OnLive, the online gaming service we reviewed a few months back, has decided that they will not charge users a monthly subscription fee to use the service. When the service went live, they were letting users sign up and use the service for free for the first year, after which they were going to charge a monthly fee of $4.95 plus the cost of the game you wanted to play.
CEO and Founder Steve Perlman said on the company's official blog,
"Although we wish we could have confirmed no monthly fee from the get-go, pioneering a major new video game paradigm is hard: we had to first grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating costs. Now that we’ve reached that stage, we can confidently say a monthly fee is not needed, which deserves a double WOOT! WOOT!"
When you sign up for the service, you have free access to play game demos, spectate other users and view 'Brag Clips' (videos created by users). When you demo a game, you are able to play it free for 30 minutes. after that you have the option to buy a PlayPass. A PlayPass can be bought as a rental that gives you access to the game for three or five days or you can buy a full pass which gives you unlimited access to the game for as long as it stays on OnLive.
OnLive has been hard at work to make their service more accessible. They recently added wireless support for the service and they say that a console version is in production.
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