Trouble At OnLive 142
Lashat writes "News of trouble at cloud gaming provider OnLive is trickling out of various sources. According to Forbes, all employees received their walking papers today. Rumors of a shutdown, buyout, or re-formation as a new company are plentiful, but the company hasn't announced anything yet. The article quotes an email sent to InXile CEO Brain Fargo from an employee within the company: '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. It has been an absolute pleasure working with you and I'm sure our path with cross again.' OnLive's Director of Corporate Communications told Forbes, 'No, let me be clear. We are not going out of business.'"
While the question of whether OnLive-as-an-entity will continue is still up in the air, an internal source confirmed to Gamasutra that OnLive's entire staff has been laid off, and OnLive employees were seen outside headquarters with 'moving boxes.' Kotaku says the company has filed for protection against creditors in California (not bankruptcy, but similar).
Still was going to have a real tough time (Score:5, Interesting)
They can crow all they like about tech, the fact of the matter is that latency, which will be interface latency with remote video rendering, and quality will always be problems. Onlive promised to offer "maximum quality" on any device. The idea that instead of a $2k gaming rig you could get that on a cheapie computer. Ok well that might have been cool. However instead you got a 1280x720 4:2:0 video stream that was heavily compressed. That meant low rez and a loss of fine detail. Hence really you were getting the kind of thing that a low end video card or even integrated video can offer, and of course those don't have latency and downtime issues.
When the day comes that everyone has high end internet connections, maybe it is more feasible. However when you are trying to compress to a 1 mbps stream, quality won't be so impressive compared to cheap systems and that makes it a hard sell.
Re:Not "Going out of Business," Persay... (Score:4, Interesting)
Was just a way to remove employee equity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
Once the service arrived for people to play the naysayers were wrong, it did work. Not without some technical issues, but OnLive was working hard to solve them (like wireless networks). ... in my experience, really didn't seem to affect me -- the latency was something you just kinda got used to. All I hear is a bunch of bigots
And some people are happy with VHS tapes on a 19" TV, congratulations. But the majority of the PC gaming market are not those people. They are willing to pay for the best video quality and lowest latency, so no, the technology, while impressive for what it managed to accomplish, did not accomplish what it *needed to*, which is be a replacement, not a shadow, of high end PC gaming. Casual PC games are already largely server-based with no significant hardware requirements, and thus have no need for what they built. They tried to break into the high end 3D gaming market with a product few people wanted, and it failed. As the "naysayers" and "bigots" CORRECTLY predicted.
So in the end, those people saying it wouldn't succeed were right and YOU were wrong. Have fun with all of your useless OnLive game "purchases" once they shut down.