OnLive Not Showing at E3? But, Why?

At the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, a little service called OnLive was making huge waves.  Some heralded it as the end of games retail, and other people shrugged and said “Bullshit.”  While the technical viability of it regarding people’s internet connections hasn’t been determined, this phantasmal service is a concept that a lot of people are interested in and talking about.

Several other sites have reported that OnLive won’t be making an appearance at E3, due to the conferences “retail-orientated” nature.  OnLive isn’t something that would be sold in stores, so why should the death knell of the retail industry be shown at this event?  Does anyone remember the Phantom?  It was shown at E3, why shouldn’t OnLive go?

As I discussed in this post, E3 is a dying event.  It’s not as relevant as it was in the past and the funding that is spent on the flashy press conferences are a waste of money that could be better spent exploiting more modern methods of delivering content to the consumers, or funding developers.

With all of the gaming press that goes to E3, it doesn’t seem like the district heads go to the conference and try out games that they’re going to put on their shelves any more.  People know what they want and can get it through services like Amazon, Gamefly, Steam, or one of the myriad other websites that sell games.

So if the retailers have already been cut out, why shouldn’t OnLive come to the show?  The buzz that it generated at GDC was enormous, as people actually cared whether or not it was going to be at E3, it seems.

Maybe OnLive isn’t going to E3 because they don’t have the money. Trying to get the service in tip-top condition before the open beta is announced, they might not have the funds or the man power to get the service into a more believable state. Perhaps they need to make some pretty charts and graphs of statistics for user performance.

Another, more cynical attitude that I and a few other people that I talk share on this topic is that this service is just a sham. Sure, it’s backed by Warner Brothers, but does that really mean anything?  Yeah, they have some capital due to this, so they’re probably going to release this product in the future.  They have publishers backing them, so they’re going to have content, which is what the service is all about.  One problem that I do foresee though, is that there has been a recent trend with American ISPs of relatively low bandwidth caps.  This could seriously hinder the service, as high def video, even with compression, still uses a lot of  bandwidth.  One of the solutions that I’ve heard is to have the cable companies sell “gaming packages” for their Internet, that would allow you to play OnLive games as much as you wanted.  So hopefully by the time they actually (read: if) they release it, these issues that may have been overlooked are ironed out.

I don’t want to see this turning into the next Phantom, as I’m genuinely interested in the idea.  OnLive could change the way we play and buy games.  Maybe not for the best, my old school self wants to actually have a box or something that proves that I own the thing, or at least the files to be natively stored on my machine.  Maybe it just needed some more ironing out before they showed it off again, after all, they really only showed a relatively small tech demo at GDC. 

I wouldn’t want to show an unpolished product at one of the biggest events of the year for my industry, so I assume that’s what OnLive is doing. They’ll be busy getting results and feedback from their beta testing, and scrambling to find an ISP that will work with them for their bandwidth issue so they can actually announce something worth mentioning that’s relevant to the consumer.

Via Gameindustry.biz