OnLive Launches June 17, Still sounds Like a Terrible Idea

OnLive, the *cough* revolutionary cloud-based gaming service will see its North American release this June for PC and MAC – coinciding with this year’s E3 Expo. It promises instant streaming of games from the industry’s top publishers – like EA, Ubisoft, 2K Games and more.

Early adopters – the first 25000 idiots people to sign up will get three months of access to the service for free – a regular cost of $14.99 US per month. Something about their terms though has me thinking this is a worse idea than I’d ever imagined.

Waiver of Service Fee includes free access to OnLive’s Game Service including game demos, video profiles and community features, but does not include playing full versions of games, which are to be purchased or rented separately.

Wait…what? So on top of that subscription fee – 3 times that of Xbox Live -  you still actually have to rent or buy the games? On top of that, until their microconsole set-top box for connecting to TV’s comes out, you have to play games in a browser window?

Sure, the launch games – Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Borderlands and Metro 2033 – are some pretty high profile titles, but I just don’t see this working.

Even if we had the internet infrastructure for this, I’d still give it a miss.

Last Updated: March 11, 2010