OnLive's Tom DuBois

Pretty much. There's no fan, very low power. And then we have greater data centres, the capabilities continue to increase. The consumer doesn't have to go out and buy a video card or buy another piece of hardware. So we really see that as part of our value, getting people to stop focusing on the hardware and think about the software, really spend money on the software.

Yeah, the TV and some sort of controller, and you're good to go.

It's pretty much what the Microconsole is, kind of a reference design. It's a pretty small box with not a lot going on in there.

To be honest, not necessarily. But they're not necessarily coming and talking to me either [laughs]. But if you step back from OnLive, it's about technology trends, it's been a long time since a major console shipped. They're all kind of refreshing now, with Kinect and Move and so on. But what are they going to do next? We're gonna get another box, but after that, do we need boxes anymore? The bandwidth at homes gonna be there, the cost of computing continue to decrease...

In some way it's pretty similar – there's that ease of use thing. Again, we have just the very beginnings here, but also the idea of building social aspects into the platform. We have the spectating and the brag clips, we're going to be adding more and more social features. We want to people fairly open as a platform – so actual connections to YouTube and Facebook. I just think people are going to expect that in their gaming. They don't want the isolated experience anymore. I think somebody here [GDC Europe] yesterday said comment about OnLive and Gaiki replacing social gaming. I wouldn't go quite that far, I'm not really sure what point they were trying to make. I think versus very casual games you see on Facebook...

We showed core games because we had a lot of doubters. You're going to see us broadening out, adding casual games, a greater variety of games. But I think the Facebook games are rapidly maturing, like the production values and the costs are going up. They're having to spend money on advertising now, it's not viral anymore.

No, I think all this stuff's additive. You're just going to have more platforms and more games.

Yeah, absolutely. [Laughs]. It's a browser plugin at the moment. Basically any PC can use OnLive. So a lot of these games are available on the Mac too, through a web browser you can play these games on a Mac today. It's actually pretty entertaining that there have been a lot of reviews coming out of Mac games, and at the bottom it says 'available on OnLive.' But that game is actually running on a PC in a data centre, but the reviewers are reviewing it like a Mac game, and giving it good reviews.

I think that's the real power of cloud gaming. Game designers have been constrained by the platform and the hardware; if you think about a game designed for the cloud, it's a different exercise. Today we're running these existing PC games, but you could design a game that run on multiple servers, used tons of memory, RAM storage, could be 500-person multiplayer... The constraints are removed. And then think about designing that game and have it be displayed on any kind of broadband display. Maybe you do have to support lots of different input devices – touch control, keyboard and mouse, game pad... Today we try to get developers to support both keyboard/mouse and gamepad.

Uh, no- but I'd love to see that game. If you think about MMOs, there's really just 40 people on some of the larger quests at any one time... If you think about multiplayer for us, really it's a very different thing. All the machines are running on the same backbone, they have like 3 millisecond latency between them. So you really could do 200 or 300 people in a multiplayer match.

So far it's only OnLive. We've had that conversation with publishers, but... We're not opposed to mixing, but most of it's been a question of fairness. I think what we would like to do is keep gamepad players playing gamepad players, keyboard versus keyboard...

Yeah, I think we've just got to get our message out, and show people that... I think today, if you look at broadband penetration in most of the countries of the world, there's already a good chunk of the market that can use OnLive. That trend's not going the other direction – people are already getting faster and faster access.

Yeah, I do. For any one individual, if they sign up for OnLive today, it's like signing up for a broadband service, there's a little test it runs. And if you don't have enough speed, we don't want people buying the Microconsole, coming home and not being able to use it. So I think, depending on where you are and what kind of connection you have, it may say sorry you need to upgrade your internet connection.

[Laughs.] I don't think I can answer that question, but we do have some pretty impressive investors. They're all strategic investors in that venture, and so I think strategic investors invest differently. Maybe they're less valuation sensitive and they're more about getting into new markets. We have Warner Brothers, Autodesk, AT&T, BT... The telcos are really interested in offering combined services which include games. We use a lot of bandwidth, they want to sell more bandwidth... I think they see us as a good service.

Yeah. But it's a valuation. It doesn't mean we have a billion dollars in the bank.