Cloud gaming with OnLive

Announcement of the launching – 22nd of September, in UK – brings OnLive officially in Europe! The event will take place at the Eurogamer Expo, in London, and it promised to reveal a package of over 100 new games for games devourers.

Let’s take a short look of what does cloud gaming actually mean for OnLive:

- Easy access from anywhere

- Gamers can play from any device: PC, mac, TV or any tablet

- Users don’t have to hold an up-to-date system configuration to play a “last generation game”, because their system is just an interface of the game.

The game is actually played in real time, on the OnLive’s powerful servers, within its datacenters. It will be needed an OnLive system which adapts games to run on the TVs

- There is access to free instant demo-games for you to play or for you to watch as others play, with the possibility of voice chat

- No more game-downloading, no further need of disks or any other special hardware
- Facebook integration.

Broadband is a key-factor regarding video quality and the required speed is 2Mbps.

The issue that came out in USA was also raised in UK – the delay. This is caused by lag and latency, which was officially recognized by the CEO of OnLive (Steve Perlman) to be 35-40ms, though in the US there were found played games at 200ms latency.

If you want to play a game, you can just rent it for a short time, buy it for unlimited play time, or pay an amount of money for 3 days, 5 days or a month of game access. But if you can make it to the event, OnLive promised to give thousands of Game Systems to the participants for free.