Bummed that OnLive isn’t really on or live in Australia? Apparently, your depression is soon to come to an end, with Mitchell Bingemann at Australian IT reporting that Telstra is working towards launching a similar video game subscription service next year.
According to the Oz, Telstra has been in negotiations with game studios like Electronic Arts to offer their latest release titles as a subscription service, with customers paying a set fee each month to play a library of titles, without the need for a console.
The service will essentially be run as a cloud computing offering, a service that allows consumers and businesses to access services such as processing power or memory capacity through a secure internet link, thereby bypassing the need to provide their own infrastructure, such as servers or game consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3.
The Big T is currently upgrading its network to be able to offer the service – apparently it’s not quite up to scratch for the demands of cloud based gaming – and will most likely end up being played through the T-Box, alongside the all you can eat video subscription service the Telco has planned.
It’s still a while away, but if this story proves to be true, it could be a huge push forward towards a console-less gaming experience.
[The Australian (paywalled)]