OnLive drops subscription fees

One of the more questionable aspects of OnLive’s business strategy has been dropped with confirmation that the cloud computing provider will no longer ask users to pay a monthly subscription.

The fact that the service had planned on asking users to pay a monthly fee on top of paying to access individual titles has always been a matter of debate, but now the firm claims that dropping the subscription charges has always been part of the plan.

Of course, we’ve had a promotion waiving the monthly fee for the first year, so this announcement is confirming what we had hoped – that we can continue without a monthly fee beyond the first year,” founder and CEO Steve Perlman stated on the OnLive blog.

Although we wish we could have confirmed no monthly fee from the get-go, pioneering a major new video game paradigm is hard: we had to first grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating costs. Now that we’ve reached that stage, we can confidently say a monthly fee is not needed.

We’re excited because this opens the door for the OnLive Game Service to be used by everyone whenever they feel like it, whether for playing a full game on OnLive, or for just instantly playing a demo before buying a game for a console or a PC.”

Perlman also confirmed that the OnLive MicroConsole has entered the manufacturing phase.


In May OnLive announced that UK telecoms provider BT had invested in the service, which in turn afforded it exclusive bundling rights – though OnLive will be available through all ISPs in the territory.

In July it claimed that user numbers in its US trial have been far bigger than expected”.