OnLive Giving Away Free Systems at PAX

What are the chances you guys will pick up my system for me?

Doesn't OnLive work so that you have to pay for a subscription to OnLive, and then pay retail prices for each game you want to play? Looking at the website, apparantly the subscription is free (for now), but even still, given the fact that you don't actually own any of the games and lose everything if you cancel your membership, I can't see how that would be successful. Maybe if they just made every game accessable and charged you a running rate for amount of time played. If I could simply pay even $1 per hour, that would be a better deal than I would get with almost any new game. I imagine a time based rate would have much less uncertainty for OnLive, since then the price would be pegged to actual processing costs, rather than speculation on total processing costs per copy over product lifetime.

They tossed the idea of a Sub fee long ago. You can pay for the PlayPack, which nets you unlimited access to over 80 games for $9.99 plus 30% off other purchases.

or you can just buy games for a limited period, or to keep.

IDK this business model may be the wave of the future, but I don’t think it will generate the revenue needed for the game developers to create AAA titles. I could be wrong, first time for everything. I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.