SL Go from OnLive, which allowed people on older hardware and mobile devices to experience Second Life at high resolution settings finally came to the end of its life on April 30th. Today when you launch the application you just receive a message informing you that an error has occurred. In some quarters people will say that the error occurred at Sony HQ, but I think it’s a bit off to bash Sony too much.
The real issues were explained in that final blog post from OnLive : A Bright Future for Cloud Gaming at Sony. The title of the post sounds bright, the reality wasn’t. However there’s an interesting tie in with future developments, which I’ll come to shortly. In the blog post OnLive admitted :
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.
That pretty much sums it all up. OnLive were not turning a profit, although their metrics were improving. Sony did not need another platform for streaming games. Whereas there were other interested parties, Sony put their money where their mouth was and purchased what they felt they needed. Whereas this is without any shadow of a doubt disappointing for those of us who genuinely enjoyed the service SL Go provided, the cold harsh realities are there for all to see.
The concept on the other hand, is not going away. More and more companies are turning to remote desktop solutions for their staff. There are many reasons for this but two of the most glaring are that mobile computing continues to rise in popularity and one size fits all desktop computing solutions are inefficient when it comes to determining who really needs the resources. For example if you buy a shed load of PC’s with 8GB RAM, many users will not need that much memory, whereas some users want more. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions are going to become more popular. However we have been here before, so it will be interesting to see if the flexibility and performance the sales pitch advertises actually delivers. However there’s potential, a hell of a lot of it.
However where does that leave Second Life and OpenSim users? Well one company aiming to deliver a similar service to OnLive are Bright Canopy. The man behind Bright Canopy is Bill Glover, AKA Chaos Priestman and as reported by Inara Pey : Bright Canopy: first user group meeting notes published.
If you’re interested in this sort of technology then I suggest you read Inara’s blog and also read the meeting notes on The Bright Canopy website. The big question of course, is how much will this all cost?
We honestly can’t tell you yet. It will be enough to keep the lights on and less than a new computer. On the back-end, we will be paying frame and they have to pay Amazon for hosting. It will be as reasonable as we can make it and still be sustainable. We will charge as we go, and we must be profitable, yes. We have some ideas to make that work.
Whereas this still means people don’t know how much it will cost, at this stage of the game it’s a very fair answer. Bright Canopy is in its infancy.
At the meeting I plotted world domination with Inara Pey, however she seemed to be more interested in taking notes than going into cahoots with me. However those notes were important!
I have briefly tested Bright Canopy and it did work reasonably well in my browser. However as I was testing a demo the nearest server was over 5,000 miles away from me, so I haven’t been able to experience a more realistic version whereby the nearest server will be far closer to my home. This is sort of thing people should bear in mind if they get an early look at Bright Canopy.
Bright Canopy is tapping into a market that SL Go has proven exists. However they will also have their eyes wide open to the fact that SL Go couldn’t quite make a go of it. People who might want to use this service should also have their eyes wide open.
I’m sure there are larger companies looking at this and wondering if a business really can make a go of offering a service such as this, especially with the virtual reality hype where it currently is, this is a solution that could be ground breaking in terms of bringing immersive virtual world experiences to many different devices. The future of cloud gaming and virtual worlds may indeed be bright, I for one, certainly hope it is.