PlayPack 200: Top-notch Entertainment. Unbelievable Price.

Posted in OnLive 2012 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2012 by Steve Perlman

Imagine if every penny in your change jar was worth hours of incredible gaming. One for BioShock. Another Batman: Arkham Asylum. A penny for weeks of Homefront Large-Scale Multiplayer Warfare. Starting today—for a limited time—OnLive is making that dream a reality.

Today we introduced our 200th game to the OnLive PlayPack, our revolutionary subscription service that now offers unlimited, on-demand play of hundreds of incredible console-class games on nearly any device. And, as part of our 200-hour celebration, we’re offering PlayPack at an unprecedented introductory price: your first month’s access to all 200+ games for just $2.00 USD/£2.00 GBP.

The OnLive PlayPack has always delivered a tremendous amount of entertainment value for a ridiculously low price. At just $9.99 USD/£6.99 GBP per month, the subscription service has been growing by the week, adding everything from top-tier shooters like Just Cause 2 and Red Faction: Armageddon (added today) to retro SEGA classics to cult indie titles like World of Goo. With addictive single-player gameplay and, for many of the games, rich multiplayer modes that you can return to again and again, the ever-growing collection amounts to thousands of hours of gameplay—and that’s not including time spent sharing and posting Brag Clip videos on Facebook, spectating and chatting with friends in the Arena, or inviting friends to play through instant-launch links on your Wall.

OnLive PlayPack deserves celebrating because no other on-demand subscription service comes close to delivering this kind of value, value that gets better all the time.

Whether you’re a past or future PlayPack subscriber or merely a fan of great games, you can get in on the fun with our PlayPack 200 Celebration: 200 hours of nonstop challenges, prizes, contests, multiplayer madness and more.

The PlayPack 200 Celebration runs from today through Friday, April 27, at 11:59 pm PDT (28 April (7:59am BST). Here’s a quick rundown of events:

  • PlayPack 200 Sweepstakes: Receive an entry for every PlayPack game you play for a minimum of 200 seconds each.[i] Prizes include tablets and controllers!
  • Multiplayer Madness Developer Events: Take on game developers and other OnLive members in 200-minute events featuring games such as Homefront and Air Conflicts.
  • Brag Clip Event: Post Brag Clip™ videos of your best and worst gaming moments.
  • Live interactive streaming broadcasts with the OnLive staff

You can get the full scoop on how to join in at www.onlive.com/playpack or follow OnLive on Facebook or Twitter for daily Community events. Official rules for the sweeps can be found at

U.S.: http://blog.onlive.com/playpack-200-sweepstakes-official-rules/
U.K.: http://blog.onlive.com/playpack-200-giveaway-official-rules-uk/

Hope to see you there!

—Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO

Leave A Comment »

New and improved: We just raised your game

Posted in OnLive 2012 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 7, 2012 by Matt Jensen

Whether you like to play on your PC, Mac, TV or tablet, you might notice some cool improvements when you next log into the OnLive service (or perhaps the time after that – our complete rollout may take up to 24 hours). We’ve tweaked the interface to put more of the info you want at your fingertips.

Here are just a few of the highlights:

Arena
Find out just how big a crowd someone has gathered with a new at-a-glance spectator icon. You can also control your Arena view with new View (V key on keyboard; Y button on gamepad) and Refresh (R key on keyboard; X button on gamepad) options.

Notifications
Take the bad or take the good: You can now control Cheers and Jeers notifications separately in Settings/Notifications.

Brag Clips

Check out and manage your Brag Clips without leaving your game. Just open your Dashboard and hit Alt + O (center gamepad button) to see your new My Brag Clips pane.

My Games
Want to see all your purchases in one place? The Play History tab in My Games has been changed to PlayPass, so you can see what you own, sorted by last played. (With more than 200 games available, this was a hot request.)

OnLive PlayPack
Find out more about PlayPack games. Trailers and related media are now supported for PlayPack games in the Game Details pages and will be added as available. Not yet a subscriber? Go see what you’re missing!

We’ve also made other miscellaneous fixes to improve performance throughout. Launch the OnLive client to check them out for yourself! And don’t forget to tell us what you think by following us on Facebook and Twitter!

See you on the service,

—Matt Jensen, Community Manager
OnLive Player Tag: OnLive_MJ

The OnLive Indie Showcase: Show Your Like

Posted in OnLive 2012 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2012 by Matt Jensen

We’ve always been fans of indie games. After all, independent developers have created some of the most innovative gameplay experiences out there, and this year they’ve done it again. So we decided to partner with the Independent Games Festival and bring 15 of the year’s nominees and honorable mentions to the public.

Launched on February 27, the OnLive Indie Showcase is a two-week celebration in which gamers across the US and UK can demo IGF honorees free on the OnLive Game Service and “Like” their favorites on our OnLive Facebook page. On March 12, the day after the Game Developers Conference ends, we’ll announce the top picks online, based on which game received the most Likes and which was the most played. We’re also putting IGF honorees from past years on sale this week for 75% off, because they deserve celebrating too. (Click here to see all games on sale.)

Hundreds of Likes are already populating our Facebook page, with Toren (developed by Swordtales), Atom Zombie Smasher (Blendo Games), Dear Esther (The Chinese Room) and Nitronic Rush (Digipen Institute of Technology) leading the way so far. But the deeper I get into playing these games, the harder it is to choose: from mercenary zombie killers to acrobatic janitors to suburban boys who change their world using just a smile or frown, you can play as just about anything and get hooked on pretty much any style of gameplay. It’s not apples to apples; in some cases, it’s not even fruit that you’ve heard of. But one thing I can guarantee: there’s something for everyone here.

Now if you still need convincing, there are two other reasons you should check out some of these games:

  1. Do it for you: You’ll not only discover some pretty incredible games, you’ll be entered to win an OnLive Prize Pack just for playing free.
  2. Do it for them: We’re all about getting the underdogs exposure. These developers created amazing experiences, and every time you Like a game, your Facebook friends get a chance to discover it, too. You can even double-down and post some Brag Clips of your gameplay so your Friends get a window into what you Like so much.

If you’re lucky enough to be going to GDC, you can demo all these games at OnLive’s kiosk in the IGF Pavilion, booth 838 in Moscone North. If you’re not, you’re still lucky: you can play all 15 games free instantly, with no discs and no downloads, on just about any PC or Mac, your TV with the OnLive Game System, and select tablets. Check them out and post your Likes at facebook.com/onlive. Here’s the full lineup:

  • Atom Zombie Smasher (Blendo Games)
  • Be Good (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
  • Dear Esther (The Chinese Room)
  • Dustforce (Hitbox Team)
  • English Country Tune (Stephen Lavelle)
  • Frozen Synapse (Mode 7 Games)
  • FTL (Justin Ma and Matthew Davis)
  • Lume (State of Play Games)
  • Nitronic Rush (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
  • Once Upon a Spacetime (RMIT)
  • POP (Rob Lach)
  • SpaceChem (Zachtronics Industries)
  • To the Moon (Freebird Games)
  • Toren (Swordtales)
  • WAY (CoCo & Co.)

Can’t wait to see your top picks!

—Matt Jensen, Community Manager
OnLive Player Tag: OnLive_MJ

Leave A Comment »

Play anywhere. Work anywhere—with the power of a PC on your Android tablet

Posted in OnLive 2012 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 1, 2012 by Steve Perlman


At OnLive, we don’t like to rest on our laurels. So we didn’t stop at bringing instant-action cloud gaming to your Android tablet. Now we’re delivering OnLive Desktop as well—an instant-response Windows desktop loaded with full Microsoft Office apps, Adobe Reader and, with the OnLive Desktop Plus service, gigabit-speed* accelerated browsing.

The OnLive Desktop App is now available free in the Android Market, empowering you to get your work done anywhere with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Enjoy a no-compromise, media-rich, multi-touch Windows desktop on your tablet, with fully functional applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Reader, along with 2GB of cloud storage. The OnLive Desktop Plus service, available for $4.99/month at desktop.onlive.com, provides all OnLive Desktop Standard features plus our gigabit-speed accelerated browsing—the world’s fastest browsing experience, whether you’re connecting over Wi-Fi- or 4G LTE. Together, we think they’ll change the way you look at your tablet forever.

Let me give you an example. Say you’re in transit to a meeting and you need to put some finishing touches on your PowerPoint presentation. You can just upload it from your PC or Mac into your free OnLive storage at files.onlive.com (or, if you have OnLive Desktop Plus, save it into third-party cloud storage like Dropbox) and open it instantly on your tablet on the go. Create new graphics, add in videos … with full app functionality and instant-response multi-touch gestures, you’ll feel like you’re working locally. And, with a Bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse you may forget you are not using a local PC.

With OnLive Desktop Plus, you can even email your presentation to co-workers for input or approval and make changes on the fly. Webmail attachments, even 50 MB ones, transfer in less than a second. By the time you arrive at your meeting, your presentation is polished, up-to-the-minute accurate and ready to present, either directly from your tablet or by simply signing in to OnLive Desktop from a different device. (OnLive Desktop is also available on iPad. Smartphones, PCs, Macs and monitors/TVs are coming soon.)

Simple, right? You look professional and your work does, too. No time lost. No compromises.  Even better, OnLive Desktop Plus can actually reduce Web browsing data usage by a factor of 10 or more, since only the top layer of the current view of a website is sent over your local Internet connection**.

The OnLive Desktop app requires at least Android 2.3 and is compatible with the following tablets:  Acer Iconia Tab A500, ASUS Eee TF101, Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1, and HTC Jetstream. For more details—and to sign up for your free OnLive account—check out desktop.onlive.com.

Welcome to your newfound freedom!

—Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO

*See desktop.onlive.com/plans for details and terms and conditions.

**OnLive Desktop’s local data usage is based largely on screen motion, not the amount of data transferred from a website.

4 Comments »

Faster Than Fast: Gigabit-speed Flash Browsing on iPad

Posted in OnLive 2012 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 22, 2012 by Steve Perlman

Just a few short weeks ago, we introduced our free OnLive™ Desktop app, delivering an instant-response Windows desktop and full-featured Microsoft Office apps to your iPad. Now, with OnLive Desktop Plus, we’re excited to transform the iPad even further—into the world’s fastest mobile Flash player.

Available today at desktop.onlive.com, the OnLive Desktop Plus service delivers priority access to all the standard features of OnLive Desktop, plus gigabit-speed* accelerated browsing with full Adobe Flash. That’s not simply a fast browser, it’s faster than any consumer browsing experience we know of.

For you that means—whether you’re on Wi-Fi or 4G (Android LTE tablets coming soon!)—you can expect even the most elaborate Flash websites to load in seconds, even if it would have taken your home computer minutes to load the same page. Animation, video and sound come through impeccably and instantly. And, large cloud storage files and Web email attachments—even 50 MB PowerPoint presentations—to upload or download in less than a second.

All of this—gigabit-speed accelerated browsing, plus Flash, plus access to fully functional PC apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and now Adobe Reader, plus your cloud desktop, plus 2 GB of cloud storage—is available for just $4.99 per month.

What’s really cool is OnLive gigabit-speed browsing doesn’t come out of your local data usage; you might actually save money. OnLive Desktop Plus can dramatically reduce Web browsing data usage by as much as a factor of 10 or more, since only the top layer of the current view of a website is sent over your local Internet connection**. So you get the world’s fastest mobile browser, at quite possibly the world’s best value.

If you don’t have an iPad or you’re not in the U.S., don’t worry—we’ll be bringing OnLive Desktop to more platforms and territories soon. Android, smartphone, PC, Mac and even monitors and TVs (via OnLive MicroConsole thin client) are all on the way.

In the meantime, check out OnLive Desktop Plus at desktop.onlive.com.

—Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO

*See desktop.onlive.com/plans for details and terms and conditions.
**OnLive Desktop’s local data usage is based largely on screen motion, not the amount of data transferred from a web site.

3 Comments »

Footie Fans, The Competition Starts Now

Posted in OnLive 2011 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 23, 2012 by brucegrove

Soccer. Footie. Whatever you like to call the sport, if you consider yourself a true fan, we’ve got some exciting news: Now you can experience it with unmatched realism anytime and anywhere you like.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 has just launched on OnLive, bringing a whole slew of gameplay improvements (and a kickin’ sweepstakes) along with it. From brand-new Active AI to a cool new Teammate Control system, which lets you command the movements of two players at once (a really fun way to draw away defense, among other things), PES 2012 has taken some impressive steps forward from past games in the series. You not only feel more in control of your team, the animation is better, players’ reactions are more defined and Konami has added some cool details to bring the whole stadium to life.

But what I’m most excited about is playing it on OnLive, and I know I might be biased but hear me out:

  1. You can spectate. With the OnLive Arena, you’ll be able to watch matches between friends and strangers, and even add your own commentary over voice chat.
  2. You can show off. Snap a Brag Clip™ video of the play that brings the crowds to their feet and post it on Facebook for the real world to see.
  3. You never have to stop. Seriously, this is awesome. With the new OnLive app for Android tablets and smartphones, you can stream your OnLive games to almost any device you have on hand and pick up playing wherever you left off. Since we just released our Universal OnLive Wireless Controller, you can even control the action exactly the same way on your PC, Mac, TV, tablet or smartphone by just bringing that one controller with you.

Pretty cool, huh? We thought so, too. So we decided to welcome all true fans onto the service with the PES 2012 Kickoff Play 2 Win Sweepstakes.

Play any time between now and January 31 12:01 AM PST/8:01 AM GMT 31 January and be automatically entered to win incredible prizes! You even get a shot at scoring some pretty sweet gaming packs just for checking out the free demo.

UK fans, get the details on how to enter—and what you can win—here.

US fans, your rules and prizes are here.

Don’t miss out—the sweeps only lasts one week. And we have a feeling our Arena will be popping!

See you there,

—Bruce Grove, General Manager, OnLive UK
OnLive Player Tag: BrooseG

1 Comment »

OnLive: Console-class Gaming Comes to Google TV

Posted in OnLive 2011 with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2012 by Steve Perlman

Videogames just took a huge leap into the future with OnLive cloud gaming on Google TV.

With Google TV, you take it for granted that you can stream just about any type of linear media—video, movies, music—on demand and experience it instantly. But, when it comes to the latest high-performance console-class games, you probably still need discs and big downloads to experience them, and gameplay is anything but instant.

With OnLive, the latest high-performance videogames stream just as instantly as videos or movies. It’s really cool.

Download the OnLive Viewer app, fire it up and check out my favorite place, the Arena. What you’ll see are gamers around the world playing top-tier videogames live, some of them approaching the visual realism of live action, and before long, you might even think you are watching a movie. Cheer (click thumbs-up) if you like what you see, and that cheer might appear on the screen of a gamer on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Try friending and striking up some chat. And, definitely watch some Brag Clip® videos, showing the best (and worst!) of OnLive gaming, with the most jaw-dropping and most hilarious moments captured from live gameplay.

As we do with most new platforms, OnLive is starting out with a Viewer on Google TV, so for now, you can just watch and use OnLive social features. But hang in there, OnLive is working closely with Google to enable full gameplay with OnLive gamers from around the world on Google TV.  And more Google TV devices are coming, with OnLive built right in.

In fact, this week at the CES Show in Las Vegas, VIZIO will showcase the first-ever line of Google TV products with OnLive playability built in. With this next generation of VIZIO Internet Apps Plus (V.I.A. Plus) devices, equipped with Google TV 2.0, you can simply power on your HDTV, pick up your Universal OnLive Wireless Controller and play amazing games instantly on demand—no console necessary. Play the first 30 minutes of almost any of OnLive’s 200 games free and buy only what you like, or subscribe to the OnLive PlayPack Bundle for unlimited access to over 140 games. No discs, no big downloads … just like the instant media experience you’ve become accustomed to with Google TV.

Google TV gives you unprecedented choice and control of instant media on TV. With OnLive, you can now add top-tier videogames to the list of media available. I hope you have a great time with it!

—Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO

3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 271 other followers