OnLive keeps refining its games-on-demand service to make it more social. Today, the company announced that it has initiated automatic recording of game sessions so that users can capture their finest moments and share them.
It also unleashed the ability to automatically share the online service with friends on a user’s Gmail list. Both features are important to improving the social nature of OnLive, which is critical to help the service spread far and wide.
It’s important for OnLive to broaden its audience so that it can attract a wider library of games from video game publishers. The more users, the more games it can attract. And the more games, the less likely those users are to go to a local video game store instead.
OnLive is a server-based game service. It computes a game in an internet-connected data center and then sends compressed video of the action at a high speed to the user’s machine, where it is displayed on the screen. Since the response time is fast, the user doesn’t know that the game isn’t being processed on his or her local computer. With OnLive, users can log into their games from any type of computer, anywhere, and get access to dozens of games they can try out or purchase or rent, Netflix style.
From the start, OnLive has offered Brag Clip recording, where you can share a snippet of your game session with friends as a video of the action. Now the automatic recording makes that feature more convenient, particularly when you reach a key moment of the game, said Joe Bentley, vice president of engineering at Palo Alto, Calif.-based OnLive.
OnLive has also added new achievements and the Gmail-based OnLive Friend Finder. Finding friends automatically is what helped Facebook grow into a huge social network. OnLive recognizes that and will add more ways to invite your friends to join its service in an automated way. OnLive also has new email notifications for everything from friend requests to chat messages and video sharing.
When users log into OnLive, they will also find an upgrade to the games list, with personal stats tracked for each game on the list, such as total play time, last time played, and achievements earned.
OnLive has raised a large amount of funding, including $40 million from HTC in February. Other investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications and The Belgacom Group. The company was founded nine years ago and has 250 employees. Because its technology is potentially disruptive to traditional game retailers, investors valued the company last year at $1.1 billion and, based on issued shares, its value could be as high as $1.8 billion.