What do you think will be the fate of Onlive?

Do you think it will work well and become commercially successful as all the other consoles or do you think it will become the biggest failure in Video game history?

Two years max.  Cable company backing will be squandered and their actual market will show to be very limited.  The whole idea is pretty poorly executed.

I hope it becomes successful. It seems really cool, but at this point I don't really know.

I hope it catches on in order to put a bit of pressure on Microsoft/Sony, to take away the monopoly on the tv-gaming-online market share. It would be healthy to make them a little uncomfortable. The major competition of a service that doesn't require a hardware purchase at the outset would be noteworthy for them, and I'll bet they've had a few meetings about it already.
 
It just reeks of 'too good to be true', however. I guess it remains to be seen how things turn out. I'm in the UK anyhow, so whatever happens, I won't see it unless it survives the trial period in the US.

If it works well I don't see why it wouldn't be extremely successful.  I know I would use the service for PC gaming at the least.

I think much depends on how viable it is over lower quality connections. If it proves to be relatively rugged, then I don't see why this wouldn't take off in a big way - providing the pricing structure is right and there's actually something people want to play.

I don't see why PC gamers would want that service.  The pleasure of PC gaming is setting custom resolutions and using mods, cheats, save edittors and the rest.  As well as being able to have your chat programs like ventrillo running alongside your game.  You take away all of that capability and you may as well be playing on a console.

They'll become a cool niche service for awhile, sort of like Good Ole' Games. I just don't see them lasting long enough for the internet to evolve into what it needs to be for them to be successful. That is, bandwidth caps and generally slow US broadband speed will hamper its usefulness too greatly. Maybe they will, and they'll see an eventual rise to success. 
 
You can bet graphics card makers will be fighting it though. Sure, they'll be selling cards to go into the servers for Onlive service, but I think they see a much more lucrative business in dealing with the consumer or individual businesses directly. After all, gaming isn't the only thing to be done on the GPU these days, and GPGPU (general purpose computing on GPUs) has been the shift of focus for both ATI and NVIDIA. There's also CAD, modeling, photo and video editing, encoding, etc. Though those are generally done on a workstation level card, amateurs with a consumer level card still benefit from working with a gpu.

I can't really say since there isn't much previews yet for it. It sounds pretty good, though.

Oh, and if they have the backing of ISPs, you can still bet on the ISP charging you a more hefty fee for the use of the service. I'd rather pay for my games straight-up than feed more money every month to my stupid cable company. I simply can't afford the tiered pricing model. If I'm going that route, I'd rather buy into Gamefly.

" I don't see why PC gamers would want that service.  The pleasure of PC gaming is setting custom resolutions and using mods, cheats, save edittors and the rest.  As well as being able to have your chat programs like ventrillo running alongside your game.  You take away all of that capability and you may as well be playing on a console. "

" Oh, and if they have the backing of ISPs, you can still bet on the ISP charging you a more hefty fee for the use of the service. I'd rather pay for my games straight-up than feed more money every month to my stupid cable company. I simply can't afford the tiered pricing model. If I'm going that route, I'd rather buy into Gamefly. "

" @AndrewB said:

" Oh, and if they have the backing of ISPs, you can still bet on the ISP charging you a more hefty fee for the use of the service. I'd rather pay for my games straight-up than feed more money every month to my stupid cable company. I simply can't afford the tiered pricing model. If I'm going that route, I'd rather buy into Gamefly. "

Pretty sure they have support from the major ISPs.  I understand skepticism, but its funny to think about a time when people were weary about dumping money into Steam. "

I don't know about OnLive itself. But the general idea of streaming highend games from a datacenter directly onto the customers screen will prevail and succeed within 5-15 years, depending on your location.

@Seppli
5-15 years is a long time to make such a prediction.  Who knows what kind of technology and processing power will be in effect even 5 years down the road.  Maybe the cloud will be able to process games without the need of subscription models like these?  Maybe the economy will recede further and bandwidth costs will be too expensive to maintain services liked these?  Maybe chip speeds will rocket so fast that the idea of people having separate hardware pieces to upgrade and maintain will be a thing of the past, thereby making services like these utterly redundant? Moore's Law and all that.
 
@Stephen_Von_Cloud said:

"I agree on the mods, but everything else I don't use and never had in all my years of PC gaming besides ventrilo, and why couldn't you run that alongside OnLive anyways?  Also just add in the fact that people want to play some of these PC games but they don't have the money for a the rig required.  I see the appeal of the service. "

OnLive Bandwidth Usage Concerns » OnLive Players

" @Seppli
5-15 years is a long time to make such a prediction.  Who knows what kind of technology and processing power will be in effect even 5 years down the road.  Maybe the cloud will be able to process games without the need of subscription models like these?  Maybe the economy will recede further and bandwidth costs will be too expensive to maintain services liked these?  Maybe chip speeds will rocket so fast that the idea of people having separate hardware pieces to upgrade and maintain will be a thing of the past, thereby making services like these utterly redundant? Moore's Law and all that.
 

@Stephen_Von_Cloud

said:

"I agree on the mods, but everything else I don't use and never had in all my years of PC gaming besides ventrilo, and why couldn't you run that alongside OnLive anyways?  Also just add in the fact that people want to play some of these PC games but they don't have the money for a the rig required.  I see the appeal of the service. "

See below. 

@Meteora  

Minimum $50 / year subscription model + game rental cost (demos free and + OPTIONAL set top box price (could by $50 but I'm guessing higher).  That doesn't seem so cheap compared to Steam where IF you already have a decent PC you actually GET the games instead of renting them and there's no yearly subscription fee AND Steam and likewise services have really good sales.  Not to mention that Steam supports an offline model too when your internet becomes unusable.  Then there's bandwidth costs, in the US your largest ISP ComCast supports a maximum bandwidth cap of 250GB/month.  Hours and hours of streamed game footage will eat serious amounts of your bandwidth cap -  1hr of gaming OnLive HD = slightly less than 1GB of data usage at optimum performance which will be less than 60% of the time, based on how video compression and streaming works for TV, as opposed to movies.  How many hours a month do you game?  How many watching video?  Videoconferencing?  Voicechatting?  Streaming music? MMOs? it all adds up and Comcast's 250GB /month cap is the highest consumer cap available. And all of this is on the proviso that it looks good too, which it will not do so consistently.  How consistent is NetFlix on consoles or set top boxes?  EXACTLY and this has the potential for a much worse performance issue.  LAG.

For my money OnLive is a valueless proposition for the end user.  It is geared solely so that Cable companies can pick up some of market value lost to Brick and Mortar retailers as Software Vendors turn their focus from product to service.  None of it really benefits the end user except giving them the ILLUSION of convenience.

OnLive Bandwidth Usage Concerns » OnLive Players

"

It won't do well enough for publishers to experiment with how much they can charge people. The 2nd company to try this will, though. And the 3rd bowl of porrage was just right.

I don't think it will really take off until 2012 or so when we have the necessary bandwidth for smooth 1080p streaming and instantaneous inputs. Gamers can identify even the slightest of lag (ask the SF community about it) and we don't have the latency yet for shooters, racing or even some sports games. But once we do, OnLive looks like the best way forward.

"  I see it more like something like 'Video-On-Demand', something which has been floating around for a good decade or so and is now more or less a reality in many places around the globe. I see the proposition of OnLive in the same light as I saw Video on Demand. It's a simple inevitability.  Yeah, we might discover that we are all actually Martian refugees and did travel to Earth on the Moon 5000 years ago as the 3rd Martian World War wiped out all life on Mars in a Nuclear Winter - by discovering the gigantic engines and powerplants on the backside of the moon in the year 2011... or progression will happen in more or less predictable ways. Progression into profitability. Streaming highend games will find broad success as soon as it becomes economically feasible. "

" @Seppli said:

"  I see it more like something like 'Video-On-Demand', something which has been floating around for a good decade or so and is now more or less a reality in many places around the globe. I see the proposition of OnLive in the same light as I saw Video on Demand. It's a simple inevitability.  Yeah, we might discover that we are all actually Martian refugees and did travel to Earth on the Moon 5000 years ago as the 3rd Martian World War wiped out all life on Mars in a Nuclear Winter - by discovering the gigantic engines and powerplants on the backside of the moon in the year 2011... or progression will happen in more or less predictable ways. Progression into profitability. Streaming highend games will find broad success as soon as it becomes economically feasible. "

I'm not sure if you realise this but VOD earns money consistently in one area alone : PORN.  Every other type of VOD is either free as part of marketing (adjunct to television, part of a larger ad campaign etc), paid for by marketing (HULU, youtube et al) or just getting off the ground (SecondLife movie rental, Netflix etc).  Almost none of the latter services save for Youtube, SecondLife rentals and Hulu are making any profit. Infrastructure and service maintenance costs are astronomical, let alone licensing fees.  Porn makes money because they largely either create their own content (minimal licensing fees) or people are willing to pay what it really costs (vs Netflix's idea that if they market heavily enough at a cheap enough fee- enough people will eventually come to offset their costs into profits).  VOD is NOT economically feasible unless you create your own content and OnLive doesn't, no matter which ties to cable they have. "

Saying piracy is profitless is rather a narrow view on the value of marketing wouldn't you say?  Not that I support piracy.  Onlive is no godsend to the gaming industry if it marginalises the customers who you want to reach.  In a tough economy, most businesses fall back on what they know because it guarantees profits that they can already expect.  Your optimism for VOD gaming is not shared throughout the industry despite whatever spin is being spun by OnLive and the Cable networks who wish to make it happen now.  OnLive is a dead duck and frankly, I see services such as Steam and XBOX Live and PSN which offer electronic distribution having far more bouyancy in the long term.  VOD gaming leaves all of the infrastructure cost and management on the shoulders of the service providers while electronic distribution leaves much of it on the customers.  The latter is far more likely to survive market volatility than the former.  VOD for movies is one thing, it's just a matter of data warehousing, VOD of games is entirely more complicated and much more expensive to maintain.  Whatever promise OnLive might have as a techdemo it remains to be seen how effective it will be in practice to maintain profitably.

" @cide said:

" @AndrewB said:

" Oh, and if they have the backing of ISPs, you can still bet on the ISP charging you a more hefty fee for the use of the service. I'd rather pay for my games straight-up than feed more money every month to my stupid cable company. I simply can't afford the tiered pricing model. If I'm going that route, I'd rather buy into Gamefly. "

Pretty sure they have support from the major ISPs.  I understand skepticism, but its funny to think about a time when people were weary about dumping money into Steam. "

Well, it's not exactly the same thing, and I'd be a lot less skeptical without knowing what I know already about the internet. I know we won't know for sure until its actual release, but I just don't see how, with all the moaning people are already going on about that the internet infrastructure can't keep up with the increasing need for bandwidth, assuming this actually caught on and a substantial amount of people started using it, there'd be no way that all that raw, ridiculous amount of streaming data could be added onto that pile. They can claim all they want to that it won't be an issue, but I can hardly just believe that without seeing it for myself.  Also, I repeat: the only reason ISPs are on board is because they can make a crapton load more money off of you if they charge you a significantly higher monthly fee for onlive access.  But whatever... I know for a fact that I'll continue buying beefy PCs for uses other than gaming, so I really don't care one way or the other. If what you're looking for is the capability to play these games through your smaller, less capable devices, such as your phone, it could still be really useful. But usefulness is going to be hampered by cost. For a lot of people, that may not be a big deal. It seems like it should be, because it seems a lot of the people interested in the service just want to forego having to spend a good amount on a computer in the first place. And to me, it is.  *sigh*... instead of moaning on and on about it, let me just leave it at I'm still incredibly skeptical, yet interested in how things are going to turn out. "

OnLive will have to win on exclusivity if they're going to get any traction, but they're banking on solely 3rd party material that you'll be able to find on other consoles. 
 
There are more issues with OnLive, but that seems to be a glaring one.

Do we even know when it will happen?

Too ambitious.

" OnLive will have to win on exclusivity if they're going to get any traction, but they're banking on solely 3rd party material that you'll be able to find on other consoles.  There are more issues with OnLive, but that seems to be a glaring one. "

Anyone remember

" @Dalai said:

" OnLive will have to win on exclusivity if they're going to get any traction, but they're banking on solely 3rd party material that you'll be able to find on other consoles.  There are more issues with OnLive, but that seems to be a glaring one. "

Um no dude. Its not its own console, its an extension of PC games. It doesn't need exclusives, that's retarded. "

" @Dalai said:

" OnLive will have to win on exclusivity if they're going to get any traction, but they're banking on solely 3rd party material that you'll be able to find on other consoles.  There are more issues with OnLive, but that seems to be a glaring one. "

Um no dude. Its not its own console, its an extension of PC games. It doesn't need exclusives, that's retarded. "