Onlive could spell trouble for PC makers

"prevents the selling-on of [secondhand] games"

this is the most evil crime since the murder of jesus!

hooray for onlive for purging the world of this evil deed!

its outrageous to think someone could have the right to sell their own property on to someone else! does the public think they are entitled to have rights? oh no, no, no....

bring back hanging!

I think its going to take a long time before the need for high performance hardware at home comes to end. There are many applications where the latency would still be an inhibiting factor. Of course hardcore gamers would be among the last to switch over, where even the latency using a wireless mouse or the time it takes for the LCD to process the signal can effect game play. These gamers obviously a significant target audience.

With broadband in the UK being pathetically slow, I can't see this taking off at all - especially with 1600x1200 @ 75-100fps being commonplace these days on local hardware.

That's saying nothing of the EU's plan to sabotage net neutrality and reduce network speeds in Europe to a crawl, unless you're just using unencrypted HTTP.

The day I have to pay a fee to play Video Games over the net on some Cloud server is the day I quit playing games. I build my own Gaming rigs and will move to consoles if this ever took over. The rumor of MS buying out EA scares me too.

@bowlhead.

2nd hand reselling of games hurts the gaming industry.

Let me put it this way:
You make a game. You sell a copy to person A for $50. Person A finishes the game, and sells it to person B for $40. Person B plays game and then sells it to person C for $30. Person C then sells it to person D for $20...

You see where this is going? 4 consumers have bought and played a legal copy of your game. Out of $140 that has been paid for that copy, you only saw less about 1/3 of it. ($50)

Doesn't really inspire you to make more games, does it?

The software companies hate Gamestop, EB, Gamecrazy, etc. Because they are making pure profit off of the software companies' games and not giving them a dime in return.

The resellers buy used games for $10-$15, and then resell them for $30-$40, and it's pure profit for them, but not for the software developers. In a weird way, it's really not much different then pirating in the eyes of the software companies. The only difference is that they saw one sale from a single copy of a game that 4+ people played, rather then no money.

So GM should get mad at me selling my old car because the person who bought it could have gone and bought a new one instead of my used one?

How many used game stores do EA, Atari, Ubi, etc own? None.

How many used-car dealerships do GM dealers own? Countless.

How many sell used cars on their GM lots? All of them.

GM still makes money. GM still makes money on repair and parts for used cars.

Bioware doesn't make money when your used copy of Mass Effect breaks. Unless you buy a new copy of the game.

Gee, I'm so sure that the online subscription service will be one-time fee like if you were buying the game disk, certainly they wouldn't want to milk the users for annual or regular fees...

HB

The only reason to buy a used game is because 50$ is frakking rape. You have a scratched disk, missing manual, DRM activations to fight etc. Can't replay it a year after you sold it.

If developers made games with replayability this woulnd't happen. If they sold their game for 20-30$ the first time, they would have 3 sales at roughly 25$ each = 75$ instead of 50$, with maybe 1 lost sale due to resale. Instead of one 50$ copy getting resold 3 extra times.

EA should buy or compete with GameStop and get that profit instead of bitching.

Ok so GM was a bad example,, how about my sons old bike that i just sold at a garage sale, or all his old cloths and toys, should their manufactures get made because they didn't get to sell new ones because I sold my old ones?

Oh and most dealerships are privately owned and either get cars on consignment, or buy them outright from GM, I know because my brother owns one.

There used to be a time when games had a concept of "replayability" that would make people want to hold onto their games to continue playing it. If people are reselling their games so quickly that it causes significant harm to the gaming industry, obviously the games lack enough content to justify their original price in the first place.

Games like that are like movies that you watch once at the theatre, and don't return to see again. The difference is, the movie ticket costs you $10 at most, the game costs $50. So people resell to recoup their costs on a content-lacking game.

It's like feeling bad that you let someone use your overpriced college textbook so the person doesn't need to pay for their own overpriced copy. I don't feel bad at all about that--in fact I feel rather good about screwing them over.

If the industry wants to earn their money, they do need a content deployment system like the OnLive system -- and they need to reduce their prices accordingly if their games are nothing more than 6-hour experiences. That, or make some better games people actually want to *invest* in and keep until the secondary market is not a threat.

Online offers highest resolution of 720p, which they call HD this is not even 1080i.
For such low resolution one needs 5Mbs bandwidth,
in the meanwhile low gaming rig is capable of much higher resolutions.
Only netbooks apply here

It is apparent than online/cloud gaming (if it works) will win as long as it is a significantly better value than buying a high end computer (it is not claiming to be better quality than your own high-end PC). Obviously if you can afford building your own $2000+ computer every 18 months and can afford buying a new game every couple of weeks then a service like Onlive does nothing for you (it is not targeted at people with gaming money to burn), but if you don't have that kind of money to spend and want the best value Onlive may be the way to go.

Ok so I've known about this service since day 1 and all I'm gonna say is go look at their list of claims, any first year cisco student could tell you they are promising things they can't even hope to deliever on. Seriously they make claims which are literally impossible unless they've cracked quantum entanglement for data transmission purposes. That's not even considering the issues with guaranteeing service, maintenance, being totally dependant on the internet for your gaming, the total lack of ownership of anything and the fact the ISP are gonna go apeshit on you for constantly using a couple hundred gigs of bandwidth a month. I mean seriously ISP's bitch about torrents taking up the majority of their bandwidth when people are only doing 50-100GB's a month, how do you think they are gonna react when you started doing close to 200GB a month just in gaming?

So what they will make this "game streaming"? It won't work.
People won't buy it simply because they don't want to be online every time they want to play a game. They want to be able to play their games without a big brother watching their playtimes. They want to play games even with their net down or overloaded.
Just the idea of another montly bill also freak me out. Maybe this sh*t will work out with the Wii crowd, but then again, they are casual gamers, they won't subscribe a service just to play a few hours.
I won't expect it to be cheap as well, because Onlive will have to keep both a high-end computer with high-end video card and a ultra wide, fast internet connection to make this happen. Can you imagine the bandwidth it's gonna take to get 100.000 users playing, let alone a couple millions or more...
Let's just hope they go dead really soon. I'm with my fingers crossed.

well as soon as you can buy a pc for less than a console it may have a chance. As is even the ps3 is in the same price bracket as a netbook and offers better preformance localy with less hastle and no bandwidth issues.
untill someone can offer a similar experience for similar cost its not going anywhere. any one know what spec the client software will require?

@Eito You don't need to buy a PC (or have any client software) at all. They are offering a small 'microconsole' that is cheaper than the traditional consoles (or potentially free/rented with a subscription) for people that don't have PCs.

@Fausto big brother already knows everything about Xbox 360 gamers already(when they are on, what they play, their achievements, etc) and it is successful so that is not a big deal. I agree with your profitability argument I also don't see how they can make this work cheaply, but that is their claim (and what they would need to do to be viable), so I hope they succeed.

Hey mister, first off: the whole sum payed by all the people is not 140$ you said, but the same 50$. Do the math: The first person paid 50$ to buy the game, then sold it for 40 to the next. So, eventually the first person payed 50$ - 40$ = 10$. And so on. In the end, the total amounts to the 50$.
Now, it's perfectly legal to sell some product - any !! - to another person. Following your curbed logic, re-selling your car should be looked at as a crime, eh ?! You must be working for the maaafiiaaaaaa... tell you what... those 'poor' guys riding sport cars should sell a game for 2 bucks and no one will bother reselling it. How comes, they won't do that ? Of course they don't want to, in this case they'll drive only 5 sport cars, not 20 and won't sit any more on big fat millions bonuses. Poor chaps, they. Really poor.

While I think users have a perfectly good right to sell used games, I can easily understand why it frustrates developers - and your incoherent, rambling response is absolutely idiotic and quite insulting.

Where did you get the idea that all game developers get huge bonuses and drive 20 sports cars? And if your argument is that they'll make more money by lowering prices and avoiding used game sales, why are you saying that they won't do it because they'll make less money?

And what, exactly, is wrong with a business trying to make money? Are the devs supposed to do this out of the goodness of their souls, and just give the games to you so you can have fun, without feeding their families or putting their kids through college?

Idiot.

Typical Tory attitude,screw the customers for every penny they have in persuit of maximum profit...bottom line...Tory boy's become Thatcherite fat cats....game players can't afford to do anything but play the expensive game until the disc dissolves in one big gas CLOUD of dust & fragments.
When one buys something, one owns that something, that is why it's sold, but Tory Boy(who is religious advocate of Capitalism), wants to keep the price at ceiling height period.
Of course Tory Boys don't know,or understand the MARKET ....STUPID IRIOT!!!