While OnLive is enjoying a healthy amount of success in the U.S. market, it’s been looking to, as well as being requested to, share the love with the EU. Yesterday marked the first step in this process, as formerly titled British Telecommunications firm, BT announced that they’d purchased a 2.6 percent stake in OnLive, and plan on rolling the service out to UK residents.
OnLive, which was rolled out in March of 2009, spend seven years in development, and the official launch of the service in the U.S. will commence this summer, following an ongoing successful beta trial. That’s not to say that the OnLive folks have been focused solely on American shores, as CEO Steve Perlman confirms that OnLive has been testing the service in the EU since 2009, with a data center already up and running in Wales. OnLive has been tested all over Europe, ranging from the U.K. to Italy, Scandinavia to Spain.
“The good news is it works very very well,” he said. “In some cases, it works better than in the U.S.”
If you’re not already familiar with OnLive’s services, these aren’t some vanilla, rehashed titles that are available. Current partners include EA, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ, and Warner Bros. IE. Games on tap to be served up by OnLive include blockbusters Assassin’s Creed II, Borderlands, and Mass Effect 2, just to name a few.
This new partnership marks the first entry into cloud gaming by BT, and they see it as a logical extension to their BT Vision on demand digital television service.
“Entertainment is going to be at the heart of what we offer customers in the future,” comments BE Retail CEO Gavin Patterson. “The partnership with OnLive complements our existing BT Vision service. It’s great for our customers – they’ll have access to a huge catalogue of games, available instantly on their TV or PC without expensive hardware. And it’s great for BT – it will enhance our premium broadband position and we’ll be entering into a market that’s worth more than £2billion.”
Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, remarks, “The UK market is extremely important to OnLive and our videogame publishing partners as we expand into Europe. We view BT as the ideal UK partner. As gamers are moving increasingly to online game distribution, OnLive delivers video games as a pure form of online media, playable instantly on almost any video-capable device attached to the internet. The implications are nothing short of transformative to video games and in time, all interactive media. OnLive is delighted to be pioneering this revolutionary technology in the UK together with BT”.
“Gaming on social networks is poised to impact the traditional video game industry and is a presence that cannot be ignored,” Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. “We have to make our move.”
Zynga’s most popular title, FarmVille has been hit hardest, and the San Francisco based game development firm has been quietly pulling users off Facebook and directing them to play their favorite farming game on Zynga’s own platform(s). Having this independence and freedom has had some notable advantages for Zynga, most notably, their own currency form, and ability to cross promote their own titles, all the while, not being at the mercy of an outside party.
TrialPay conducted a 
If The Agency rings a bell, you’ll remember that we first 
“The sale of virtual goods through micro transactions continues to grow in popularity with consumers and is establishing new revenue models for the games industry,” said Joel Ronning, CEO of Digital River. “With the addition of fatfoogoo, we’ve strengthened our commitment to the gaming marketplace. We believe the combination of our in-game and in-store commerce solution along with our subscription management capabilities will be unmatched in the industry. This partnership continues our promise to provide existing and future clients with the leading e-commerce technology and expertise they expect from Digital River.”
MapleStory, and arguably microtransactions founder, Nexon Corporation announced it’s successful majority stake purchase of fellow Korean MMO firm NDoors Corp. The deal saw 67 percent of NDoors’ stake sold to Nexon. This percentage also includes shares from the former NDoors chairman, Seong-Mun Kwon. This majority stake buy in will now give Nexon management rights as the largest shareholder. At the end of the day, NDoors will be incorporated as a subsidiary of Nexon.
Subtopics of issues to solve include a series of missions that present players with energy, water, banking, and retail industry problems. One game ‘mission’ revolves around a city where water consumption has expanded at twice the rate of population growth, supplies are becoming strained (and possibly polluted); the city is losing up to 40 percent of it’s water supply due to leaky infrastructure; and energy costs are on the rise.
