$1 Deus Ex: HR Augmented Edition

$1 Game from OnLive

This weekend only, OnLive is offering everyone a $1 game from their service. You can choose any play pass game on their service. The best choices are:

• Deus Ex: HR Augmented Edition (Why not? same cost as normal edition)
• Warhammer 40k: SpaceMarines
• F.E.A.R. 3
• HomeFront
• MLB2K11
• Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

This is the absolute best time to try out the service and get your first game. Remember, the service is completely free! Existing customers will be emailed a 98% off coupon code, new members will automatically see the discount in the marketplace upon logging in.

 

Does it work with a pre-order of LA Noire?

 

They did restrict it to no pre-orders, so you're only allowed to get games currently in their library.

 

I guess could either get Assassin's Creed Brotherhood or Space Marine...

 

How does it work, do i keep the game permanently?

 

Yeah... But it's OnLive which means I won't actually own the game.

 

My bandwidth is not even 1Mb/s.

 

Pretty sweet. Anyone from Canada succeed in getting this?

I can easily create a proxy into the US to sign up, but I'll be playing from Canada because I don't want to tunnel so many gigs through my proxy...so will that be a problem?

If I "buy" the game for my account in the US, will I be able to use it in Canada?

Their fine print states "only valid while playing the game in the US" so I am wary...

 

eh. probably not permanently. for a few years more likely than not.

 

If you get screwed on $1 and are only able to play Deus Ex HR for 2 years, I think you'll manage to survive. You also don't own any of your Steam or Origin games. So I think the return on investment for your $1 should be a no brainer.

 

I know many people on the service who play from Canada.

The fine print exists because they don't want to have to support Canada and they don't price for that region. You may have to have a US credit card though.

 

OnLive is pretty crappy.

 

Dunno, Onlive works pretty well for me.

 

It performs as well as your internet. If your internet sucks, OnLive will suck.

 

Definitely scales with internet speed, but there is always input lag, no way around it. Also caps out at about 720p I believe.

 

If they sent you a key you could activate on Steam (which shouldn't cost them anything since you're technically buying the game from them anyways), then I'd give this a try. Otherwise, I'm not going to pay for something that's worse than Ubisoft's DRM.

 

You're limited by the speed of light, so blaming your internet provider won't do you any good.

Short of living close enough to the OnLive servers (in terms of distance and hops), there isn't much you can do.

 

Was very enticed untill I learned it was streaming. I have WIFI and my laptop is about 30 feet from my Wireless-G router (so the signal isn't great).

Maybe next time.

 

I'm probably being paranoid now, but how safe exactly is it using your card to buy a game from onlive? What I mean is, is there any risk that you might be charged more than the 1$ that the game costs?

 

The only risk is you are paying for something you can't own. It will never be with you to take with you wherever you go. You are just paying for the service to play it. OnLive owns your account and all games on it.

Bad deal to me.

 

Sure, but for 1$, I can't see how it's any worse than buying a bag of chips, a soda or w/e.

The way I see it it's simply cheap entertainment.

And still, you didn't really answer my question.

 

And waste your bandwidth... which costs more than $1

 

Waste? And if I'm on a fixed cost? Will you be saying that I'm wasting my time?

 

They're not going to randomly charge you, if that's what you mean. It's a legitimate service.

The fact that there are worse ways to spend your money isn't really a good justification for spending money. You could burn $100 with fire. Surely, it's better than burning $100 using fire!

Also, there's really no ownership difference by virtue of paying for a streaming service vs. paying for the game on steam or even a box copy. In the end, you're paying exclusively for the license to play the game in all cases. You don't have any more ownership of the game with a boxed copy than a digital copy. In both cases, it's zero. Any feelings otherwise are purely imaginative, they aren't real.

With onlive, that license is unfortunately more restrictive than normal. One big reason being that they only guarantee game availability for 3 years after purchase.

 

Alright, so that's one worry out of the way then, I guess.

I think that you have misunderstood me.

Basically what I meant was that 1$ for being able to play the game was good enough for me, I simply don't care that I don't own the game since the money spent:fun ratio is good enough.

Let me give you another example..

Many people pay money to watch a movie at the cinema, I don't feel that this is much different from that.

Maybe onlive's license/ToS is a problem for people that like to replay their game tons of times, the same way that some people might prefer to buy a DVD over a cinema-ticket so he/she can re-watch the movie, but for me it's no issue at all.

So.. I wouldn't buy an onlive-game at full price since I agree it's 'crippled' but at such a low price I think that the pros outweigh the cons.

(simplified)

+ dirt cheap
- not 100% ownership of game

 

I think there is. You can own a game in the manner you can install it wherever you want, on whatever computer you want, and play it in whatever manner you want. Not based on whether you are near an OnLive server or not or whether you are online or not. And of course the 3 years part.

And owning a game isn't related to whether you have an account with OnLive or not. Lose the account, lose all your games. Buy a game from Amazon, doesn't matter if your Steam or OnLive or Origin account is gone or not. OnLive goes out of business, you're screwed.

 

You people crack me up. If you can't "risk" a $1 on a legitimate service in exchange for a $50 video game, perhaps you should take that $1 and invest in some tinfoil.

 

Tinfoil is extremely useful and something I use on a weekly basis. Tinfoil is a far better purchase for me than any game that only gives me on average 5 hours of fun, if it's any good...

 

So I guess you never visit the cinema, see a show or anything of the sort?

edit: Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just trying to see if there's any consistency here.

 

It's likely not the one dollar that he's asking about. He could be concerned that his credit card information might end up being abused and/or that the $1 purchase comes with an expensive monthly subscription unless you jump though a bunch of hoops to opt out of it.

Both are valid concerns if this thread is his first and only exposure to OnLive. I don't think it's run by mobsters, but I know nothing about their business model either.

 

Well, I've heard about onlive previously and I have actually started a thread about them (though the idea of it was mostly the focus), I just don't have much information on the $-part of things.

And I don't think rschauby's post was directed at me, but rather at hulawafu77 and the other dude?

 

I definitely didn't misunderstand you. I don't think this is good logic to determine how to spend your money. If you feel like other people are wasting their money, and this isn't much different, you're basically saying you can tolerate wasting your money if other people do it, too.

I do the pro/con list and personal assessment is helpful. If you think the enjoyment you get out of something is greater than the cost of entry, and you want to do it for that reason, that could be a good reason.

As far of ownership of the game, you don't own video games no matter what. You buy a license to use them. Some licenses are more restrictive than others, and onLive happens to be restrictive, but that's not strictly because it's a streaming service. They could offer a better license.

 

You're imagining this. Some games offer licenses that allow to install the game as you please, others don't. There are plenty of games that restrict the number of times you are allowed to install. There are games that force you to connect to the company's servers to play single player. You'll need to be able to connect to OnLive's servers to play as a matter of logistics, but that isn't inherently different from other games that force you to do the same thing strictly as a matter of DRM.

If you purchase a box copy of the game, and then lose the box with the CD key, you lose the game. That's no different than losing your account. If you buy a game from amazon, and amazon goes out of business, you are guaranteed to be able to keep the disc. There still could be complications regarding the license that might prevent you from playing the game. For example, if the game requires online activation (or, worse, a constant connection to the internet, which is becoming common), and the developer's servers go down permanently for some reason (bankruptcy) you could be in the exact same position with a boxed copy as you are with a digital one. Having the physical copy gives you no additional inherent rights.

My point is that, yes, OnLive is restrictive. However, the notion of ownership of a game based on having physical media is entirely in your head.

 

Actually that's not what I'm saying, I merely gave an example of something I find acceptable (going to the cinema and thus paying money for something you can only experience once, or w/e) and compared it to this.

I don't think going to the cinema sucks, or is a rip-off, and in the same way I think that what you get for your 1$ here is a lot.

I don't give a sh*t about what other people do, I simply think that what you get here for 1$ is more than enough.

It's no more complicated than that, I promise.

PS. I might be wrong about the specifics about ownership when you purchase a game, but that's really not what I'm discussing here.

 

Instead of speculation about the service, you can set up an account and try it out (no credit card or personal information required).

Or you can read some reviews about the service

 

This is very different than what you said, but, if this is what you *meant* - then I think you're good to go. As noted above, you can try out OnLive for free to make sure you can tolerate the streaming and the way the service works. They offer timed demos and such for free. And, since everything is streaming, you don't have to wait to download / install anything, except the OnLive program itself, which is just a few MB.

 

Well, I might not have been perfectly clear but still, "Many people pay money to watch a movie at the cinema, I don't feel that this is much different from that." <- That was just a simple comparison, I think you read a bit too much into it. I mean, where did I write that going to the cinema is a waste of money?

And yeah, I already have an account, and I have tried a couple of demo's, I just wanted to clear up that last thing.

 

Think about all the things that "people" do, versus the things that you do. Look at the news. Probably pretty different. It's an interesting thought, but it doesn't have much to do with OnLive. I think you're all set.

 

What? Please elaborate (but not too much )

edit: alright, you edited the post while i was writing. But please respond to my post if there is anything there you disagree with.

edit2: Or specifically,

You said that I basically said that. How did you get that from my previous post (the one you quoted)?

 

********** IMPORTANT INFO **********

Since this got derailed, let me answer some questions:

1) OnLive is a legitimate business. They have investors who would be very unhappy if they did illegal things (such as charging you without your consent), so you needn't worry about giving them your credit card.

2) From what I've seen, you ONLY pay the one-time fee for the game, NOT for however long you play it on their server.

3) The whole game license argument is moot. Onlive is a service. They sell you the service, not the game; they just feel it is more attractive to have users pay on a per-game basis. Gamers are used to paying for games, so they kept it that way, even though you are technically paying for their IT service plus a small portion for the game developer royalty.

Instead of paying for the service monthly, or hourly (as you do for Amazon or IBM or any other cloud computing service), you pay per game. They have done some sort of actuarial data that says "if we charge X per game we can recoup the XXX necessary to run this server cluster". It probably costs them about $0.25-.75 (number pulled out of my ) per hour to provide you the game, so they assume most people will put 50 hours into a game, and they can charge $40, make some profit after paying the game developer a license and paying their high IT and networking costs, and MAKE IT SIMPLE FOR THE USER!!!

It is also probably better for them to charge a one-time fee than have a constant billing metric up and running and charging users constantly.

 

@Ryko, you're mostly right. I'll just add that OnLive also allows you to pay for their service in a variety of ways. You can pay a one time fee for a game that is usually similar to the normal price. You can also pay smaller fees for timed access (very similar to rentals), which usually isn't available for non-streaming titles. They also have a playpack thing which is a monthly subscription that grants you access to a variety of titles.

As far as paying for a service vs. license vs. ownership, there's really no difference. If you buy a game, you are limited to the terms of the license, to the "terms of the service" (often called "terms of service" *surprise*), and you have no ownership of anything - you have an agreement that you can use THEIR software (they own it) and that both parties will abide by the terms of the agreement. In the case of OnLive, part of that agreement is that they will provide streaming access to the title you purchase for at least 3 years. Other venues generally don't have such limitations in the agreement, but it's a logistical necessity for a streaming software service, I suppose.

---
It's not that going to the movies is a waste of money. It's the line of reasoning.

People do thing X -> I am considering doing thing Y -> Thing Y is better than thing X -> I should do thing Y.

vs.

I do thing X, and I approve of thing X -> I am considering doing Y -> Y is better than X -> I should do thing Y

The flaw with this type of reasoning is that people commonly do things which are VERY bad. Just because something is better isn't *sufficient on it's own* to make it a good choice.

 

I see what your getting at, but an important thing to remember here is that.. I'm not a retard, seriously!

I mean, I compared one form of entertainment that I approve of to this, like I said (about 1$/game) a long long time ago in this thread "The way I see it it's simply cheap entertainment."

I agree that people sometimes do stupid things, but I'm not comparing it to something like that. I'm not going to say: some people buy a bottle of whiskey for 10520$, so a random pc-game for 10519$ is acceptable.

Now, if you think that paying for a temporary experience (e.g. a cinema visit) is stupid, and therefore see a flaw in my logic I can accept that. But now, when I get the feeling that your just sticking on to some minor detail for no real reason, dude, come on...

 

I understand you, I don't think cinema is stupid. You don't have to think cinema is stupid either, to see the flaw in logic. You have to under stand the difference between sufficiency and necessity. This also derails the thread. I'm only elaborating because you specifically asked me to explain further. I'm not stuck on this at all. I think you are 100% set to go with OnLive. It's just a dollar.

 

Can someone confirm for me ON-LIVE works on win7 64bit?

 

Yes it works. It's also only a few mb, so trying it out is very easy.

 

Do you work for OnLive? Just saying, you seem to be pushing it pretty hard.

 

Works fine for me. Picked up DE:HR for $1 yesterday as well btw.

 

Lol he's really not pushing it hard. We've spent a lot of effort describing a free service that doesn't require CC info to test. I think he's being fair.

 

Not at all, I'm just flabbergasted at the negative response people have towards a $1 game. If Steam was selling Deus Ex HR for $20, people would be going crazy nuts. I thought more people would be excited about a $1 game, but I guess not.

 

I am picking up something later before they close the deal!