OnLive Cloud Gaming Service to Launch in June

Matt Peckham

Mar 10, 2010 1:37 pm

For the price of a low-end PC plus a monthly fee you’ll soon be able to play ultra-high-end games like Borderlands, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, and Crysis. According to VentureBeat, the service, dubbed OnLive, will launch in June after eight years of research and development, offer up to 720p-caliber high-def gameplay, and cost $14.95 a month.

Billed as a games-on-demand service, OnLive handles all the intensive game processing on the server side, so your local computer doesn’t have to. What you see is tantamount to a “screen-scrape” video feed send to your client device. All the intensive computing that might normally convert the insides of your homebrew rig into a mini-bake oven renders instead in the cloud.

It’s an ancient concept in computing terms–the model’s existed since mainframes and green-screens, in fact–but until recently, no one’s come up with a system to transfer high-bandwidth video with low enough latency to pass muster with gamers.

(for more, see the full article @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/191197/onlive_cloud_gaming_service_to_launch_in_june.html/)

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