Onlive launches in UK, offers cheap games and other deals

@Knives Chau Shouldn't really matter since ya live in Canada anyway...

@jamiepgs You just keep watching. You ain't seen nothing yet.

@InkSix Yeah, because stores love selling things that never bring the consumer back to the store... I doubt store will carry these. We are also many years from this being a widely used service. People still have dial-up in some places.

@Roflrex

This is primarily a gaming service, with other things such as application streaming coming later. Customers who are concerned with their gaming habits don't use dial-up.

And when OnLive becomes popular enough, retail stores will carry the consoles. Stores want to sell things people want to buy. And they can come back to the store for extra controllers, and possible future OnLive cards, just like PSN and Xbox.

@InkSix

Unfortunately, not even Onlive can change the laws of physics.

@Roflrex For starters, stores are already beginning to carry OnLive. When they launched in the UK today, they also launched with product in stores at GAME, one of the UK's largest gaming retailers, who will be carrying OnLive hardware in every location. GAME is only the first retailer, and OnLive has already stated, more deals are in the works on both sides of the Atlantic, and will be announced when their retail partners are ready to make those announcements.

So it's already in retail, and this blind assertion that it cannot be, or won't be, well that is all that it is, a blind assertion. And this is why retailers are willing to carry OnLive in their stores - they can make money at it.

Plenty of retailers carry recharge cards for Xbox LIVE, PSN and WiiWare, and those retailers make money every time they sell a card . . . cards that gamers used to buy digital goods. Matter of fact, if you take into account all the companies that issue recharge cards for the sale of digital goods and services, the recharge card industry is easily worth the tens of billions of dollars currently. OnLive, like every other company out there selling digital goods, need only to plug into an already existing system provided by the recharge card industry

And it is not like retailers do not get a piece of the pie when they sell console hardware. Most game companies (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) sell their hardware either at cost, or at a loss. And as a result, retailers do not make much, if any money at all from the sell of game console hardware from the big three. OnLive on the other hand, their console costs so little (estimated by iSuppli to be in the $25 to $40 range), they can afford to give it away for free (which they do quite often). Normally the OnLive console retails for $100, but most of that $100 is pure markup. That's markup that OnLive can just hand over to the retailers, which means the retailers stand to make more money selling OnLive hardware, than selling anybody else game console.

As you see, there is plenty of reasons why retailers would have no problem carrying OnLive in their stores. Which is why you already see them starting to do so.

@Tachyonic Cargo That was more of a lecture then a comment.

@Dick Socrates actually its a multiplication of eight times. Most broadband providers advertise there services in megabits(Mb) rather than megabytes(MB) and there are 8 bits in every byte. Therefore with a 20Mb connection you can expect maximum download speed of 2.5(20/8) megabytes per second.

It is very confusing and i think it is wrong the way they are allowed to advertise like this.

@Dick Socrates Internet speeds are Mbps. Megabits per second.

8 Megabits is 1 Megabyte.

OS's like Windwos and OSX do show download speeds as Megabytes, however ISP companies will advertise it as Mbps.

I think really it's just to confuse consumers, since most people know what a Megabyte is, thus thinking the speeds are faster then they really are.

So BTs up to 20Mbps is around 2MB per second. 2.5MB to be exact.

Kb = Kilobyte
Mb = Megabit
MB = Megabyte
GB = Gigabyte

Caps matters in their abbreviations.

@Ordeith you do this on every single OnLive post. seriously?? if you dislike the service so much, ignore the articles! plenty of other people really like OnLive

@stickzman

And those people think McDonalds is gormet.

Sorry, the realities of the internet, the speed of encoding-transmitting-decoding-getting input-responding, visual quality issues, and lag don't just magically go away because the astro-turfers here want them to.

A $60 game through onlive will always be a worse experience than a $60 game through steam or even on a game console. There is no changing that.