OnLive's Bruce Grove on next-gen gaming

---

To say the last 12 months have been a bit of a bumpy ride for game streaming service OnLive would be a bit of an understatement. However, over that time, the games continued to stream uninterrupted, and the firm seems intent on not standing still. In a recent interview, GM Bruce Grove espoused his optimism for the technology beyond general hardware vendor collaborations. The key, Grove believes, being cloud-gaming's very design, which he hopes could always offer more power than current consoles thanks to the "rafts and rafts" of CPUs at the game developer's disposal -- without the wait for new hardware iterations. More importantly, Grove's confident in OnLive's continued stability as a company -- even after nearly self-destructing. "We now have a feeling that here we are as a company, we have a huge amount of experience with this business model, we can point to the things we have seen don't work ... we have a positive feeling that we can take the leadership here," he said.
It wasn't just processing prowess and company stability he was keen to talk-up; cross-platform MMOs got a mention too. Grove essentially claims that OnLive's "cracked" the problem of delivering the multiplayer format to mobile -- and other non-traditional platforms -- but implies that there are still some tangles when it comes to making the model work for his firm's particular set-up. The flexibility of cloud-based gaming has always been the central pin of its proponents' arguments, but with the boast that his firm could take the lead in this area, Grove is hinting at the direction OnLive is focusing on. We'd also point out that MMOs aren't typically the most stable of sectors in the game industry -- outside of Blizzard juggernaut World of Warcraft, few are competitive if at all successful -- and playing one through OnLive would mean paying both for an OnLive subscription and a game subscription. Grove hopes to get around that issue with an OnLive -exclusive MMO; something he's "fairly certain" will happen, but we're less sure about. Still, we've yet to hear much in the way of concrete details regarding OnLive's plans since the company imploded last summer, so we'll have to wait and see what the company's cooking up for 2013. Head through the source to Red Bull UK's full interview for even more.

bruce grove, BruceGrove, cloud gaming, CloudGaming, gaming, onlive