to play them via broadcast.