![OnLive assets sold, service to continue [Update]](https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/resize?type=webp&url=0&width=1032&sign=hjPf1YK82dV-QT8oL3v_lLzC62zix4hvLjTqBJFhHgY "OnLive assets sold, service to continue [Update]")
OnLive assets sold, service to continue [Update]
Game streaming company OnLive has reportedly shut down.
Update #2: Added confirmation from OnLive that the company has been sold.
Update #1: Added comment from OnLive representatives and analyst Michael Pachter. Additional information from new sources added.
OnLive has, for all intents and purposes, died. "We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed company and is backed by substantial funding," a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. Although the company is being restructured, the OnLive service will continue. "There is no expected interruption of any OnLive services," the statement points out.
According to the representative, "the new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive Inc's staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees." Earlier reports indicated that the entire staff had been laid off.
Explaining the company's silence on the matter, the rep said that "we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed, and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive's businesses."
Original story follows.
Former employees of OnLive are claiming the imminent demise of the company. InXile Entertainment's Brian Fargo has posted a forwarded email from a now-former employee of the company, saying that by day's end "OnLive as an entity will no longer exist." It appears everyone at the company has been laid off. Gamasutra report concurs. According to statements posted on Facebook, "a new company will be formed" that will coordinate "current initiatives in place."
However, OnLive representatives claim that the service is not shutting down, in spite whatever may be happening at the company.
Sources close to Mashable report that the entire OnLive staff was fired at an all-hands meeting that took place at 10AM PT. The report also claims that "some staffers may be rehired as the company transitions to its next unknown iteration." Kotaku also received the same information, adding that the company plans on filing for bankruptcy later today.
OnLive offered streaming games that could run on a variety of devices, including PC, Mac, and Android. The company most recently announced a partnership with Ouya to bring their services to the Android-based device. OnLive also offered its own standalone TV-connected console.
Speaking to Shacknews, an OnLive representative said that "we don't respond to rumors and have no comment." The service will remain open, but there's still no word on the extent of layoffs. Analyst Michael Pachter tweeted that financing is "not an issue" at OnLive, so "it must be a changed strategy to an all IP model."
New reports from Engadget and GamePolitics suggest that the company is laying off at least 50 percent of its employees, and that a new company is buying OnLive. Apparently, the company has faced severe financial difficulties as of late, contradicting Pachter's claims. Shacknews will continue to update this story as new developments arise.
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Shacknews
replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Rumor: OnLive to close today, 'new company will be formed'.
Game streaming company OnLive has reportedly shut down.-
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They might be still laying off most of their staff as part of a radical restructuring
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Shacknews this is your opportunity to post "OnLive Lives On"
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OlLive DEAD? NO! LIVE!!!
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you should be one of the writers
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Wow, that sucks. I'm not a huge user of Onlive but I've used it from time to time to demo a few games. Just recently I played the first 30 minutes of Darksiders II just to give it a try before buying it on the 360 (which I did the next day). I actually have a few games on the service which I got for free for being a beta tester and I think I bought at least one (for a reduced price). This means I now probably can't play: Lego Batman, Just Cause 2, Red Faction Guerrilla and the original Darksiders! The only one I'm really sad about is Darksiders because it's a game I always intended on playing at some point.
I'm curious to see what (if anything) comes out of this. They have some substantial data center infrastructure with big fat pipes going to them. I'd imagine they have some valuable assets as a company. I was kind of half wondering if MS would buy them up after Sony got Gaikai. Looks like tha'ts not going to happen... -
This is just my theory. But I can't verify it yet. What seems likely is that the company has laid off most everyone off its payroll. A few people will remain, while others necessary for the upkeep of the service will be rehired on a freelance basis. The company will then be restructured--after current obligations are met. Still trying to get more info for you guys.
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Assuming the new reports are accurate, I bet they're prepping the company for sale. Meaning a cash out by the founders. Not necessarily closing, but selling the tech to some larger company. There's probably some hush-hush money coming in on the backside to prop the company up to handle the bankruptcy proceeding so they make themselves more attractive for the sale.
Considering Sony's move this would make complete sense.-
yeah I would assume whatever plan they had to try to be independent and scale out on their own has proven untenable and now they're looking to take the tech down a pure licensing/acquisition path
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Gamasutra confirms they just laid off all their employees.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176180/OnLive_lays_off_all_employees.php-
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Gamasutra confirms that they've laid off all their employees.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176180/OnLive_lays_off_all_employees.php-
Nuke time. Sorry for the double post, Lamp is taking forever to update.
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Another one is the same vein:
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/17/onlive-losing-at-least-50-percent-of-staff-purchased-by-unkno/?a_dgi=aolshare_twitter
My theory is Microsoft might buy them to compete with Sony and Gaikai.-
The Engadget story mentions HP.
Man if HP buys them they might as well just go away. HP will buy them, have another management changeover, and OnLive will get shuttered outright. Just look at what happened to Palm.
If Microsoft buys them I bet they only trot them out if Sony ever actually does anything with Gaikai. I think Gaikai will just be swept under the rug and never actually make it into a Sony product. Sony having Gaikai and Microsoft having OnLive will be like the USA and USSR having nukes. They're never used, just held for mutually assured destruction.-
Sony really doesn't have $400 million to spend on acquisitions they have no intention of using (the idea that anyone spends nearly half a billion on an acquisition without a plan for it seems... odd). Their plan may fail, the execution may be poor, whatever, but the idea that it simply exists as some sort of strategic missile in case of emergency seems very strange.
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Sony's an odd company.
But you make good points. I think the most likely scenario is that if Sony uses Gaikai they'll do so in a way that we don't expect.
Something interesting to me is that if Microsoft buys OnLive and Sony has Gaikai, and they use them in their consoles, one of the big selling points of cloud gaming - hardware ubiquity - goes away. Now you can't just run OnLive anywhere you can run a browser, now you have to have an Xbox 720. Not that hardware ubiquity with OnLive ever really worked anyway - it wouldn't let you play Mass Effect on a Macintosh, for example ("ONLY ON WINDOWS AND XBOX 360" and all).
Makes me wonder if their failure to deliver an iOS client has any relation to this recent maneuver.-
Makes me wonder if their failure to deliver an iOS client has any relation to this recent maneuver.
If their problem is profitably scaling, then an iOS client doesn't really change that. There's not much to suggest running the service gets cheaper as you build out. The more users you have, the more machines in datacenters you need, and the more geographically distributed data centers you need.-
It just seemed odd to me that they would go so far as to give TouchArcade an ad-hoc build of their app and then let it expire without ever delivering or explaining anything
http://toucharcade.com/2012/07/06/an-in-depth-video-preview-of-the-ios-onlive-app-moments-before-my-build-expires/
Of course there could be other issues, like collusion with Apple over selling games and access.-
well you are talking about now requiring people to buy a bluetooth controller, and losing 30% of any in app purchases/subscription sign ups if you're hoping to use it to generate new users. They wouldn't be the first to find that kind of cut kills any chance of profitability.
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If it is HP consider it dead. HP is about as good with gaming as Intel is with graphics.
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Also, I think you are wrong. Publishers and developers both like the concept of cloud gaming, it's the execution that's been lacking. Cloud gaming lowers the rate of piracy, lowers support costs, and makes the experience for PC game like consoles in that everyone has the same visual and audio fidelity.
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Devs and Pubs like it because it will make everyone buy another copy of their game. If you wanted to play a game on OnLive and you owned it already you had to buy it again. If you bought a game from OnLive and you want to play it after they shut down you'll have to buy it again. And there's no price comparison - the price OnLive charges is the price the game is, period. Not like how Target could underbid Walmart on Diablo 3 if they wanted.
But I disagree on your "everyone has the same visual quality and fidelity" bit - nothing could be further from the truth. The experience with OnLive varied wildly from user to user depending on things like how far they lived from an OnLive datacenter, whether their ISP is having a good day, whether or not their neighbors are downloading too much, etc. At least with a PC or a console you know why you're getting the fidelity you are (console users all get the same thing, PC users get better or worse depending on the quality of their PC). With OnLive it's a ton of variables out of your control. The only guaranteed fidelity is "shitty" and if you're lucky it gets better from there.-
It also allows people to rent and for that rental revenue to eventually get to the dev unlike now. As for the fidelity, I said there ar still execution problems, doesn't mean they can't be worked out. You don't like the idea, that's pretty obvious, doesn't mean it's a bad idea though.
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Its always been a terrible idea and this is all just making it clearer
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Yes, but you are obviously pretty biased against it.
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Except it's not. It's been sold, not shut down.
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HP could probably use it for a VDI offering. Virtual Desktops for CAD workstations are pretty awful, and although nVidia's VGX should make it way better, you'd still have to have huge expensive servers. The latency that onLive had would be great, although the resolution might be lacking.
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Shit, you're probably right. I remember OnLive was renting out Microsoft Office and shit to people. Either HP is going to buy them and turn them into an on-demand Citrix type thing or Microsoft will do the same.
Actually it might not make much sense for Microsoft what with the Office 365 thing.
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Devil's Advocate: "not ready for it" isn't always a good excuse for a business failing.
If I created a business that made energy fuel cells for personal hovercraft which don't exist yet my business would fail because no one would buy them. It doesn't mean I was just "ahead of my tine", it would mean I was stupid.
These guys were trying to sell cloud gaming to a country whose ISP infrastructure sucks, is prone to bandwidth caps, and whose console users tend to not even put their systems online. OnLive wanted to let them play Crysis on a netbook with a 10" screen. It's a neat idea. It's not a good idea. And it's nothing to base a company on.
Personally, I kinda think this may have been their plan all along. Dollars to donuts these guys have some patents on this stuff (they were working on it for "seven years", which may be the amount of time needed to get a patent approved). Maybe they really wanted to make a go of it with OnLive but maybe their plan has always been to patent something that might eventually happen one day and then cash out selling the patents to someone else.
Of course to be fair I'm dancing on their grave here but there may be something awesome underway. They did a dog-and-pony up at Valve a while back, maybe they're shedding employees to go work there and maybe Steam Cloud's going to get an interesting new feature. That's an incarnation of OnLive that I might find interesting and useful.
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Why is it shitty? When it's done right it's actually pretty cool. Are you down on streaming video as well?
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Streaming video is great because I don't have input into it. The latency for inputs and seeing the result of the input really isn't something they can do anything about and is why that sort of service won't be anywhere close to running something on my PC anytime soon.
I'd love to see someone try to play Tribes via that service.-
Doesn't mean the idea should be killed off.
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actually.........all UI these days is shitty. remember back in the day when clicking a button meant you instantly got what you wanted? even the fastest browsing experience usually means at least 1-2 seconds of latency before your link clicking brings you what you want. when you factor in streaming video, buffering takes god knows how long. ugh
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Just because it wouldn't be great for Tribes doesn't mean it lacks applications completely
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it is pretty clear to me that you and others bitching about it never even tried it...it worked pretty damn well.
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No, but distance reduces latency. If something like this really took off all they have to do is build more datacenters with big pipes and get them as close to users as possible. If you have a datacenter in your nearest big city with a round trip ping time of 10ms... that's gonna be pretty damn quick. I'm in the Boston area... I'm not exactly sure where the nearest datacenter for Onlive is but I have very little latency when I play. It's good enough so that I sometimes forget I'm playing this game on a remote blade somewhere.
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So you never tried it? Because while it had its flaws it worked rather well actually.
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Music: very recently this has changed, yes. Namely Amazon's Cloud Player. I'll grant you that. But otherwise you're just referring to buying files from a server or listening to Pandora, which isn't ideal since you don't have direct control over what gets played.
Movies: Not sure what you mean here. Are you referring to Netflix instant streaming? Yes, that's nice, but they don't have much selection for old content holder reasons. Renting single-watch movies online or purchasing them? Renting's nice, if a bit pricey compared to renting a disc at Blockbuster. Purchasing them? On the PC it's a DRM nightmare and on consoles there are space issues.-
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Banking, file storage, picture sharing, office apps, web apps/SaaS. Even telephony and some desktop computing.
Forget for a moment the idiosyncrasies with OnLive as a company whatever they may be (pricing, content, licensing, etc). As a vision, concept, and idea it's brilliant, ahead of its time, and largely inevitable.
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What? Why is it shitty? I think the technology is amazing.
Some OnLive guys gave a presentation at my school I think 1.5 years ago and they showed off streaming Windows to a mobile device. They showed an iPad streaming Windows and running things like Photoshop, Premiere, AutoCAD, etc. with very low latency. It was really cool. -
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I'm with you. Fuck onlive.
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I don't understand this belief that something like this is inevitable.
Technology is supposed to be about making things better, cheaper, more accessible. In 1999 you had to spend thousands on a PC that could handle Quake 3. Today the $250 netbook can handle it with no sweat. Your $600 cell phone can run games that would make your PC squirm a few years ago.
So I don't understand this idea that one day we'll just throw all of this out in favor of someone else running massive server farms and we'll just have screens that show video of it all. Instead of spending $600 on a good gaming PC or hell, $200 on a game console, spend $15 per month or whatever, indefinitely, to some service and have nothing to show for it should you stop paying? That just doesn't seem like it adds anything to the equation to me. Heck, running the OnLive client on a $500 iPad to avoid spending $200 on an Xbox just seems foolish to me.
(note that my statements above are based on my understanding of OnLive pricing, which may not be accurate)-
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The processing power still needs to come from somewhere. Who is going to maintain server clusters that can replace tens of millions of home PCs? There's a reason things like Folding@home exists because it's prohibitively expensive for single companies to run clusters with that kind of processing power.
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Folding@home actually supports uncleanmonkey's argument that it's extremely inefficient to have most computers out there doing nothing most of the time
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But it doesn't support the argument that the answer to the problem is to move to a bunch of clusters maintained by a few companies. Just consider the costs of running clusters with similar processing capabilities of 10 million mid-speced PCs. First there is the upfront cost of the hardware. We are talking billions of dollars alone there. Then there are operations costs, electricity, rack-space and network costs. Then you have to pay a team of people to run the things. Then you are responsible for replacing failed hardware and also responsible for upgrading the hardware as the games become more demanding. THEN someone needs to make a profit from all of this.
You think they'll be able to offer all of this at an affordable monthly rate and not go out of business? I'll just have to say good luck especially where there are more like 100 million people playing games on PCs.
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Or... buy a dedicated game machine (be it a console or PC) and be done with it.
Seriously, what you're describing there is akin to trying to pull a flatbed trailer by training a large flock of chickens on leashes to pull it. If you want talk about efforts and energies as if they're a single, overall resource, I think the efforts would be much better spent trying to improve graphical technology and further the art of game design and development, rather than taking what we know to already work and try to figure out ways to force it down a straw.
Just because something is a neat idea doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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Not for heavy computing. Cloud services serve lightweight computing where servers can provide the resources needed for thousands of clients at once. This isn't going to happen with gaming. Even the most powerful servers are going to be able to serve maybe a handful of clients at once and they need to be far more powerful machines.
There is a HUGE computational difference between processing a few spreadsheets for a business and processing a few instances of Crysis 2.-
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But the areas in which this is already happening don't involve things like trying to serve HD video in perfect real time with next-to-zero latency from an input device on the client side. If you have to wait a few seconds for Azure to do your thing, no big deal. When you start a Netflix movie and you wait a few seconds for it to buffer, no big deal. If you have to wait even half a second for your video game action to register, you're dead.
And by the time today's technology can comfortably fit on a chip (as in, the amount of CPU/GPU technology I bought for $1500 earlier this month in a big case can fit on an inexpensive chip), the consumer level technology wil be way past that. It won't matter that you've figured out how to push Unreal Engine 3 level graphics through the pipe when the market is using Unreal Engine 7 level graphics. Maybe I'm wrong and at some point graphics technology will level off but I don't see this as a problem that you can catch up to. That's the big problem I have with cloud gaming - it encourages the gaming world to slow down. It can potentially influence the way games are made (don't make that explosion too intense, it won't stream well). It's poison to the valcan_s's of the world. And for less graphically intense games it seems pointless (you can run Peggle and Solitare fine on literally anything, why run them in the cloud at all?)
But anyway, OnLive isn't really dead yet, cloud gaming is still unproven one way or another, and I've probably made it clear what my opinions are in the dozens of posts I've made here so I'll drop it now.-
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Cloud based gaming is never going to truly solve the latency problem. They can hide it through interpolation and other algorithms but it will never be as smooth or accurate. I am sure that certain games that don't require precise aiming or twitch or response will be fine.
Processing power has never been the problem. The real problem is how the internet is setup and the physical distances. In the long run because of bandwidth caps/overages it might actually end up costing users more to play their games.
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It didn't depend on perfect network health and it generally worked pretty well. It's definitely too early for it to really get big, but it demonstrated the possibility beautifully.
Also, you should probably get used to more and more things being delivered as services over the internet or you're going to be really disappointed in the rest of the future. -
Onlive provided benefits requiring internet access, whereas single player Diablo 3 gained very little by requiring an internet connection.
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If you're playing single player this doesn't really affect you though.
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It's acceptable when the price is right and you know what you're getting into from the start. No one complains that Netflix or Hulu requires an internet connection and you're not interacting with anyone when you're watching a show or movie. They made some mistakes in the past by trying to charge full retail price for the games which I'd certainly agree is flat out stupid but from what I gather, prices are more reasonable now.
I think it's a fantastic compromise for people who don't want to be on the standard PC upgrade cycle but still want to game on their PC. It stretches out the lifespan of the hardware, gives people instant access to games, and their spectating feature is great, even though twitch.tv provides something similar and probably with better content.
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Because downloading a 7 GB demo, waiting forever for it to install and use up 10 GB of space, then play it for 30 minutes and delete it after realizing it's not something you want to play, leaving behind a mess in your registory, when you could try it out on OnLive harmlessly instead, is not a shitty idea.
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Looks like the initial report was spot-on. We've updated our story, but here's the summary: OnLive Inc has been dismantled, its assets sold to a new company that is continuing to maintain the service.
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Some articles mention that this devalues the stock any employees had in the previous incarnation of OnLive, making it essentially worthless. Also it gets the salaries off the books for the purchasing company and the 'old' company that did the firing offered no severance.
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I seem to recall some discussion in the early days of OnLive that this was their plan all along - to get sold to some bigger company.
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I don't think they ever explicitly stated that, it was just speculation that this was perhaps their business plan since their original plan didn't make sense - the amount of money in infrastructure needed to effectively pull this off didn't seem to scale with how much they were charging. Ergo, their business plan may have been to be bought by a bigger fish.
Of course, being bought by a bigger company is pretty much a valid path for many businesses.
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I was hoping to test this out with google fiber sometime in the next year or two =/
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The service was probably possible today but the realities of the internet didn't really make it economical or desirable. You had to contend with the latency issue which there is no way to complete solve unless there is some breakthrough in physics. Photons and Electrons can only travel so fast. ISP bandwidth caps and overages basically made this dead on arrival in a lot regions.
You have to feel bad for any one loosing their jobs in a economy like this. You have to feel bad also for the early adopters that will probably lose access to the content they paid for one the service. Its pretty much a lose lose all around .-
Not to be heartless, but you can only feel so bad for them depending on what their employment status was.
If they were regular full-time employees then yeah, it sucks.
However, I'd be willing to be that some or all of the employees were working for sweat equity, as in they were taking a lower than normal or even average salary in exchange for stock options.
In that case then yeah I feel sorry for them since it sounds like what OnLive did was a complete dick move designed to rob them of their stock options and give them nothing while OnLive cashes out.
But on the other hand, the other edge of the sweat equity sword is that you're taking a gamble. You're working for less than you're worth based on the premise that maybe one day you'll be able to cash out, like people did at Microsoft and Google. But you also have to know that it might never happen - the company goes under and then you've got nothing, money-wise (you still have the experience, the job on your resume, etc.).
Those are the ones I don't feel too sorry for, any more than pity on someone who lost money in Las Vegas. You knew the risks going in.
But since at least one report says that most of the employees are going to be re-hired for OnLive Mark 2 or whatever hopefully they'll be alright.
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