Streaming gaming service OnLive has been on fire since yesterday. People were tweeting it was going down within the day, and that it was in a very bad financial situation, filing for bankruptcy.
Gamespot asked whether the company was shutting down entirely, and a representative answered “We don’t respond to rumors, but of course not.” Then, the rep went on to say that Vizio Co-Stars streaming media players that have OnLive built in are just now rolling out to customers, and the company is in the middle of a three-week indie game giveaway promotion.
Mashable then had reports that OnLive laid off its entire staff, with the company transitioning to a new phase, in which phase a high number of the staff could potentially be rehired. A report claimed that the new look OnLive received could be driven by intellectual property, and the numerous patents on cloud-based gaming.
Brian Fargo, kickstarted Wasteland 2′s developer and founder of Inxile, posted on Twitter that he had received an e-mail from an employee of OnLive, saying everyone had be laid off and the end of the day would not find the company existing. However, he later tweeted that he had a recall request on the same e-mail.
Later, an OnLive spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat that the company’s assets were sold to another company, but assured the users they wouldn’t suffer from any service interuption or product rollouts, and the company plans to rehire a large percentage of its former employees.
We also remind you that Ouya was confirmed to have OnLive integrated, and if the company goes under, Kickstarter funders might be in an uproar. What’s your opinion on this?
surprised they have lasted this long to be honest.
when you spend millions on a service that only 0.00000000000000000000000001% of the world can use, and you last as long as onlive has you should be pretty proud!
its a shame, the idea was brilliant but the execution was poor.
technology simply just is not ready for this!
hell i cant download a single steam game without my connection constantly dropping out, and the speed dropping to below 200Kbps!
hell, i cant even stream a 10 minute video without it having to pause and buffer a few times!
hell i cant even surf the web for a hour without the net dropping out several times!
so how the $#%^ are you suppose to stream games when you cant even stream webpages!?
talk about trying to break the speed of sound in a vehicle that still has square wheels!
Good points.. Gaikai was the lucky company, then. Or should I say the most aggressive seller of their product.
it would be interesting to see if gaikai would of lasted much better if it did not have investments from $ony and sammy.
it definetly was the better tech, it lets you play the games onlive does yet onlive requires a fairly powerful system where gaikai runs in a freaking browser!
but that said it suffers the same problem onlive does, ISPs are still stuck in the 19th century!
so i really doubt it would be in the position it is in now if it was not for $ony and investors.
its great tech, problem is it needs to be held onto until the industry catches up to it.