OnLive sets launch date, price and game publishers
After eight years of preparation, games-on-demand service OnLive announced its launch plans
Speaking at the GDC conference today, OnLive chief executive Steve Perlman announced gamers will be able to subscribe to the PC or Mac games-on-demand service for $14.95 a month, and get access to a wide variety of current titles from major publishers. It is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that, depending on how negotiations with other publishers proceed.
“This isn’t just older catalog games in our library,” Perlman said in an interview. “We’re going to have a lot of fresh games.”
OnLive’s basic technology is compression, which squeezes game data into a compact form so that it can be transferred over a broadband connection to a server, where the data is computed. Then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. OnLive tries to make this round-trip happen so fast that the user doesn’t notice that the computing is happening in the cloud, rather than on the user’s own computer.
“This is for the user who wants instant gratification,” Perlman said. “The idea is to give gamers the same ability to enjoy something instantly as with music or video.”
The Mac version of the service will be particularly interesting, as Mac gamers have had to wait for their games for a long time after they’re published first on the PC. But OnLive will have competition on that front, as Valve announced on Monday that Mac games will be available on its digital distribution network Steam.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company plans to launch its consumer game service in the U.S. on June 17, during the beginning of the E3 2010 video game conference in Los Angeles. That’s later than it originally planned, but Perlman said it takes time to test a nationwide service.
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