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Once Valued at $1.8B, OnLive Was Sold For Only $5M
gabebear writes with details of what happened to OnLive back in August: "In a firesale, OnLive, which was once valued at $1.8bn, was sold for practically nothing. Workers are mostly losing their jobs and stock options and investors are having to write off their investment."
More details.
OMG you know what this means?! They FINALLY realized that you can't stream 60FPS video streams of 1920x1080 over the internet!
They may have even discovered that gamers don't tolerate an internet connection level of input delay in their games! And that serious gamers want to own their own gear! And that gamers do other things than games on their computer so they own a faster computer anyway! And that rendering a 1920x1080 video stream locally also takes a fast computer!
I once valued my microwave at $1,100,000 but ended selling it for $20 on Craigslist. There was disappointment all around.
As well, I once had an idea for a jetpack that I valued at $20 billion AUS dollars ("billion" with a "b"). Unfortunately I sold that idea for a pint of Fosters to work colleague.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Sure, but their whole basis was that they were streaming it from the Cloud.
Why if I have a 20gb BW cap would I stream HD content when I could go buy the game on DVD and play it locally?
With Onlive's ridiculous pricing, are people actually surprised? The last time I took a look at Onlive they were "selling" games at about the same price as retail. Why would I want to pay retail price for something I am essentially renting from a new and untested company while having no recourse when they go under?
No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money. It was a bad idea and people who invest in bad ideas lose their money. As a result of companies they invest in losing their money, ultimately, they don't have money anymore to invest. The people who end up with money to keep investing are the ones who are better at it.
Posit a theoretical public/government technological investment equiv. What makes you think the members of that board wouldn't have invested just as poorly? All the evidence points to them making worse investment choices, not better ones. After all, it's not their money, it's your money, so they have a different incentive in their investing. A much more political incentive with goals other than simply finding the most useful technology that people will want to pay for. And after this government equiv.'s investment failed? They'd either keep pumping in money to prop it up, or at the very least, the people making the bad investment decisions would just keep making them. After all, the government has more of your money to spend, right?
Please go learn some Public Choice economics. You'll understand the world a lot better.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It is necessary if starvation and homelessness threaten to break down public order.
This has happened many times in the history of human civilization. Don't pretend it can't just because your head is full of naive libertarian ideas about how you wish the world worked.
Whenever the shit really hits the fan, libertarians disappear into the cracks like scattering cockroaches.