It is a shame that it wasn’t October, I love alliteration. Anyway, the mystical gaming on demand service OnLive has officially announced a launch date for those of us who dwell in the US of A. Mark your calendars folks, because this thing hits in mid June and should have systematically destroyed all of the gaming world’s paradigms by July. It should be noted that this is only an announcement about the cloud gaming service being available to computer users, a date for the OnLive “microconsole” TV adapter has yet to be uttered. More importantly even than release dates, the monetary details of the service were also announced today.

The price of destroying everything we know about how the game industry works? $14.95 monthly plus the cost of buying or renting games.

People seem to be complaining about this, but they are complaining about it for all the wrong reasons. 11 million WoW players have already proven that paying a subscription plus the cost of the game is a viable business model, and this is just taking that to a larger level. Plus, honestly, for what OnLive appears to be offering, 15 bucks isn’t exactly a huge amount of money. I’ve paid more for porn. The problem I have is that no matter how many videos or articles I see explaining how this tech works and why it is this enormous innovation, I still have absolutely no belief that it is actually going to work or that it is going to change anything. I’ll probably be wrong, but it is funny to see people on messageboards saying how this is going to kill the gaming PC market or how its going to change what we think about consoles. Possible, but never going to happen.

For one, I don’t like the idea of not owning things I pay for. If I buy Crysis from OnLive, and OnLive goes out of business, did I just give them my money for no reason? Are they going to mail me a physical copy of the game I just purchased through their service? This is an issue I originally had with Steam too, so I’m not just being an asshole (for once). Of course, Steam plops the game right onto your hard drive after you purchase it, so it is more yours than if you are just sending money to OnLive for the right to play a game plucked from the ether. I feel like people should be asking more questions about the logistics of what they are offering. How will DLC and expansions work? If I pay $50 for Modern Warfare 2, do I get the upcoming map pack included with that also? How about all the DLC that a game like Borderlands or Dragon Age offers? There hasn’t even been a mention about how these “ownership” issues will actually work out within a cloud gaming service.

The second thing is that, while this poses a threat to taking a large chunk out of the console market, the infinitely dying PC market will remain unfazed. Why is that? Because I would hazard a guess that I can’t mod anything I get through OnLive. Imagine a game like Oblivion through this service- a good game that was made nearly flawless by the PC modding community. Would you have played Unreal Tournament for so long if you couldn’t download a trillion maps? Doubtful. On top of even all that, there will still be geeks like me in this world that would rather build a kick ass computer and have all my games available directly to me instead of playing through what would essentially be a gaming middle man. What is left of the high-end PC gaming world are essentially tweaking control freaks at this point, and something like this just won’t take a bite out of that.

And this is all assuming the thing actually works. I guess we will see in June. I will certainly give it a shot either way, but I think we should all probably realize that when it comes to things like this the glass is usually half empty.

[Source: Eurogamer]

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