OnLive: "downloaded media past its peak"
Perlman says his service is way forward.
OnLive CEO Steve Perlman has told the DICE Summit in Las Vegas that "physical media is in rapid decline" and even "downloaded media is past its peak".
As part of a speech that included a demo of his company's cloud-based gaming service, Perlman argued that people no longer talk about listening to a CD or watching a DVD, because there's no assumption of physical media any more.
He also said pointed to comments made by Apple CFO Peter Openheimer in January that even the mighty iTunes and App Store businesses are merely "a bit over break-even", to support his point about download media.
Perlman believes the answer to this decline is to provide instant gratification, which handily is what OnLive seeks to do by letting people play games over the internet on remote servers that take care of hardware costs, compatibility and so on.
"The lowest-capability server we have right now is many more times the capability of an Xbox 360," Perlman explained while his colleague Mike McGarvey demoed the service, including Burnout Paradise, Unreal Tournament III and Crysis.
OnLive is currently in closed beta. Check out Digital Foundry's recent coverage of how the service appears to work despite significant technical challenges, and look to our trade sister site GamesIndustry.biz for more DICE coverage.