In Onlive's eyes it's all about seeing how much of the proverbial shaft they can dik the customer with before they start losing money. I'm sorry, but as I said earlier why buy a game full price when you could buy a console copy for similar pricing(and a barebones console to play it for less than a year's worth of subs to Onlive.), and with the console copies you'd get local saves/acheivements/etc as well, and of course actually OWN the game.

Still you may be right about it taking off. There are alot of less than smart people out there after all willing to part easily with their money, just like there's people who will shell out for Alienware or Monster Cables.

Because you don't own a console? Every post assumes that I want to spend £200-£300 on hardware to play these games. I don't.

Can I just be clear on this one point - I see no place where it says subscription is necessary. The article at the start is from June 2010 - almost 18 months ago. Onlive UK has no subs fee and neither does Onlive US according to the website.

I'm not sure why there's the necessity to insult users as if they are being ripped off. As mentioned earlier, I've paid in the region of £23 to play Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Just Cause, Just Cause II, Borderlands, Bioshock, Titan Quest, Deus Ex:HR and RF:Guerilla, along with a host of others, on a clapped out netbook with an INTEL GMA 915 processor. The bandwith is free. Sure, the quality isn't brilliant, but the FPS is ok. At what point did I get ripped off?

Many here have stated that there will be a yearly sub fee on top of game costs. And as I said it'd be about the same if they are charging subs on top of game costs to just buy a console for the reasons I gave earlier, and IMO owning trumps renting any day when the prices match so closely.


Also I wasn't trying to insult all users of such services....just the service itself and also a certain subset of buyers....as in the ones who buy things without thinking all options through. (Obviously not everyone does this but some do). What people do with their own money is their own business. I still don't think the service is a good idea for most people, though.

Not surprising.
OnLive was always going to have expensive games, no matter what anyone thought.

It's like:

PC: Expensive hardware, cheap games.
Consoles: mid-price hardware, expensive games.
OnLive: Free hardware, expensive games and subscription.

They're still fumbling about with their pricing scheme (and might collapse unless they get it right).

But really, lot's of people are willing to splash out $500 on a new console up front (without knowing if it'll still get new games a year later). I bought GameCube and while Wind Waker was a masterpiece, I only got 2 other games for the syste. Not money well spent.

I wouldn't go for this, simply because there's no sense in it for me. I have a high-end PC and consoles, so the benefit of not needing them to play is lost on me. If I only had.. say.. my older generation iMac, this might be very tempting.

I could see the access bundled with internet access, or something. Or there needs to be a decent library of free (or almost so) games.

Wait and see.

How much does the subscription cost?

Dude, they scrapped their plan to have a subscription model a long time ago. There isn't going to be any additional subscription fees on top of the purchase price.

Oh, led me astray as well.
Then I see nothing wrong with the system.

Again, obviously not suitable for someone who already has a powerful PC, if not for the added convenience.

Seemed to me like $9.90 for a couple dozen games, some of which were semi-old (Bioshock etc.), and rest fluff.

If I knew I'd always play connected to broadband internet, that sound a pretty good deal to me. At least for games I don't wish to "own". Unfortunately, I mostly prefer playing games which are so good that I want to "own" them (which excludes even Steam). But for people who play only connected and move on and don't cling to games like we GOG gamers do, sounds great (I guess).

http://blog.onlive.com/2010/10/04/onlive-just-play-for-free/

It is silly, you have read too many Wardell's posts, we are not talking about him asking some crazy thing, just for the ability to easily remove his credit cards, it should be the most basic thing available to any shop or whatever that ask for you card in the first place.

Heck, I know it's not the case in the US but in several European countries it's even the law, you must provide a way (it can be by an e-mail request) for users to delete their personal information whenever they want, no matter if you are Amazon, Steam or just an amateur blog.

Punching a random guy in the street or shooting him point blank in the face are both illegal too... it doesn't means they are both equal.

You takes a lot more "risks" when downloading a full game when compared to what you do when simply downloading a crack, not to mention that it's unlikely (not impossible but unlikely) that a publisher will go after you only for downloading some cracks.

What ? how ?

Steam has abused of its position by doing what : weird euro/dollars conversion rate ? Region locking ? Locking you out of all you game if your account is locked ?

Well OnLive has similar conversion rate (like most online shop) and the region locking is actually build into the technology, you must play on the closest regional server to have a somewhat decent latency, not to mention that OnLive has already in the past imposed artificial limitation, for example allowing some games to be played only on PC and not on Mac (ME2 IRC) and if your account is locked, well it even worse than Steam as you can't even continue to play in offline mode.

Also about the "somewhat less evil", no matter if you like or not the service, but what part of "you have to be online 100% of the time, any bandwidth/latency issue will impact gameplay" is "somewhat less evil" than "you need to connect online from time to time to activate/reactivate the game", I really fail to see, as far as "rights management" technology goes, streaming is the worse possible, 100% control in the hand of the right owner, 0% in the hand of the consumer, heck it's even a lot worse with gaming when compared to movies or music : you can record movies and music steams, you can't "record" the interactivity of game's steams.

They are wrong. They scrapped it almost immediately.