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Sony Buys, Shuts Down OnLive
Jay Maynard writes The OnLive gaming service that rose from the dead and became an inexpensive way to get high-end performance on low-end hardware has now been purchased by Sony Entertainment. Their games, desktop, and SLGo Second Life services will all end on April 30, 2015, and be free to use until then."
And this is why I refuse to buy games that require a connection to some corporate server to play.
and I hope the CEO lost money, but I bet he made out fine. The guy cheated his engineers out of millions. He paid them in stock options while they built the company from nothing and then folded the paper corporation right before the investment money came in.
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On Live filed for an alternate bankruptcy protection status and as part of the process sold assets to Sony. Sony didn't come in heavy handed and Buy On Live then shut it down. The headline it inflammatory.
Sony and pretty much Microsoft alike have a predatory, disruptive model of work. Also it is not their best interest to provide a continuity of services, and change things every so often, to create artificial needs for new products. They also do not work for the best interests of the industry or for their customers, but only for their goals. They often also do shadow or questionable moves via proxy firms in order to not tarnish more their reputation. They are not deceiving anyone. Any time they do something like this, they are only being true to their core models. You are just naive and dumb if you do business with them.
When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just shake it off".
I did, when I did the startup thing. Well, there was some drinking involved. But that's the normal, expected outcome. for a startup. Anyone with half a brain knows this. You hope for that payoff, but it's long odds. This is why most startups these days pay pretty close to what the big guys pay, assuming they really are hiring equivalent talent.
This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare. When the startup fails, you get a handshake. That's the game. And shipping a fine product is no guarantee at all it won't fail.
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This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare.
That a startup succeeds is quite rare. Just considering those cases though, I don't think ones where the employees also get screwed are rare at all. The groundwork for that is usually in place from day 1, with how shares in the company are split into classes.
For me it's been 100%: all three of the successful startups I've been involved with, all purchased by another company, did that transaction in a way that valued the common stock in employee options I owned at nothing. All the books were cooked until the company founders and, more importantly, the funding investors were paid all of the proceeds. And just to rub some extra salt in the wound there, the second also removed my name from the patent they were granted near the end of the process, to grease concerns that I'd expect more from the sale than nothing and could cause trouble with its licensing. (I signed those rights away in my employee contract, and all I really wanted was the little patent plaque)
The third laid me off, forced me to exercise my options to keep them, then valued the common stock at zero during the sale. That one's bonus fuck used some going out of business loopholes to cancel my COBRA policy with zero advance notice the week after the sale, as if they'd gone bankrupt and couldn't afford to administer the policy anymore. The company was sold for millions to Cisco; the engineers who built its technology lost their health insurance.
I've come to see these anecdotes as a pattern by design. Startups are not structured to make the employees happy if the company succeeds. They're setup so the majority share holder(s) get what they want. And there's a lot of rich assholes who will screw over anyone they can in that chain.