OnLive was a decade ahead of its time, and it worked decently.
Problems were nobody really expected it to last and prior wanted to be able to keep their games off the service shut down.
I think their biggest mistake though was targeting gaming. Imagine if instead they offered enterprise software rental.
Say your business needs to use ArcGIS, but just for one little project. Pay 200 bucks to rent the software for a few hours, make a deliverable, and that’s it.
Or what if you want to do a quick Photoshop project? Pay 10 bucks for an hour of time workout having to download anything or buy a $1000 software package (CS was a purchased product back then), then email yourself the final image.
It also would have been great for anti-piracy purposes for some software, since the client only ever gets an AV stream.
In addition, remember how Sony bought OnLive then shut it down? Fuckers.
OnLive was a decade ahead of its time, and it worked decently.
Problems were nobody really expected it to last and prior wanted to be able to keep their games off the service shut down.
I think their biggest mistake though was targeting gaming. Imagine if instead they offered enterprise software rental.
Say your business needs to use ArcGIS, but just for one little project. Pay 200 bucks to rent the software for a few hours, make a deliverable, and that’s it.
Or what if you want to do a quick Photoshop project? Pay 10 bucks for an hour of time workout having to download anything or buy a $1000 software package (CS was a purchased product back then), then email yourself the final image.
It also would have been great for anti-piracy purposes for some software, since the client only ever gets an AV stream.
Yeah sometimes companies buy competition not to absorb them but to destroy them.