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"Big news today — OnLive has closed a major round of funding with participation from AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital. The funding is much larger than our previous rounds and gives us a serious jolt of rocket fuel as our Beta progresses and we look forward to launching the OnLive® Game Service. Over the last decade, we’ve seen an enormous upheaval in the media business as the written word, photos, music, and video have been steadily moving away from physical media to online delivery. One major category that still remains largely based on physical discs is fast-response interactive media—in particular, video games. And, of course, OnLive’s goal is to enable that last remaining transition. We are both pleased and inspired that our investors share this vision with OnLive. Not only do they see the value in OnLive in particular, but they also understand the significance of what OnLive is doing to lead a massive sea change in interactive media distribution. We are grateful that they have not only provided OnLive with their support, but they have also provided OnLive with such a strong endorsement. All fueled up, there’s only open road ahead." —Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder&CEO |
We've heard previous reports that several big name companies are on board for this: Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Atari, Codemasters, THQ, Warner Bros., 2D Boy and Eidos Interactive have all signed up to have their PC titles available. This gaming equivalent of cloud computing has certainly gotten a lot of attention. Sony going so far as to trademark "PS Cloud" not long after OnLive was announced.
What could this mean for the future of home and console gaming? I will remain very skeptical as I have heard many claims of the end-all, be-all of gaming before (i.e. the previous iterations of the Phantom). Between direct-download content delivery and the concept of games on demand, the only thing I really expect to happen is for the physical distribution of games and related content to slowly fade away. We are already starting to see a move to that very visibly with Xbox Live's service, and with the PS3 and PSP also making continued strides.
For me, there's always been something uniquely endearing about purchasing a physical copy complete with instruction manual and whatever else. There's a charm to it that watching a download progress bar doesn't really match.
But maybe that's just me.
