Onlive is doing just fine with all their streaming games and everything, i dont think Microsoft will have a problem plus advertising and xbox live gold I don't think they ate worried about money plus all the strict rules over copyright and user stuff there's not gonna be alot illegal copying and everything, I'm just saying this may not happend for years and if onlive is making good money microsoft will as well and maybe more because more users mean more advertisements and its just a big stratagie, it may take a few years after microsoft introduce the xbox 720 but they will eventually will do it. Plus if they arent usimg disks anymore for the 720 like it was rumored from a bunch of companies like ign and everything then it would make sence that ghey might stream as well
OnLive Launches New Company to Avoid Bankruptcy | TIME.com
Onlive is barely surviving, and has been barely surviving for quite some time. The simple fact is that they didn't factor-in the price of constantly streaming into their equation, and so hardly anyone wants to use their service because it would be far, far too expensive to do so. If I watch a single 22 minute long episode of South Park on Netflix on my smart phone, and it's only running at 720p, and I go from a $60 data usage bill to a $100 bill just from that, just imagine the cost of trying to stream a 1080p game stream for any length of time at any regular interval. The cost would be very, very high unless you had unlimited internet, which is exceedingly uncommon these days, as 99% of "unlimited plans" are actually just capped internet with fees (unlimited for a price). The very idea of being able to pay for such a thing is completely absurd, your internet bill would be HUNDREDS of dollars every month.
So anywhere without uncapped internet (anywhere that isn't South Korea or a couple of dots on the eastern coast) can't use it, and anyone with uncapped internet that doesn't have speeds over 15 megs (most uncapped internets have no cap because they are not high speed) eliminates even more people. It leaves a very, very tiny percentage of people who have uncapped internet, an even smaller percentage of those who have uncapped
high speed internet, an even smaller percentage of people who have both of those who are gamers, and an even smaller percentage of those who are PC gamers who are old enough to even use such a service often enough to warrant its presence.
It's a very tiny audience.
And plus advertising? Seriously?
Do you really want to watch commercials just to play a video game? Aren't load times bad enough? Can you imagine just how awful it would be to try and play something like Assassin's Creed 3, and get slammed with commercials CONSTANTLY because they know you have to watch them to play their game?
THAT WOULD SUCK.
Next thing about copyright, you don't really understand how that works. Rules simply don't work on pirates, no matter how effective you think your DRM is, they will break it every single time without fail. People make a living doing this. It's just part of the world. The reason however that companies lose so much money on games due to pirates is because pirates are offering a better deal than the publisher is. Let's weigh in what they'd be offering in this situation:
Microsoft: huge internet bill, latency, server downtime, subscription fee, commercials during gameplay, account freezes, no ownership of product, low res video (unless you want to pay thousands for streaming 1080p at all times)
Pirates: internet bill was a fart in the wind, real-time gameplay, free, no commercials, no account issues, the product can't be taken away from you, no server crashes or downtime
The choice is pretty obvious. All the microsoft version does is add irritating BS to deal with, and takes away from just playing the game.
Onlive is
not making good money. They had to fire most of their employees without severance pay and dump their company to reform at the
peak of their company's financial situation.
IGN is full of crap, and pretty much any gamer with two braincells knows it. Tell me why is it that every AAA game that comes out, no matter how awful, short, bland, or copy-paste it is gets a 9/10 on IGN? Because they are paid to do reviews, and have been for years. They do normal reviews as well, but anything that's AAA gets at least an 8.5/10 from IGN. As well they are incredibly inconsistent and basically a parasite on the gamer culture that's brainwashing idiots into buying shovelware and it needs to stop. IGN is not a good source of information, especially rumors.
The problem with the console gaming scene right now is that it's in uncharted territory where no one knows what to do, so everyone is trying to come up with a plan. When the last console cycle started, everyone said that the Xbox360 and the PS3 were the future, but all they really were were their predecessors with bigger hardrives, better graphics, and entertainment junk that had nothing to do with video games, with a massive pricetag. The only real game console was the Wii, which was much cheaper, without the frosting, and was the only one trying to innovate in the industry.
Halfway through Sony and Microsoft saw that the Wii was destroying the sales charts and gamers were onto their scene, because their consoles added almost nothing to the industry but better graphics. After that they started trying to imitate the Wii in various ways, and now that its been proven that only innovation in some spectacular manner will keep the console wars going, they are experimenting with radical new ideas.
However, creating massive money sinks is
not lucrative to the industry whatsoever. I don't care if they created a magic crystal ball that could play Xbox9000 games everytime I tapped by heels together; its still the same system, same game features, better graphcis and bigger harddrives add
NOTHING to the industry, and trying to make games more accessible than they already are (because its SO HARD to buy a box from best buy, attach 2 cords and done) still adds exactly nothing to the industry besides a new billing plan.
Consumers have been onto this over the last 4 years in gaming, and this is why the entire console market has plummeted off a cliff. Sales are down, development is down, investors are not jumping up and down like they were during the entire last console cycle.
I can't even begin to state just how many lines this crosses for people, always-on DRM, non-ownership, huge bills, internet requirements for singleplayer games, high-speed internet for singleplayer games, the inability to resell their games, unable to buy used games, being forced to watch commercials even after subscribing to a service (because the service wouldn't be able to maintain itself without ads) the list goes on and on, but I can make a list of incidents where publishers hit massive mudcrab storms for trying each and every one of those things, all of which failed miserably and were regretted and even APOLOGIZED FOR by publishers.
TL;DR, this is probably the worst idea in gaming history in the last decade.
