The DeanBeat: Cloud gaming gives companies more room to maneuver

When OnLive hit the wall a year ago, pundits concluded that cloud gaming was a sham. The company flew high with a service that promised to disrupt traditional gaming by delivering games digitally from the cloud to players who had limited hardware that wouldn’t otherwise be able to run high-end PC games. The service debuted in 2010, but OnLive spent more money than it took in, and it never accumulated that many subscribers. It ran out of funding after raising a ton of money from big backers such as Warner Bros. and British Telecom. OnLive went through a change in ownership and survives as a smaller company, but it left quite a wake.

Now, the cloud is sweeping through lots of industries and changing them. Microsoft and Sony have embraced it and are using it to further their console ambitions. Sony bought Gaikai, an OnLive rival, for $380 million last year. And Microsoft has introduced the idea of cloud processing, where its 300,000 servers in the cloud will supplement your Xbox One’s hardware, processing game code to ease the burden on the local machine. And more recently, Big Fish Games, a maker of hundreds of casual games, decided to shut down its cloud-gaming service because it wasn’t on the path to profits.