Even I can’t stay away from this new way of gaming. Release date set at Summer 2009. OnLive comes out of an incubator company called Rearden, which was started by Steve Perlman, the man who made zillions of 1990’s dollars off of WebTV. Apparently they’ve been working on this for 7 years, and they have a raft of major publishers on board: EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Atari, THQ, and so on.
Is it possible that Sony and Microsoft might actually be grateful for OnLive? They lose money on every console they sell, and make it back on software. So if they can just sell software, it’s all profit, right? Then again, OnLive will be running a pretty compelling online gaming community through this thing — if everybody’s game is running on the same hardware, in the same room, it’s a cinch. It looks like they’re doing a nice job of building out some Live-like community features, too. And if they’re supporting all consoles, plus PC? I could easily imagine that service crushing Live and Home.
But you know who’s definitely going to love OnLive? Apple. All that time they spent not turning Macs into a credible gaming platform now looks like pure foresight. OnLive just did it for them.
Source: TIME
