OnLive is "built for scale", chances of downtime "mitigated"

OnLive is proof against the launch-demand jitters which plague major multiplayer releases, according to director of publisher relations Chris Donahue.

"Our backend is built for scale, and so we've yet to run into a problem where we are unable to host people," Donahue told Game Revolution at Develop last month.

"So it's more a matter of that we have a really good IT group and systems integration group that is really good at managing the loads we have.

"In the US we have 3 locations and we balance load across the 3 locations, my assumption is that we will do the same here in Europe - we have data centers here in the UK and Luxemburg, so for redundancy and also for reaching further into Europe."

Donahue couldn't say what level of growth it is capable of absorbing at present, but commented that it would be "a really good problem to have".

"It's all just more hardware, we can build more hardware," he noted, later explaining that the OnLive network had been built to avoid downtime all together.

"I believe we’ve architectured our backend so that would never happen," he said.

"Barring an EMP, or some catastrophic failure or something - there’s always that chance, but we’ve mitigated that as much as possible."

Donahue said of the company's European roll out that it intends to bring across as much of its existing US catalogue as licensing and territorial restrictions allows, and to continue pursuing simultaneous releases with retail. He also commented on OnLive's relationships with near-competitors Apple, Origin and Steam, and discussed the problems of bringing motion control to cloud-based gaming. Follow the link above for the full interview.