OnLive Announces Free, Rental and Demo-Powered Game Portal

OnLive has announced that it will be launching a service, called the Game Portal, set to be directly accessible through a browser without a subscription, allowing gamers to gain access to popular demos and rent a selection of videogames, using the same streaming technology as the full OnLive service.

Steve Perlman, the Chief Executive Officer of OnLive, has written that “Through the OnLive Game Portal, gamers will be able to play select games directly on a rental basis as well as game demos for free; subject to available OnLive service capacity and whatever usage limits are associated with each given demo. Rentals will be priced on a per-game basis. There is no service fee for the OnLive Game Portal.”

The idea behind the OnLive Game Portal is to serve as a sort of test for the full service. It's not clear yet how many demos and rental titles will be offered through it but the selection needs to be quite broad in order to show gamers that the streaming technology can work for all sorts of types of videogames, from first person shooters to real-time strategy.

Last week, the company announced that its full service would be released on June 17 and that the subscription for one month would cost 14.95 dollars, which is pretty steep considering that the sum only delivers access to the service itself and that all videogames a player is interested in experiencing need to be bought or rented for a separate fee. A lot of commentators said that even if OnLive overcame technical hurdles, launching the pricy subscription would deter potential customers from signing up.

OnLive claims that it will allow those PC gamers who lack the hardware to play the newest titles to experience them by running them on servers and streaming the content to their PCs or television sets.