GDC 2010: OnLive to launch on June 17 for $14.95 a month for PC and Mac

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GDC 2010: OnLive to launch on June 17 for $14.95 a month for PC and Mac

Posted Mar 10th 2010 2:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Downloads, Hardware, Mac

We had a feeling that this week's Game Developers Conference would yield some major news concerning the upcoming OnLive streaming game service and we were not disappointed. At the VentureBeat@GDC keynote address today, OnLive's head man Steve Pearlman stated the service would officially launch on June 17 at a basic cost of $14.95 a month. The first 25,000 qualified people to pre-register for OnLive will have that monthly fee waived for three months. Renting or purchasing of games on the service is a separate fee but no prices have been announced. At the moment the service is for the US only.

The service will support both PCs and Macs via a browser plugin. VentureBeat reports that OnLive will feature between 12 and 25 game titles at first including recent games like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands and Assassin's Creed 2. More games will be added to the service over time. OnLive will later allow the service to run on televisions via a small set-top device. Today's announcement of a June 17 launch date is a few months later than OnLive's original plan to launch their service in the "winter 2009" time period. The big question: Will this streaming game service perform as planned with hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of gamers signed onto OnLive?

Tags: breaking, gdc-2010, onlive, onlive-beta, onlive-game-service

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

I'm still kinda iffy on the subject. the big downer is you can't "own" the games, but I think i'm gonna wait until the documentation comes out, i'll read the fine print and then look at what the early adopters have to say about it. THEN i might try this out.Posted at 2:59PM on Mar 10th 2010 by Sam

@ $15 / month it's clear they're not trying to touch the console market. But for $900 every 5 years, it's not exactly saving you any money not having to upgrade your PC. I guess it's more of a luxury for people that travel a lot and want to game in their hotel on the road.

I probably spend about $450 every 2 years upgrading my PC. So maybe this is a bit of a savings. But upgrading your PC offers benefits other than gaming. OnLive doesn't.

I thought their price point would be the determining factor of their success. I wagered that they would need $5 / month to survive. They're well above that. I'm interested to see if this is a success or not. Quite pricey for such an unproven product.Posted at 3:47PM on Mar 10th 2010 by Eric

$15/mo is about as much as Gamefly, right? I see them following that model -- you don't own your Gamefly games either. They probably couldn't get away with having PC games on gamefly -- too easy to pirate -- but they could "rent" PC games to you on an all-you-can-play basis, if they keep the binaries on their servers. If it really works, and my crappy net connection can keep up with it, I might be willing to give it a shot.Posted at 12:03AM on Mar 13th 2010 by James