14 DAY TRIAL // OnLive, the cloud based, on demand video game service, has announced that it is renouncing membership fees for all users, making it cheaper to stream titles and potentially expanding the number of gamers who are interested in signing up.
The official OnLive blog has a message from Steve Perlman, the founder, saying “Although we wish we could have confirmed no monthly fee from the get-go, pioneering a major new video game paradigm is hard: we had to first grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating costs.”
Access to a game through OnLive is at the moment as expensive as picking it up at retail.
The idea behind OnLive is to allow everyone, regardless of computer power or console ownership, to enjoy the biggest PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 titles of the moment.
The games run on servers maintained by OnLive and only video data and input travel between the computer of the user and the server.
Latency has been one of the issues for such a service but most users report that it's not noticeably higher than for video games that have been installed locally.
A Internet connection of 5 Mbit/s or faster is needed to play video games in high definition.
At the moment a computer capabler of playing video streams is needed for OnLive but the company is getting ready to produce and sell a MicroConsole and controllers, allowing the gamer to link the service to his television set and enjoy it.
Founder Steve Pearlman also suggests that the technology used by OnLive can be integrated into other devices, like set top boxes or connected Blu-ray players.
A game streaming service is an exciting possibility, allowing gamers to enjoy the most important titles without needing to worry at all about hardware.
If OnLive becomes big enough then Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo might be interested in offering something similar on their home consoles, using their online services and hardware.