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Hey,

The name�s Donovan. Like everyone else, my first cognitive memory is sitting in front of the T.V. with the N.E.S. humming. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The games I would take to a desert island are: Star Wars: Kotor, the Half-Life series, Star Tropics and a bunch of others not worth mentioning

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OnLive: The next Sega Channel or video game messiah
Jhett \| 1:29 PM on 05.05.2009	8 comments

If you weren't using the Internet during the the 2009 Game Developer's Conference then you missed the video-game-industry explosion that was OnLive.

For those who still don't know, OnLive is potentially the fifth to the big three--Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft--and the PC market. Offering full budget titles that will be processed and streamed straight to your onLive system. Meaning you no longer have to have a NASA super computer to run Crysis at full steam.

This all seems awfully familiar and too good to be true. A service that streams games with little or no down time straight to your system. Sounds like the 21 century's Sega Channel.

Sega Chanel in its heyday streamed games to your Sega Genesis allowing you to play full titles without buying the game. You simply paid for the service. The service worked well and lasted longer than some systems after the Genesis.

Will OnLive bring subscirption based libraries back from video games' past and become top contender of the industry? Maybe. GameSpot's feature about onLive points to a lot of heavy-hitting publishers lining up behind OnLive.

In the April 19 issue of the San Jose Mercury News, Steve Perlman, onLive's CEO, said that someone will sign up for the service and out of a $50 billion market those someones will be their market.

Will it put the final nail in the coffin of PC gaming since it takes the guess work out of building a specialty PC? No way, building your own towering monster is part of the draw of PC gaming and taking the opportunity to tinker away from a nerd isn't going to happen.

OnLive is an interesting concept and it will change the way indusrty will look at publishing but it it wont change the indusrty overnight. What Onlive will do is cater to casual gamers who don't know the difference between Xbox Live and their Nintendo channels.

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7 comments | showing # 1 to 7

DJDuffy

Ah yes the Sega Channel. It remains to be seen what OnLive will actually be like, I have my doubts. The Sega Channel was awesome back in the day although completely different technology. I'm pretty sure it would send all the game information down the pipe and your Genesis was actually processing and running the game on it's hardware. In the case of OnLive all the hardware is server side which has to be compressed and sent over broadband...but if they can pull it off, it would be really amazing.

Jhett

The thing is the compression and the transmission. If there is any sort of lag people are going to avoid it like the swine flu

Danzflor

this gaming plattaform could work fine, but only on USA. The bandwith in some countrys (i mean A LOT) isn't gonna be ready to support this huge ammount of data transmission :S the best example latinamerica. here we don't have the usa internet speed, so, it will be impossible to use OnLive here, maybe in a couple of years (if our goverments wants to changes the laws for the sake of all).

KaliKot

As bandwidth gets faster and cheaper this will only become more viable.

Last year my friend and I were discussing how the future of games will be just streaming the games through high end computers and just paying for the service and this is the first step for that to happen.

Go ahead and laugh but one of the reasons blu-ray won't last is because of digital distribution and potential of services like these. It may not be good right now but wait until a few years. Hell, even Steam was a laughing stock when it first came out with half life 2

pedrovay2003

While I like the idea, I don't like the idea that I won't have the game in my own machine. When I pay to play a game, I want complete and total control over the entire experience, and I'm not willing to just let it sit on a server, requiring an active Internet connection to play.

Jhett

it's funny you should mention that because that's the way a GameInformer poll came out. As much as the industry embraces change gamers, as consumers, still prefer to have a hard copy. But you have to look at services like Steam that are doing very well despite that trend

themizarkshow

I probably won't support it just because its a rental service and I like actually owning my games (whether its digital or a disk/cartridge). Not being able to loan it to friends, play at buddies places without taking my whole system, etc is a nice part about disks. And with a lappy that can do most recent PC games, I can take Steam with me.

For me, OnLive looks like it will be a combo of PC/console digital downloads and GameFly. For my money, I'd much rather just own what I'm playing and have a backlog that I can see and feel good about.

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