OnLive ditches their monthly fee.

AlmightyCushion · 05-10-2010 12:36pm #1

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/10/05/onlive-the-streaming-video-game-service-is-now-free/

OnLive, the one and only cloud-based gaming service, has eliminated its monthly fee of $4.95. You can now sign up without supplying your credit card details.

Games still cost money to buy, but the main thing thing is that you now have access to fully-playable 30 minute demos for free. We were finally able to test the service, and it really is rather good. The client is attractive, smooth, feature-rich -- and playing any game is just a matter of two or three clicks. The video quality really is astoundingly good -- and even though we were warned that latency might make games unplayable in the UK, it certainly felt responsive enough!

As for pricing, games cost the same as they would in the store, or perhaps a few dollars cheaper. Batman: Arkham Asylum is $39.99, while Assassin's Creed II is $29.99. There are also 3- and 5-day passes for $4.99 and $6.99 respectively, however -- and a 5-day pass is probably all you need to finish a game...

OnLive is currently only 'available' (i.e. low-latency) in the US, but it's set to launch in Europe in 2011. How exciting!

Still not available here unfortunately but it's still a good move. Hopefully it's permanent and not just some time limited offer.

Retr0gamer · 05-10-2010 1:00pm

The prices of the games is still an absolute joke compared to how much they go for online.

AlmightyCushion · 05-10-2010 1:04pm

Yeah I noticed that, apparently they do a lot of half price sales so you may be able to snap up a few bargains.

VenomIreland · 05-10-2010 8:11pm

Half Price sales? Do you even own a licence to the game when buying through OnLive?

Trevor451 · 05-10-2010 10:59pm

Onlive would never work in Ireland thanks to our country's great broadband infrastructure :rolleyes:

AlmightyCushion · 06-10-2010 12:15am

VenomIreland wrote: »

Half Price sales? Do you even own a licence to the game when buying through OnLive?

Not really. They say they have a 3 year guarantee on all games but that isn't much good if they go tits up.

Trevor451 wrote: »

Onlive would never work in Ireland thanks to our country's great broadband infrastructure :rolleyes:

Speak for yourself. I got 30Mb here.

VenomIreland · 06-10-2010 7:04am

I got 1Mb

Come on UPC, Roll out in my area!

PogMoThoin · 06-10-2010 7:05am

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Speak for yourself. I got 30Mb here.

Upc? 30Mbit through copper not fibre, from a company who don't peer through the inex (Upc are the only big player in this country who don't, not sure why either). How will that work? It may be ok with a UK Onlive server, but not with an Irish one. Its crazy that Upc haven't joined the Inex, especially when Google are there, 50-60% of their traffic (or any Isp's traffic) is to Google and they have to route outside the country to get there. Tracreoute will show You Your traffic leaves the country to come back in

nickhilliard · 06-10-2010 9:00am

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Upc? 30Mbit through copper not fibre, from a company who don't peer through the inex (Upc are the only big player in this country who don't, not sure why either). How will that work? It may be ok with a UK Onlive server, but not with an Irish one. Its crazy that Upc haven't joined the Inex, especially when Google are there, 50-60% of their traffic (or any Isp's traffic) is to Google and they have to route outside the country to get there. Tracreoute will show You Your traffic leaves the country to come back in

Hello PogMoThoin,

UPC are active members of INEX. Please see:

https://www.inex.ie/about/memberlist

Nick

NunianVonFuch · 06-10-2010 2:40pm

It (occasionally) works in Ireland. I can get into it after multiple retries on a super college connection and it's quite spiffy. Playing Dirt 2 in HD on my crappy college lappy was great! Didn't notice any significant lag once I got into the game itself, but a racing game probably wouldn't show that up too well anyway.

So comments about it not working in Ireland are just plain wrong. It's latency that's the issue, which is mostly effected by the distance to the server, not the speed of your connection. So if there was a server setup in Ireland it'd probably work quite well. They're launching in Belgium and Luxembourg later this year, with the UK sometime after that. So probably worth trying then as it's free to try.

quinnd6 · 19-10-2010 6:47am

We're sorry but this application only supports a graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0. So much for it working on a low end pc.
Load of bull.
I thought the whole point of this thing was that you could play games that normally wouldn't work on your pc.

Nehaxak · 19-10-2010 11:31am

If you're worried about latency, I could only highly recommend the following...

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html

I've used it not just for world of warcraft servers but for gaming in general.

You can do all that script does yourself manually if you know what you're doing but it's handy for those of you that don't understand all the settings, how to get to them etc.,

If you manage to get into OnLive US from Ireland, the settings it changes/enables will bring your latency right down.

Nehaxak · 19-10-2010 11:41am

Just been playing the demo 30 minutes there of Just Cause 2 on Onlive, no problems experienced, pretty bloody good service. Didn't think it was possible to play from Ireland, delighted with that now

Cuddlesworth · 19-10-2010 11:52am

quinnd6 wrote: »

We're sorry but this application only supports a graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0. So much for it working on a low end pc.
Load of bull.
I thought the whole point of this thing was that you could play games that normally wouldn't work on your pc.

If you don't have a gfx chip in your machine that is capable of Pixel Shader 2.0 then you don't have a machine capable of playing any games since the late ninety's.

Nehaxak · 19-10-2010 4:14pm

Been playing around with the 30 minute demo's of games all afternoon now, very enjoyable. Everything loads in very fast and I've no lag or latency issues at all.

However, there doesn't seem to be a great selection of games on offer and their prices seem very high. It's grand to take advantage of the 30 minute demos but I can't see myself buying or renting any games at the prices they're charging. Then again, I'd probably complete a game within a 3 day rental so it's alright I suppose. Still think it's a great idea but I'd like to be able to try out multiplayer options or for them to have a rental service to play multiplayer only, lets say for instance you could subscribe for a monthly fee and be free to play whatever game you want but only the online multiplayer option, rather than the single player versions.

quinnd6 · 20-10-2010 3:35am

Yes I know.
I'm just dissappointed I was hoping to try it out and see what it was like.
I don't need a good pc for gaming as I use my 360 for that.
The main selling point of it was you would be able to play games on pcs that aren't normally capable of it so I thought mine might work.
It's a failure for me anyway I'm afraid.
I definitely won't be going for it.

ILA · 26-10-2010 11:36am

Any idea on when this is going live for Europe?

VinLieger · 26-10-2010 3:01pm

ILA wrote: »

Any idea on when this is going live for Europe?

Hopefully never, really looks set to fail hard imo

Doge · 29-11-2011 1:24am

Just saw an advert on TV for an Onlive promotion that BT are doing.

Northern Ireland only unfortunately, but will probably be here soon.

http://www.btnorthernireland.com/home/onlive

BT Customers will be able to play over 100 games free for 3 months when they sign up,

and you can buy the console for £9.99

"With BT, the OnLive service won't count towards your broadband's usage limit until January 2nd 2012."

Sneaky feckers!

Overheal · 29-11-2011 1:45am

not even bothered to try this.

Grumpypants · 29-11-2011 2:11am

BT are investors in Onlive in the UK anyway so thats why they are offering this deal.

You can sign up to the UK service and test it for free. I think its brilliant, i can play top AAA titles on my average laptop something i never thought possible. 30 mins free trials is another bonus.

Sarky · 29-11-2011 2:15am

I'm visiting some friends in London who picked up the little OnLive box for free at some expo or other, and I was impressed. It was smooth enough to play Arkham City challenge maps without screwing up combat, for example, and they'd have a fairly average net connection.

If broadband ever catches up in Ireland it'll be worth looking at.

wes · 29-11-2011 10:53am

I tried this a few weeks ago, and it actually worked pretty well. I only tried a quick demo, but I might buy a cheap game at some point, to give it a real go, and see how well it does.

death1234567 · 29-11-2011 1:47pm

VinLieger wrote: »

Hopefully never, really looks set to fail hard imo

I don't know how anyone can say that. If you look at the comments in this thread you can see that it works and users are playing demos on it and enjoying them. OnLive has the potential to be a great cloud computing solution. I'm not saying it will revolutionise the industry just yet but the service only going to get better not worse and it has bags of potential.

Grumpypants · 29-11-2011 1:51pm

Games are cheap on it too. Fear 3 for a fiver thats not bad and they always run promos like play homefront and red faction for free for thanks giving weekend.

The best thing is the subscribe option you get 150 games to play for a tenner or so a month. Not brand new games but around the standard of Batman Arkham Asylum.

OnLive ditches their monthly fee.

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