After more than a year of silence, cloud video game streaming service OnLive has returned. Under new leadership and with two new game services, OnLive is hoping to return from obscurity after its financial drama in 2012.
It was announced today that the company has appointed Mark Jung, co-founder of IGN and chief of video streaming site Vudu, as its executive chairman.
OnLive is restructuring itself by offering new services that do away the limitations and issues of the company's previous offerings. CloudLift has been announced as an OnLive service that lets users stream their existing PC games to other devices through the cloud. OnLive will be working with Valve to offer users access to their Steam libraries though cloud streaming.
Essentially, if you own a game on Steam that's eligible for CloudLift, then you can play that game on any OnLive compatible device without an additional purchase of that game.
OnLive previously only offered titles for streaming through their services, forcing users to purchase a cloud-only version of a game or a downloadable version from a different retailer. This change allows for OnLive to still sell product keys but give people more options.
CloudLift will be a subscription service that costs $14.99 a month and reportedly launch with 20 compatible games.
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The second OnLive service revealed was OnLive GO: a cloud service centered around MMOs and virtual world games like Second Life, allowing for access to these games from different types of devices.
Prior to its revival this month, OnLive saw all of its employees fired in August 2012. The company then sold its assets, restarted its self, and was sold for $4.8 million in October 2012 to a venture capital firm. Gary Lauder, OnLive's lead investor had this to say about the company's past problems, "It was more of a proof of concept than a true business," he said.
"(OnLive) didn't fail because of fundamental problems with its business, but the business now is a much more viable business now that it had been then.”
