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HTC Invests $40 Million In OnLive
Smartphone-maker HTC has invested a significant chunk of change into cloud gaming service OnLive, raising speculation that the service could be headed for mobile devices. "At the D8 conference in June 2010, one of the most impressive demonstrations was a PC game running on an Apple iPad tablet via the OnLive service. HTC has yet to announce a tablet, although a recent report by DigiTmes said that HTC will ship a tablet at about the time that the Motorola Xoom launches." The deal comes alongside HTC's acquisition of a company involved with mobile video-on-demand, pointing to a renewed interest in bringing more types of content to mobile customers
I've no Idea if $40 Million is a lot of money for this project. I see so many huge numbers on the news about money that anything less than One... Hundred... BILLION DOLLARS! doesn't bother me.
From the perspective of "competition", deals of this sort make me a touch nervous.
It could be largely benign: "Company that makes devices incapable of playing PC level games sees potential in service that would change that, doesn't want it to die, does want to profit if it succeeds".
However, the cellphone market is a bundling-riddled hellhole. Hardware exclusives are used to drive service subscriptions, certain carriers obtain "content exclusives", etc, etc. Seeing an "OnLive Go: Only from HTC" sticker in the near future would, let's say, entirely fail to surprise me.
That may well light a fire under some of the on-device game producers, and the device makers whose hardware capabilities they depend on(though those already seem to be moving about as fast as the, quite competitive, ARM SoC market can carry them); but a deal between a handset maker and a potential handset content publisher is unlikely to aid competition much(particularly if OnLive has any juicy patents over important parts of their comparatively low-latency streaming stuff...)
The situation it looks most similar to, to me, is when Microsoft or Sony eat an independent game developer in order to obtain an exclusive for their respective console. The amounts they are willing to pay to do so are certainly indicative of competition; but competition of a sort that is basically just a pain in the ass for buyers: many games are simply unavailable on one platform or the other, and those prices being paid then have to be ground out of the install base that they help generate...
You're missing the bigger picture.
Imagine a top of the line HTC tablet with a slide out joypad or included BT joypad, hardware optimised / accelerated stream decoding etc. that 'plug and play's anything from onlive. Sure you've still got game interface issues but as the portable gaming market grows more and more games will be designed with portables in mind, even AAA titles eventually. OK so 3G or 4G streaming online still sounds like scifi (that extra 100+ms latency.... oooooh) but could work very well with wifi. How about a Motorola atrix style dock next to your TV? Suddenly you have a tablet that doubles as an portable onlive machine that can dock into your HDTV for a full onlive experience, or you can take it round to your mates place.
Without knowing HTC's balance sheet and cashflow don't know if 40 million is a big number for them but this could be far from a niche within a niche.