Verno wrote on Jun 22, 2010, 14:35:
Everyone has limits as the music industry found out the hard way.
No, what the music industry learned is that if you can't control the unauthorized distribution of your product and you don't offer an attractively priced and easily accessible alternative, people will download your product for free. That's not the case with cloud gaming services like OnLive. Even if the price is initially seen as unattractive due to the existence of alternative platforms, there is simply no way for consumers to steal and distribute the content.
It also helps if you have something that people really want and OnLive isn't offering anything that cannot be found elsewhere.
As I have stated that is only true for now.
you're ignoring the fact that the industry's big players had a hard enough time accepting Steam
But, now that the large publishers have embraced digital distribution that is no longer an issue. Plus OnLive doesn't have the potential risks that Steam did especially since the company is not also a competing game developer and publisher like Valve.
Cloud gaming in North America faces some pretty significant issues due to the huge distribution of population and lack of any real organized effort at a national broadband infrastructure. That's without going into usage caps and the other crap that's also been a problem for digital distribution.
Those are the same issues that digital distribution faces, but they certainly haven't stopped it from being successful. With ISP's like AT&T as partners in OnLive, those issues won't keep it from being successful.
This comment was edited on Jun 22, 2010, 15:11.