I speak from personal experience – them refusing to accept a return a dead component (telling me to go to the manufacturer), then refusing to pay for return shipping – then refusing to refund me (because I was damned after that if I was giving them my money)… I literally had to report them to my bank for fraud, and get a refund on my credit card that way.

Then 2 days later they phoned me and threatened me with court action for reporting the transaction as fraudulent. Upon which I happily informed them that they broke almost every distance selling/sale of goods law, and would welcome their attempt.
I’m guessing my bank demanded they pay them back for the refund they provided me, but I’m not sure what action the bank took, if any.

Thankfully that was the end of it, my credit card game me a full refund no the goods and the return shipping (which they would also not refund, but are legally required too).

It’s worth paying the extra pennies and £2-3 pound shipping from someone like ebuyer, because they have bloody brilliant customer service when something goes wrong.

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things you can get for FREE on the internet (demos,

I think you’re misinterpreting what they mean by ‘demos.’ Demos on OnLive aren’t like regular demos. It’s going to be something like: You select a game, you select ‘Play Demo,’ it loads up the full game, and then kicks you out to the OnLive menu system after a level, or a set amount of time or something. So you can play a demo of a game that doesn’t have a ‘demo’ (i.e. Mirror’s Edge).

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OnLive can:

Get Fucked.

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@Optimaximal: They’ve said multiple times that the micro-console is going to be super dirt cheap (cheap enough to give it away free with some of the subscription plans). It’s basically just an ethernet card with a blue tooth receiver, HDMI out, and an internal web-browser that only goes to the OnLive page.

But you still cannot get realtime due to the fact that every modern (and good looking) codec makes use of GoPs in one way or another. So the lag always has to be at least the distance to the next i-frame which usually is half a second or more.

I don’t have a link handy, but the CEO gave a talk a couple months ago where he focused on the codec (and the hardware encoder) they developed, and it doesn’t use GoPs.

I still see this as largely a good thing, mostly because the OnLive data centers all run on regular PC hardware. A game developed for OnLive doesn’t have to do anything to their renderer or engine, they just have to plug in the OnLive APIs to replace their multiplayer code and add in support for their social networking stuff. The benefit being, once a publisher or developer has made their OnLive version, why would they not proceed to release a boxed retail, or Steam, or D2D or whatever version as well? They’ve got the game running on PC already, so it’s not going to cost them anything extra. It kills console exclusivity for third party games.

The thing that’s going to kill it is the pricing for rentals and purchases. $14.99 doesn’t seem horrendous for the service itself, but if they expect $50 or more for a full game purchase, nobody’s going to use it. $15 or $20 for buying a game (and 2 or 3 a week for rentals)? They could probably get away with that.

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However, surely gamers already have the system to play the games they want to play. Therefore, we have no need to pay a subscription for getting an inferior experience.

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It’s hard for me to see how turning the PC into an online-dependent console can possible be a good thing.

Your perception comes from them ‘trying to turn the PC into said online console’…

OnLive have already stated their ultimate goal is the Guitar Hero model – a simple, cheap plastic box designed as a controller interface to allow you to play over the net on your TV.

They’re just using PCs & Macs as the easiest platform to gain traction with – they’re all already largely internet connected and have a much larger ubiquitous user base than all the consoles together. Once that’s profitable, functional and the coffers start filling, then comes the bespoke high-margin hardware.

At least, that’s how I expect their shareholders are seeing it.

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OnLive is only as reliable as your net connection, so less reliable than a console or PC. It’s costly, so uninteresting to a more casual audience. It removes sense of ownership which is extremely important to people. While the technology is amazing the business behind it needs to be incredibly smart and agile to avoid bullying by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony who all have first party developers and strong relationships with publishers.

It’s probably before its time. I don’t expect a huge amount of developer interest and I don’t anticipate a massive upheaval in the games industry because of it. This is not the one console future you’re looking for, chill out.

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