OnLive Blog

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4

Ten days ago, following our E3 booth wrap-up, we hit the button to start inviting founding members to the OnLive Game Service. By then, the OnLive waitlist had grown far larger than expected, and we knew the initial flood of new users would be pushing OnLive’s data centers to their very limits, regardless of how fast we added capacity. OnLive’s maiden voyage would be at full throttle from the get-go.

Each day, as increasingly more users were invited, we saw the load on our data centers rapidly mount as we repeatedly hit new session highs. We were blasting into completely uncharted territory: cloud gaming on a massive scale. Theory put to practice with no margin for error.

Now, ten days later, I’m happy (and relieved) to report the OnLive Game Service has been running 24/7 since launch, with games being played every day, around the clock, from every corner of the 48 States, despite the fact we’ve accommodated far more members at this stage than ever anticipated.

As I mentioned in my last blog, there would be some bumps on takeoff, and there were. As with any new technology, some small bugs have surfaced that we are fixing now. Also, while we have been installing data center capacity as quickly as we can, it looks like it will be about a week until we’ve balanced capacity across all US Internet regions. This will improve response time for some users as we fine-tune Internet routing, and it will also enable us to invite users from the waiting list more evenly across regions.

We appreciate the patience of our users while we iron out these bumps and continue to ramp up the OnLive Game Service, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the unexpected demand. If you’re still waiting to get in, hang tight, we’ll get to you as soon as possible.

We are also working hard to bring more great games to the OnLive Game Service. We announced an exciting slate of great new and coming soon games at E3, and we are rolling them from Beta into public release as fast as we can. In addition to these, we anticipate many more new game announcements in the coming months. In fact, here’s the first one:

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is being released tonight at 12:01AM PDT on Tuesday, June 29th. What makes this a major milestone for OnLive—and showcases an awesome benefit of instant gaming—is OnLive members will be playing the game before anyone on any other platform. No waiting for a store to open or waiting in line to buy a physical disc. No downloads, updates, installs or authorizations required. (And, no Windows required if you are a Mac user.)

With OnLive you Just Play. It’s better than being first in line!

To commemorate this milestone, we’re going to have a contest! The first OnLive member to make it all the way through LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 will win an Apple iPad™, and the next 5 OnLive members will win an Apple iPod touch®. The six winning entrants will:

• Have a PlayPass for the game to participate in the contest, so if you are logged in just prior to the game going live, we recommend you log out and log back in at 12:01AM to be sure your Marketplace list is refreshed and all PlayPass options appear for the game.
• Take a Brag Clip™ video showing collection of all 200 Gold Bricks in the game and reaching the final bonus level. Specifically, winning Brag Clip videos must show you have collected all 200 Gold Bricks in the game and have become Lord Voldemort in the final bonus level. You must enable “All players” to view your Brag Clips video under the Privacy settings in the OnLive Game Service Dashboard.
• Send an email to community@onlive.com with your Player Tag (associated with the Brag Clip video of the game completion screen), First Name/Last Name, Address, Telephone Number and Date of Birth in the body of the email as soon as you have completed the game. Entrants will be ranked based on when OnLive receives a properly completed email.
• Receive a contest confirmation email from OnLive to confirm receipt of your validated entry. Remember that your OnLive Account will only save your last 15 Brag Clip videos, so wait until the winners of the contest have been announced by OnLive before making any more Brag Clip videos that might delete the game completion Brag Clip video.

For full contest rules and eligibility please click here.

So, OnLive is now 10 days old, and despite growing up much faster than expected, other than a few bumps, so far, so good. Again, we are grateful for all of you who have been patiently waiting for OnLive, and we are working as fast as we can to get you in.

For those of you who have tried OnLive, we do hope you like what you’ve seen so far. But, remember, this is only OnLive’s very first step. In every dimension, OnLive will get way better from here.

—Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder & CEO