OnLive, the ground-breaking cloud gaming service, has landed in the living room with the release of its first hardware.
A “MicroConsole” set-top box with a wireless game controller is available for pre-order in the US immediately, with delivery from December 2, in a $99 package that includes any OnLive online game.
I have been talking to OnLive founder Steve Perlman and testing a pre-sale version of the new equipment.
With its low price and intended living-room location, it moves OnLive into the mainstream consumer market after being available only through software on a PC or Mac since its June launch.
The attraction of OnLive for gamers is it allows them to play fully-fledged console games over an internet connection without the need to buy a console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
OnLive offers some unique features such as an Arena area for spectating, where players can choose from 100s of screens of games being played live to watch how others are faring inside games.
It has been experimenting with various models of charging, including a monthly or annual subscription, free demos, limited-time rentals and full digital ownership of a game.
I was impressed that OnLive had fulfilled its promise of delivering high-resolution games over the internet with no noticeable lag when I tried the service on my PC in June.
The MicroConsole continues that experience – I plugged it into a 50-inch HDTV and was even more impressed by the quality of graphics on this larger screen.
The small black box has an HDMI port for the TV on the back, an Ethernet port to connect to your home network (a 5Mb/s hard-wired connection is required to get a full HD experience on a large screen TV) and a couple of audio outputs to connect to a home theater system and allow wired headsets to be plugged in.
There is also a Bluetooth chip inside to enable wireless headsets and two USB ports on the front allow the controller to be charged and PC game controllers, keyboards and mice to be plugged in if needed.
The wireless game controller blends buttons and joysticks from the Xbox 360 and PS3 and adds some OnLive features of its own, in the shape of media buttons for recording, playing, fast forwarding and rewind.
This is intended for the recording and playback of “brag clips”, where players can show off their skills and kills in a game. But it also points to OnLive’s future of also delivering other types of media over the internet, such as movies and TV shows.
My doubts about OnLive have been that it might not work technically in delivering latency-free HD gaming, publishers might not support it enough by providing their newest games online and that OnLive could struggle to lure enough gamers away from the 360 and PS3, which have their own online services.
OnLive’s rock-solid performance to date has allayed my first concern and the number of games has been growing, from 19 at launch to 36 now.
Although you won’t find Call of Duty: Black Ops here, Mr Perlman said some games are being made available on the same day as their console release, such as last month’s NBA 2K11.
Publishers have been adapting their PC versions of games for OnLive, but the founder said console-only games would also be pushed to OnLive next year.
“The really exciting thing will happen later next year when you start seeing games made just for OnLive,” he said.
“These are very high performance, hyper-realistic games, they are going to look like movies, with much better geometry, numbers of polygons and textures. We’ll use ray tracing that will make eyes look moist and the physics will be more sophisticated.”
This will be made possible by a number of top-of-the-line servers in OnLive’s data centres working together on a game to provide the processing power needed for such realism, he said.
On my third concern over adoption by gamers, Mr Perlman did not give numbers of users but said the service was ahead of target and more than 2m online sessions, some more than eight hours long, had been recorded since the service went live in June.
“That’s with no marketing at all and that begins now with TV ads and a multi-million dollar campaign…[the MicroConsole] is the main product for OnLive,” he said.
It had been testing its network with the PC and Mac versions, but when it launches in the UK (BT has been testing the service for some months now), the “frontline thing we will be showing is the MicroConsole”.
A new deal for gamers in the US getting the initially limited quantities of the MicroConsole in December will be a monthly flat-rate plan, providing unlimited access to a library of older games and indie titles.
