Although the service has already made a fairly impressive debut on the Mac, we’ve been waiting to see what gaming thin client OnLive had in store for iOS.
The potential for gamers is pretty great: imagine a graphically intensive PC game running at maximum graphical settings on your iPad or iPhone, thanks to Onlive’s fantastic streaming technology.
The only problem: how do you translate a PC or console game’s controls to a touchscreen without porting it over? Earlier in the year, Onlive demonstrated one solution and showed Gearbox’s fantastic shooter Borderlands being played on an iPad, but the controls looked pretty cumbersome.
It doesn’t look like Onlive’s come up with any better solution in the six months since that demo, though, because they still haven’t delivered a way to play their library of streamed games on iOS devices. Still, it looks like they are at least trying to raise awareness of their company on the App Store, because they’ve just announced that they have enabled game spectating on the iPad.
Sure, it’s better than nothing, but I really want to see a more aggressive move towards iOS on Onlive’s part at this point.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
