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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.
Surprise? There is none.
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.
Once over-hyped at $28 billion, Facebook sold today for $523 and a case of beer.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
i remember when onlive first came out i dumped my xbox and all my games in the garbage to join up. i mean gaming in the cloud is so much better than doing from a hard drive
i know you end up paying more than owning physical games, but its da cloud. its the future and so much cooler
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?
Eh. I tried OnLive to see how well they accomplished what they did. Latency wasn't the main concern, but then I have a reasonable connection (~25Mbps) and may be geographically near one of their data centers. The main problems are more the following:
In the end this always seems to fail at a financial level: if it's cheap enough per-player that a $10/mo fee can cover licensing, hardware, and utility, then it's probably cheap enough the user is going to have his or her own device (e.g., a smartphone). If not, then it's not going to work anyway.
And it's not a matter of volume. Nintendo, Sony, and MS have volume on their consoles, and they still sell for $200+, often at a loss, and the only maintenance cost is warranty support. Making up for this on licensing isn't an option for OnLive, since they don't make any games. There are no exclusives.
The only way this might work (financially, at least) is a subsidized hardware console with a reasonable contracted subscription fee, and first-party game support as well as third-party exclusives. Gamestop might be trying this, but it's unclear if they're actually funding games or just providing a similar service.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I beta-tested OnLive a long time ago, and by the third day it was back in the box, ready to be shipped back. It took a long time to pre-buffer a game. The game prices were too high. The resolution wasn't that great, and it didn't have most of the games I actually wanted to play. A company with an existing revenue stream could get into this market and support the initial losses with their other products. Valve/Steam could do this. Valve already has an existing profitable business model (digital distribution of games on PC/Mac). They're branching out into distribution of apps. They already offer Steam on TV. But I just don't see the draw yet. A decent, $500 PC can run most games on acceptable settings. A gaming console is only $300 and there are tons of games available.
I can see something like a hardware add-on that does game streaming, but both Sony and Microsoft (XBLA) offer game and video downloads. So I'm not quite sure where a dedicated game-streaming device will fit in (and be profitable). If I wanted to spend $50 on a game, I'd get it for PC or a console and have a much better experience.
I don't think the market for something like this will happen until most of the US has affordable, reliable, and reasonably fast (10 mbit+) internet. And when it does happen, I think it's going to be a side-market by an already-profitable company.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
OnLive had a pile of debt and a pile of employees with a pile of stock options.
The "bankruptcy" invalidates all those stock options and means that half the employees can be sacked. Many of those may not be needed because they worked on things like early stage development which is no longer needed.
But guess what? The new company that "buys" the assets of the old company then basically becomes identical to the old company, except that you have suddenly sacked a lot of people, and the remaining employees including the CEO gets 2X the stock options they used to have.
What's interesting is that the creditors and investors of the old company were happy with it being sold at only $5m. It wouldn't surprise me if the investors in the new company are identical to the investors in the old company.
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?
It refused to run on my ~1.5 megabit connection. So the only place I tried it was on my tablet at a restaurant for a few minutes.
I could see it being ok for casual games, but anything requring precise timing would be very annoying.
A lot of people (particularly I'm discussing western political leaders, but not just them) state as a matter of blind faith that markets are effective allocators of capital
OnLive to me is another DotCom Crash Co, it just happened rather later: We all know the basic story, they said they could deliver high fidelity gaming as a service, thus freeing users from the capital investment of the console and turning a sales market into a services market
Most of us scoffed, pointing out things we understand about residential internet connecticvity, the devastating efffect of lag upon gaming, and the implausibility of the system in general. Institutional investors looked at what the company said, thought ' turning a sales market into a services / rental market is a good thing, it means higher long-run revenues' and poured money into it.
I have limited sympathy - they invested badly. Only real benefit was to the coders who had jobs there for a few years. But I do think the idea that investors will run to invest in markets they patently dont understand doesnt speak well for the efficiency of the capital markets.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Digg just sold for $500K. Also tanked or tanking: Tribe, Salon, Myspace... Tribe and Digg started to tank after they did a "Web 2.0" site redesign which users hated.
With "social", just because you have "clicks" doesn't mean you make money.
I am primarily a mac user, and this was the way I was able to play certain games that didn't get ported over, like Arkham Asylum and such. And they looked a heck of a lot ebtter than if I'd just run them in a VM or something like that. I had occasional bandwidth issues, but that was generally down to my ISP in any case. Frankly, I thought they were the bee's knees, and I'm sorry to see they seem to be going the way of the dodo. It's still a good idea, to my mind. Maybe just needs a little tweaking to make it a viable proposition.