Sony – Ciaran Laval

April 10, 2015

Dennis Harper Of Onlive Talks To Draxtor Despres Regarding SL Go

The latest edition of The Drax Files Radio hour (without Jo Yardley this week) features an interview with Dennis Harper of OnLive. Dennis’ role at OnLive was as Product Manager for SL Go, so he knows his stuff.

The interview is a fascinating and emotional one. There are some cold hard truths about what happened with SL Go, why OnLive’s patents were sold, the power of virtual world communities and why a virtual solution for Second Life would still be welcomed by many

We learn early on how the way companies envisage something working, aren’t always the way they turn out. For example Dennis explains that OnLive thought that the people who may want SL Go would be power users, landlords, content creators, people who are in Second Life a lot and may see SL Go as being a good addition. However they soon realised, landlords and content creators often already spend a lot of time working on their home computer, which in many cases is quite a decent spec. The people who ended up embracing SL Go? People on older hardware.

This sort of thing always interests me, it happens a lot, a company think they have a target audience and find out they do have a target audience, but it wasn’t the one they originally envisaged.

However as much as I love (it hasn’t gone yet) SL Go, it’s not perfect and Dennis points out some of the flaws. The number one complaint was regarding voice chat, or more to the point, the lack of voice chat. However Dennis did let us into a little secret. Voice chat via OnLive servers was possible, but only to other OnLive users. Therefore if two people were using SL Go, it would have been feasible to voice chat, but not inside Second Life, the chat would be via their OnLive accounts.

Another issue people complained about was the fuzzy looking world SL Go could produce. The reason for this was that OnLive is 720p, not 1080p, therefore on smaller screens it looks fine but on large monitors, it could get a bit fuzzy.

Dennis also talked with glowing praise about the Second Life community. When SL Go opened their island people would come and visit, they’d join in the chat, some people wouldn’t quite understand what cloud computing was, they wouldn’t understand what SL Go could do, but they would give it a go and then, in many cases, they’d be extremely excited about the results, seeing Second Life in a new light. This was the power of SL Go, but having the inworld island helped people to learn more about SL Go before giving it a try. The richness of the conversations people could have within a virtual world aided their experience.

The other side of the community issue was that Dennis himself was a noob. He had no idea how to use Second Life initially and his comments here are comments that Linden Lab should take note of. The way Dennis learned about Second Life was by someone else showing him how to use Second Life. Someone showed him how to dance, how to groom his avatar, where to go shopping, where to hang out and how to overcome some inworld quirks. Dennis suggests that without that sort of support from other users, he imagines many users may turn away from Second Life before they’ve really got started.

However how about OnLive and SL Go? What really happened, this is interesting indeed.

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April 3, 2015April 3, 2015

Scepticism Of Cloud Gaming May Be The Real Reason SL Go Is Closing

A blog post from OnLive sheds a lot more light on the Sony deal : A Bright Future for Cloud Gaming at Sony. The post also confirms my thoughts that it’s unfair to paint Sony as the evil corporate villain in all of this, because there are some cold hard facts about the viability of the business are explained in the blog post.

One important point to note is that the blog post suggests that OnLive were indeed looking for someone to purchase them, and this section of the blog post spells out the situation quite clearly :

Since 2012, the company has dramatically improved its technology and business models such that all of its 5 services are gross margin positive, ranging from 43% to 86% margin. The fact that we had such positive margins should prevent repeat speculation that we were “crushed by infrastructure costs.” The company also was able to achieve conversion rates from free trial to paid of between 64-78% for its services. Despite these positive metrics, the lifetime value (TLV) of a subscriber was still less than the cost to acquire subscribers (CPA), but they were converging. While we knew we could not get to break-even on our own, we believed that there were many large companies who would be able to get there due to: 1) being able to communicate broadly and inexpensively (lowering CPA), 2) having their own distribution platform for the service, and 3) being able to license the most popular games and MMO’s, the latter 2 would have had the effect of both reducing CPA and reducing churn (thereby raising TLV). Despite these positive developments, we were unable to entice an acquirer who wanted to continue the service, and Sony already had their own service.

Therefore OnLive were seeking assistance in terms of breaking even and whereas some of that assistance could come from companies such as Linden Lab, they needed more companies to jump aboard the ship to make this project viable in the long term.

Step forward Sony. Unfortunately for us SL Go users and those who use OnLive Desktop, Sony have absolutely no need for a streaming service, as they are already running one in the shape and form of Playstation Now.

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April 3, 2015

Sony’s Gain Is A Loss For Some Second Life Residents

It was with great sadness that I read that SL Go from Onlive will be closing its services on April 30th. Sadness may be an understatement, there was much profanity. The reason for the closure of not only SL Go, but other OnLive games related services is due to Onlive selling patents to Sony as Kyle Orland explains over at Ars Technica.

Sony are of course a corporation and therefore it would be easy to paint Sony as the evil corporate villain. Fans of Science Fiction know where corporations are leading us, but to be fair to Sony they have a fairly decent reputation, therefore they’re not exactly in the same league as the Tyrell Corporation or Omni Consumer Products. More importantly, there’s probably more to this than meets the eye. The details of the deal haven’t been made public. I’ll find it hard to stay annoyed at Sony, especially as my annoyance may be misplaced.

In Kyle Orland’s article there’s a quote from a statement by Sony Computer Entertainment VP of Global Business Development, Philip Rosenberg :

“These strategic purchases open up great opportunities for our gamers, and gives Sony a formidable patent portfolio in cloud gaming,”

“It is yet another proof point that demonstrates our commitment to changing the way gamers experience the world of PlayStation.”

The point being missed there, by a country mile, is customers of OnLive were not playing on the PlayStation. However there may be some good news for those who would like to give SL Go a try, even though it’s closing down on April 30th.

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