June 17th, Onlive was released with little ceremony apart from the hype it had gathered from previous game conventions such as E3, and Gamescon in 2009 when it was officially announced. It’s now been out in America for over a week. So how successful has it been? has it made the splash that Steve Perlman promised it would? Or has it barely made a ripple in the games industry?
For us to make an accurate judgment of how successful it has been, you first have to have a look at Onlive, the technology behind it, and it’s aims. Steve Perlman, the CEO of the company, initially promised to enable anyone and everyone with a broadband connection to “stream” games right onto their laptops, allowing even netbooks to play games like Crysis in High definition. It was met with waves of scepticism from critics and fans alike, however behind the pipe dream was in fact a pretty decent concept.
The Idea was that in reality you are actually playing the game on servers up to a couple of hundred miles away that have state of the art computers, and then your results are then streamed back to your screen. Pretty neat in concept however in reality, this means that there is the potential for lag, both from streaming the games visuals to your laptop, and latency from your input on the keyboard to the computer on screen.
However the creators of Onlive have promised no latency due to their brand new compression technique, enabling the game’s visuals to be compressed and then uncompressed on the screen removing the lag and enabling the buyers to play the games of their desires with companies like 2K and Ubisoft signed up with the service to distribute their games, it seems as though Onlive has a lot going for it…So how successful has OnLive been?
The biggest flaw perhaps in their new way of distribution has been their business plan, they charge a $15 flat subscription fee and then you also have to buy the games. This makes it hard for anyone with a computer good enough to play games to justify their purchase. A gaming PC can cost around $600 Onlive you’d be paying $180 a year without even having a game in your hand. They then charge the prices for games at higher rates than in the game market, for example Assassins Creed 2 is still $40 while in retail, this PC game is going for about $20.
Another puzzling flaw is that the games aren’t owned permanently once purchased, most of them only being owned for three years, while some find a three year date of expiration on their games fine, many gamers are against it. The current library is also tiny, with only 21 games on the service at launch none of them particularly new.
Of course those are just the beginnings of Onlive’s problems, the latency they promised wouldn’t happen has been reported throughout the gaming community, FPS’ a staple genre of the gaming community have been reported to be almost unplayable, as have fighting games. Other games, such as platformers, fare a little better, but there has still been noticeable latency while playing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpFzpF0msrU&feature=player_embedded
So where did they all go wrong? The sad thing is that I can see the technology working if they spent a little more time developing it and also developing their business plan. They could start by either removing their subscription fee or reducing the prices of the games on their service. Alternatively they could offer a service like Gametap where they pay a flat subscription fee that allows them unlimited access to any of the games on the service, they could justify raising the price of the flat fee as well until they made money.
Maybe a larger company will buy it up, it’s been reported that BT are going to offer the Onlive service to customers who buy their broadband from them, and maybe the funding will help the Onlive company form a financially sound business plan, and develop their technology till it works in a realistic enviroment, but like a unified console, and jetpacks, it seems that Onlive really is just a pipedream right now, which is a shame, as I really like jetpacks.