The "Founding Members" of
OnLive--the eager participants who have signed up for the program during an
ongoing promotional period--will have free access to the streaming service for a year and will additionally be given the option to renew the service month-to-month at $4.95. Not bad, but free or low-cost membership doesn't mean OnLive's cloud-based games are free. They are, in fact, most definitely not.
Borderlands: An OnLive Joint
has created a spectacular list of what the current games are costing those of us with the service on our PCs and Macs. It's also a good representation of the scattered nature of pricing options. Some games, for example, allow for three-to-five-day cloud rentals. Others? Not so much. But all games, regardless of cost, whether purchased or rented, will only be yours until "at least" June 17, 2013.
Here's a taste of what Eurogamer gathered.
More games will inevitably launch, including a much-needed
Riddick title, so maybe a more exact idea of what to expect in terms of cost will crop up. As of right now, it seems like rental options are only being extended to older titles--but even that doesn't stand up too well.
I gave OnLive a short spin the other afternoon. You're required to have a wired connection--which is a silly hassle--but I was impressed with how
Batman: Arkham Asylum's demo ran on my Macintosh. The visuals were decent and the action didn't have noticeable combat lag. This isn't an endorsement, by the way. I just had a few minutes to spare. Surely, some of you have given it a spin for longer stretches, right? How is it?
You don't get the quest for articles, silly.
lol @ you.
The sub is definitely not bad, but renting the game for a couple years is a bit iffy.
I feel the exact same way. In canada I can't care about it. But yeah it is really weird how there is NOTHING on onlive. When this was announced it had the status of "OMG WTF REVOLUTION" for weeks, but now that its out, no one cares? its strange, to say the least
Later I played the first 20 minutes of Splinter Cell Conviction. The image quality was pretty compressed and washed out (true of the service overall, not just this game) and there was a bit of lag in the controls but it was still playable. I was also underwhelmed by the small offering of games but I'm interested to see how things go as the service matures. It did just launch, after all.
The concept of playing a game via streaming is still pretty neat.
Might also be of interest to Mac owners with no PC.
I might be more interested when the "Micro-Console" ships this winter. An easy way to play PC games on my TV wouldn't suck...
Comment above you said he suffered a BSOD on the computer running his game at OnlIve.
For SP games this might work. Competitive multiplayer? I really don't think so. Also the idea of renting games for years makes little sense to me. Latency is still a huge issue for me and even if it was available in Canada I probably still wouldn't bite on this.