Making Your Console Disappear

Say goodbye to your console.  At least that's what OnLive would have you do.

Riffing off of the Steam model and taking it a step further, OnLive (set for a "Winter 2009" release) is an online gaming service accessible via PC, Mac or "microconsole" - a piece of hardware you connect to your HDTV - and a broadband hookup that purports to provide access to any game title instantly.  Having partnered with almost all of the biggest game studios (Activision/Blizzard is a notable exception so far) OnLive aims to be a less hardware dependent way of delivering gaming content by essentially "streaming" the games to your computer or television.

Obviously the big advantage here is that there are no trips to a brick and mortar store to buy games, but OnLive looks to be building in a few other handy elements.

A Demo feature allows you try out a game before you buy it.

An Observe feature lets you watch other people play (another way of demoing a game).

A recording feature lets you record your gameplay for display later (they call them "Brag Clips").

There are some other community elements, but the big allure here is the instant nature of the whole thing.  Because the games are server-side, you don't even need to download anything to play them - your controller is just communicating with a big powerful centrally located gaming server via the internet so all you really have on your end is a display.

It occurs to me that this model is also highly resistant to cheating - since all the calculations are happening server-side.

If it really works as advertised I don't see how this couldn't be a huge success.  The ability to easily demo games before buying them is great on its own and since you aren't physically buying (or even downloading) the games they HAVE to be priced lower than in-store and potentially even lower than Steam-esque discounts.

Overall OnLive is obviously something to keep watching.  They've clearly already gained the trust of the biggest studios and if they can get it to work as smoothly as advertised they'll be putting some serious competition on the console market (the Wii being an exception because the hardware is generally part of the gameplay).