The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Onlive's Dirty Policies
dudewhat
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello, long time reader first time poster.
Two dirty policies where recently revealed when Onlive put the Terms of Service and the expanded FAQ on their website a couple days ago to anyone that read them. These are practices that I believe every gamer should know before spending any money buying games from Onlive.
I have used spoiler tags to make the post easier to read. Open the spoilers for more information on the policy.
Policy #1
Your account and games are deleted if you unsubscribe for 12 months.
Policy #2
Games you have bought from onlive at full retail price will be removed from the service sometime after 3 years.
Hopefully Onlive will change these policies. Intill then everyone should be fully aware of these policies Onlive has written clearly in their Terms of Service and expanded FAQ.
Two dirty policies where recently revealed when Onlive put the Terms of Service and the expanded FAQ on their website a couple days ago to anyone that read them. These are practices that I believe every gamer should know before spending any money buying games from Onlive.
I have used spoiler tags to make the post easier to read. Open the spoilers for more information on the policy.
Policy #1
Your account and games are deleted if you unsubscribe for 12 months.
I have been reading the Onlive's Terms of Service and FAQ's to see if it is worth buying games on the service. Below is a list of quotes written word for word (Including capital letters and bold letters.) in the Terms of Service and Account FAQ that you must accept to use Onlive.
Read the parts about Account Suspension and Account Closure on both the Terms of Service and Account FAQ to enlighten yourself. The sentence in the Account Suspension part of the Terms of Service that says "OnLive may suspend an Account, or resume a suspended Account, under certain conditions specified in the Terms, including, for example, the expiration or renewal of your Service membership term." is key to understanding that a unsubscribed account is a suspended account. Then read the part where suspended accounts are closed after 12 months and you understand the problem.
Read their Terms of Service here: http://www.onlive.com/legal/termsofservice
Read their Account FAQ here: http://www.onlive.com/support/account
- OnLive reserves the right to change the pricing and billing practices for the Service at any time.
- OnLive may suspend an Account, or resume a suspended Account, under certain conditions specified in the Terms, including, for example, the expiration or renewal of your Service membership term.
- OnLive will close your Account if it not resumed within twelve (12) months of the last suspension.
- Once an Account is Closed, the Account may not be reopened, and all player data will be deleted, including any saved game data, active PlayPasses and any coupons or credits.
- CLOSING YOUR ACCOUNT WILL RESULT IN PERMANENT LOSS OF ACCESS, CONTENT, SERVICES AND VALUE ON THE ONLIVE SERVICE.
Read the parts about Account Suspension and Account Closure on both the Terms of Service and Account FAQ to enlighten yourself. The sentence in the Account Suspension part of the Terms of Service that says "OnLive may suspend an Account, or resume a suspended Account, under certain conditions specified in the Terms, including, for example, the expiration or renewal of your Service membership term." is key to understanding that a unsubscribed account is a suspended account. Then read the part where suspended accounts are closed after 12 months and you understand the problem.
Read their Terms of Service here: http://www.onlive.com/legal/termsofservice
Read their Account FAQ here: http://www.onlive.com/support/account
Policy #2
Games you have bought from onlive at full retail price will be removed from the service sometime after 3 years.
Now before you say "Who plays games 3 years after they are released?" and miss the point that not only do you not own the games you buy at full retail price on Onlive but that they can be removed from the service after only 3 years.
This is taken from their Getting Started FAQ.
What is a PlayPass?
A PlayPass grants you access to play a game for a specified period of time. Membership is required to purchase and use a PlayPass. PlayPass options available:
In the highly unlikely situation that a game becomes permanently unavailable before the minimum term of your PlayPass, you will receive a prorated refund.
Read their Getting Started FAQ here: http://www.onlive.com/support/getstarted
This is taken from their Getting Started FAQ.
What is a PlayPass?
A PlayPass grants you access to play a game for a specified period of time. Membership is required to purchase and use a PlayPass. PlayPass options available:
- Full: Provides unlimited access to the selected game throughout its supported lifetime on the OnLive service. We expect to keep all games supported for as long as people continue to play them, but at a minimum, all current games will be supported for 3 years after their release on the OnLive Service.
- 5-Day: Provides unlimited access to the selected game for five (5) days from purchase.
- 3-Day: Provides unlimited access to the selected game for three (3) days from purchase.
In the highly unlikely situation that a game becomes permanently unavailable before the minimum term of your PlayPass, you will receive a prorated refund.
Read their Getting Started FAQ here: http://www.onlive.com/support/getstarted
Hopefully Onlive will change these policies. Intill then everyone should be fully aware of these policies Onlive has written clearly in their Terms of Service and expanded FAQ.
dudewhat on
0
Posts
EDIT: On some research, it seems like its some kind of idiot version of Steam?
edit: damn beat'd
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
They do have rentals it looks like, through their playpass system.
From what I’ve seen, its main use is to let you play high-end games at full quality on mid to low end PC’s. Also there’s no CDs/etc to worry about, although you already get that with Steam.
The way it works it that the game runs remotely on their servers, the input data from your mouse/keyboard gets transmitted to them, and the local client on your PC gets sent a video stream of the game being played.
Which, regardless of whatever magical fairy dust they claim to be using, seems useless for any skill-based twitch games like FPS’s due to latency, although it might work for strategy and turn-based games, etc. I’ve been assuming it’ll end up as another Phantom myself.
Onlive is a service where any games bought are not actually owned by the buyer. To play what you bought, you will also have to subscribe with the first year being free for now in the same way that your first hit of crack is free.
I feel like inless some large gaming press outlet with lots of readers points out this policy some poor gamers might fall for this tick and the company won't be forced to change their policies to be more gamer friendly.
EA's download store works in a similar fashion (you get a maximum of a year's worth of install access to whatever you've bought. You unistall your software after 12 months? EA tells you to get fucked and buy a new copy), and I'm thinking even STEAM won't hold your software for you forever.
The other policy is just legal ass-covering. It doesn't mean OnLive is going to try and maliciously pull the rug out from under you in three years - it means that they make publishers sign on a contract to keep their shit on OnLive for at least that long. After that, most publishers will probably keep their stuff on OnLive anyway, but OnLive can't do anything if a company decides to become asshats and pull their products (and if they do, OnLive refunds you anyway).
The real issue, of course, is that OnLive just isn't going to work. I absolutely guarantee it won't work. I mean, how the fuck could it? There's no magical way of making input lag disappear.
I never trusted the idea. It's too Utopian and business practices these days are too shady to trust such a thing. And lo, there were two policies described above, that did so emphasize those practices.
Those policies are in place to make people pay as much money as possible as often as possible. And can you blame them? The amount of tech they have to have in place to make all this work out is astronomical. The people behind this probably have a real hefty loan from some bank or two, and that 3 year deletion of content is in place to help them pay all that back.
Yeah, OnLive has no incentive to delete games after three years unless the publisher forces them to do it, and if that is happening with any regularity then OnLive is sunk. These seem like perfectly reasonable policies to me, especially considering we're talking about a magical fairy product that is impossible.
Ok so here's the thing.
First off, the EA store is terrible and sucks.
Secondly, if you still have access to the content that you bought then the EA store removing your ability to get it again is crappy, but not the same as, say, going into your hard drive and deleting the game/DLC.
Since Onlive doesn't have you download and play the games on your system, but rather is a cloud-based system, if you don't have the account for a year you lose the data and the games.
If you buy and download Sims 3 from EA, and have it on your computer without playing it for a year, you still have Sims 3. If you have the installation file, you still have Sims 3. Only if you uninstall it and delete the source files do you lose it when they don't let you re-download. If you buy Sims 3 on Onlive and don't play it for a year, you can't play it.
Yeah but still, if you buy anything through EA and don't play any EA game, go to EAs site, or use any words with the letters E or A in them you still can play it unless you've gotten rid of it. EA's just throwing out the CDs, not the hard drive
I bought Northern Strike around its release for BF2142. When my old laptop finally gave up every ghost that it had left, I built a new desktop and installed BF2142 'cause I was still having fun.
Well, I didn't have the NS files, but hey, it's like $5 and I wanted to play, and I knew that I should've backed it up if I had planned on moving it, my fault. Except then EA wouldn't let me buy it again because it was already registered to my account. But I couldn't download it again because it had been 12 months
Exactly.
It's not strictly more draconian that any other online distribution service that's already in full swing. Check the fine print in STEAM or on Stardock's distribution service - you'll find similar legalese. The lawyers just write it up in the event of some worst case scenario.
I mean, you want to be talking about a couple of nitpicks some folks have with OnLive's EULA rather than, say, what OnLive's distribution mechanism means in terms of DRM? That seems like something a little more substantial to me (...if, y'know, the whole thing wasn't a shovelware joke that going to disintegrate upon launch tomorrow. I look forward to the lulz when people start reporting back, and OnLive starts manning damage control. 'OH DONT WORRY WE JUST NEED TO IRON OUT A FEW BUGS!')
Steam at least has offline mode, which could presumably be enabled permanently if the service closes, or hacked to do such if it came to it. With Onlive you have no local copy of the game, so you’re completely at the mercy of the company and their fine print. (Also their continued existence, which I have my doubts about)
Because very likely OnLive is not actually letting you buy the game at all. They're probably paying a large licensing fee to the game developers/publishers in order to get the games on their service, and thus only 'buying' as many keys as they need for the hardware they're running in their server farm. You, as a customer, are not entitled to a key - You're not buying a game from the game publisher, you're paying a fee to play the game that OnLive already purchased.
Edit: To be clear, OnLive are either paying a one-time fee, or else a recurrent flat rate. I'm guessing they don't 'buy' keys in the way that Steam does, so there's nothing for them to transfer to the consumer.
Wot.
Source?
I was under the impression the servers all had more or less similarly beastly hardware & capabilities. I mean, that's the whole idea behind cloud computing - you've got this big cluster of hardware that render anything you throw at it, each part of that cloud contributing to the task.
Okay - What about X-Box Live Arcade?
Yeah - you're misunderstanding what's being said. Lego Batman gets it's own server, where ten instances of the game are being run, but that server isn't just for Lego Batman. Typically they would probably reserve one particular server for running instances of a particular game, because it makes good sense to do that, but they can shuffle the software around as demand necessitates.
Think of Shards in World of Warcraft. Each shard has it's own dedicated server, but that doesn't mean Blizzard can't update the hardware or even swap it out entirely.
...*Sigh*
You're not getting it, dude. No, that's not why the policy is in place. It's in place because OnLive can only make publishers sign on a contract guaranteeing access to the games for 3 years tops. It has nothing to do with the hardware - it's strictly an issue with publishers & distribution rights.
OnLive isn't going to steal your games from you. That's like saying Blizzard's EULA will have them stealing your WoW toons from you because their EULA says that they retain ownership and can ultimately pull the plug on anything at any time that happens re: WoW.
Also,
OnLive has been demo'd as working numerous times and was created by the guy that invented Quicktime. You know, Quicktime? Yeah, the movie app. The one that people told him it was impossible to ever do full motion video on a computer. He's explained numerous times how OnLive works, and actually had to cut support for PS3 and 360 controllers because they had too much latency to work with OnLive.
He even said that games that don't get played will just sit on the server in a presentation "because all it does is take up some HDD space". The 3 year minimum keeps publishers from pulling a game 3 months after they put it up, making them lose money in chargebacks and shit.
You'll find similiar warnings in the back of most game manuals regarding their online service.
That's correct... so perhaps Steam is a better fit for you, the owner of a gaming-capable computer, than for John Q. Onlive, who doesn't own a gaming computer and prefers to spend his money on Onlive's service? I mean you pointed out the big difference between Steam and Onlive as if it's some sort of bad thing when it's really the core of their business model. Of course you have to keep paying to pay games you bought through them. That is how they are planning to make their money.
Every time it was demo'd, though, the data center was either right inside the building or right outside of it. Like I said, we'll see tomorrow if I'm wrong.
And yeah, I know the guys have a reputation behind them - but that alone doesn't mean any idea they come up with will automatically work.
From what I've gleaned online, the reason a lot of people are highly skeptical of OnLive is that it would take more than one breakthrough advance to deliver on all the promises they've offered up. I'm not saying it's true one way or the other, but apparently what they're talking about would require (1) The best video compression in the entire world, developed in secret, specifically for video games (when that tech could fetch more money on other applications), (2) The best latency/input latency prediction ever developed, and (3) a fantastically huge network of high-powered computing resources, considering how much tech it takes to just run a single instance of many of these games when multiplied across their expected user base.
Eurogamer did a pretty good analysis about a year ago.
I still don't know what to think. I don't want to believe it's possible, knowing what I do, but my expectation goes against what many firsthand accounts are saying.
John Q. Onlive should know that he doesn't actually own any of the software, will be unable to pay games he payed 59 dollars for if he cancels it, will have to continuously pay to play, will not be able to get the games back if he doesn't resubscribe soon enough, and may have the game deleted if the company decides it is too bothersome to continue supporting it.
edit: watching this entire video should be required before anyone starts quoting blogs as fact.
They are selling games and the ability to play them. That's fine.
You have to have a subscription to play the games you've bought, that's fine.
If you don't use the service for a year then you lose the games you bought? Ehhhhhhhhh. Unless there was some reason to do that other than "Because we said so" I'm not as sure about that one.
The subscription isn't the problem, the fact that any purchases you made just magically disappear when you stop paying for a year is the problem.