A company called OnLive is launching a big cloud-computing gaming experiment this summer. For a subscription fee of $15 a month, PC games will be able to be streamed over a broadband connection to your home PC, or your HDTV with a OnLive MicroConsole adapter.
For the fee, you have access to OnLive's entire repository of games, which for now, is made mostly of EA, Ubisoft, THQ, and Warner Bros. games. However the $15 a month just gets your foot in the door -- you have to pay further charges to rent or buy games. The service will feature new games as they became available. A few of the many launch titles include: Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Assassin's Creed II, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Borderlands and Metro 2033.
The service will only be available to folks in the United States for now.
OnLive is getting things started by offering 25,000 new folks to the service free games for the three months. You can read about the qualifications over here.
If you are playing off of your computer, you will not need really fast components to get decent framerates either. Since the games are streamed, most of the heavy lifting is done my OnLive's systems, and they just stream you the graphics, as you would stream a movie.
Update: had the pricing wrong in the earlier version of this story. Some misleading descriptions about the service lead me to believe that the subscription fee included the streaming of games, but it does not. The $15 a month is just to access the service; you'll be charged for each game you play (no word yet on the price).
Section:PC Games
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