OnLive Red Faction Armageddon Demo

I was a bit bummed out by OnLive's announcement earlier, but I've changed my mind after reading the official statement on their of blog (http://blog.onlive.com/).  This is actually a pretty exciting achievement for OnLive.

At first, I though this was merely a simple demo.  However, this so happens to be the only way for PC/Mac gamers to demo the game.  That's right, this truly is an exclusive OnLive demo.  What's even more impressive is that the demo can be launched instantly by clicking this link:  https://play.onlive.com/launch/trial/red-faction-armageddon!  That is, of course, if you already have a [free] OnLive account.  If not, you can quickly set one up, and still be playing the demo within a few moments.

This is exciting news for OnLive, and they claim that this is only the beginning.  By doing this, they can "force" PC/Mac users to try out their service in order to play new game demos.  Gamers have nothing to lose with this approach, and OnLive has everything to gain.  Consumers skeptical of the service will have a new reason to give it a try, and hopefully see the benefits in the process.

This is also a direct blow at, as of yet, OnLive's biggest competitor in the cloud gaming realm; Gaikai (http://gaikai.com/)  For those of you that don't know, Gaikai is a cloud gaming service that has the primary function of providing instant demos to customers. With this Red Faction deal, OnLive has just proven that they are more than capable of providing the same sort of service to game publishers; and this is on top of everything else that they already do.

This should be exciting to fans of OnLive.  There is potentially a lot of money in this sort of a service, and they have just positioned themselves to take a slice of the pie.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out for OnLive in the future, and if this can potentially lead to them signing contracts with new publishers...