Ken’s Blog

TechCrunch’s reporting that OnLive managed to put together a series C round of funding to add on to their previous $16.5 million in funding. Looks like some large companies are hedging their bets a bit. You’ve got AT&T (likely for cable/television distribution), Warner Bros (movie and television as well), and  Autodesk (previously mentioned to be interested in the idea of cloud distributed 3D CAD).

If I had to guess, you’re looking at a $30-50 million round, given the players and how late the round is. So, you’re looking at enough to get ramped up for expansion (also, given the players) into other areas. The thing is, will they lose focus and end up spinning their wheels as competitors grab market share in the games market?

I still can’t help but think all this is doing is funding the build out of the on-demand gaming industry without any guarantee of success for OnLive itself. Plus, they’ve lit a spark. Outside of direct competitors trying to mimic their model, you’re going to see Microsoft putting some of that $9.5 billion (per year) in R&D funding to figure out how to repurpose the Xbox into a similar device…except it’ll have a hard disk and CPU to handle other stuff off-line (for instance, how’s about 160GB of cache space to speed things up even more?).

We’ll see…it’s six months until GDC 2010 and 9 months until E3. I’m guessing they’ll announce something by one of those events if they’re really on to something. If they don’t, then you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t taking a tangent they shouldn’t be.

kn

Looks like the OnLive Open Beta is upon us. Now, we’ll see how well this service will hold up over a more unpredictable and widespread Internet.

I still think this is a shaky idea at best, at least here in the US. Sure, people will love not having to upgrade a PC or deal with shelling out $60 for a game they’ll play for a month or two but I think people still like to hold on to certain games (so maybe this becomes a great way to demo games). In other words, you won’t eliminate the need for consoles in homes but you might create a sort of “pre-market” for games.

The tricky part might be the competition…they’re competing against the console makers themselves (game devs will make more money selling to individual gamers than to a single company that buys a bulk batch of licenses) as well as anyone else in the living room that wants to own the game market in some way (cable operators, InstantAction and other online services, and Microsoft and Apple with their home TV systems).

And, of course, there’s the whole issue with lag. Broadband is fast but for many it’s not consistent which will suck for FPS and racing games which already cause a lot of frustration when lag strikes.

kn