24 replies to this topic

[Lonely1]

http://kotaku.com/59...-take-its-place

[TrashyMG]

I never saw the point of it really.

[iprice]

Who never saw that one coming?

[WizardStan]

Everyone who actually gave them money, that's who.

[vcoleiro]

Story on engadget is mentioning a buy out. Very confusing , hopefully they will release a truthfull statement soon. Don't know why pr is telling everyone everything is ok when something is up. Reminds me of that comedy (naked gun) where the cop is standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory saying, nothing to see, move along.

[EvilDragon]

Didn't the Ouya advertise with that it will run OnLive...?
Hmm... that is some setback, if the new company (or whatever will happen here) won't do the deal.

[ParadisoShlee]

Who didn't see that coming.

I can't stream in realtime from my laptop to my computer for a word processor.. let alone 30FPS real time shooters :|

speaking of which.. anyone aware of a VNC/RDP replacement which streams like onlive in a local network?

[erico]

Oh my god I can´t believe it! My main best gaming platform is done!

...

[2bit]

Didn't the Ouya advertise with that it will run OnLive...?
Hmm... that is some setback, if the new company (or whatever will happen here) won't do the deal.

You beat me to the punch , ED .

[vcoleiro]

Looks like they will still operate under the new company. The new buyers seems to have cash a plenty. Looks like a raw deal for the employees that were booted. There stocks/stock options are now worth nothing, not to mention a lot are also out of a job.

As for Onlive support, I cant see it changing, they will want it on as many things it can be on, for no extra development , to rake in the as much as they can. That includes Android and of course Ouya.

[Lonely1]

We can't really say that until we know at least who bought the company. If its someone like HP, while they will likely maintain their contractual obligations, the plan would be to leverage the technology in order to empower the HP products.

[vcoleiro]

Here's an update on Slashgear

" OnLive confirms that it has indeed been sold to a “newly-formed company” The Verge reports. OnLive says in an email that all of its services and partnerships will continue on as normal, and that this company will be “hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees.” Apparently, the reason why OnLive executives were being so vague and short in statements throughout the day is because they weren’t allowed to comment on the deal until it had been completed. OnLive did not name the company that has purchased it.
So there you have it: OnLive has been sold, a lot of people get to keep their jobs, and there is no planned interruption for any of OnLive’s services or partnerships."

And this from VentureBeat:


In the face of a myriad of rumors and conflicting reports this morning, the pioneering cloud gaming service OnLive confirmed today that its assets have been sold to a new, still unnamed company. OnLive will continue to operate its services during the transition and the new company is backed “by substantial funding,” said a spokeswoman for Steve Perlman, the chief executive of OnLive.
“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships,” the company said in a statement. “The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services. We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.”



From Yahoo Games:


"I have no comment on the news other than to say the OnLive service is not shutting down," he told Polygon.
Other services, like the recently announced partnership with upcoming Android-based console Ouya, are expected to move forward as well, since OnLive had an existing Android client that fit easily into that console's operating system.

[vcoleiro]

So the burning question is, who bought Onlive?

Anyone know?

Edit: Here's a great article quoting the CEO himself on why onlive failed. Some pretty sad tales indeed , especially the bits about how many servers they bought and (concurrent) users they had. It also mentions the buyer is a well known individual venture capatalist with a lot of money. Check the story below:

http://www.joystiq.c...companys-final/

[Wrath of Khan]

The tech wasnt there to do it right anyways.It couldnt display properly on bigger size tellys and there was framerate issues and missing textures etc.Why provide a service that is inferior to existing consoles ie xbox 360 and ps3 and then expect it to be a success.

[vcoleiro]

Looks like the venture capitalist Gary Lauder bought Onlive.
Some breaking news indicates they have 2.5 million subscribers and 1.5 Million active accounts. Check the latest story here:

http://www.theverge....-names-investor

[Foxgod]

Dirty trick to get rid of small shareholders and re organize their employee's.
This is a fine example of a loophole in the law....

[vcoleiro]

HTC must be pretty pissed off , they have lost $40 million on there investment in it.

The thing I don't understand is there were supposedly buyers who had made offers but were rejected. Surely they should have taken an offer over doing an ABS thingy.

[Jebe]

So... according to those articles when it actually came down to it OnLive despite having an unreasonable amount of marketing and partnerships in its favor only ever managed to have _1,600_ subscribers... That's especially damning when one acknowledges they couldn't really give the advertized services to their Dumb Terminals with 8,000 Servers, which doesn't bode well for what would have happened if they actually had made it big.

Even if we don't get into the issues of why this was a completely horrifying and horrible idea from conception, why should this epic failure of a business model be propped up? People clearly don't want it.

HTC must be pretty pissed off , they have lost $40 million on there investment in it.

Based on the article you linked I see no reason to believe OnLive could have ever generated a return on that "investment." So I fail to see why they deserve any sympathy for losing the money they threw at them. Investment by its nature involves risk of losing your investment capital.

And let's be blunt here. 500-600USD AMD A-series APU laptops are going to tend to give better performance then what OnLive was claiming. Most commentators consider the Vita on the same level of the PS3 for graphics, which is a level of power Smart Phones should be tending strongly towards by next year. That doesn't really leave much in the way of devices that could be argued to have seen a benefit, meaning the theoretical window where a purpose could be argued for this service is rapidly closing. On the fly converted and compressed video streams only go so far.

[vcoleiro]

They had 2.5 million subscribers with 1.5 million active subscribers. 1600-1800 was the figure for concurrent users which is far to low to have similtaneously online for 8000 servers. I believe they had to lease some of the servers to others to try and reduce the cost burden

[Jebe]

They had 2.5 million subscribers with 1.5 million active subscribers.

If true, fair enough but it doesn't really make it meaningfully better.

I only see a single news site with that number in the heading and no source. They weren't exactly known for publishing those numbers, IDC estimates were lower, and let's be blunt. If we go with the interview number and that "active" subscriber number that would mean that for every person they had actually using their servers at any given time there were 937.5 people who weren't using their service. In other words if both statements are true then the average OnLive subscriber used the service for an average of less then _2 minutes_ a day.

If they had 2.5 Million subscribers, 8,000 servers, and only 1,600 people actually using your service at any given time their problem wasn't having too many servers. Those numbers imply they had lots of subscribers in the same way gyms have lots of members. Hence their issue problem involved either not gouging people for a service that basically never used, or actually getting them fired up about using it.