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).

Comments

Not "Going out of Business," Persay...

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:Not "Going out of Business," Persay...

[wiegeabo]

So it's better they just fire everyone and go out of business?

That makes no sense.

Re:Not "Going out of Business," Persay...

[AmberBlackCat]

I figured they're just filing bankruptcy and reopening under another name so they can erase any money owed and keep moving along.

It's true

[Caerdwyn]

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:

• sign the majority of the major publishers
• get them to release new titles simultaneously with physical retail
• convince the publishers to charge somewhat less than physical retail and
• form revenue-sharing-based transit agreements and peering deals with major ISPs to keep OnLive traffic out of the bandwidth caps

Unfortunately, none of the biz dev plays were driven to success.

Tech is easy. Business is hard. CUtting deals is hardest of all.

Re:It's true

[Caerdwyn]

I'm an ex-employee, too. Weren't you the guy who used to suck my dick in the restrooms every day at about noon?

No, that was some troll from Slashdot.

Good riddance

[WaffleMonster]

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.

Re:Good riddance

[Guspaz]

I tried it out. Latency wasn't great, but was tolerable. Major problem was image quality; no matter how fast a connection you threw at it, the bitrate never scaled high enough for good quality under high motion.

Re:Good riddance

[Onymous Coward]

Jesus H. Christ, people! What's so insightful about "I don't get it because I imagine it would suck" when there's a freakin' free trial available?

Go play the free games and decide for yourself just how good the technology is.

It's not hard and then you can stop talking out your ass.

The customers have spoken

[Hentes]

We still don't want computing to be a rentable service.

Still was going to have a real tough time

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Still was going to have a real tough time

[Caerdwyn]

Where do I begin...

With OnLive, you could play Crysis at 30fps on medium settings at 720p on a Celeron-equipped netbook with an Intel GMA950. So no, you were not getting the kind of thing integrated video can offer.

Latency depends entirely upon the quality of the network link between you and the data center. OnLive was not intended for people in Yellowknife or Cheyenne or the Azores; it was for people in densely-populated well-wired urban areas in which they had data centers. That's a lot of people, but no, it's not everyone, nor is there any sort of requirement that it be for everyone. Part of the setup was a latency/bandwidth test that you were supposed to run before you signed up. And if your ISP oversubscribed your last-mile connection to the point where you couldn't use it between 7pm and 10pm... yeah, that's a problem, but it's not universal, and it's not anything OnLive could do anything about, any more than Ford is responsible for whether on not your street has potholes. I suggest beating your ISP over the head with a lead pipe in such cases.

Yes, there's a loss of single-pixel detail. It's not perfect, and there is no requirement that it be so (any more that there is a requirement that lossy audio be forbidden for sale). Expectations must be reasonable (as must expectation-setting).

OnLive's video was tuned for 4 to 6 mbps with less than 30ms of latency, with low packet loss (less than 1%). Under such circumstances, it did well. When network conditions deteriorated, it had some automatic fallbacks to keep the framerate above 30fps for as long as possible; it would remain at least usable down to 2.5mbps/5% loss, though it wasn't pretty under those conditions. It was far, far more than glorified RDP and VNC (it wasn't a video memory buffer; the hardware captured and processed the digital video stream from a DVI interface and the digital audio stream as taken from SPDIF outputs, and injected control with a virtual USB HID). It was good tech. Low latency was achieved by essentially running unbuffered and a couple of other things that I'm not sure whether I could talk about yet.

But as I mentioned earlier, the real failure was the inability to make the deals with third parties that would turn that tech into something worth paying for.

Re:Still was going to have a real tough time

[Onymous Coward]

I'm no anonymous voice. My UID makes that clear, whippersnapper.

A single 2560x1600 screen cap from a video stream over an unknown quality connection? That's your proof? It's like you're saying JPEG and MP3 don't work because they're lossy.

With the reporting and public opinion being heavily against you, one can only wonder what it is that helped you form you opinion.

Experience. I though that was clear. Actual experience. The thing that you don't have. This is what irks me about particular detractors, the ones talking out their asses. They make comments about the service quality without having even tried it. Maybe you can't get it at home, but go visit a friend and try it there, jeez. It's free. And then you'll be able to talk about it knowledgeably.

And you'll see that quality is not a binary thing. All the little factors come together in a complex way to make the gaming experience. You can't just sum latency, framerate, and resolution to get a scalar value of quality, saying the system is good or bad. You have to play it. Conceiving of quality in black and white terms is the same conceptual trap as thinking that there's a "best" product, solution, distro, car, or whatever.

Just give it a try and think for yourself.

Re:WOW, people are still renting gaming

[scot4875]

GP said computing, not gaming. WoW and EQ players don't rent the computers that run their game clients.

--Jeremy

That's what I don't like about Corporatism

[rsilvergun]

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

Was just a way to remove employee equity?

[Graemee]

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

[Joe_Dragon]

that is why we need unions in TECH so employee don't get f* over.

Re:LOL

[farble1670]

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.

Re:LOL

[Dahamma]

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.