LiquidSky 2.0's beta lets you play Overwatch on your Android phone while out and about

It almost seems like eons ago when OnLive wanted to make the possibility of cloud gaming on various devices a reality. The company crashed and burned almost spectacularly, but no one said the road to cloud gaming would be paved with success. LiquidSky hopes to avoid that possibility with LiquidSky 2.0, which is now in open beta and ready to be stress-tested.

At its core, LiquidSky is similar to previous video game streaming options in that it allows you to play PC titles from your Android device, whether that is over Wi-Fi or your cellular network. When you use the service, you are assigned a unique, virtual PC that taps into the likes of Steam, Humble Bundle, Origin, and plenty more for your gaming needs. This allows folks to download new games and access their existing libraries from anywhere, so long as they are connected to the internet.

What separates LiquidSky from others are its infrastructure and pricing details. Unlike OnLive, which bought and installed its own servers for every person that logged on, LiquidSky taps into IBM’s public cloud infrastructure. As such, LiquidSky can scale at demand and in real-time without the need to constantly make sure each person has their own virtual PC.

Pricing might be what helps LiquidSky the most, however – you can either not pay at all, pay as you go, or pay a flat rate each month. The latter two options mostly include the same benefits, such as Full HD, 60 frames per second gaming and faster downloads, but paying each month allows you to change the data center from where you access your virtual PC.

As far as requirements and recommendations are concerned, your Android device must have at least 1 GB of RAM and run Marshmallow and up. LiquidSky also recommends you connect to either ethernet, 5 GHz Wi-Fi, or 4G LTE. Finally, the recommended internet speed is a minimum of 5 Mb/sec, though 20 MB/sec and up is ideal.