OnLive Drops Subscription Fees
In a move that’s likely to get a few more people interested, streaming gaming service OnLive has permanently removed the subscription fees it was due to charge. It had intended to charge in order to use the service to download demos and use other non-multiplayer features.
The company had previously announced that for a year OnLive would be subscription free anyway, so this serves to extend that, meaning now you won’t need to pay just to try it out.
Users can use the service to check out the “free Instant-play Demos, Free Massive Spectating, Free Brag Clip™ videos, messaging, friending.” In a blog post on the OnLive website, the company has said that they first had to “grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating costs,” something they’ve now done. You still have to pay to play online using either the “3-day, 5-day or Full PlayPass”.
This makes sense and should give more people the chance to just see if it actually works. That has, for good reason, always been the main problem behind OnLive: people’s suspicion of a service that sounds too good to be true. At the moment the it’s restricted to the US so I can’t really try it out (and I’m almost certain that it would be terrible as my internet is run by hamsters in wheels) but this is certainly a step forward. They’ve spoken before about introducing the service in the UK, but that’s probably a good way off.
via: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
News Tags: gaming, online, OnLive, streaming
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I’ve gotten it working on my PC and it’s… not terrible? The lag is very much noticeable and makes games almost unplayable, but it does work, and surprising well too. It’s just a shame their game selection is quite poor.
@John Kershaw: Hmm, it just told me the latency is too high for it to work. The hamsters have failed me yet again.
It told me it detected a high latency connection too, but it still worked basically fine. At least, it worked a lot better for me being in the UK than most games do when I play on American servers. It’s kind of crazy that I got less lag playing Arkham Asylum via OnLine than I do if I try to play old, original COunter-Strike.