How the Future of Gaming Fell Apart

By Dan Nosowitz Posted 08.30.2012 at 10:50 am 8 Comments

OnLive Playing L.A. Noire Dan Nosowitz

The promise of OnLive always seemed crazy: graphics-intensive major games are offloaded to remote servers and streamed to any device with an adequate internet connection. That means, yeah, Crysis on an iPad. We've been impressed with the service in the past, despite its catalog and availability issues, because it's just such an amazing, futuristic idea, but the service crashed a few weeks ago--and crashed hard. The Verge has a great account of how the most exciting company in gaming lost it all--read it here.

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8 Comments

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killerT

08/30/12 at 11:39 am

Wow! The public really dodged a bullet with the collapse of that company.
We almost had another Apple on our hands. Only way more evil.

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Nonapod

08/30/12 at 12:43 pm

It was way too soon for Prime Time. Cloud gaming will be great in about 10 years or so when most people have >100mb low latency connections.

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aerosphere

08/30/12 at 12:51 pm

It didn't collapse, It's just about to ignite with OUYA.

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suggestivesimon

08/30/12 at 1:04 pm

@ killerT

You have an interesting perspective on things. Why do you say that?

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suddenmischief

08/30/12 at 1:10 pm

Wow, that article really made Steve Perlman look like a jerk. If he hadn't had a hissy-fit about the EA games and tried variable quality steaming (like netflix does) OnLive probably would have grown enough to stay ahead of the bills.

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JediMindset

09/01/12 at 12:55 pm

its was destined to fail.

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

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killerT

09/03/12 at 3:22 pm

@suggestivesimon

Did you read the linked article?
The company failed because of a whole series of spiteful decisions, with no consideration for the paying customers, the investors, or the employees.
What would have happened if OnLive actually had some power?

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suggestivesimon

09/07/12 at 11:25 am

@killerT

OnLive would've undoubtedly had to go public to raise enough cash to scale its idea, so the company would've ultimately had to live up to the expectations of shareholders, just like everyone else. Just cause the guy who had the idea is a douche, doesn't mean he's going to poison the well forever.