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Trouble At OnLive
Lashat writes "News of trouble at cloud gaming provider OnLive is trickling out of various sources. According to Forbes, all employees received their walking papers today. Rumors of a shutdown, buyout, or re-formation as a new company are plentiful, but the company hasn't announced anything yet. The article quotes an email sent to InXile CEO Brain Fargo from an employee within the company: 'I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist. Unfortunately, my job and everyone else's was included. A new company will be formed and the management of the company will be in contact with you about the current initiatives in place, including the titles that will remain on the service. It has been an absolute pleasure working with you and I'm sure our path with cross again.' OnLive's Director of Corporate Communications told Forbes, 'No, let me be clear. We are not going out of business.'"
While the question of whether OnLive-as-an-entity will continue is still up in the air, an internal source confirmed to Gamasutra that OnLive's entire staff has been laid off, and OnLive employees were seen outside headquarters with 'moving boxes.' Kotaku says the company has filed for protection against creditors in California (not bankruptcy, but similar).
Yep, other than idiots pushing cloud buzzwords the rest of us knew this was bound to happen.
More like "Business going out.. of country"
Yea, I'm accusing them of ditching the American staff that grew the company into what it is today, so they can outsource the jobs to the 3rd World.
Here's hoping they prove me wrong.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Ex-Onlive employee here (I left a couple of years ago). I've been hearing from my OnLive friends... yup. Big big layoff. Hire these people if you see 'em, folks, they're good workers who know their stuff and have a work ethic.
The tech works, and has been fine for almost three years now; I was doing all my gaming through OnLive when I worked there, and was about 50 miles form the data center. The trouble as I see it is the same that I saw back when I left: it ceased being a technology play when it worked well enough, and turned into a business development play. They needed to:
Unfortunately, none of the biz dev plays were driven to success.
Tech is easy. Business is hard. CUtting deals is hardest of all.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I never understood the appeal given many games must really suck to play with all the control latency and video buffering.
How much more can a used xbox/titles really cost over time vs subscription cost of onlive service?
No secret I've always had a negative opinion mostly due to the egregious waste of bandwidth and resources but also for failing to see the market value.
My bet at the time they would be done in three months and they lasted quite a bit longer so excellent job on execution.
We still don't want computing to be a rentable service.
They can crow all they like about tech, the fact of the matter is that latency, which will be interface latency with remote video rendering, and quality will always be problems. Onlive promised to offer "maximum quality" on any device. The idea that instead of a $2k gaming rig you could get that on a cheapie computer. Ok well that might have been cool. However instead you got a 1280x720 4:2:0 video stream that was heavily compressed. That meant low rez and a loss of fine detail. Hence really you were getting the kind of thing that a low end video card or even integrated video can offer, and of course those don't have latency and downtime issues.
When the day comes that everyone has high end internet connections, maybe it is more feasible. However when you are trying to compress to a 1 mbps stream, quality won't be so impressive compared to cheap systems and that makes it a hard sell.
Millions of World of Warcraft players disagree with you, and EverQuest players before them.
Are we starting to see reality run into the cloud hype, or is this just ordinary everyday business failure?
My money is that Valve or someone with real business ability will absorb the tech and re-bundle it in new ways to serve advertisements on a premium paid service.
Seems a shame for the Ouya platform if their 'deal' with Onlive isn't kept alive after the restructuring/relaunching/whatever they're doing over there.
Ouya simply doesn't have the hardware to run e.g. battlefield. However, it has the hardware just fine to run an Onlive client, meaning even the 'hard core' gamers (if they can deal with the bit of latency) could get their fill.
It's unfortunate that it appears not enough publishers were willing to go with Onlive - although I suspect that's a combination of income from game sales themselves and pressure from certain hardware companies that like seeing their logo slapped on triple-A titles.
Hopefully they can reorganize, rethink their business strategy, and get to a successful formula.
On the other hand.. outside of the Ouya.. take a budget graphics card, drop it into a computer from 2 years ago, and you'll still be gaming along with the guy next door with a $4k setup - just slightly less flashy. Add to that data use limits likely to make their comeback (many ISPs in the U.S. already do, iirc), and perhaps it's just not as attractive as it was when they first launched.
You're shilling FOR cloud services by making its critics look like morons. The only question is whether you're doing it on purpose.
When did Brian Fargo change his first name? Doesn't he realize that this will make a prime target during the zombie apocalypse?
This won't be the case if the people at the top had learned the proper use of leadership. So many companies promise so much, but forget on how to do business in the first place. You can make great things, but do not know how to sell it and cater to the market - then no one would ever care. Only if the CEO read Robin Sharma's leadership book, and Ranak Jones's Rogue's Guide to Acquisition book on how to sell. Oh well, You had a short live OnLive. RIP
So what does this mean for similar companies like Gaikai, that appear to have more mainstream titles and higher quality? Opportunity, or impending doom?
Baver
the entire company's about to be gutted but that leadership will come out smelling of roses. How many times have we watch a company collapse and reform as a legal entity with no debt? I wish I (with my large looming debts from years of paycuts) could do that... back to the grind stone, except I don't really have a nose left to grind after 30 years of this $@!T
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It been reported that this move to fire the staff was just a way to remove the employee equity in the company, thus making the owners more of a share of the sale price. Steve Perlman may be a giant Scrooge. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/source-onlive-found-a-buyer-cleaned-house-to-reduce-liability-prior-to-acquisition/
that is why we need unions in TECH so employee don't get f* over.
GP said computing, not gaming.
The article is about OnLive. OnLive began as a gaming service, and the content of the front page of www.onlive.com still mentions games, not OnLive Desktop.
WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.
They do rent the computers that run their game servers. This raises the philosophical question of where the game actually is.
How am I looking like a moron.
Can you point out one thing i said that is moronic?
I said I'm happy that cloud is suffering.
That I think cloud/SaaS is evil and that the employees service that evil by working for it.
That I want cloud computing to die a horrible death.
I think all the ppl who do not say what I am saying, are morons.
Brainwashed by an industry that is looking to take computing out of the hands of the common man.
You sir are the moron.
-HasH @ www.trypnet.net
"I wanted to send a note that...." should be followed by something like "...the refrigerators will be cleaned over the weekend", not "...you're all fired."
I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist.
but corporations are people too! if you cause them to stop existing then that is MURDER!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Mod parent up. That appears to be exactly what happened.
Expect employee lawsuits over this.
So they run a Hadoop Cluster with 2 datacenters,etc,etc...
However ALL of the I.T. staff during my interview repeatedly said "I am not a gamer"... Indicating they have no real intention or feel for catering to their core demographic.
I had even registered a account for the free X hours trail I noticed they had several bots "liking" your "playstyle" and more over any so called "Multi-player" games would instance a server for only yourself.
The only explanation I can see for the walking papers is an acquisition is going to occur. They have one of the Netscape guru's architect the multi-render cloud protocol and possibly are going to go for a dissolution and sell that single patent.
The only company I can see MAYBE pulling this type of service off is either Amazon or Microsoft via their cloud infrastructure. Possibly even Google however I won't want the Wonka Factory spamming ads overlaying my gameplay.
if they were just moving the things elsewhere, that would have been done in a different fashion.
they're out of money, out of liquidity - so instead of leaving employees hanging and telling them to come in without knowing if they'll be paid they showed them the door.
I'd be an asshat for it, but it's pretty easy to deprive people of stock options the same way that the PGE/Enron thing played out with no discernible profit to the operating company that was left after the dust settled from which to reclaim damages. "Sorry guys, we are victims too!". I was pretty screwed that way once, but that was once too many.
You derez the current company to zero your debts then rerez as a new company that buys the old company's assets at fire sale prices to claim a tax loss on the old company holdings while transferring ownership to the new company at a new basis price.
This is pretty much "offload debt to the employees while protecting the named investors" 101.
The only place this doesn't work is real estate, and for that you have an LLC per property to keep yourself on the "I didn't sell the property, I sold the company that owns the property, so the property tax should not go up" side of things (Hi Kaiser family trust! Send me money K PLZ THX!).
where are my mod points when I need 'em.
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