Adam Finzel

Onlive, My Thoughts

I bought an onlive box,and 2 games for £2 plus delivery. For that price, I thought I had to give it a go. Onlive is moving computer gaming in to the cloud. The idea is that you will never have to upgrade your computer again as all the game processing is done on big computers on the internet and the graphics are sent to your device.

Onlive supports, its own console, PC, and promises to have Ipad and Android support soon. This interests me as it would be good to play my games where ever I have my Ipad and an internet connection. Also any saved games should follow me on my devices. Other people can watch you play and give you a thumbs up or thumbs down, which is a nice touch adding more social to game playing.

After seeing the quality at a gaming show and comparing it to my own, it seems my internet connection isn’t quite up to the job. I rarely get any problems with playing games, the graphics look blocky in comparison to what I saw at the show suggesting they downgrade the graphics for differnet internet connections.

What worries me about Onlive is their business model. They charge the same price for a game as you can buy in a shop although in some cases it can be more expensive. Which would be fine aside from when you purchase a game they say that you are buying this game but it will only be available to play for x period of time. This is understandable as they have to have these games loaded on a hdd somewhere and guaranteeing lifetime access to the game is a bit of a far fetch. However, when you think about this some more, you realise that if you went to the shop and bought that game or purchased it off of Steam, then you would own that game. You can play that for as long as you have a computer that can play it. I hear some people saying, but realistically I only play games for a few years and then they get dusty. Is that necessarily correct though? If that was true, would ebay have so many sales and purchases of old games? I mean you can even buy NES games.

My point is that when you buy a game via Onlive, you are effectively renting it compared to if you bought the game in the shop (remember the price is the same). So why would I do this. Another concern arises when you read the ts and cs where they state that at the moment, membership to their system is free but they reserve the right to charge a monthly fee and you can only play the game if you are a member. So worse still in the future I may only be able to play my game if I pay a monthly fee.

In conclusion I like the idea of online and think it is a very good innovation to the market. I do however beleive that they shouldn’t sell you games at full price but let you rent them, like you can from blockbuster. To me this seems how Onlive will evolve to and when it does, I would be more interested in spending more cash with them but at the moment, buying a game through them isn’t a better deal than buying from a shop.

Tags: gaming