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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).
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.
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.
I'm going to have to agree with the AC... gamers and/or anyone with any reasonable technical knowledge clearly knew this was an F-ed company from the start. The only people who seemed clueless were the investors and various naive media pundits who habitually fall for unproven CES demos...
GP said computing, not gaming. WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
spoken by someone that clearly has never used the service.
i'm a subscriber and have purchased several games spanning the spectrum, including defense grid gold (a higher-end tower defense game), osmosis, some permutations of warhammer 40k, and homefront (first person shooter). all of these games were $10 for unlimited play (with the stipulation that the company needs to still be in business i guess).
i can play all of them on my mac, windows pc, and android tablet. except homefront which required keyboard control to do anything useful. they all ran pretty great as long as i was on fast broadband.
it was a pretty awesome idea. no more installing gigabytes of crap on your PC. no more compatibility problems. games that just work wherever and whatever platform you are on.
Oh please.
When OnLive first came out and said they could do this there was a shitstorm of, "it's scam, this is impossible." I was one of the few that told this vocal majority sit down and wait to see what they had to offer before they go making stupid unsubstantiated claims. Once the service arrived for people to play the naysayers were wrong, it did work. Not without some technical issues, but OnLive was working hard to solve them (like wireless networks).
What OnLive did was downright bloody incredible. They really pushed the limits of internet and business to try to make this a reality. Now you didn't have to have a top of the line PC to play games at a respectable FPS, you could just use OnLive. Not only this, but they began their game library began to expand and get quite a few respectable titles, and even managed to come out with a low monthly access fee for what turned out to be a pretty extensive list of games, considering what they were doing. This was, as I had believed, an incredible solution to piracy and hardware challenges at the same time.
So why am I hearing a bunch of crap about the latency and video compression? Stuff that, in my experience, really didn't seem to affect me -- the latency was something you just kinda got used to. All I hear is a bunch of bigots unwilling to admit that this company did something innovative and did it pretty damn well.
It makes me think when car phones came out a bunch of people complained about how it couldn't work /everywhere/ and with perfect quality. Do us a favor and come down from your pompous pedestal and maybe actually see that the company accomplished quite a bit.
Once the service arrived for people to play the naysayers were wrong, it did work. Not without some technical issues, but OnLive was working hard to solve them (like wireless networks). ... in my experience, really didn't seem to affect me -- the latency was something you just kinda got used to. All I hear is a bunch of bigots
And some people are happy with VHS tapes on a 19" TV, congratulations. But the majority of the PC gaming market are not those people. They are willing to pay for the best video quality and lowest latency, so no, the technology, while impressive for what it managed to accomplish, did not accomplish what it *needed to*, which is be a replacement, not a shadow, of high end PC gaming. Casual PC games are already largely server-based with no significant hardware requirements, and thus have no need for what they built. They tried to break into the high end 3D gaming market with a product few people wanted, and it failed. As the "naysayers" and "bigots" CORRECTLY predicted.
So in the end, those people saying it wouldn't succeed were right and YOU were wrong. Have fun with all of your useless OnLive game "purchases" once they shut down.
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!).
But the majority of the PC gaming market are not those people.
I think even the majority of PC gamers wouldn't mind the ability to continue playing their games on the go on their phone or have the ability to check out a game demo within seconds instead of an hour to download a few gigabytes. Or how about playing that latest Crysis game without having to by a new PC? OnLive would have allowed all of that.
The problem with OnLive was simply lack of integration, when you have to compete with Steam, than sure as hell you will have a hard time. If OnLive would have been simply a part of Steam that you could use when you want to, I am sure as hell PC gamers would have loved it. Another problem was that they simply a little to early, bandwidth are still to limited to make high quality video streaming possible for everybody. They also entered at a bad point into the PC market when most PC games were targeted for 7 year old consoles and thus had very low hardware requirements.
Either way, OnLive as a company might be toast, but I that kind of streaming technology is here to stay and I wouldn't be surprised if another company will be successful with it in the not so distance future.