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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

One of the major reasons why OnLive struggled (and now failed) is because they launched their platform (20010) well after the launch of the XBox 360 (2005) and PS3 (2006).

Serious gamers, the early adopter market for OnLive, already had purchased an XBox 360 and/or PS3. Since OnLive, as far as I can tell, didn't have any compelling, exclusive titles, and provided a gaming experience that was inferior to alternatives, there was no reason for a serious gamer with a console to try (or switch to) this new platform.

OnLive needed to launch around the same time as the other consoles and deliver a superior experience, or an equivalent experience but at a lower price point (upfront and over time).

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The fallacy here is that only serious gamers play on consoles. PC gaming is back on the upswing, and one could argue that PC gamers are just as serious or even more so than console gamers.

The thing that OnLive offered was a way to play high quality AAA game titles on basically any device that has a internet connection and can play video. Where they failed I think was the pricing model, prices were too close to retail products, and it was an ala carte service. If the moved to a subscription based model similar to gamefly I think they could have had more success.

OnLive is the ideal service for cpu/gpu games, and works great against cheaters in multiplayer games (No more transparent or wireframe walls, boxes around enemy players, and other tricks)

but then most social/casual games are not cpu/gpu hungry....

I really want technology like OnLive to succeed... There is Gaikai too

I don't. OnLive is the ultimate DRM; abusive stuff like Securom can be bypassed, but with this tech any game can be killed without recourse. While I feel sympathy for the fired people, I'm also somewhat relieved that this was further delayed.

It's the ultimate copy-protection without DRM - e.g. without crappy kernel drivers sitting and trying to protect you from stealing something from your own machine.

But not only that, it protects you from doing stupid things like cheating in an multi-player game, and it's available everywhere if there is a good connection.

Oh, and it's updated with the latest HW.

It's also more energy efficient, you no longer need massive HW in your room to power your game. And the folks that run the similar HW in their server room, would surely know better than the general game customer how to make it more green efficient, and reuse the resource better.

So it could've been a great win. I could've (if Wi-fi allowed) played on my iPad games, that are still not possible to play there, without any download, install, updates, etc.

Sure, but that's all irrelevant when you lose access to all your games. Like when the company goes bankrupt.

If you bought a copy of the game and then you could play on their service with a proof of purchase (and a monthly fee, for example), I wouldn't worry. But their service was just more lock in.

I think one thing that was always unclear was if they were targeting PC or console gamers. Clearly they were 'PC games' but they didn't act like PC games (sandboxed network environment, no mods, no settings) and the console controller really didn't work right for many games.

The real target market seemed to be people who aspired to be PC gamers, but enjoyed the idea of a console and didn't have the ability/money to buy a decent PC (but had a great internet connection). Realistically, this market just never felt fully there yet.

It also was a company with a huge number of ambitious goals. This isn't a terrible thing, but it definitely pushed them to having a very high (reported around 5M/month) burn rate. Many of these goals, as of today, were unfulfilled. Focus overall seemed all over the place for the company.

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