The recent troubles of OnLive have brought the area of cloud gaming, something that’s been a little quiet since Sony’s purchase of Gaikai (on my birthday strangely enough), back to the forefront of the gaming community. Not only do OnLive’s issues raise questions about some of their business practices and decisions, something I’m not going to focus on here, but it means the whole area of cloud gaming needs to be looked at again.
The question, for me, is whether or not a cloud gaming service can survive by itself, or if it’s simply OnLive’s approach that was at fault? I mean OnLive’s attempt to create a new category of gaming device is certainly praiseworthy, but I’m not sure if the way in which they’ve done it is necessarily the best approach.
The problem is that people seem to have this all you can eat perception of streaming services, likely created by the video offerings of companies like Netflix and LoveFiLM, or Spotify’s unlimited music service. The success of these services does seem to show that people have a space in their life for media consumption where you don’t own the media, although earlier physical video rental (like Blockbuster) had already shown that people don’t need to own everything they watch.
Partly I suppose that’s due to the inherent technological challenges of streaming video, let alone an interactive streaming service. Personally if I’m only paying £6.99 a month, the currently listed price for the Playpack, I’m much more likely to be forgiving towards the service than if I have to pay for each game I want to play individually, despite the reduced prices that OnLive seems to offer.
The other mistake that OnLive made, and something they may have to address if they want the new incarnation of the company to survive, was attempting to make OnLive its own service. If they’d done what Gaikai did and partnered with other companies, before ultimately selling themselves to Sony, I can’t help but feel OnLive would have had a much better shot.
Trying to build their brand and their own identity was always going to be a tougher challenge than building themselves as part of say Xbox Live. Attempting to create a technology that could then be included in another platform may not have been as high profile or as “sexy”, but it may well have allowed them to build a more secure base for themselves.
Of course it’s worth remembering that this isn’t a eulogy for OnLive, the service still exists although the company has, obviously, changed drastically (and isn’t even the same entity). Maybe they’ll manage to change their business model in such a way that allows them to continue, or simply sell out to a bigger entity that can afford to support them.
I’m not sure their setback shows we’re not ready for cloud gaming though, merely that we’re not quite ready for cloud gaming as a distinct entity. I’m not sure we ever will be to be honest, but I hope someone manages to nail the formula for solo cloud success.
I believe Onlive was always going to have trouble trying to stay in bussiness due to many people not liking having to pay for something that could be pulled at any time. As well as the state of the net in the UK. Probably 2% of us have a strong enough connection to handle Onlive’s requirments. And i’ve heard that they charged full retail price for the games so it’s no surprise that they failed as chances are people thought to themselves why bother paying £40 to stream a game when i can just get the physical version and keep it forever? They should not have blown a quarter of their budget on giving away thousands of free onlive consoles at Eurogamer last year as that has cost them dearly. It is common sense that if you are a new company, you don’t give away your product for free as chances are you can’t afford to.
They should have just done a yearly subscription service that allows you to stream any game free of charge for one set price. For example, £40-50 a year and you can stream any game that you please. As well as doing a lot of deals every few weeks. And organise some tournements to help keep users interested in their service. But overall they should have waited another 5-10 years before commiting to it as we are not ready for a streaming only console. Hell, we are not even ready for a digital only console as the PSGo proved that. You could argue that Steam is the best exa,mple of a digital only service but i don’t think a Steam only console would be that successful as people still love to own the physical copy. :)
Now just isn’t the time for cloud gaming, there isn’t an advantage to it as most people’s internet isn’t up to scratch. It’s similar to 3D gaming – nice idea, but only a few people can use it.