Why You Shouldn’t Ignore OnLive

Last week saw the UK launch of a new gaming platform in the shape of OnLive. If you attended the Eurogamer Expo over the weekend, chances are you nabbed yourself a free OnLive kit seeing as they gave away thousands of them to the attendees of the show. OnLive has been around in the US for a few months now but now that’s it’s here in the UK, we’ve gone ahead and tested it out to deliver you a verdict. Is it the console competitor it hopes to be?

[Bigpappy]

too late!

[farhad2k8]

These days, broadband is so cheap and ANYONE can get OnLive. I was always skeptical about OnLive, but after trying it today, I bought the £6.99 a month offer to play ALL the games.

It's truly amazing, I do have a powerful PC, but now that I have OnLive, I can play games on literally everything, my laptop, my PC, downstairs and on my HP Tablet. It's just AMAZING. The fact that you can view ANYONE playing their game, is just amazing to me.

Best money I've ever spent. £80 a year is the same price of 2 PS3/360 games, but with this subscription, I get to play over 150 games and counting, for only £80 a year!! Truly fucking amazing. haha

Sorry if I've been talking alot, it just blew my mind earlier today.

[SaiyanFury]

Not everyone can get on the OnLive service. Living out in the country, the fastest connection available to my wife and I is 3mbps, and that's on a good day. Normally our connection is so unstable, we're lucky to get up to 1.8 mbps. Factor that in and we can't even watch HD movies over Netflix. OnLive is obviously for some people, but for those of us who live where a fast, stable internet connection is impossible, we won't get it.

[farhad2k8]

@SaiyanFury
True, I guess for people like you, it may be a little hard. I heard there were two types of streams for OnLive, a Standard stream and a HD stream? Maybe the HD stream is 4mbps while SD is a little lower for people in your situation?

[MaxXAttaxX]

I don't find joy in watching someone else play when I could be playing a game myself. Not really "amazing".

And it's not a broadband connection that's the problem. It's the dependency and....

* If the OnLive service fails, you lose all your games.
* They're games that only exist in a virtual world.
* No physical copies means no ability to trade/sell or share with anyone.
* No exclusive games.
* You will be at the mercy of a company ALL the time.

[Jacobite]

If you have less than 4mb bb forget it as a large number of folk in the uk still have

[ProGrasTiNation]

It doesn't matter what your speed is,your playing your game on a server..Epic fail
Imagine getting that silent kill that was eluding you in hitman & bang rubberbanding.."what gotta do that again eh..na "

[Jacobite]

It was on Player (game program) for streaming on 40 inch TV he said you,ll need 4mb BB the bigger BB the better

[fatalred alarm]

Don't know about you, but here in the netherlands like 90% of the population has acces to 25mb/s at least. personally paying 8 euro more for 60mb.

If we can do it, so can the UK?

[Jacobite]

2-4mb is average UK yes in major cities up to 50mb those lucky with cable in their area, most still rely on exchanges either still copper or aluminium wire then distance comes into it, nearest about 10mb till the furtherest away less than 1mb so I cant see Onlive taking off that big till better BB speeds in UK anyway : (

[Hufandpuf]

I'm telling you, Onlive will be a force to be reckoned with in the next few years. I wouldn't be surprised if other companies start making products like Onlive, or making games exclusive to onlive.

[Kamikaze135]

Deep in the future when most user online speeds will be up to par with OnLive's requirement. Even if you do have a fast connection, you also need a stable connection. My 20mbps isn't enough to get beyond Youtube quality and input lag and I'm not willing to pay for more.

[Hufandpuf]

I agree, but it's inevitable. There will be more benefits for companies than there will be for users, but I'm pretty sure they will pick up on it. It will cut down manufacturing costs from both the publishers and developers, and they would be mad not to jump on this opportunity.

[ProGrasTiNation]

The sooner onlive goes away the better!
Lag in Multi player you can expect but in single play,,HA
& what about if your net went out,how you getting at your games??
To be honest i think they're coming into the market thinking something new is good enough when the actual product is shit!

[protekjv]

what's Onlive?

[ProGrasTiNation]

Its a worse idea than the 3DS!

[Dno]

i will never buy a full system that requires me to be online at all times. Yes it stop stealing of games (to some degree) but what if cable is down? i have to wait to play games to the cable guy comes and charges me 30 bucks to check it out?

Allow me to DL games to my harddrive so i can play lag free and internet free then we can talk.

[LightofDarkness]

Why you should ignore OnLive:

Are you already feeling like you're at the mercy of the big publishers, more so than you'd be comfortable with? Well, OnLive gives those guys even more power over what you play and how you play it. You'd no longer own the rights to physically play the game from your home PC, you'd be streaming it from a service. Think on-line passes are inconvenient? Try being denied access to your singleplayer as well, either through a network failure or because of the myriad reasons you can be disconnected from an online service.

Like mods? OnLive says "screw you" to modders and our prospective development community because you no longer have access to a games source files/contents to modify them. They're off on some virtual machine on the cloud and can't be accessed directly. Hooray for progress!

Think lack of dedicated servers in online games is too much lag for your tastes? Well OnLive has lag by the barrel-full, even in singleplayer. Attempting to play on my 5Mbps connection (the fastest available through much of my country) is a bad joke, and that was just singleplayer. There was nearly 1 second of delay. Imagine that with other players running around.

A service like OnLive is bad for the industry in general. If it were to catch on in any major way, it would erect a barrier between the developers, the publishers and the gamers in many ways. So many developers hail from a modding background, which OnLive would effectively eliminate. It removes a consumer's control over the product they've just "bought." It turns the concept of ownership in this industry on it's head and flips the balance unfairly on the side of the publishers; and OnLive, the people who ultimately control access to the content.

[Redempteur]

AMEN