We were promised cloud gaming nirvana
on June 17, and OnLive has indeed kept to its self-imposed schedule. The new service that allows you to play resource-hungry games via only your browser window has taken its first steps into the real (non-beta) world with an initial catalog of 23 games. It'll be free for the first year for those who showed faith early on and
pre-registered, or $15 per month for new bandwagon riders. Do let us know your thoughts if you've gotten onboard at this nascent stage: does it play fantastically well, is it close to spectacular, or is it just a pedestrian effort aiming to capitalize on geeks' lust for unbound gaming? We
have to know.
[Thanks, Mike]
Update: OnLive's site doesn't seem to have been updated to reflect the service going live (you can
sign up, but can't just jump in and play). It might be, therefore, that OnLive is booting itself up in stages, with only
the early birds getting the first bite.
posted June 18th 2010 4:28AM
I tried out the service and to be honest it's not the greatest thing in the world, NO mass effect 2 which really had me upset since that was the game I was looking to play, you have pay full price to play the games which is kind of stupid or you can buy like a 3 day pass, again gay! I think I'm going to stick with gamefly for now.
Played Assassin's Creed II for about 3 hours on OnLive last night and thought it was great. Running a mid-08 iMac on Verizon Fios out of Delaware. Maybe a few times I felt cheated out of a button press but for a casual gamer it was great. I did get the free 12months and free game, so not sure if I would feel the same dropping $50+ for the same experience.
@badbox Yeah the juror is still out on spending $60 bucks on a game. But with all cloud based models I think the pricing structure must change (meaning cheaper).
It's definitely live, OnLive 1st user test run
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQeV77sjyaw
so its like natal? only shit?
I just spent an hour playing onlive (I did the preregistration so the subscription fee is free for a year). While not perfect, I am extremely amazed by the low level of latency and surprisingly lower level of compression. I'm very impressed. Even if onlive does not make it this level of performance could accelerate the already clear move toward cloud based HD content (Netflix, On Demand, Roku, etc). This will be interesting very interesting.