OnLive lives, but employees laid off
Reports say the cloud gaming service has fired all employees
UPDATE: OnLive has released an email statement to outlets [Via The Verge]:
"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 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."
Original story: According to recent reports, cloud gaming service OnLive has fired all employees, but will continue on in some form. This story kicked off earlier today, when InXile Entertainment founder Brian Fargo tweeted about an email he received from an OnLive employee.
"Just received an email that OnLive is closed as of today!" tweeted Fargo.
"Their employees are sending out emails that OnLive will be closed by the end of the day," he added.
"I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist. Unfortunately, my job and everyone else's was included. A new company will be formed and the management of the company will be in contact with you about the current initiatives in place, including the titles that will remain on the service," said the email Fargo received, which he later tweeted the contents of. That email was recalled by the sender according to Fargo.
OnLive later responded, saying that the reports of the company's closure were in error, but that it decline to speak about rumors of layoffs.
"We don't respond to rumors, but the service is not shutting down," and OnLive spokesperson told AllThingsD when asked about the company shutting down.
"No, let me be clear. We are not going out of business," OnLive director of corporate communications Brian Jaquet told Forbes when asked.
Independent sources confirmed to GameFront and Gamasutra that layoffs had indeed happened at the company. Another inside source told Kotaku that OnLive CEO Steve Perlman called an all hands meeting this morning to announce that the company would be filing for bankruptcy in California. Kotaku's source added that some employees will be moved to another company created from the husk of OnLive, with the cloud service continuing on.
OnLive has not confirmed or denied the latter reports.
OnLive always felt like it was going come to this ending. I remember standing in line at the Eurogamer expo last year waiting for a free console thinking - "How many are they giving away" - that single event must have cost millions, and i feel that many people didn't have the internet connection to support it.
Even though I did have the connection - I ended up very rarely using OnLive even though I bought several games just to support the service. My major gripe that forced me away was that even with my 30MBPS connection and minuscule pings, the quality of the visuals were very poor. Dirt3 being a massive case. I always felt that if they sold the tech to MS or Sony it would be a fantastic system for demos. Give a player a 3 hour pass to a game and stream it live so no downloads. Insta Demo!
It is a massive shame however because the "dash board" has to be the least distracting in terms of "this is a games-playing device" non of this Xbox "watch a film! Listen to music!" and the controller was really fantastic; might try and buy the universal controller before they disappear. As for the staff - while it is regrettable when anyone loses their job, I'll never forget how rude two of their employees where at the Eurogamer Expo - rudeness in uniform is always a sign of unhappiness with a company as it shows you don't want to present the company in a good way.
Posted:9 months ago