OnLive is Now Free to Play With No Monthly Fee

News
By Marcus Yam
published

No credit card required to check it out.

If you're weak in the hardware department but you're strong with internet bandwidth, then OnLive could be the gaming solution for you.

OnLive is the gaming service that streams your game input and output over the internet. There's a little lag, but you can actually play modern PC games on machines that would have never dreamed of it.

The game streaming service announced that it has dropped plans for a monthly base fee to access the service. That means that anyone can join and play demos, spectate and interact with other members for free. Playing full games requires payment, of course.

No credit card is needed until the user chooses to purchase time to play.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
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44 Comments Comment from the forums
  • beayn
    Free to play but you must pay to play.
    Reply
  • LATTEH
    TBH it is actually a pretty good service... But i wouldn't buy a game on there i may do a rental (which is cool!)
    Reply
  • bustapr
    This is a great idea and their deals are good enough to rival Steam in some cases. Just a few days ago they announced you can play any game free for a limited time. Too bad they dont care about Puerto Rico.
    Reply
  • lradunovic77
    No thanks
    Reply
  • lradunovic77
    This does not compete Steam cause Steam just distributes games. Bottom line please don't enforce cloud computing on us cause people don't want cloud computing.
    Reply
  • Darkerson
    Might give it a shot, if anything, just to see how well the service works.
    Reply
  • Onus
    This might be a way to check out a game to see if it might be fun to play, but I plan to make sure my hardware can handle installing the games I want.
    Reply
  • mchuf
    lradunovic77Bottom line please don't enforce cloud computing on us cause people don't want cloud computing.
    While many people don't, the big companies sure do. They don't want us to own anything. After all, you may be able to convert your old stuff to new formats and not re-buy everything in the new format.
    Reply
  • Netherscourge
    Free to SAMPLE is more like it.

    I support the idea though.
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    Makes a lot of sense, demos are free so why not via a streaming service?

    Big thumbs up to Onlive, all we need now is a rock-solid 24mb connection
    Reply