As many of us know, it didn’t end well for OnLive as they attempted to bring streaming gaming to the market. The service had potential and a lot of people enjoyed it, including those of us who utilised SL Go to enhance our Second Life experience. However OnLive were never able to turn that potential into profit and eventually they sold a lot of their IP to Sony and the ship sailed.
When it comes to a replacement for SL Go, Bright Canopy have been at the forefront of developing an alternative. However an alternative to OnLive’s gaming service hasn’t yet appeared.
However The Verge have reported : GameFly’s new streaming service wants to be Netflix for games :
We still don’t have a true Netflix for games, but that isn’t stopping companies from trying. The latest is GameFly — the rental service that sends you games in the mail — which today is launching a new video game streaming service. As part of the announcement GameFly revealed that it has acquired streaming company Playcast, which will power the new service.
Now to be clear, this is not OnLive 2, electric boogaloo, for a start, the service is currently only available for Amazon Fire TV, which I’ll be honest, I’m not really familiar with. However the service currently offers packages bundles of games for $6.99 a month, each bundle contains around seven games, The Verge article states.
The sort of service The Verge is talking about, a Netflix for games, is something I’ve discussed before. All the way back on September 30th 2011 I blogged; Online Gaming Needs Channels :
if I could pay a reasonable amount a month to play Lord Of The Rings Online, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, I would do so, give me a channel I can subscribe to and a choice of games and I’ll pay.
Even more to the point, I stated :
The games may need someone else to bring it together, like Virgin Media, SKY, Netflix or someone like that and of course there will be games in your subscription package you’ll never play due to lack of time, but this is surely the way forward for online gaming and will give studios a money stream as well as the providers of the channel. The days of being able to stand alone with your twelve quid a month game are drawing to an end, a subscription channel however makes sense, or a choice of subscription channels anyway.
However at that time, I wasn’t considering the option of titles being streamed. The Gamefly model is closer to the model I envisaged, bundles, which are similar to channels on cable where you get a choice of how many channels you subscribe to with differing prices.
Now Gamefly aren’t offering Second Life in their bundles, which is a shame of course, although a limited market would be even more limited with the Amazon Fire TV requirement, but the Gamefly offering does answer one question people have been pondering since OnLive went to the great Sony in the sky, will anyone else try streaming games to customers. the answer, as we can see from Gamefly, is a resounding yes.
The potential is most definitely there for this sort of service, but can Gamefly make it work in terms of service and profit, that’s the broader question and one that won’t be answered for quite some time.
Read more about Gamefly streaming here : https://www.gamefly.com/#!/stream