OnLive – The New Era in Gaming

Yesterday, a San Francisco start-up called OnLive revealed its new video game streaming service that has been 7 years in the making. According to a CNET article, OnLive is trying to do for video games what iTunes has done for music: remove the content from the  restrictions of physical media.

Basically OnLive will be harnessing the power of cloud computing to stream first-run, AAA games from major game companies straight into your home via your PC or or a small device about the size of a wallet that connects to your TV. OnLive is trying to remove the game console and physical media from the gaming experience. It claims that its ultra high-end servers will do all of the computing necessary to run the game, and it will stream the resulting video to your home with only a 1 millisecond delay. All that is needed is a high-speed internet connection and a custom wireless controller that works with your PC, Mac, or the OnLive plug-in box. Pretty cool stuff.

(Credit: OnLive)

OnLive has partnered with major game developers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft and others, and claims that brand new games will available through its service at the same time they are released to the public on the major consoles and PC’s. Their goal is to offer a reasonably priced subscription service that will be much less expensive than spending hundreds of dollars for the latest console and upwards of $50 for each new game. OnLive will also be able to adapt to new technologies as they become available, thus eliminating the need to buy the latest versions of Playstation or XBox every few years to play the newest games.

This all sounds great, but OnLive has some major challenges to overcome. Gamers will be tough to win over initially, especially those that already own one or more gaming consoles. The technical hurdles of providing this service are even greater. If the video game experience is sub-par in any way due to lag or graphics performance, gamers will not use the service, at any price point. OnLive is currently undergoing closed beta testing, but early reports claim the service may have some issues to work out before its official launch towards the end of 2009.

Other industries like music, film, television, and computer software are also experiencing similar competition from cloud-based services like OnLive. Most have yet to gain any significant market share, but these trends seem to only be gaining strength. Time will tell if OnLive has what it takes to compete with the software based gaming experience found on a console like the PS3, but its presentation later this week at the Game Developers Conference should give us some clues.

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