OnLive Player App for iPad and Android brings tablet/TV integration, ala Wii U

@velocitystrike

"Hopefully Nintendo has the quality software"

Are you new to gaming?

@velocitystrike

hahahahaha..

that was a joke right?

@velocitystrike

"quality software"

aka Mario, Zelda, and all the same fcking games you have been playing since you were 12

So are you guys saying that someone finally figured out what an iPad is for.

@velocitystrike I think your avatar is all Nintendo needs to win. Plus, you have The trinity of Nintendo... Mario, Zelda, and Samus. they all do different things but from the same company.

@ecbremner

you got it! it's definitely a joke. I forgot internets101 - don't attempt sarcasm in writing without an appropriate tag.

@velocitystrike The same tech as Wii U will be shown by Sony at the next e3 using the Vita and PS3. This I guarantee.

No, its just Apple. AGAIN.
I'm usually not an evil person, but I wish these guys would just roll over and die.
Congratulations Apple! You, more or less, set the standard for a new form factor.
Now step aside and let progress take over.

http://www.wholesaleonepiece.com/

@ajbrown141
I couldn't disagree more. Even for high-speed broadband, most people have caps, and those caps are pretty outdated. Comcast's is a joke. 250gb a month with no way to buy more. If you go over twice in six months they cancel your service. Others are worse than this. No to mention the mental hurdle of with onlive you "own" nothing other than the console, which is worthless if the service goes down. At least with Live/PSN/Steam, if they service went, you would still be able to access what you have stored locally (for the most part). If (well, really, let's be honest, when) onlive shuts down, um, yeah, that's it, you're ****ed. You now have a paperweight and literally nothing else. It's just too much of a risk and the surrounded tech has not caught up to it, not to mention any interuption in internet service and you're not playing anything.

@mietha

But you're only looking in the very short-term. Like I said, once super-fast broadband (with higher download caps) is widely available, OnLive looks set to really take off. It's currently building and improving the infrastructure which will allow it to keep growing, and since it improves along with PC technology, it'll constantly look better than its console counterparts.

If I had the money, I would definitely buy shares in OnLive since in 2-3 years I think it will really start to become an important market player.

@ajbrown141

IF either Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo decide that acquiring OnLive is a good idea, they are going to have to shell out a lot of money to buy it. Currently OnLive is valued at over $1.8 billion by it's investors. Had either company (Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo) had been smart enough to pick this company up before they opened doors a year ago, they could likely have purchased OnLive for less than half of it's current value.

If you have been keeping track of OnLive's announcements at E3, then you know not only is the service coming to iOS and Android (including phones as well as tablets), this year, but they are expanding to the UK by the fall, with plans to expand all over Europe soon after, they are already setting up servers in Asia to expand there in 2012, they have inked a deal with Intel that will put OnLive embedded into Intel's CE4100 SoC, which between the Intel and the Vizio deal from earlier this year, is expected to ship in over 25 million HDTVs and over 50 million blu-ray players by this Christmas. And they are already currently working directly with many game developers to leverage the power of OnLive's servers, to create next-gen games, now. Even id Software's engineer supreme, who is also at E3, has stated in two separate interviews, that he is actually impressed with OnLive, and that OnLive is doing is the future of video games.

I think my point is, though it got very little press, this E3 has been a pivotal E3 for the progression of the company. It officially opened it's doors to the public a year ago at E3 2010, and in that time has more than doubled it's market value, and hasn't even IPOed yet. With the moves they are making based on announcements from E3, they are set to at the very least double their market value yet again over the course of the next year. This little startup that could, is quickly turning into an extremely expensive purchase in very short order. Another couple of years go by, and they are going to be almost too expensive to purchase - not without breaking the bank to do so.

Personally, I hope the company remains independent. Far too much of the tech world these days centers far too much around companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Sony - you can't buy any damned thing any longer in the tech space, and not be trapped into one of these companies ecosystems for life. I'm an old school techie, and really feel the best tech, the best innovations, and the best inventions came along before Apple and Google and Microsoft bought up everything and killed creativity and innovation. And especially as a gamer, with all the consoles going uber-casual, trying take over the living room and other ulterior objectives, it's nice for once to have a game company focused on doing one thing - delivering core games to core gamers. And in the case of OnLive, they now can do that to any device you want to play your core games on: a PC, a Mac, a game console, a laptop, a netbook, at tablet, a television, a blu-ray player, and a cellphones. No one else can come remotely close to doing that, and it is this type of independent spirit of innovation which will keep OnLive coming up with new ways to maximize their technology, as well as newer technologies to get excited about.

If they get bought up by one of these giants, then they lose that and simply have some other corporations ideology dogfooded down their throats. Which at the end of the day, would be yet another sad day, with fewer choices and less competition to chose from, for the consumer.

@Tachyonic Cargo

Great points. I've been following E3 but hadn't heard all of the announcements about OnLive. It really looks like they're poised for great things in the next few years.

I'm not saying I'm in favour of Sony/Microsoft buying OnLive, just that it would make sense for them. You're totally right that they should have bought them last year when they were even cheaper, but I guess a year ago we didn't know how successful they would be. Right now it looks pretty clear (to us anyway) that OnLive could be hugely successful and start taking quite a major chunk of market share.

One thing they need to try and work on is the ownership issue - as mietha said, people are worried that they don't actually own anything and that if OnLive fails then they will be left with nothing. I'm not sure how they can get round this, but it's pretty much the only major obstacle they still face. I guess with a larger market share people will become less worried about this, but I still think they should try and do something now to help people get over this mental hurdle.

@ajbrown141

I agree with you 100% about the ownership thing - even as an OnLive customer, it is the one thing that has kept me from purchasing full priced games. Why pay $50 for a game, that I am only renting for three years? Fortunately, for anyone who has actually tried OnLive and given it a fair shot would know, OnLive has some amazing sales - picking up Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood three weeks after it came out, for a mere $12.50, is a steal by anyone's standards. Paying that little money for a brand new game, takes a lot out of the sting of only owning it for three years - and that was before Ubisoft through in The DaVinci Disappearance, free of charge with the deal. Or even take the current sale, spend $10 on any combination of purchases, get a 100% off coupon to credit for any game purchase. That's basically $10 for two games. It's hard to stay upset about not owning the games, when you pay so little for them so often. It's like getting a 3-year game rental, for less than what it costs to rent games for a week from Blockbuster or Hollywood video. Even taking into account how long it takes a rental service like GameFly to do turn around on mailings, I still work out to paying about the same amount every month by "buying" games on sale over OnLive, than even using GameFly - which used to be my goto source for saving money on video games.

And while true, in three years I am highly unlikely to revisit that game again, but if I get nostalgic and want to, I should not have to re-purchase it to do so. However, the way OnLive words that disclaimer, it feels more like they are covering their ass in case either the publisher pulls support, or OnLive goes out of business within that time period. All the same, it would be nice to own the games. However, going into Europe, I feel that OnLive is going to bump into it's first snag over this issue. In America, conservatives for three decades may have done all the can to favor corporations over consumer rights, but in most of Europe, it's the diametric opposition. Consumer rights across much of Europe is like Shambala, Paradise, Valhalla , and Elysium, all rolled into one, in favor of the consumer - with extremely stiff penalties and fines for corporations who either violate the laws, or operate in a manner that could be construed as in bad faith to the spirit of those laws. It may only require a single consumer complaint to get the snowball rolling into a full blown investigation of OnLive by European consumer rights governing bodies. And while not enough to shut OnLive down, is certainly enough to give the company a PR bloody nose on the scope of the recent PSN outages have caused Sony. In the long rung, it is going to be in OnLive's best interest to change that policy in writing. Of course they seem like a bunch of fair blokes, and may have been planning on change the policy anyway, once they pass a particular milestone. However, I hope it does not require the company taking a beating for the Euro press and the Euro consumer advocate governing bodies, to finally get them to make that change.

@Red Deer So you skipped the part where his syncs with the new online controller, which is basically a 360 controller.

@yomachaser

sooo you hold the controller in one hand and an iPad in the other? Intuitive!

@Red Deer

Yeah, it's either buttons with a real controller, or just fake buttons on the tablet screen. All these games need buttons, there is no other way around it. The true beauty of the Wii U controller is the buttons and screen are both at hand.

@yomachaser

Yeah don't think you get the point. If you need an extra controller that means the device which was meant to control your games has failed. In this case its a tablet... So what does the tablet become?? Either a screen or a 'middle man'.

If its a 'middle man' (acting exuivalent to a console) you're playing a less powerful console which ironocally is more expensive to purchase (consoles need controllers, the device and a TV for output). IF its the screen then you have the problem someone before me has stated. Where the hell are you going to place it in order to view it?? You can't hold it because you have the controller. You can ly it down but thats awkward. You can buy a stand.. but that involves buying a stand.

Please try to see where i was coming from before stating "i never saw/read" replys invovling a slightly flawed concept.

@Swifter This works with the onlive controller.

@yomachaser, except with the OnLive controller, the experience is nothing like Wii U. The post is about using the iPad/Android tablet as controller. Read the title

@mimalo88

You know what I see. I see sad people.

I see people who are afraid that change is a bad thing. I see people who think that giving gamers more options to play, is somehow bad for the consumer - as if somehow, fewer options is better. I see people who are afraid that healthy competition is the wellspring of innovation, and they don't want any innovation at all, and just want everything to stay exactly as it is.

Yeah, I see sad people.

@Tachyonic Cargo

Not everything has to stay the same but not everything has to be different. If you go from owning a copy of the game (be it on disc or HDD) to owning the right to play it as long as the company stays in business, is that progress?

Of course, all that I just mentioned could be seen as the trade-off for the low price of the service. That being the case, I can see this as the video game counterpart to Netflix Instant Watch. It's good for trying out games for which you don't want to pay full price, but that's it.

Innovation is fine and all my only fear is that if there is a service interruption or maintenance or my ISP is down which happens more often then I like to admit (thanks Comcast ) I will not be able to play games that I purchased on their service. Is that still innovation? If they can figure that one out I can see this going places but if not I can see this going the same way as the short lived sega channel.

@hitjohnyup

You do know that the iPad and iPod touch have been extremely successful, right?

But anyways, the WiiU controller offers the best of both worlds: a touchscreen AND buttons. With this OnLive streaming thing, you have to settle with either a touchscreen or a controller with buttons. WiiU has both!

Maybe the answer is to get rid of sh*tty Comcast?