OnLive, the Internet based Game Streaming service, has announced that they will not charge a monthly subscription fee as they had originally planned during their private and open beta.
It’s official: There will be no base monthly fee for the OnLive Game Service going forward. WOOT!
Free Instant-play Demos, Free Massive Spectating, Free Brag Clip™ videos, messaging, friending.
No credit card needed, unless you decide to buy a 3-day, 5-day or Full PlayPass. And ongoing access with no monthly fee. Of course, we’ve had a promotion waiving the monthly fee for the first year, so this announcement is confirming what we had hoped—that we can continue without a monthly fee beyond the first year. Although we wish we could have confirmed no monthly fee from the get-go, pioneering a major new video game paradigm is hard: we had to first grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating costs. Now that we’ve reached that stage, we can confidently say a monthly fee is not needed, which deserves a double WOOT! WOOT!
We’re excited because this opens the door for the OnLive Game Service to be used by everyone whenever they feel like it.
I am impressed with their decision to eliminate this fee when it could have been easy to retain it even though their financial model works without it. It is genuinely impressive to see a company doing business this way.
I have not tried this service yet but I think now that this fee has been lifted I just might give it a shot and see how it performs. There just might be more to follow on this.
