yeah, most people including myself do not like the fact that you are essentially paying full price to "borrow" a game and have no control over it

I'm surprised they're still in the business, lol....

Which is why I havent bothered paying real money for today's games, only getting second-hand ones for free.

Yes, you big game companies, I'm a pirate for being given second-hand games for free cause you dont get any money! HA!

No one ever started paying a subscription. They said it would be free for a year, and before that year was up they changed it to no subscription.

Also, I don't think people understand that you never "own" any games in the first place. There are so many different rules written by publishers and developers now that at best you're paying $60 for a privilege that they can take away at any time. Every game you buy from any major company is loaded with DRM in that regard. OnLive is just a little more honest about it.

They never implemented the subscription fee. So far all memberships are for a free year of service and they weren't going to begin paid subscriptions until next year. And now they've decided not to switch to a paid service next year and will remain free for good.

Well that's good news, I'd have hated to be someone who had been suckered into paying a subscription only to have then become free.

As for those rules written by publishers, the EULA does not have the legal backing many people think it does. It's there to make you think they can, and to let them claim that they said x in a court of law, but it is not as enforceable as they claim it is. Yes, there are laws protecting the publishers' rights and so on, but they cannot just take away someone's right to play a product they have paid for just because they can unless it is an MMO, in which case they are not taking away your right to play it but removing the service of their servers, which they do own. If you can still play the game without their servers then you can do so without the consent of the publishers.

If a company tried to take away the right of users to play a game they had bought then they wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. No amount of EULAs could change that.

The supposed differentiation between ownership and licensing is beside the point; with a non-activation retail copy or DRM-free download you can pull it out 20+ years from now and play it just fine even if the publisher is long dead. That simply isn't possible with OnLive rentals. Publishers or service providers can withdraw your access to an online-dependent game or service at any time, but they have no power whatsoever over games that can install and play offline (this is one of the reasons why GFWL is superior to Steamworks).

Also note that OnLive is still strictly in rental territory; games are only available for their "supported lifetime" based on continued popularity with players (according to the FAQ "all current games will be supported for 3 years after their release on the OnLive Service"). The wording indicates they might remove games that unpopular, and this line gives them an easy way to wriggle out of any obligation longer than a mere three years. With Steam and the like you can still access any game that's been made available on Steam no matter how unpopular it is (even if it's been totally removed from sale).

for steam i copy all the steam codes to force down/load games which were pulled from sale. They have yet to take a game away...

See Codename Gordon, the company went belly up and dissolved there games vanished but Steam still serves the install files...

on second thought and after looking at there service i'll pass, this is dangerous as all hell to gaming as a whole.

Bingo. Other than the hardware advantage OnLive offers it actually represents very little value to the customer. Publishers are able to charge the same prices as retail with zero cost and more restrictive control over how, when and where we play their games.