The New Steam Killer?

SL33TBL1ND

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Joseph Alexander said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
you haven't read the steam ToS, have you?
they're in their full right to ban you from your account anytime they please... oh and your account is what own the copy of those games, not you.
so yeah, its more or less the same bullshit deal.
Not really, if you stop paying your sub for Onlive, you lose all of the games on your account. Plus you need some damn fine internet to use it. Also, if Valve ever goes under, they've promised to remove the DRM scheme so you don't need to authenticate your games through steam any more.
 

AlexiVolkov

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Joseph Alexander said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
you haven't read the steam ToS, have you?
they're in their full right to ban you from your account anytime they please... oh and your account is what own the copy of those games, not you.
so yeah, its more or less the same bullshit deal.
While true, Steam's track record shows the only time they actually Account ban people is due to piracy, or theft. If a stolen credit card is used to give a large number of games to specific accounts, those accounts can receive the ban hammer for that. Also if steam catches an account trying to run pirated copies of games, yup, ban hammer.
 

Smooth Operator

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Well they aren't really directly competing, but if Onlive really takes off it could kill retail sales as a whole, completely change the marketplace and the oh so dear platform wars.

In theory:
- they can run any game made for any platform
- let you play games on anything from a phone to your top or shitty PC(and consoles if they would allow it)
- any game available anywhere at any time
- not have you risk buying games that may be shit, just start them up and see how it is
- all in all it should be sublime gaming convenience

However:
- internet tech wont really be there for another 5-10 years
- the service gives them absolute control over your gaming experience, and with the ever increasing hostility towards customers in this industry that is a truly terrifying prospect
 

GiantRaven

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I'd like it a lot more (possible enough to even consider paying for it) if all the games were available under the subscription payment model, rather than a bunch of games that look ok and only a few really good ones. To pay to stream each individual game is a completely ridiculous idea. Paying a monthly subscription to stream a huge amount of games is a fantastic one.
 

Robert Ewing

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Steam is working on something like this, so it will be many times better.

OnLive requires a hell of a lot of bandwidth. You don't actually own the games, high spec PC gamers will lol at it's inferiority.
 

Epona

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Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
Same is true for Steam.

Yeah though, even if you pay full price for a game on Onlive, you quit paying your monthly fee and you can't play the game anymore.
 

Epona

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Hiphophippo said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
To be totally honest, you don't legally OWN any game you buy these days. Mind you, if you buy retail you have a physical copy so it's pretty easy to lie to yourself that you do own it but you don't.

And I've always got internet. Well, 95% of the time. And Steam will let me play whatever I want offline so I don't sweat it much. There will come a point, probably in both of our lives where everything is always online. Everything. Always. Games are just trying to get there a little early.
No, you legally own the games you BUY and the only thing standing in the way of that is DRM. So you legally own what you buy DRM puts limits on it. You can see that when you compare PC games (physical copies) with console games where the only difference is in the DRM and how that changes everything.
 

Souplex

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The new "Steam killer" is the old one: Actually owning your games by buying them retail. Sure; you might not be able to get your PC games for it that much anymore, but Blizzard announced they're working on a console version of Diablo III, so all that doesn't really matter anyway.
 

Beryl77

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While it's not a bad idea, I haven't really heard a lot of positive things from people who've tried it. I guess it's just too early, also since my PC can handle pretty much every game out there really well, I don't see much of a reason to use this at the moment.
 

Epona

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Beryl77 said:
While it's not a bad idea, I haven't really heard a lot of positive things from people who've tried it. I guess it's just too early, also since my PC can handle pretty much every game out there really well, I don't see much of a reason to use this at the moment.
You can't alter the video settings or the ini files. The games run at 1280 x 720 (720p) and if you are used to running at higher resolutions and/or cranking up the graphic settings then ONLive will look bad to you.

For example, I played Borderlands on it and with the mouse smoothing turned on by default (you have to edit an ini file to turn it off) it was choppy and the graphics looked bad in 720p. My Steam version runs at 1080p and I can turn the mouse smoothing off and I also alter the field of view.
 

LordFisheh

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Zantos said:
Ooooh, this I have to see. It won't kill steam, they'll live in happy coexistence next to each other and have playdates with GOG and Origin. Cookies for whoever can guess which one of those is a lie and not actually anywhere near my PC.
But Origin lives where you live...
 

Epona

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syrus27 said:
Master Steeds said:
SO has anyone been looking at this new Onlive games thing, it looks like it could be really good.

You get the game in like 5 seconds, there seems to be some good deals like your first game is just £1 (UK only i think) which includes new games like deus ex etc.

I think it costs £6.99 a month, and you can play like 100's of games, i dont know too much about it at the moment, but i thought some of you might be interested.

Downside is the resolution for most games seems to be a bit off and im not sure if you can change it at this moment in time

Edit: OK so after having used it a bit more, im going to agree with most users here, and say it sucks.
Onlive could kill pc gaming as we know it. You'd be foolish to say it sucks though, it really is ahead of our time, it just needs current internet speeds to catch up with it's demands and it really could be revolutionary.
Virtual Boy was ahead of it's time, CD-I was ahead of it's time, 3DS is ahead of it's time, the PS3 was ahead of it's time, etc...

Ahead of it's time only matters if they can stay afloat until the prices come down and/or the infrastructure catches up.

With bandwidth caps I see the brakes being put on internet based services like Netflix, Steam and of course, OnLive.
 

Stormz

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The-Epicly-Named-Man said:
Onlive will never succeed outside of the US, and even there it'll be limited to just the major cities (and possibly Sweden). The fact is that, despite what half the people on these forums will tell you, modern day broadband speeds are still terrible in most parts of the world. I know I have trouble just watching a video with another one buffering in the background, I can't imagine ever being able to stream a whole game at the FPS speeds I could get by just running it off my hard drive.
Not to mention if you use shitty ISPs. ere in Canada we only have I think 3 major companies and they all fuck with you. I have rogers and they purposely throttle your connection and we only have a 50gig limit and 1 gig cost 2$. So paying for that PLUS sub fees and a full priced game is out of the question.

I'm a hater of all online only DRMs though. I also hate steam so Onlive is no exception even if it didn't have all those problems.
 
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Stormz said:
The-Epicly-Named-Man said:
Onlive will never succeed outside of the US, and even there it'll be limited to just the major cities (and possibly Sweden). The fact is that, despite what half the people on these forums will tell you, modern day broadband speeds are still terrible in most parts of the world. I know I have trouble just watching a video with another one buffering in the background, I can't imagine ever being able to stream a whole game at the FPS speeds I could get by just running it off my hard drive.
Not to mention if you use shitty ISPs. ere in Canada we only have I think 3 major companies and they all fuck with you. I have rogers and they purposely throttle your connection and we only have a 50gig limit and 1 gig cost 2$. So paying for that PLUS sub fees and a full priced game is out of the question.

I'm a hater of all online only DRMs though. I also hate steam so Onlive is no exception even if it didn't have all those problems.
Here in Ireland, the main ISP is government funded, and every other ISP has to pay to use it's connections, eliminating any form of competitiveness in the market.
 

omicron1

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I can't see OnLive being a competitor in this market for one simple reason: It's entering the game late. There are already half a dozen established storefronts, a few of them massively popular in certain circles (Steam is generally great, Gamer's Gate has euro/niche titles, Good Old Games has older titles). A service like this can't just come in and claim a small marketshare and be happy with that; at the very least investors will clamor for it to try to take over the market. In much the same manner as every MMORPG since WoW, each new storefront is positioned as The One, the Steamkiller - and then fails to be better than Steam. In Origin's case, it's the one-company-centric nature of the beast - the fragment of the market that it represents (not to mention EA being large and self-important); in OnLive's case, it's a whole raft of issues that fail to make it competitive. It might hang on, barely, with however many people join its service... or it might die completely - an eventuality that will change a great deal about gaming as it now stands. For, if OnLive dies, people will lose access to the games they purchased, perhaps even as soon as a few days prior. They will not be happy about that, and it could bring to the forefront the prime issue with digital distribution, esp. server-centric digital distribution - how do you play if the provider goes belly-up?

Interesting, if it turns out that way. I will be waiting and watching avidly to see if it does so.
 

Appleshampoo

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I have a free 3 month trial for the 6.99 sub they have, which I'll use since it's free, but I'm not going to pay for it. The resolution sucks and when the service goes under everything I've paid for will go bye bye.

I'll stick with Steam for my purchases :D
 

strum4h

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Crono1973 said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
Same is true for Steam.

Yeah though, even if you pay full price for a game on Onlive, you quit paying your monthly fee and you can't play the game anymore.
You can do offline mode on Steam and still play single player games I believe.
 

Hiphophippo

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Crono1973 said:
Hiphophippo said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
To be totally honest, you don't legally OWN any game you buy these days. Mind you, if you buy retail you have a physical copy so it's pretty easy to lie to yourself that you do own it but you don't.

And I've always got internet. Well, 95% of the time. And Steam will let me play whatever I want offline so I don't sweat it much. There will come a point, probably in both of our lives where everything is always online. Everything. Always. Games are just trying to get there a little early.
No, you legally own the games you BUY and the only thing standing in the way of that is DRM. So you legally own what you buy DRM puts limits on it. You can see that when you compare PC games (physical copies) with console games where the only difference is in the DRM and how that changes everything.

Not exactly. DRM is a bit of a misnomer that people have the tendency to misuse or mislabel. Traditonally people view DRM as things like Steam or online passes, things of that nature. Wherein effect it actually encompasses anything used to manage digital media, hence the name digital rights management.

When you buy a console game, what you're buying is the license to use it. Not the game itself. Case in point: Some games come with day one dlc already loaded on the disc that still must be purchased for use. If you OWNED the game on purchase legally everything on the disk would be yours but that is clearly not the case. Mind you, not EVERY publisher uses this sort of shrink-wrap EULA (google it) but nearly all large ones do.

Buying a game in the store does not mean you own it. It means you've purchased a license to use it. Semantics perhaps, but the publisher retains all rights of the product hence why you're not allowed to do with it as you like, IE bundle it up and make it available on torrent sites online. They own it.

You do not.