Video Games On-Demand from OnLive Arrive in June

Today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman revealed a U.S. launch date of June 17 and a monthly price of $14.95 for his subscription-based, on-demand video game-streaming service. We wrote about OnLive previously when it went into beta testing . You can think about the service as essentially “Netflix Instant Queue for games,” where your monthly subscription costs gives you instant access through your PC or Mac to a library of video game titles, including high-profile new releases from launch partners Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. At launch, we should expect between a dozen and 25 games to be live on the service, with more to come as game publishers negotiations proceed. One of the perks of this type of system is that players don’t need to have screaming fast hardware to play the latest, graphics-intensive game titles — all that processing is done on the server side, and images are sent back to the player’s computer (or OnLive’s Micro Console TV Adapter unit) over the network. Mac users also stand to benefit in particular from a service like OnLive, in that many PC titles never get released on the Mac or are only ported long after release. Still, the service will face competition from Valve’s Steam, which recently announced native Mac support for its digital distribution platform and several of its popular titles.

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Video Games On-Demand from OnLive Arrive in June