I was surprised to read about this, this morning. And when I was ready to write it off, I read that a “raft of major publishers” including EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Atari, etc. are on board. This could be big:
A games startup called OnLive will be coming out of stealth mode today at the Game Developers Conference. Here’s the proposition: they take the heavy processing part of video games and move it into — and I apologize for using this hated, hated word — the Cloud. All the high-end graphics heavy lifting happens at some server farm, instead of on the overheated, overpriced chips in your PC or your console, and what you see onscreen is just the end-product, shipped to whatever machine you happen to be playing on in realtime using some ultra-powerful compression algorithm.
via Is OnLive the New Fourth Game Console? Actually, Maybe :: Nerd World – TIME.com.
Richard Clark (Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief) has spent his entire life writing, reading, listening, and playing. He has a Bachelors in Theology from the Baptist College of Florida and has a Master of Arts in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives in Louisville, KY where he is the classroom technology manager at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to writing at Christ and Pop Culture, he is also a staff writer for 
I agree. This really could be big. With that name and a lack of a strong backer (MS, Sony, Nintendo), it’s going to be extremely hard for it to get off the ground though. My guess is that the other consoles might take a clue from this and move that direction themselves. ?
All I know is Gamestop is so screwed.
In another note, I hate this sentence: “OnLive comes out of an incubator company called Rearden, which was started by Steve Perlman, the man who made zillions of 1990′s dollars off of WebTV.”
“Zillions”?
I will be interested to see how well this really works. Like how low in video processing can you go on your local box and still get good results. That is where the value would be to the end users.