Onlive looks to exclusive deals

OnLive has acknowledged that exclusive content deals will help tempt more consumers to its cloud gaming service.

Currently OnLive, which officially launches in the UK on September 22nd, streams PC games from its data servers – and all are either available as standalone PC or multiformat console games too.

But the firm is already talking to publishers about exclusive DLC, plus considering deals with indie developers – and could even set up its own internal studio.

There are certain companies we’re working with to do exclusive content,” publisher and developer relations boss Chris Donahue told MCV at GDC Europe this week. Map packs and things.”

But such deals come over time: The main thing to look at is every platform to date has spent a lot of money on exclusive titles, and a lot of money on marketing them. We’re a start-up and we don’t have that sort of bandwidth.”

However OnLive is staffed by web and tech experts, which creates a welcome platform for content creators, he added.

We have Rob McCool who helped develop Apache, we have Tom Paquin who helped found Netscape, there’s a lot of opportunity.

One of the luxuries we have is we’re a PC platform, which is something developers know very well. We’re certainly interested in exclusivity at some point.”

He added: It’s possible we’d set up an internal studio, there’s a lot of people at OnLive who have worked on that side of the business. I can’t say we’ll definitely have a first party, but there’s every possibility that we’ll have third-party exclusives.

And we’re also huge fans of the indie scene. Should something come along that we think is significant and isn’t too expensive, we’ll consider that.”