Europe next for growing OnLive

Onlive’s new UK base will also help it grow in Europe.

The firm’s Bruce Grove – previously senior director of engineering and one of OnLive’s first employees – took the role of UK GM before Christmas. He is now working on a more ‘British’ side to the business.And he’s looking at the next European markets to launch in.

OnLive launched in the UK during September last year. The cloud gaming service is supported by BT and has scored a deal with GAME.

OnLive was built for the US originally. When we came to the UK we started to put things in place to be a global platform,” Grove told MCV.Now with me in the UK you will see more of a UK focus: more sports games, and titles I can’t talk about yet which work really well for us. Everything from our service, the titles we offer and business partnerships will be more UK-specific.”

As well as picking the UK office location and hiring more OnLive UK staff, Grove has to scope out the next European countries to move into –and is encouraged by the UK’s response.

OnLive in the UK exploded in a way we didn’t expect, and that’s really not hyperbole,” said Grove.We planned UK capacity, but it was an order of magnitude much bigger than anticipated. We had to air freight in crates of servers to put in our data centres in order to keep up and double our capacity – we had expected to do that over four months, but had to do it in a matter of weeks.

The UK has got behind OnLive in a vocal way that they were slower to do in the US. Users are at the point now where they are happy with it, but know that limitations come from their broadband line, not our service.

So we’re hugely motivated to really get things off the ground over here and then take that further across Europe and make OnLive a global service.”