OnLive to offer 'OnLive Game Portal' service without monthly fee

Agree with you on gamefly. It comes out way cheaper

because with gamefly you can get PC games & are able to play on a TV or even a netbook on max settings. That is such a similar service.

"subject to available OnLive service capacity and whatever usage limits are associated with each given demo."

Reading between the lines it sounds like the onlive portal won't be sending you fullscreen max setting anything any time soon, also sounds like you might get booted if someone paying a sub comes along and wants to play with the server slot your taking up ......

An almost victory transformed magically into an epic fail

Whoa. Slow down there, big man. One step at a time.

Dear Joystiq Commenter,
Please mail me 3 copies of the demo of your game that I can play over the phone line with my friends so we can try it.

I will need two copies on 1.44" floppy, and one on a 3.25" floppy (Jay's 286 doesn't have a 1.44" floppy drive)

Best Regards,
Kevlar

You haven't played that one, it's not out yet.

there's no need to rag on the guy just because he's bad at time travel.....

Yeah, see, if he owned a PS3 like us, he would also be masters of time travel. 1/1/2000 is where it was at!

The point of OnLive is give people without high-end gaming rigs an opportunity to play the games they've always wanted to (Crysis etc.)
Also, CPU is not the same thing as PC.

Play the games they've always wanted to play with considerable latency*

Fixed.

@bluesky_v2.01

Showing your youthfulness a bit there mate. Its not used nowadays, but back in the 90s it was considered perfectly acceptable to call a PC a CPU. Helped the layman keep track of the fact that his monitor was not his computer.

You made my day +1

I have a hard time believing that the general public is going to buy into terminal based computing when personal computers are so cheap and readily available. Why would I bother paying a subscription fee (leaving games completely out of the equation) to use a cloud-based computer, when I could just use my own computer at home? It makes absolutely no sense.

My prediction might not be worth much, but I'd imagine that very few people are going to pay 15 dollars a month plus the rental fees, plus other fees, to use a service like OnLive. For that much a month you could upgrade your computer bit by bit until it was powerful enough to play whatever game it is you are wanting to play in the first place. Maybe OnLive could have had potential as a rental platform (since PC games can't be rented at a place such as blockbuster or GameFly) but that isn't going to matter a whole lot when there are only a couple of non-MMORPG exclusives for the PC per year.

So, yeah, after a long hype campaign, we are finally seeing the finished OnLive product, and it isn't exactly wowing most of us. If that makes us awesome then...well...we must be awesome.

Oh crap it's time for jeopardy.

Way to be a douche, douche.

Oh relax, we get it that you are into this idea but there are flaws to the business model that deserve criticism. The issue isn't the tech or the service - it's the pricing schemes.

This kind of comment epitomizes the level of research done by the typical blog post comment maker. Sure, Crysis is only the game they've demoed on the service THE MOST but why should he have to know that before telling people who've been in their industry for decades what they're doing wrong?

For $1000 you can build a small-mid end server.

Not gonna spend 1000$ to play games (i have a laptop for all other PC needs, so its all about the games). Not even gonna spend 500$ since i have consoles already, which have the same library for the most part. This is only to play optimized versions of those games. And 15 bucks a month, plus whatever the game cost to try is much more sane.

You do realize that to actually play the game in the purported 720p quality smoothly, you'll probably need a machine in about that range anyway? No, the old PII-450 you have sitting in your closet from years ago isn't going to cut it. So really, you're not going to be gaining as much as you might think.