GDC: David Perry's OnLive-style service
"The OnLive news has forced my hand."
Acclaim's chief creative officer David Perry has said that he plans to launch a games-on-demand service a bit like OnLive, and was originally going to show it off at E3.
Speaking to VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi, Perry said: "I was going to reveal it at [E3], but the OnLive news has forced my hand."
OnLive, of course, claims that it will offer 720p, 60fps games over the internet to PC, Mac or "microconsole" owners without any appreciable lag or loss of picture quality.
Announced at GDC, the service - fronted by entrepreneur Steve Perlman and former Eidos man Mike McGarvey - has apparently been in "stealth development" for seven years and has caught the imaginations of gamers and industry-watchers alike, earning more column inches around the world than virtually anything else going on in San Francisco.
Perry, however, has not been working on his thing for seven years. According to VentureBeat, it's just him and a couple of Dutch technologists at the moment, and after filing some patents he hopes to raise venture capital and hire more programmers.
Interestingly, VentureBeat does record that Perry wants to do a deal with a major ISP, and this could be a significant move, as boxes hosted at a service provider won't suffer as many lag issues as those hosted in a datacenter.
Perry also reportedly said that his service will work on any machine with a broadband connection, and won't require an OnLive-style 1MB download. All of which is splitting hairs though: until either service is proven in the wild, you'd do well to be sceptical.
Look out for our analysis of the OnLive announcement, compression and infrastructure claims very soon.