For those of you who haven’t heard, OnLive is an upcoming cloud game service that allows you to stream games directly to your computer or television without having to buy an expensive console. When it first premiered, it caused a lot of buzz in the gaming industry, even leading Sony to copyright the name “PS Cloud” the day after its announcement. The videos look great, and the idea sounds awesome, especially with the popularity of services like iTunes and Netflix that have already popularized digital or streaming media. But is the idea too good to be true?
OnLive allows gamers to play a game on their computer or television, and sends the controller’s actions to a sever center hosting the game, so a subscriber should be able to log on and play from any computer with a fast enough internet connection. Many game developers have jumped on board, including EA, Ubisoft, Atari, Eidos, and more, so the game selection should be pretty good.
I can see the service being well received, especially for PC gamers that can’t afford to constantly be upgrading their hardware, and would rather pay for a service to always be able to play on a top notch system. Console gamers however, I don’t think will be so fast to abandon their systems. With Xbox Live’s success, I don’t think the multiplayer community will be too thrilled switching over to OnLive, unless they offer everything Xbox Live is and more. Also it should be pretty obvious that you won’t be seeing a Mario game or any other 1st party offerings on the service, and seeing how successful 1st party exclusives have been especially on the Nintendo consoles, I don’t think OnLive will be bringing the death of the game console anytime soon.
If OnLive does turn out to be a awesome and threatening service to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, I predict we’ll be seeing their own iterations of cloud gaming, and if that happens, I don’t think OnLive will stand a chance with the lack of exclusives that the other three will offer.
While I’m hopeful, I’m haven’t jumped on quite yet. What do you guys think? Will OnLive be full of bugs? Will it fail? Will it rock? Are you sold? Will it be the death of the game console as we know it?
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