OnLive considering a pricing change for future games, welcome to Episode Land

OnLive is faced with a bit of an issue now that they are available on Android phones and tablets and soon to be on iOS devices as well. This little issue is about the overlapping of games and how they plan to combat that. One idea they are throwing around is that future OnLive games could end up being broken down into episodes.

The problem lies in the fact that some games, such as LEGO Harry Potter, are already available on iOS and future games may already be available on the Android Market. This could happen with both indie and Triple-A titles such as Grand Theft Auto 3 or other games that could make their way to OnLive that are already available on Android. Most of the time these games are shorter, more scaled down version of their console brothers. Of course this doesn't apply to GTA3 but it does apply to LEGO Harry Potter.

The iOS version of LEGO Harry Potter is smaller than the OnLive version and this is where the overlapping issue comes into play. To combat this for future games, OnLive is discussing possible changes to their pricing models and other reasons that OnLive versions will be better such as you will be getting the entire console game instead of a scale down version of the same title.

OnLive Founder and CEO, Steve Perlman and OnLive UK GM, Bruce Grove had this to say about the whole thing when talking to Tap Magazine:

There’s going to be overlap. You’ve got LEGO Harry Potter on the App Store, we have LEGO Harry Potter on OnLive, and so on the iPad you have two LEGO Harry Potters to choose from. The one that’s in the App Store you can play on an airplane or away from any connectivity, but if you’re playing LEGO Harry with OnLive it’s a much richer experience. They don’t have to simplify the game, but you’ve got to be near an access point somewhere. I think the two versions can coexist fine. - Steve Perlman

Here is what Bruce went on to say about new pricing models:

It’s something we’ve talked to the developers and the publishers about and right now, the obvious pitch is: ‘This is a console that plays across all of these devices’, so what you’re paying for is making games playable across all these devices.

The other part of it is, when you look at the games in the App Store, and you look at the Dead Spaces or Infinity Blades that could cost up to £10 a game or £5 depending on which ones, they tend to be shorter. They tend to have four, maybe eight hours of gameplay in, whereas this might have 40 hours of gameplay in. So we’ve already started talking to some of the developers and publishers about exactly this, which is: ‘What if we break games down into episodes, and we give out or unlock the episodes for a price?’ Because that way you can get your 10 hours of gameplay for £10 or £5, and then you go onto the next chapter for £10, or maybe you go and buy some side quests for a few pounds.

Between us and the publishers, what we’re doing is thinking about what models make it more mobile friendly. We know one of the things that’s going to happen is that it will open up an audience that wasn’t there through the microconsole, or wasn’t there through PC or Mac, because there’s so many iPads and iPhones in people’s hands, and so we have to go up against the App Store games, just because we’re both on the same device, and so visible to the user. - Bruce Grove

If this does come to pass, that means we could be paying $5-10 per episode of a game instead of getting the entire game. A lot of the games tend to be around the $6.99 mark when it comes to Android specific titles, usually when they are on sale. Even when they are not they are not much more than $15.

While breaking down a rather large Triple-A title into episodes seems like a decent plan, especially when those games end up costing $30-$40 to buy anyways, this sort of pricing will probably not work for the smaller indie games that will be available. So what do you think? If all OnLive games in the future go the route of episodes would you still use the service?

Website Referenced: OnLive Fans