Have you guys heard of Onlive?

I don't like it much. I don't mind not owning a physical copy of a game, like what you get through Steam, but not owning anything, isn't for me.

• What if I don't pay for my subscription, can I still play the games I payed for?

• What if the company goes out of business, have I wasted hundreds of dollars on games I will never be able to play again?

• It would drive me insane if I bought a game and wasn't able to even play single player, because the servers are down.

• How well is it going to preform while playing online, which would require even more bandwidth.

The only really big positive I can see, is that there wouldn't be any hackers. But even that is fun sometimes.

It is purely based on a gimmick.

It sounds great to be able to use any low powered system and run any game regardless of how demanding it is. Sounds great on paper but in reality it is like this.

Not all games will be at their max visual quality. You are limited in which resolution you can use since the content is streamed, the video stream is compressed (max 720p resolution)

You wont get the full audio experience of the game

Lag is not fun, imagine this, you are connected to the server at a ping of 100ms, the server takes 100ms to send you the visual info of a enemy shooting at you, you act upon that info and your actions take 100ms to reach the server. You just got a 200ms delay on a game designed with the expectation of a 0 ping delay.

Now lets repeat this for a multiplayer game.

Suppose you want to do multiplayer, between you and the online server, there is a 200ms delay, now between the onlive server and the game server, suppose there is a 100-200ms delay, you just got your self a unplayable ping because no matter how good you are, you will be stuck with nearly a half second delay.

it is also a very bandwidth intensive service, if you are on a service like comcast, you may only have enough bandwidth to complete probably 1 single player game and if you are lucky, a little bit of multiplayer before hitting your bandwidth cap

Also 1 problem with most ISP's is that during peak usage hours, your bandwidth and ping are impacted, you may not be able to play your games during peak times. Peak times are peak times for a reason, it is a time when most people have free time and probably the time your friends are online.

Now suppose your internet is down, you cant even play a game to pass by the time.

Now suppose the company decided to close up shop or increase their monthly fee to a rate that you are no longer willing to pay, guess what, you cant play any of your games.

Then as pointed out before, when the company goes out of business, they are taking your games with them.

Another problem, onlive cost $5 a month for access to their service, on top of that you pay additional fees for each game you actually want to play. here is an article that better explains it,

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191433/onlives_pricing_wont_add_up_for_most_gamers.html

Onlive is significantly more expensive than getting the gaming hardware and buying your games while at the same time offering less control over the games (no modding or anything) and offering less features

With onlive, you are still buying the games, $5 a month allows you to do the remote processing of the games, then just like steam, you buy the games you actually want play. for the price of a few months of onlive, you can upgrade your PC to be gaming ready.

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/onlive-pricing-announced-and-its-expensive-20100621/

all in all, you are better off upgrading your PC and buying your games from steam.

PS with onlive after a year, you introductory price disappears and you are now paying $15 a month for access to the service, + the cost of buying the games.

also here is what onlive has to say about when you buy a game from them
Provides unlimited access to the selected game throughout its supported lifetime on the OnLive service

their fine print rates a supported life for 3 years, meaning you better not want to play that game after 3 years because you wont be able to.

gaming in the cloud!, there servers do the work

I've been using OnLive since the very limited beta and I love it! I have 20mbps down on average and it runs perfectly for me! Just recently OnLive sent me the MicroConsole for free because I was part of the beta. It's pretty good