OnLive – Future Of Gaming or just a Temporary Storm?
If you’ve been following Gaming Rant, you’re likely aware that we always write about OnLive. Hell, before we crashed back in 2011, we had nearly ten additional ‘we love OnLive’ articles published between June 2010 and February 2011.
Yup, we praised this service to no end, and couldn’t imagine a future without the future of gaming service dominating the gaming industry. It just wasn’t a thought we were capable of having.
Then, after a few months had passed, OnLive began to slowly fade into the shadow, only popping out every so often to brag about their latest game releases, or ‘upcoming’ games that never came. Now, here’s where my dedication truly starts to shine. While the gaming industry was downright insulting the OnLive service, I (not on behalf of Gaming Rant) saw this whole debacle as a minor storm, and still kept my high hopes for a brightly lit sunny future.
I strongly believe OnLive is capable of far more than simply being an alternative to the current video gaming services. If anything, OnLive could be the only service to actually compete with every major gaming industry, from mobile ‘apps’ to dedicated consoles and machines. OnLive truly has the potential to change the way games are played, and although they have already, in a small way, migrated our beloved gaming industry to adopt a digital cloud direction, they shouldn’t simply change the industry in minor ways, they should, and could, compete directly with Apple, Sony, Microsoft & Nintendo, all at once, and without developing any kind of additional technologies.
There quite simply isn’t anything else like OnLive. They had so much media attention and industry hype starting up, but have since dipped down into a virtual thunderstorm, eliminating the fluffy clouds that once swarmed around the OnLive offices.
So, how did this thunderstorm come to be, and how could we let it form to begin with? It isn’t as if OnLive wasn’t at one point in time a giant fluffy and friendly cloud. They used to be the talk of the web. They used to be in every nerds twisted technology dreams.
So, what in the hell happened? Why hasn’t OnLive taken over the world?