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OnLive Denies Rumors That the Company is Shutting Down [Updated]
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MRU
macrumors Penryn
ScottishDuck
macrumors 6502a
Hey guess what, all you people that invested in this DRM encumbered crap are losing all the games you "bought".
This is pretty sad. Onlive is pretty revolutionary. I guess Ouya won't have Onlive anymore. The idea of Onlive is great but the latency problem is really bad. It is a bit tad too early for Onlive. But the idea is there. If the average internet speeds become faster, I can really see this type of service taking off.
It's a shame OnLive is going down the pan. I really liked what they were trying to do. I like the service, and managed to get one of the microconsoles free last year and think it's a pretty sweet little device.
The killer feature I *really* liked was the arcade. Being able to choose games in-play from a wall of them and jump in and out watching people's games was really cool. Spent quite a while on that, checking out games before I bought them myself or simply watching how other players play games. Batman for example was quite watchable from a spectators point of view.
My only gripe is it isn't all that playable on my home 3Mb connection. Elsewhere on faster connection i've played some good games but I think really 5Mb is the minimum for a decent quality of service.
The killer feature I *really* liked was the arcade. Being able to choose games in-play from a wall of them and jump in and out watching people's games was really cool. Spent quite a while on that, checking out games before I bought them myself or simply watching how other players play games. Batman for example was quite watchable from a spectators point of view.
My only gripe is it isn't all that playable on my home 3Mb connection. Elsewhere on faster connection i've played some good games but I think really 5Mb is the minimum for a decent quality of service.
chrmjenkins
macrumors 603
I don't think Microsoft needs OnLive to launch a competitive service. It would be a waste of money for them.
faroZ06
macrumors 68040
A bit off-topic for MacRumors, but it's a slow news day, so I'm not going to complain.
This needs some commas.
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This is why I sometimes have to pirate stuff that I already bought. Digital rights can sometimes rip people off. I guess SOMETHING good comes out of piracy sites.
This needs some commas.
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This is why I sometimes have to pirate stuff that I already bought. Digital rights can sometimes rip people off. I guess SOMETHING good comes out of piracy sites.
I honestly think a contributor to this failing is because Apple kept their client off of their iOS platform. I have been waiting for iOS to get the gaming client of onlive for a year now. I was delaying purchasing anything on onlive until that happened. Onlive certainly would have got a lot more money if Apple would not have kept it off of their system.
NutsNGum
macrumors 68030
Someone better tell Vizio that they need to take this off their list features of their Co-Star Google TV device. . .which is one of the reasons I decided to buy the Vizio Google TV device. I was anxious to see whether a dedicated box would be any better than trying to run Onlive through my PC. And I bought an OnLive controller for it and everything! 😡
PSN, Xbox Live, Apple App Store, Steam... they're all online stores... ya, I don't have much faith of them being around should any of these companies encounter financial difficulties.
I got excited for OnLive for awhile the first time I heard about it. I signed up to test drive their technology but I never heard anything from them after that. I bet there are millions of others felt the same way I felt waiting for nothing. I talked about this technology to other people at work especially the gamers and they're excited too. They should have learned from Netflix, since I signed up for that 1 month free trial years ago until now I'm a subscriber. This makes me think that OnLive is a scam waiting for people to sign-up then shut it down!
OldSchoolMacGuy
Suspended
this is kinda of bummy news. i have one of the micro consoles and even purchased a few games that they had specials on. i am also a backer of the kickstarter project Ouya and they announced on their FB page that they would feature Onlive. Ouya is android based so maybe el goog was the one that swooped them up. i honestly liked Onlive at it's core for what it was and feel it was executed fairly well
The OnLive service was pretty cool, both the game side, and the Microsoft Office on iPad product.
I think the biggest problem wasn't that the products didn't work -- it's that they gave a fairly mediocre experience.
It was like playing last year's game on a 3 year old desktop. Same with the iPad experience.
It could be that I'm too much of an Early Adopter to be part of their customer demographic. I always try to get the latest gear etc. Maybe the late adopter struggling to hang onto MS Word instead of using any of the purpose built iPad word processors and sharing via the cloud would pay for the service.
I didn't follow the gaming community as closely, so I'm not sure what kind of paid market share they were getting there. I'm guessing it wasn't appealing for hard core gamers -- at least not appealing enough to shell out dollars for.
External factors, like Microsoft cracking down on licensing for remote access, and tier 1 game makers choosing not to launch on the PC might have played a role too.
It's sad to hear about them going into bankruptcy / reorganization, but sometimes that's the only viable way to pivot a business that can't establish a working revenue stream.
I think the biggest problem wasn't that the products didn't work -- it's that they gave a fairly mediocre experience.
It was like playing last year's game on a 3 year old desktop. Same with the iPad experience.
It could be that I'm too much of an Early Adopter to be part of their customer demographic. I always try to get the latest gear etc. Maybe the late adopter struggling to hang onto MS Word instead of using any of the purpose built iPad word processors and sharing via the cloud would pay for the service.
I didn't follow the gaming community as closely, so I'm not sure what kind of paid market share they were getting there. I'm guessing it wasn't appealing for hard core gamers -- at least not appealing enough to shell out dollars for.
External factors, like Microsoft cracking down on licensing for remote access, and tier 1 game makers choosing not to launch on the PC might have played a role too.
It's sad to hear about them going into bankruptcy / reorganization, but sometimes that's the only viable way to pivot a business that can't establish a working revenue stream.
LethalWolfe
macrumors G3
Many times it's easier to buy an existing product/company than to start from scratch. For example, if MS buys OnLive then MS gets access to OnLives users as opposed to creating a competing service and building a user base from scratch. MS would also get access to OnLive employees that know the ins and outs of streaming games.
The average internet speed are already fast, just not in America where we're still getting raped by ISP companies.
chrmjenkins
macrumors 603
Microsoft has a vast xbox live network that does everything with games other than streaming them. They also were streaming 1080p movies before netflix was. I think they got it.