OnLive, the company that enables cloud-based online gaming is ready to open its service to the general public. We’ve seen the demo last year during the game developers conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and the service has been in beta for a while. If you are not familiar with OnLive’s technology, it is based on the idea that the game can be streamed from a gaming platform (PC or console) to any client as a video stream. Commands from the player are then streamed back to the server to be executed. It looks like OnLive is confident enough that it has worked around potential latency issues(the delay between your input and the visual response) to release its service to the public.
The result is a tiny microconsole that is even smaller than a game pad. On the server side, the game could run on a PC or a game console, depending on availability and compatibility with the system. The promise of Onlive is that you don’t even have to worry about which platform to “buy into”. We have yet to see how console makers will react to that, but on the video-game publishers side, things looked pretty positive. You can get the specifications here, and there’s an order page if you want to jump in.
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