Wii Competition
A very huge gauntlet was thrown down today in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference. Touting it as ‘the most powerful gaming system in the world,’ the OnLive gaming service has a very high bar to reach this winter when this new way to play games is released.
This new service gamers can use on their PC or TV with an HDMI connection. They only need to download a small file on their PC. Games are run on the server farms of OnLive - meaning no lag in gaming and games start up in mere seconds. It will be a subscription service and players will have to buy games and/or rent to play them on a daily basis.
Steve Pearlman and the rest of the 100 team that has spent the last 7 years developing OnLive believe it to be a competitor and even superior to next gen consoles like the Wii. That is a very bold claim especially for a game service that will cost you money but won’t give you any tangible in return. The good thing about console games is that there is a used market for unwanted games. At least you can recoup some of your money. With OnLive, that option will not be available.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that a game service that uses a keyboard/mouse/generic USB game controller can compete with the Wiimote/Nunchuk. Wii gamers prefer Wii games for a reason. I don’t think a PC-like game service is going to be able to dethrone the Nintendo Wii.
Leave a Reply