OnLive Finally Comes To Your Living Room


It was quite a while back when we first tried out OnLive, and got our first look at the “microconsole” and wireless controller. So long back, in fact, I was wondering whether they’d abandoned that avenue of sales altogether. But no! They were just lying in wait for the 2010 holiday season to drop the sucker on our laps.

The service has been available on PCs for months, but this little box makes it much more of an accessible product, and much more familiar to console gamers. You plugs it in, you plays your games.

At the moment, the rates are still rather high for renting or playing games, in my opinion — for console gamers, a service like GameFly is probably still a better deal. But then you wouldn’t get the thrill of knowing that it’s all streaming live to your TV from some datacenter fifty miles away! Of course, you also don’t own the games you pay full price for, but that’s another discussion.

The microconsole and controller will be available on December 2nd for $99, and that includes a free game — which makes this a pretty tempting deal for the holidays. Soon they’ll have a nice subscription model that lets you play as much as you want for a flat monthly fee, but I suspect they’re busy working out the economics of that right now. We’ll have a full review as soon as we get our paws on the sucker.