OnLive lets publishers "design games better"

OnLive's unique feedback and metrics capacities are drawing publishers in, founder and president Steve Perlman has said.

"We gave the publishers tons and tons of data, they love it," Perlman told GamesIndustry.

"It allows them to go and make decisions, to design games better.

"Now in the design process we can actually go and put up games in a beta group that's closed off from the rest of the world even though it's running on the same servers but no one else can spectate that. And then the publishers are the only ones who can spectate that.

"They can actually watch their users testing their games. What they get stuck on, what doesn't work and so forth. They're loving it."

OnLive's capacity to deliver rental and demos is giving publishers valuable feedback, too.

"They have rentals with OnLive, and demos that can lead to rental or demos that can lead to purchase. So it's tough for someone to do a 1GB or 2GB download just to do a demo because they have more friction getting someone into it," Perlman explained.

"With OnLive what we've found, and it's funny, we came to them with our statistics of 'here's our conversion rates from demos to purchase, how does that compare with other demos to purchase now' and they said 'we don't know'.

"They're completely unaware, they don't really know how many demos link to purchase, they just put them out there, they know demos help. So it the first time they've ever had any data."