Four years ago, a new service called OnLive debuted, offering a whole new way to play and get games using online streaming. Rather than downloading games or buying them from stores, you streamed them from online servers and paid for the access rights – meaning low-cost, no-storage-required gaming that just required a solid internet connection and which promise to revolutionise the way we played games. The reality, however, was far less rosy. By marketing itself as its own platform – alienating both publishers who worried about game sales cannibalising those on established platforms, and players who were forced to decide whether to buy their games traditionally, via OnLive, or both; selling some games itself – cutting it off from retailers; and giving developers an extra step in the development process to support the platform, OnLive made an enemy of practically everyone; and in 2012, the company folded, its assets sold off and all the staff laid off.

Now though, OnLive is back and learning from its mistakes, thanks to a relaunch in the hands of the buyer, a new (legally-speaking) company also called OnLive. After 18 months out of the limelight, OnLive has returned under new management and carrying two new business models.

The key to the new OnLive is a brand new offering called Cloudlift. Thanks to a partnership with Valve, OnLive now has access to the full library of Steam games, bringing thousands of games of all different kinds to the platform. OnLive will now let you buy Steam games and add them to your Steam account through the service, solving the platform separation by potentially allowing the same game to run on multiple devices through both OnLive and Steam itself. The magic comes with OnLive’s streaming abilities. Once again, when playing a Steam game through OnLive, you won’t actually be downloading and playing the game locally – instead, the game is streamed to you over an internet connection from super-fast, super-capable servers hosted by OnLive, meaning no storage is required. In a genius touch however, slam in your Steam account details and as long as you’re using Steam’s Cloud Save feature, Cloudlift will grab your online save for each game as you load them up, so you’ll be able to continue the same game you have on your traditional Steam-enabled device. If you have a solid internet connection (2mb/sec minimum, 5mb recommended download speed), you may never notice the difference.

As Cloudlift is available as a smartphone app and as software for PC and Mac, the service potentially will allow Ouya and other Android-based consoles to get the full range of Steam apps and play them with high performance, instantly increasing their usefulness and the size of the game libraries; and also potentially means a game you start on your PC can be later played on the Mac at work, with little change in performance even if the power of all the devices is completely in different leagues – all you need is a compatible controller. Cloudlift comes with a heavy price tag, however, at $14.99 and £9.99 per month; and with only Steam games on offer at the moment, the choice is limited to your already-purchased and future-purchased Steam Games; you don’t get a whole range of games included in the price like with movies on Netflix. Along with this is the problem that not all Steam games come with cloud sync, meaning they can still be streamed but won’t allow players to pick up where they left off.

Luckily, OnLive are not resting on their laurels, as they have two additional plans in the works to increase the game library as they come along. First, the original OnLive game library will soon be relaunched, meaning the company will once again start sellings its own games too. While this will remain a separate service to Cloudlift for now, any games bought from OnLive will also come with seven days’ access to the same game on Cloudlift – whether this feature will remain or be enhanced in future however is yet to be seen, as the company are not committing heavily to the OnLive market to prevent it repeating its past mistakes. OnLive is also allowing games publishers to partner directly with them and deliver demos of their games to stream through the services, which will be a white-label service – so the publishers are free to credit the games however they like (expect names like “Sega Go” or “EA Live” to crop up, for example). Gaijin Games are one of the partners named to be on board.

Will the new strategy allow OnLive to succeed where it once failed? And will full online streaming become the future of, or a strong alternative to, both digitally stored and physical media gaming? Time will soon tell.