Anyone who has played at OnLive can tell you that it’s a social gaming experience like no other. Every time you connect, you’re on with thousands of other gamers from all around the world, watching what (and how) they play, cheering progress and most recently, chatting it up with Voice Chat Beta.
But OnLive just got even more social with new Friend Finder features, improved messaging systems and easier ways to track, share and compare your in-game achievements with friends.
Make new friends and invite the old
Today we made it easier than ever to find your friends quickly on the OnLive Game Service or invite more friends to join. If you have Gmail, the OnLive Friend Finder will instantly connect you with contacts who are already OnLive members or send a personalized referral link to anyone who hasn’t yet joined. Not on Gmail? We’ll be adding other providers soon, but until then you can enter your friends’ email addresses into the “Add a Friend” dialog to send friend requests to their OnLive accounts. We’ve also added new email notifications for everything from friend requests to chat messages to video sharing, so you can keep up with your new-found friends even when you’re not logged into the OnLive service. (Choose the notifications you want in the Dashboard Settings menu.)
Lay claim to your bragging rights
Log into the OnLive service and you’ll also discover an upgrade to your games list, with personal stats tracked for each game such as total play time, last played and achievements earned (when available). Dive into your friends’ profiles to see their game stats and plot your strategy to blow them out of the water. Not sure your stats tell the full story? Relax. We’ve added an Instant Playback feature that automatically records a Brag Clip™ video when you reach key moments in each game. That’s right, we reached out to game developers to identify critical Achievements throughout each game, so that as you finally clear 1,000 feet of jumps or earn that 50th level, the moment is instantly preserved for you to share with friends or the entire OnLive Community. That’s simply not something you can do anywhere but OnLive.
And that’s what makes all of this so exciting: with each of these new features, we’re taking another step toward making OnLive even more engaging and unique—a social gaming world where you can play, watch, chat and share experiences in ways you just can’t do anywhere else. Sure, “social gaming” has always been inherent to OnLive. But when you look at the potential, you’ll see we’ve only just scratched the surface of what it can—and will—soon become.
Sign in now to http://play.onlive.com to see the new features. And don’t forget to tell a friend. It’s easy!
—Joe Bentley, VP of Engineering
