14 DAY TRIAL // OnLive, the service that promises gamers they will be able to play all the titles they like on their PCs or television sets, has announced that it is entering an open beta period designed to showcase the possibilities of the service while also eliminating potential problems when dealing with a wide audience and getting ideas from the gaming public.
OnLive was announced for the first time at the Game Development Conference earlier in the year and its creators have shown how it can stream information from and to servers on which the games themselves run in order to allow the player to game on a machine with limited power.
Those who are interested in using their PC will need to download a small program, while those who wish to use their television set can get what OnLive creators call a MicroConsole. The device is not available yet so only those who want to use their PC are taking part in the beta.
Steve Perlman, who is the Chief Executive Officer of OnLive, has posted on the official blog saying that “One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can.”
Since it was initially revealed, a lot of people have said that OnLive will never be able to work mainly because of the issues associated with network connectivity and because of the huge infrastructure it would need to provide its services to a large audience. The beta will probably be a good way of showing nay sayers that the basic idea is coherent and that OnLive will work as intended.