OnLive: The Future of Gaming?

Posted by Tony Cardone in Games on Mar 25th, 2009 | View Comments

Heard about this cool OnLive system? If you haven’t, you’re potentially short information on the future of gaming. For years, PC gaming has been a mess. Xfire was among the first pioneers in the attempt to consolidate PC gamers. It’s slowly evolved into Valve’s Steam service, which is just a distribution service with a feeble attempt at unification. Now, OnLive has burst on the scene potentially changing this overnight.

OnLive is a system designed to allow people to play games on a PC, Mac, or on their TV with each other. That’s not even the best part, however. The best part is that all these games are delivered via the cloud- no downloading required. In the demo below, Steve Perlman (WebTV and QuickTime brain) seamlessly switched from a game of Crysis: Warhead to Lego Batman simply by going back to the home screen and clicking on the game. Not swapping discs, not downloading the entire game, but simply by clicking on it. Also cool about the demonstration was the ability to view a friends’ game live as they see it from the interface. The demonstration team also showed these features on a MacBook and dedicated box connected to the TV, in addition to the Dell Studio 15 laptop. Really, really cool.

There’s no doubt that this will challenge Steam on the PC. But it’s not the fact that it’s a digital distribution system that is exciting. It’s the full experience. Much like the Xbox experience, OnLive is attempting to consolidate games, friends, and a marketplace. It’s not clear how that third part will play out, but their demo at GDC was simply astounding. I watched it at home, from my desktop and found myself wanting it now. There were a few drawbacks indirectly mentioned about the system, most notably the rather high demand for bandwith from the device. And most importantly to me, how did they get a puny laptop playing Crysis from a server somewhere else? It’s all a mystery to me. OnLive promises a beta test in summer 2009 (register here) and full release by wintertime (probably in time for the holiday season).
Official Site [OnLive]