With any luck, one of those might just be a
massively multiplayer online game (MMO). Imagine playing Star Wars: The Old Republic or World of Warcraft from anywhere: Grove believes they’ve now cracked how to do just that.
“The MMO one is interesting, there’s some technical challenges doing that - but we believe we’ve mostly resolved for those now.” The only problem? Making it profitable. Many MMOs charge a monthly fee, and since OnLive has to charge too, there’s not an obvious fit - who’s going to pay twice?
“We run large farms of servers and we need to be able to run that business and so it’s about finding the right balance and the right business model that allows you to have enough users online to make an MMO worthwhile as well as being able to operate the service cost effectively."
"Some of that - never say never - may include - maybe we bring portions of an MMO to the service, maybe if you bring an MMO to OnLive it’s not exclusive to OnLive for example."
Now a massively multiplayer online game so massive it can only run on OnLive - that could be a gamechanger. Grove is sure that’s the sort of game we’ll see in time.
“Once the right number of people are there that’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen,” Grove says. “I don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it’s something I'm fairly certain will happen.”
Whether it’s OnLive that pulls it off or not, it’s coming: your next console won’t just be one machine, but hundreds.
