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OnLive,?the company that has created an on-demand gaming system, that it believes will change console gaming, has announced that it will launch its service in June.
First announced at the Game Developers Conference in 2009, the company has used this GDC to give more information about the system that hopes to radically change the way we play games in the future.
According to the company, gamers will only need to plug in the company's OnLive MicroConsole TV Adapter to work the system.
So far Electronic Arts, Ubisoft 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have all signed up to launch games on the OnLive platform.
Starting on 17 June 2010, the OnLive game service will be available to early registrants in the US for $14.95 a month.
Individual game titles will be available for purchase or rent on an ? la carte basis, with specific game pricing to be announced prior to the consumer launch event at E3, says the company.
While launch titles will be announced prior to E3 in Los Angeles, a few of the anticipated games include Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Origins, Assassin's Creed II, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, Borderlands and Metro 2033.
Tags: Gaming Gaming hardware OnLive Networking PC games Games industry Reardon
OnLive streaming gaming service launching in June originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:53:18 +0000
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'OnLive' Video Game Service to Start Streaming this Summer originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Well, what can we say, but it’s finally here. After almost 8 years of development and millions of lines of code, OnLive, the gaming equivalent of cloud-computing technology is set to take the gaming world by storm on June 17th, coming to both PCs and Macs in the contiguous 48 states at a $14.95 per month base subscription.
The company is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, Dragon Age: Origins, as well as a bunch of other titles. CEO Steve Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that in the future.
Intially the service will run on Macs and PCs as a browser plugin, but the MicroConsole TV adapter will be slated for release later this year, along with other devices. The service will stream at 720p, but 1080p full-HD at 60 fps will be added “as the bandwidth becomes available”.
[OnLive]
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OnLive Game Service to launch on June 17 in the US for $15 a month originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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OnLive at GDC today narrowed down the launch date and pricing for its streaming gaming service. The technology is now due to go live June 17th and will cost $15 per month for playing OnLive's entire catalog through a broadband Internet connection. An exact game library isn't fixed but should vary between 12 to 25 games, including modern games like Borderlands and Mass Effect 2 in addition to some older titles....
OnLive at GDC today narrowed down the launch date and pricing for its streaming gaming service. The technology is now due to go live June 17th and will cost $15 per month for playing OnLive's entire catalog through a broadband Internet connection. An exact game library isn't fixed but should vary between 12 to 25 games, including modern games like Borderlands and Mass Effect 2 in addition to some older titles....
After eight years of planning, games-0n-demand startup OnLive is announcing today its plans for launching its subscription service for providing online games using its novel cloud-based gaming technology.
Speaking at the GamesBeat@GDC conference today, OnLive chief executive Steve Perlman said gamers will be able to subscribe to the PC or Mac games-on-demand service for $14.95 a month and get access to a wide variety of current games from major publishers. The launch partner game publishers include Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will include new releases such as Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to25 titles to be available at launch and more after that, depending on how negotiations with game publishers proceed.
“This isn’t just older catalog games in our library,” Perlman said in an interview. “We’re going to have a lot of fresh games.”
OnLive’s basic technology is compression, which squeezes game data into a compact form so that it can be transferred over a broadband connection to a server, where the data is computed. Then a video is sent back over the broadband line to the user’s computer. OnLive tries to make this round-trip happen so fast that the user doesn’t notice that the computing is happening in the cloud, rather than on the user’s own computer.
“This is for the user who wants instant gratification,” Perlman said. “The idea is to give gamers the same ability to enjoy something instantly as with music or video.”
The Mac version of the service will be particularly interesting, as Mac gamers have had to wait for their games for a long time after they’re published first on the PC. But OnLive will have competition on that front as Valve announced on Monday that Mac games will be available on its digital distribution network Steam.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company plans to launch its consumer game service in the U.S. on June 17, during the beginning of the E3 2010 video game conference in Los Angeles. That’s later than it originally planned, but Perlman said it takes time to test a nationwide services.
OnLive is disrupting the traditional retail distribution of high-end games, and it is also disrupting high-end game hardware. It does so by letting gamers play games almost instantaneously over a network. The network is so fast that no game downloads are necessary and the processing of graphics content happens in servers, which then send images to the user’s computer screen.
Gamers can buy and start playing a game almost instantly; that upsets the retail market. Meanwhile, since the heavy-duty processing takes place in servers in a data center, OnLive allows gamers to play on relatively simple hardware. You could play a high-end game like Crysis on a netbook or laptop without heavy-duty 3-D graphics chips in them. Or, you could use a Micro Console TV Adapter from OnLive which converts the images so they can be displayed on a screen; hence, you could play a high-end PC game on your TV set, using only the Micro Console. In this way, OnLive promises to disrupt high-end game hardware.
When the company announced its general games-as-a-service plan a year ago, many were skeptical. And OnLive has fallen behind its original schedule; it will launch in June instead of the winter of 2009-2010 as Perlman first said. But point by point, Perlman has dealt with the criticism.
Last summer, for instance, he rounded up the capital needed to deploy the network from AT&T and Lauder Partners. Other backers include Maverick Capital, Autodesk, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. While he didn’t announce the funding amount, Perlman said the money was more than enough to allow OnLive to fully test its system and launch when it was ready.
Last fall, the company began an online beta test. At the Dice Summit, Perlman showed the system working live before an audience of hundreds. Perlman also planned to show the service off at GamesBeat@GDC. The company plans to extend its beta test to another 25,000 users now.
The OnLive Game Service will let gamers discover, explore, purchase and play video games. Much like the Netflix DVD rental service’s online component, you can play games on the network instantly. You simply click on an icon for a game and it launches over the broadband connection.
The OnLive service will include online game service features much like Microsoft’s Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360. You can have your own permanent gamer tag (identification), user profiles, friends, chat, and the ability to challenge friends in multiplayer matches. The company’s Brag Clips feature records your online game matches and lets others watch them as videos. You can pause and resume a game, even on a different platform. Games can be purchased or rented, with actual per game pricing to be announced at E3.
Other big titles include Dragon Age Origins, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Metro 2033. By June, some of these games will be old. But Perlman said more games will be announced over time. The MicroConsole TV Adapter won’t be available in June, but will ship later in the year.
Perlman said that the company’s 100-plus employees have been toiling away at building the network across five different data centers and then testing it. The service can’t suffer from delays, known as lag, or gamers will complain loudly. That’s also why OnLive is expanding the service little by little.
If it works, then the company will transform games. There’s still a lot of ifs, but not as many as there were a year ago. There are also rivals such as Otoy, Gaikai, Valve and others trying to do different variations on the same theme of cloud-based gaming.
OnLive will be telling developers how they can create games that can be released on its network at the GDC. Perlman said it took one THQ engineer about three weeks to port the first title to run on OnLive. The games have to modified for various things they do different in a console game; for instance, they don’t have to sign someone into a company game network or initiate a digital rights management authentication, as a user does that when they log into the OnLive service. So some of those functions have to be turned off in a game in order to make them run. As for building out the OnLive network, it took eight years to design it and then roll it out, “rack by rack,” Perlman said.
“If you do something with huge potential scale, that takes a lot more work,” Perlman said. “Some things turned out better than we expected. Some things worse. There was a time when we thought we would have to come out at a much higher price. That isn’t the case. Overall, it’s a net positive.”
“We are follwing through on our goal of disruption,” Perlman said. “Some skeptics said we were violating the laws of physics. Some said it would be easy. Some said it wouldn’t be practical. We have seen that it is hard and complex. ”
So far, hundreds of thousands of people have put in their requests to get service. The initial service will be available in high-definition at 720p. To do 1080p resolution, Perlman said it will take time, perhaps not until 2011. As for the competitors, Perlman said, “We haven’t seen anyone else come out ahead of us. The question is what games are they going to get.”
We recently ran a video for the just-released Borderlands content "The Secret Armory of General Knoxx." To watch the video, you had to put your birthdate into the window to prove you were old enough to view the M-rated content.
We're sure most of you are familiar with age-gated video content, but we received a few e-mails asking about why some content is age-gated, and that got us thinking... how is video content regulated in the video game industry? We spoke to Eliot Mizrachi of the ESRB to get our questions answered.
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Both very good games.
- Kol TregaskesThey are; Trials, in particular, has hit that magical balance of controller-smashing frustration and addictiveness...
- Andrew Terry
Josh tries to keep up with the hamster wheel of video game releases through GameFly, the Netflix of gaming, but the USPS can't seem to get the game envelopes to him. His story brings to mind the troubles GameFly has long had with the Postal Service.
I have been having a problem recently with the USPS and Gamefly. I have an issue of getting my games at all, not being delayed. Gamefly acknowledges that the games are being sent but I just can't seem to get any at all. I have had the same game "Borderlands" sent to me 3 times and still have not received it. It has been nearly a month since the first one was supposedly sent to me through the mail.I have called and complained to my local post office several months ago about this problem and it seemed to get fixed quickly but the problem is back again and I just can't seem to stand it. I am currently on a 2 game plan where I am getting no games. While contacting my local post office I seem to talk to the same person who says they will call me back, but never does, so I always have to ask about how this situation is being resolved.
I am about ready to cancel my subscription withe Gamefly as I am currently spending over $24 / month for no service at not the fault of the service provider but rather the USPS. Do you guys have any tips as to how I might get this escalated or who I can talk to higher up the chain as my current solution just doesn't seem to be working at all.
I have heard from Gamefly and they are threatening to reconsider whether they can continue my account based upon all the products that they are losing.
I haven't heard from the USPS and I have continued to try and reach a resolution with my local post office and any calls to the 1-800 number has reached no resolution either.
GameFly users, have you had any trouble getting your discs through the mail?
Take-Two Interactive Software, the maker of the Grand Theft Auto video games, reported its sixth quarterly loss in a row today and said it would cut about 15 percent of its work force.
The New York company’s first fiscal quarter results ended Jan. 31, and results were actually better than the company and Wall Street expected. The company also predicted that its second fiscal quarter results would be above Wall Street’s current estimates.
But the encouraging thing is that Take-Two has a genuine hit on its hands with BioShock 2, a horror shooting game that has a deep story. BioShock 2 has sold more than 3 million units since its launch a month ago. That means that the hardcore game audience, which bought fewer games last year, is still embracing ambitious new games despite the lingering effects of the recession.
Take-Two reported a loss of $33.9 million, or 43 cents a share, down from a year ago loss of $50.4 million, or 66 cents a share. Excluding one-time items, the loss was 31 cents from 56 cents a year ago. Revenue rose 9.3 percent to $163.2 million from $149.4 million a year ago. The prior-year results were adjusted to exclude the company’s distribution arm, which was sold last month.
Two games, NBA2K10 and Borderlands, drove the better results. In the second quarter, Take-Two expected to see a profit of 20 – 30 cents a share on revenue of $250 – $300 million. Analysts have estimated second quarter results will be 7 cents a share and revenue of $267.4 million. The second quarter results will be driven by new hits such as BioShock 2. The original BioShock, launched in 2007, sold more than 4 million units. I’m in the midst of playing that game, and it is truly loads of fun; I intend to finish it. The NBA game sold more than 2 million units.
Regarding the company’s goal of maintaining profits in the future, Chairman Strauss Zelnick said in a conference call, “We believe we can deliver on that goal.”
The company said its fiscal year revenues will be higher than expected, at $725 – $925 million. Borderlands sales are also at 3 million and continue to grow due to sales of downloadable expansion content. Zelnick said that he is still cautious about the outlook for the overall company. The company had announced last month that it would have layoffs and today said that the 15 percent cuts would result in a savings of $8 million this fiscal year and $15 million a year in future years.
More big games are coming. The company is launching Red Dead Redemption on May 18. This year, the company will launch Sid Meier’s Civilization Network on Facebook, and the Firaxis studio is also working on a new flagship game, Civilization V, for later this year. Also in the fourth fiscal quarter, Take-Two will launch L.A. Noire, where you play a rookie detective in 1947 Los Angeles. Other games coming at year end are Max Payne 3 and Mafia II.
Meanwhile, Take-Two is working with Tencent in China to create NBA 2K Online for the Chinese market. Digital revenue from downloadable content was about 12 percent of revenue in the quarter, compared to just 3 percent a year ago. Take-Two also plans to publish on its own in Japan rather than rely on partners in the future.
The challenge, as always, is for Take-Two to create hits and profits even when it isn’t shipping a new version of its Grand Theft Auto franchise; the last one generated 15 million units in sales.
"2K Games has announced that it plans to release the first two expansions to Gearbox's Borderlands on disc."
- Kol Tregaskes
RT @edgeonline: Borderlands DLC to hit retail shelves in compilation disc:http://tinyurl.com/ygcq4yh
[Direct Link]The newest package of content for Borderlands has been released on both the PC and the PlayStation Network after its launch on the Xbox 360. The content picks up the story where the game left off—something of a deviation after the side-stories of the last two content packs—and "the Secret Armory of General Knoxx" will give you quite a challenge.
So what's included? Hours of content. A new vehicle that can seat four players. New weapons. New bad guys... including enemies that ride Skags. Characters you know and love will pop up throughout the story, and they're put to good use. Above all, this is funny stuff, and it shows that Gearbox is learning how to best take advantage of the world it has created. The downloadable content is getting better and better, giving the game some impressive legs.
For $10, this is a no-brainer, and it's great to jump back into the game with everything feeling fresh and new. Here's the kicker, though: the content may raise the level cap to 61, but to play the content you'll need to be in a specific point in your game. You'll need to be less than level 40 to for the enemies to be a challenge in the first playthrough, or above level 50 to stand a chance in your second playthrough. Why is that a problem? My character was in the mid-40s when I downloaded the content. It was a choice between either blowing through it, or getting stomped.
Still, this is a great amount of content, an extension to the story, and a great value. There is no reason not to pick it up.
Randy Pitchford, who is the president of development studio Gearbox Software, revealed at the DICE Summit, which took place in Las Vegas, that their latest release, Borderlands, is a 3-million copies sold franchise and that they are ready to deliver more content for it as long as gamers are interested in it and as long as t... (read more)
"I want to start off by saying congratulations on the upcoming release of the latest Borderlands DLC, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I’ve been following the coverage, and so far, I’m impressed. From new vehicles and enemy types, to a raised level cap and even more ridiculous guns, General Knoxx looks extremely promising. However, I should note that I was one of the people who bought Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot on day one, and the coverage on that expansion looked compelling as well. It’s a little late to say this, considering General Knoxx is just about complete, but I wanted you to know how important this DLC is to the fans, and how thin the ice you’re walking on may be."
- Kol Tregaskes