Having been kept behind closed doors for seven years, OnLive exists to stream top games like Crysis to PCs without the hardware horsepower.
The subscription-based service will render the videogames at their "cloud" of servers, delivering games in high quality and even at 720p. Major publishers are all signed up already.
"What OnLive does is seamless and completely transparent, and it does not have any requirements for the local system," says OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman, reports Gamasutra.
The service is boasted to work with any PC system from your standard desktop PC to a notebook worth just about a sandwich. Users subscribe to the service and then buy the individual games to play. OnLive can also be streamed into your television.
The one downside is that in order to take advantage of the highest possible quality streaming from OnLive, users will need a steady Internet connection of 5 megabit to achieve 720p. For a standard connection to the service a 1.5 megabit connection is the ideal. Latency is obviously an issue and something team OnLive say they've managed to reduce thanks to working closely with Internet service providers during development.
OnLive will also offer its own community much like Xbox Live or Steam. The big publishing and development houses are all jumping up and down in excitement over the possibilities with the service; EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, THQ, Atari, Warner Bros and Epic Games are all inked.
"We're going to hit 200 million people that Steam can't sell to, who have non-GPU-based PCs but want to play the latest games. Yes, they are a competitor, but we're a little more of a pure platform than just digital distribution. And we eliminate the need to purchase hardware," said OnLive COO Mike McGarvey.
The service goes live this winter and users will even be able to observe one another’s games despite the videogame itself not supporting the feature.
"With OnLive, gamers can play what they want, when they want, how they want. That level of freedom has never been possible until now," continued McGarvey.
Is OnLive a tempting stream to you, videogamer?
