Why onlive fail

Target audience Putting the cart firmly behind the horse, having an audience you know wants to play your games and then using streaming technology to provide those games as a service seems like a much more sensible move. Gaikai's vision is now more console-shaped Presumably that's how Sony expects to use Gaikai; plugging it into its existing committed PlayStation audience. And that's exactly what Big Fish Games is doing with its Unlimited service.

Obviously these games don't require anything like the same server costs or bandwidth to stream compared to Crysis: Warhead. While Big Fish's position as the 1 casual publisher with its own traditional digital download distribution portal means it can funnel users between these two services, balancing volume with the revenue it receives.

Big Fish's ambitions are less framerate dependent But even with an audience, it's not trivial to run many servers and deal with the customer support issues if - for whatever reasons - people aren't having the same experience they know they can get if they're playing the game locally.

So, while over the coming months and years, streaming game services will take their place in the games distribution market, they will be one of the available options. The complexities of technology, business model and human psychology are not so easily disrupted into any single solution.

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OnLive said late Friday that many of its assets have been acquired by a new owner, and that the company will transition to a "new form. OnLive was revealed with great pomp and circumstance in , promising to revolutionize the way publishers and players would produce and consume video game content. Instead of selling physical goods, like the retail juggernaught GameStop GME , OnLive would run a copy of a publisher's title from a server at one of the company's datacenters. Then customers would pay a licensing fee to play an on-demand version of the game.

Streaming meant that publishers could patch their games instantly and could save on the packaging and sale of their goods. But the service struggled to keep up the momentum. Big, first-person shooters such as "Battlefield" and "Call of Duty" weren't available on OnLive because of concerns about the service's latency. The same goes for computers. The same laptop, however, is able to run the majority of games decently and even in this case users will still be inclined to update or replace it over time.

The only area where this might make sense is that of consoles, dedicated hardware that, in fact, gamers would prefer not to have to purchase or upgrade.

OnLive however, it is unable to offer such titles, and it is unlikely that any cloud service will do so unless the game is offered by the same companies that produce the consoles.

In an age where processors tend to get smaller, especially graphics, efficient and cheap; in which the very thin phone we keep in our pockets will soon become more graphically performing than the console we have at home … in an era like this one can only be perplexed in front of a business that mainly aims to ignore hardware power which consumers have at their disposal to favor an approach based on a centralized system.

WoW, for example, takes data from the cloud over the course of the game, allowing you to start playing even before the client download is complete. However, rendering assets on servers and then sending everything to a client is not in step with the way modern technologies work and their capabilities.

Yes, it is possible, but there is no economically convincing argument why it should be done, with the exception of some cases like, for example, demos. There is a future for OnLive? No, unless you find a buyer like Gaikai did. The company has decent technology but not good consumer service. What does the failure of Onlive teach us? Article 11 and Article 13 approved European Parliament — And now? What went wrong with OnLive? OnLive unexpectedly sold to an anonymous company OnLive has arrived … and now?

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