Be Excellent To Each Other

Again with the silly comparisons. "The top games" <> XBLA games for a few quid. "The top games" cost £40 to buy on 360, and on PS3. So the price is directly comparable, although I take your point on the 3 year lifespan.

I played Driver on a smartphone through OnLive. It was ace. It weren't mine, mind. I could have played Dear Ester through this an' all. Fuck, I shoulda signed up and saved the company.

Top games on 360/PS3 cost about, what, £20 when they're a few months old on pre-owned?

AFAIK there was no such discounting with OnLive.

Again Craster, I really don't understand where you think this demographic exists of young chaps with a reasonable chunk of spare cash, sat on top of a 16meg internet connection they have exclusive use of, hungrily anticipating a gaming experience that's 'a bit better than consoles but not as good as the PC' which they have to pay through the nose for.

If only there was an expression for making up the other side of the argument and knocking it down. That'd come in handy.

Your 'paying through the nose' is bullshit though. Games from onlive cost the same as games from shops for 360 or PS3. Comparing them to second-hand prices is idiotic. The initial outlay is ZERO, compared to £150+ for a console or £400+ for a PC.

16mb broadband is common, especially in metropolitan areas, cable offers up to 100mb, and FTTC is rolling out all over the place with 40-70mb.

I've got the facts of the case on my side, and it's not like I've changed my tune either, I called this out as a failure so big it can be seen from space two years ago. (In fact, OnLive's redundant server estate probably can be seen from space.)

This is all very good Craster, so explain again why they were burning through $5m per month and had four times as many servers as they did concurrent users?

You can only explain so much with 'lack of marketing' - word of mouth is still a very valuable medium in the internet age.

Not every venture takes off, however good it might be. There are countless examples of really good ideas that didn't sell. You're taking a rather dogmatic, singleminded view of this, AE, and are completely ignoring every single word Cras says, which doesn't really add weight to your "well it's shit cos I say so" argument.

No, I can explain it all with 'lack of marketing'. They didn't do any, so they didn't attract customers. BT didn't even market it to their broadband users, and they were a launch partner!

Word of mouth means jack shit without critical mass.

Can I borrow this thread when you've all done banging your heads against it?

I read about OnLive in EDGE. That's got a readership of almost 500 now.

Yeah, but EDGE is, like, "boutique".

See I'm being accused of some sort of dull-headed 'making stuff up' stance here but at least I actually have the facts of the case on my side - which is that OnLive has bombed so hard the US Military are probably thinking of buying it up for the next time they want to take out some random Middle Eastern dictatorship.

You're repeatedly insisting that there was a super-duper market for OnLive out there if they'd just talked to their potential customers a bit more, but apart from you saying 'I used it and it was great' (and the 1,799 other people who thought so), there's simply no evidence to back that assertion up.

Christ you're thick headed sometimes.

Just because it didn't work out, doesn't mean there wasn't a market for it. The sales of almost anything at all are based on marketing, otherwise my last three employers wouldn't have spent such an eye-wateringly massive amount on it.

The fact that the sum total of your argument is "I don't like it" and "it didn't sell" really should tell you something.

1800 users is also intentional selective statistic misrepresentation. 1800 concurrent users was mentioned, not absolute users.

I think it's a good idea. They should definately do it.

I've just gone on their website. Contrary to widespread belief, the front splash screen has numerous (1 is a number) games at under £10 on full passes.

I'm not sure what you're saying about AE's bottomcheeks there.

Not at all. I'm accusing you of dull-headed ridiculous comparisons. Three times in the last set of posts you've tried to label OnLive as expensive. Once by comparing to second-hand console game sales, then to bargain basement XBLA games, then to second hand games again. Whereas the only real valid comparison - to off the shelf console games, makes onlive perfectly price equitable.

OnLive said they had a userbase of 1.5m, (so it clearly didn't 'fail to reach people'), from that they managed a maximum concurrent userbase of 1,800 people.

Those are shocking numbers.

So shocking you repeatedly misrepresented them to make them more shocking?

What percentage of Spotify users are online at any one time?

I can only go off the numbers reported in various articles, if you have better and/or more accurate numbers then please share them.

Whoa, Whoa, WHOA! WHOA NOW!

Can I sign up, play Dear Ester on my crappy laptop for pennies and never touch it ever again?

Spotify didn't/don't need one server per user.

You're rowing against the tide here my friend. Only 3 people on the planet are stupid enough to play this, and despite widespread evidence to the contrary, you aren't one of them.

citation needed.

how many servers do spotify play with, compared to concurrent users.

And how much more do Spotify spend on marketing?

Looks like Dear Esther is only in their playpack bundle, for some reason. 200 games for £6.99 a month, cancel at any time. Probably not worth it for just Dear Esther, but if there's others in that 200 that interest you...

I like the look of Bridge Constructor and Air Traffic Control simulator (I really do).

It's like Perkies never left.

You can play most games for 30 minutes for free, too.

Too expensive. That'll never catch on.

When you can hoover up old games through the likes of GOG for about £2, and keep them safely forever as a DRM free executable, then yes, it is too expensive.

Steam is a little bit of a trickier proposition, but it does have an offline mode and you can play single player games in offline mode even if the Steam servers disappear.

Sweet, that'll let you get almost 20 yards in Dear Esther...

You have to install things? That's so last gen.

I reckon I'm pretty good at keeping up with new gadgets and things but I only ever heard of Onlive on here and perhaps a couple of other websites, and that was only when it launched.

If they wanted people to buy their product, they needed to invest heavily in marketing which it seems that they didn't.

It's pure and simple, they needed to advertise. Everybody has heard of Coke and Pepsi but do they think "that's it now. Everyone knows who we are. We don't need to advertise". Of course not. Onlive needed to be everywhere, not just on specialist gaming sites.

OnLive sell a product and a service. Coke are literally nothing but a name.

And a fuck load of factories, bottling companies, etc etc.

Nope. Coke own none of those things.

Weeeeerll, I did a load of work for one of their bottling companies so, yes, they do. Unless they've flogged them since 5 years ago. Or we got the whole thing wrong and didn't know who our client was.

Is it all some MaccyD's franchise effort but on a larger scale?

Coke sell the rights to make the syrup which is then sent to all the bottling companies, none of which are owned by Coke. That way they don't have to get involved when said companies do things like cause droughts and kill unionised workers and the like.

I read a book about it, can you tell?

ISTR you mentioning this before, actually. Curse my dreadful short/medium/long term memory.

Well, it makes sense. Much like Sam Seabourne's limited liability oil tanker. It's how I'd do business, tbh. And I'm sure it's the way that Cavey exploits all those orphans.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19409211

Square Enix has launch something and its free!

Hmm:

I think that's a pretty canny move. (The service is ad-supported, incidentally.)

You seem to need to pay for the Hitman levels so is it ad-supported as well as wanting people to pay money? That's not going to go down well....

Note: the actual games won't play for me here at work because you need to run an exe installer that I can't download through our proxy so I'm only seeing half the story here.

It's not just ad-supported (ie, showing ads while you play), it seems to be a case of watching ads to get credits for playing time.

Another example of pirates getting a superior product, then. There has to be a tiny cross-section of people who want to do the right thing and are happy to sit through ads to get 30 mins of funtimes.

Much like TV, then.

Pirates have to find the download, download it, extract it, worry about viruses, install it, tweak it, find out the crack is disabled by a later patch, get a new crack. Legal users click a button in a web browser and they're away. I'd say that's a not insignificant difference.