OnLive reasserts gaming focus

Tomorrow’s release of the OnLive Desktop app does not represent a move away from gaming, cloud computing firm OnLive has pledged.

In fact, speaking to Gamasutra OnLive CEO Steve Perlman has said that the Dektop app – which allows users to stream a Windows 7 PC and a set range of programs to their iPad – is tech built before its gaming platform.

Here’s the sneaky truth – we launched the first version of Desktop white-labelled with Autodesk, before we launched the games service, as sort of a pilot,” he explained.

"They were using it with Autodesk Labs, so you could go and try out the next year’s version of these very high-end visualization applications. It was a good thing for us try out in stealth mode the OnLive games service in the real world, before we released it for gaming, which obviously has much more extreme demands.

It’s still mostly games, in the sense that that’s what we’re set up to do. We’ve always had Windows running on most of these servers. So what we’re doing is now exposing the desktop that’s underneath all these games.”