OnLive

OnLive was the idea of streaming games made flesh, and it arrived years too early. Announced with great fanfare in 2009 and launched in 2010, it let players run demanding PC and console games on almost any hardware, including underpowered laptops and a tiny set-top MicroConsole, by doing all the computation on remote servers and streaming back compressed video. In an era when many considered the concept technically impossible, OnLive shipping at all was a genuine achievement.

The service offered a mix of purchases and, later, an all-you-can-play subscription bundle, and it dazzled in demos: a heavy game like Crysis running smoothly on a cheap netbook felt like a magic trick. It pioneered features that would become standard a decade later, including instant spectating of other players' live sessions and the ability to jump into a game from a link without any installation.

But the physics of 2010 were merciless. Home broadband was slower and less reliable than the service demanded, so many players suffered visible compression artifacts and input lag that made twitch games frustrating. Data caps loomed. Publisher support was cautious, leaving the catalog patchy. Running warehouses of expensive servers to give each active player a dedicated slice of hardware proved ruinously costly against a modest subscriber base.

The company's collapse was abrupt and dramatic. In 2012 OnLive effectively went insolvent, laid off its staff, and had its assets absorbed into a new entity in a restructuring that wiped out shareholders and stunned employees. It limped on until 2015, when Sony purchased its patents and shut the service down entirely, folding the intellectual property into its own cloud ambitions.

OnLive's commercial story is a failure, but its historical importance is hard to overstate. It proved cloud gaming was possible, established the vocabulary and user experience the whole category would inherit, and its patents and lessons flowed directly into the services that later succeeded. Everyone who streams a game today is walking a path OnLive cut first.