Not so interesting for those with other gaming equipment, but potentially big news for those without a gaming PC. Of course, this could be impending doom for the company. I'm guessing that the $15/monthly fee just to join wasn't so successful a model. They are supposedly guaranteeing service for 3 years on any purchased games.

I just played a few minutes of Borderlands, just part of the intro scene on my mac. The video quality was more than adequate. I usually need to run games at lower resolution anyway (bootcamp) so I didn't mind. The controls seemed responsive for a single player. I'm not an avid online player. so I would be interested in someone else's opinion of lag times, etc.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/05/o...world-a-freer/

Oh god, I gotta find all those post where everyone went " THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING ".

Now it's not working out.

****, feels awesome to be right....

Their business model was just plain terrible. Subscription fees, full priced games and games you have purchased at full price having expiry dates. No thx. A year of sub fees would basically pay for a PS3 or 360. People who went for this service are suckers.

Still to be determined how things go for Onlive, but I'm confident this is a big part of the future of gaming, whether it's Onlive leading the way or somebody else. Getting the lag issues worked out is just a matter of time and technology (and as the industry grows we'd start to see more and more local server clusters so the network traffic wouldn't have to be redirected across too many nodes anyway). Based on what I've seen from Netflix streaming, technology has already largely solved any bandwidth issues regarding streaming HD video. And I really don't see any other major issues standing in the way of the cloud-based game distribution model.

A large part of the reason this is going to take off (whether through Onlive or somebody else) is because it allows the game companies to finally get the upper hand on piracy, and they won't need to harass potential customers with an army of lawyers or install DRM rootkits to do it. I think we'll start to see Onlive-exclusive releases of games, where only the Onlive servers ever have access to the actual code, which gives them a very tight grip on game distribution and shuts down piracy entirely (barring a leak, of course). Not to mention they won't have to design their software to run on a plethora of machine configurations, it'll be "bleeding edge supercomputers only" and people with ordinary machines will still be able to play it. More and more game companies will prefer to do business this way. So that's my two cents, we shall see.

This is the future of computing in business. Not sure about gaming though really...

Agreed. It's figuring out a business model that will ultimately jive with the consumers.

Interesting to note that the original creator of the Playstation is working on something equivalent to what OnLive is doing now:
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/...aming-service/