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Comment by jaymzcampbell | Hacker News Reader

This is very much what OnLive where doing a few years back - I had a subscription for a while but never used it as much to justify it. They would have some problems from time to time but for a casual gamer like myself that only had an ancient and linux-only laptop it worked surprisingly well.

They're since defunct, Sony picked up their assets end of April this year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive).

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It's essentially thin client gaming, right?

With the roll out of more fiber networks, this could be a reality (assuming you still had enough host locations to reduce latency).

I have never using OnLive, did they support playing via browser? Browser solution is key to this as almost every device support modern browsers capable of ruining OP solution.

They had Windows and OSX apps, as well as an iOS app. Onlive started in a time before browsers had the features needed to make this possible.

The browser is the key to what? Doing stuff in the browser?

It's certainly not the key to getting a game on every device. I can't think of one browser game that people play on their devices. Even Words with Friends, the simplest 2D game you could think of, is not used from a browser - most people run the native app for that.

>It's certainly not the key to getting a game on every device. I can't think of one browser game that people play on their devices. Even Words with Friends, the simplest 2D game you could think of, is not used from a browser - most people run the native app for that.

Because of performance, but streaming games solve this problem. Full screen browser wouldn't be any different than native game client.

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