OnLive

[rock_nog]

Well, apparently when they announced OnLive, that service that runs games on a server farm and streams the video to your computer, it wasn't vaporware after all. Being bored and curious, and being that they currently have a deal where you can get a year's subscription for free, I decided to give it a shot. I have to say, although there are obviously some caveats, first and foremost, the service actually works. I was surprised. Now to break it down.

First off, the video quality, as expected, isn't the best, and things tend to look blurry. However, running a couple of games that my PC can't normally handle, I guess I can't really complain too much about that. But yeah, right off the bat, if you have a decent PC, it's not really worth it, but on the other hand, for those whose PCs aren't all that great, it's got that going for it.

As for how the games handled, well it was kind of a toss up. Arkham Asylum and Red Faction played just fine on my computer, but I had some issues with lag with Borderlands. I don't know if it has to do with the style of gameplay or what, but yeah, my experience was that some games run great, others not so much. I might have to investigate with a few more games to see how things hold up overall, but yeah, two out of the three games I tried worked just fine and there wasn't enough noticeable lag to interfere with gameplay.

Finally, it's hard to talk about the service without discussing price. Basically, the service works as a rental format, where you pay several bucks for a several-day pass to play the game as much as you want. My first reaction is that based on this, I don't think the service is going to take off. On the other hand, for once, you can rent games for the PC, which thinking about it, is kind of interesting. And besides, you do have the market for people who want to play the newest games, but don't necessarily have the money for new hardware, so there might yet be a market.

Anyway, that's my take on it. It definitely works, I just have no idea whether, especially given the fact that it's basically a rental service, it will take off. I might even consider putting some money down so I can play Batman for longer than the 30-minute demo period (forgot to mention, you get to try all of the games for 30 minutes before you have to decide whether or not to pay for them). It certainly worked extremely well, and I've really been missing out.

[AtmaWeapon]

Last year I pretty much pooh-poohed this idea with numbers that I felt showed it was impractical and not likely to work very well. I guess I was wrong.

It's kind of lame to hear that the video quality can be bad. It seems to me the value proposition for OnLive is to appear cheaper than a console; if graphical quality is too low that won't work. I guess their target audience is the "good enough" crowd and there's quite a few of those, though.

I don't like the sound of the rental model, but I'm a stick in the mud. I don't like any service where they cut my access to all of my content as soon as I stop paying (note: I use some because I have little choice on those.) I'd be much more likely to consider OnLive if I could keep one game forever every 3 months or so, or maybe if every 5-6 games I rent I get a perma-rental. I hear they have a set-top-box kind of thing in the works; that might be interesting.

What kind of internet speed do you have? Care to run a speed test (http://speedtest.net/)? These services almost never publish the speed they expect you to have to make them work.

[Mercy]

The main reason we do not have an Xbox is because I cannot stomach the idea of paying an additional subscription fee every month for online access. I prefer to own games over rent but if the cost is not ridiculous, I definitely see a market for such a service. We rent PS3 games for a day to decide if they are worth buying at "new release" price, waiting for reasonable price, waiting longer for discount bin, or skipping completely. If it is something we want to play and the game can be "completed" in two or three days, we may just rent it for that time. I might be tempted to rent time with certain PC games in order to decide if I wanted to buy them if I did not already have alternative methods. The line is spending the same amount to "rent" a game as to outright buy it. For people constantly on the roam with their laptops, it would probably be a worth while service.

-m.

[gdorf]

I was skeptical about Online but I just tried it and I have to admit they might actually have a solid product/business model. I don't have any wired connections at my house, so I bridged my LAN/Wifi connections in order to connect to Onlive. Even with my somewhat-flaky Wifi connection Unreal Tournament 3 was playable and enjoyable. I have a couple of very slow computers at work that have very fast internet connections. I am excited to try playing some modern games on a Pentium 4.

If Onlive can actually find a way to turn a profit I could see this being a viable business in the future. I suspect, however, that the cost of maintaining their servers combined with the reluctance by consumers to pay subscriptions will be the eventual downfall of the company.