OnLive relaunches; ‘The market is more ready for cloud gaming now’

Cloud gaming specialist OnLive has relaunched with two new services – CloudLift and white label business OnLive Go – and is more confident of success this time around.

CloudLift – a £9.99 monthly subscription service – links the player’s game library with their OnLive account and syncs cloud saves automatically, so they can carry on playing on a different device where they left off.

It allows gamers to play any digital PC game they own (which is also compatible with OnLive) on either their PC, Mac, Android smartphone, laptop, tablet or compatible TV, such as the LG Google TV. Games are streamed direct from OnLive’s servers, allowing them to be played on devices that wouldn’t usually have the processing power to run them.

OnLive initially launched in 2010 but laid off its employees in August 2012, before selling off its assets to start up OnLive afresh. Steve Perlman stepped down as CEO while Gary Lauder became chairman.

From now, OnLive will now also sell its own download codes, which will include a seven-day free trial of CloudLift. 

Compatible games include titles from publishers such as Square Enix, Koch Media and Warner Bros, like Batman: Arkham Origins, The LEGO Movie Videogame and Saints Row IV.

A cheaper £6.99 subscription gives players the PlayPack, which provides access to 250 games. Both subscriptions let players share game footage ‘Brag Clips’ with their friends.

OnLive has also launched OnLive Go – a B2B white label business service that lets companies such as developers or other firms launch their own cloud applications. The first application to showcase OnLive Go is a mobile viewer for Linden Lab’s Second Life, which extends the player’s Second Life world to Android tablets via a touch-enabled app, as well as low-end or older laptops and OnLive’s TV platforms. 

The OnLive senior management team includes Lauder, executive chairman and former IGN CEO Mark Jung, UK general manager and former Dell XPS engineer boss Bruce Grove, VP business development Carrie Holder, engineering SVP and former Microsoft exec Don Gordon and VP and product marketing executive Rick Sanchez.

The new OnLive team (From left to right): Mark Jung, Rick Sanchez, Bruce Grove, Carrie Holder and Don Gordon

Bruce Grove told PCR: "What we had done [before] is position ourselves as a platform that forces a user to make a choice – they buy a game on OnLive or they buy it on PC or somewhere else.

"We got rid of all of that and said ‘Okay, what we need to do now is we need to be a benefit to the platform you already own.’

"The market is more ready for cloud gaming now. We got a very critical reception in the past for not owning the games, broadband not being ready – all those sorts of things. If you look at the response to things like PlayStation Now, there’s a change in attitude – people are getting invested with the broadband.

"Look at the new generation of consoles – if you wanted to play the Titanfall beta, that was a 6GB download, which is a chunk of data to pull down. We’re now in a state of mind where big data coming down bandwidth matters. 

"When OnLive first launched, 20mbps was still a good connection. Quickly things have moved into a world where a large amount of the population get 60 or more mbps.

"It’s been really interesting for us doing an audience map of the UK, seeing where the hotspots are. If you overlay that with the BT Infinity map, and the fast fibre to the cabinet, you can see an absolute correlation, and as people are adopting premium internet they’re looking for the full services that take advantage of that."

OnLive has opened data centers in Chicago and Seattle, and increased footprint in existing data centers in Virginia, the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas and Luxembourg.