While it started as rumors that Onlive laid off all of its employees, the digital game service will continue with no harm to customer accounts.
Recently there were rumors floating about that Onlive, the popular cloud-gaming digital service, might be going out of business after two years. Apparently Onlive laid off all of its employees a few days ago, and many suspected that their servers will be going down soon. That rumor is now squashed as it turns out the assets for Onlive are being transferred to a new investor.
Running a server is expensive, and doing it through a cloud-gaming service is really expensive. OnLive CEO Steve Perlman summarized how expensive it is, saying “If you’ve got 8,000 servers and 1,600 users, how could we ever get to cash flow positive, right?” However this doesn’t mean that OnLive will be closing its doors. The OnLive board of directors found that the best course of action is to sell all of their assets (including its technology, intellectual property, etc.) to a new company. An affiliate of Lauder Partners was the first investor in the sale, holding the view that OnLive is the future of computing and entertainment. So far the users to OnLive’s service are to expect no changes to the service in this transaction: The OnLive Game and Desktop Services, OnLive Devices and Apps, and OnLive Partnerships are expected to continue without interruption and all customer purchases will remain intact.
Unfortunately the shares and staff for OnLive cannot be transferred over in this transaction. OnLive responded by giving employment offers by the new company starting at current salaries upon the transfer, and the non-hired staff will be given offers to do consulting in return for options in the new company. New and old employees will be hired as OnLive continues to live on, and new games will be added to the expanding library.
OnLive is a digital distribution service that ‘streams’ a video of the game to a gamer’s machine. The video games do not rely on the hardware the gamer has for their machine to display the highest quality graphics and textures. So gamers could play any video game on any device: iPad, TV screens, or even on a Netbook.
