Things like used game sales and piracy causes a lot of consternation for those in the AAA games industry. However, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman thinks that cloud gaming is the solution to many of the industry’s woes.
“With videogames what you’re talking about with a total addressable market is how many Xbox 360s, or how many PlayStation 3s right OnLive is different,” said Perlman. “Our total addressable market is much more similar to that of a television channel, or perhaps Netflix or LoveFilm. People will begin to stop thinking about videogames as a type of software tied to a particular platform, and begin to think about video games as a type of media, the same way we think about television or music or pictures or the written word. The thing that’s interesting about those is video games and the videogame industry first of all OnLive does what the cloud has done for all the other industries in making it so it can reach everywhere but video games are in a very special place. Although the cloud does that for distribution, in terms of every other industry unfortunately it makes it easier to pirate all other types of linear media, the written word and things like that.”
“When it comes to videogames, there’s no way to pirate a cloud based game,” added Perlman. “Because the game is not running locally, it’s running in the cloud. And there’s also no used games, so the margins zoom up for them. And what that means of course for the consumers is that prices can come down. From the publishers point of view they want to sell as many of these as they can and right now it’s tough because they have this cliff right after the game’s released because the used game market begins to carve into all their sales. It gets harder and harder to sell new games after they’ve been out for a couple of months. And then of course, especially on the PC side, but also now on Xbox 360, they’re getting increasing amounts of piracy and it’s easier to distribute through bit torrent and so forth.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
