OnLive Has Bit The Dust?

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Rumors are flying that OnLive is closing its doors and there are e-mails from employees floating around claiming the entire staff has been laid off.


Here is the email that I received from the OnLive employee at 11:37am this morning.

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.
*UPDATE* According to Mashable, OnLive’s director of corporate communications has denied the rumors.
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whats OnLive?

They are that site that keeps sending out emails regarding there NEW promotion and Best chance deals! So you better hurry.

I saw this coming a mile away just by the increasing urgency of the emails they would send out trying to get people to bite.
 
Stupid idea, TBH. In an age where PC gamers tend to shun always-online DRM, making the games stream over the Internet just seems like going full retard.

It was an interesting concept but we're just not there, technologically and mentally.
 
Stupid idea, TBH. In an age where PC gamers tend to shun always-online DRM, making the games stream over the Internet just seems like going full retard.

It was an interesting concept but we're just not there, technologically and mentally.

The other problem is that because of bandwidth costs and latency, they can't actually offer you "full detail" games. The selling point was that you could play games with all the detail cranked on and low-end hardware. Ok, that might be worth it. I mean if you can get the kind of detail you need a $2000+ rig for then that could be nice.

However in reality you get a 1280x720 4:2:0 stream that is heavily compressed so it looks lower detail because fine detail is lost with the compression, the chroma sub sampling, and the rez.

Well middling detail/rez is something that is easy to get these days. A cheap video card can handle that, even integrated usually. So they aren't selling something you need an expensive rig for, it is something that a mid-low end rig can do. That makes it much less worth it.

Then, of course, there's the fact that there's latency on everything, and because it is on the video stream itself, it is interface latency which is really annoying. So that makes it way less useful.

I can't see it being a thing.
 
No, we're there technologically. If you can stream a video in high quality, you can stream a game in (somewhat less) high quality. The latency involved isn't actually that high, and various contributors to it can be cleverly reduced on the software side. In addition, if you throw enough resources into a cluster, you can eliminate long load times and other annoyances by throwing entire data sets into RAM, which just requires software support.

The question is whether streaming high-end games with costly high-end server clusters can be profitable. The answer isn't clear yet, I don't think. I don't think the current market is willing to bear that kind of business model yet.
 
I thought they have done really well with latency. I remember reading quite a few posts on here, saying just that.
 
Don't worry, I'm sure they'll live on as a patent troll, fucking things up for everyone else for a decade to come.
 
The official statement reads like BS damage control.
That doesn't disprove that everyone got fired only that the Onlive name/service will "live" on.
 
One of the problem with something like OnLive is what does it truly add to what's already there. It does allow for simpler and platform neutral PC gaming which is kind of cool but it at the same time can add costs and oddly enough can make single player gaming less mobile as it requires a good constant connection.
 
What the hell?

I thought they were doing well. They'd entered some partnership with Vizio for incorporation with TV's, etc.
 
They entered bankruptcy.

Best guess: the company will cease to exist in its current form and will be repackaged as a new entity with a smaller staff.
 
What sucks is that the management keep their jobs, and the people who actually do the work, barely hang on at best and are screwed at worst.
 
Too early. 5-10 years from now a cloud based gaming service has a lot better chance than it does right now. Provided our infrastructure at least makes it up to the level of current day SKorea or Japan.
 
With all the bandwidth data capping, and the infrastructure not quite there, and the small issue of people wanting to have the actual console of choice I'm not surprised.
 
The other problem is that because of bandwidth costs and latency, they can't actually offer you "full detail" games. The selling point was that you could play games with all the detail cranked on and low-end hardware. Ok, that might be worth it. I mean if you can get the kind of detail you need a $2000+ rig for then that could be nice.
I could not disagree more. The ability to play any game and get a full Windows desktop while enjoying 8+ hours of battery life on a compact notebook or tablet was a huge innovation. We both know that in five or ten years, pretty much everyone will be doing their computing through a service just like OnLive. They had a great business model and were ahead of everyone else in technical execution.

Onlive's service was fine. What killed them was Microsoft licensing fees. Microsoft, so far, has succeeded in using their monopoly to prevent anyone else from generating significant revenue from a cloud computing platform.
 
Too early. 5-10 years from now a cloud based gaming service has a lot better chance than it does right now. Provided our infrastructure at least makes it up to the level of current day SKorea or Japan.
We don't really need to be at that point. We need to be in a better situation, bandwidth wise, than we are now, but we certainly don't need or even particularly benefit much from gigabit internet or anything fatter.
 
Onlive's service was fine. What killed them was Microsoft licensing fees. Microsoft, so far, has succeeded in using their monopoly to prevent anyone else from generating significant revenue from a cloud computing platform.

Yeah. Microsoft is what killed OnLive. :rolleyes:
 
Okay, what on Earth is OnLive anyway? I've seriously never even heard of it until Steve posted this thing about it dying.
 
Okay, what on Earth is OnLive anyway? I've seriously never even heard of it until Steve posted this thing about it dying.

it's a cloud computing, gaming-on-demand platform. Think Steam (but shittier) except you stream all the games instead of installing them. You can either buy the game, rent a 3 day pass, or you can pay a 10 dollar monthly subscription which gives u access to a few hundred games.
 
it's a cloud computing, gaming-on-demand platform. Think Steam (but shittier) except you stream all the games instead of installing them. You can either buy the game, rent a 3 day pass, or you can pay a 10 dollar monthly subscription which gives u access to a few hundred games.

Oh thanks for the summary!

Geez that's a stupid business model. How did they even get funded to start a company like that?
 
Onlive is actually pretty cool. I tripped out when I found out I could use it on my Xperia Play and play games like SF4 and shit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay full price for games I already own on the rig they were designed for. Onlive's pricing can't compete with sales from Amazon, Steam etc. Seriously with the money that you might spend on Onlive, you could save and buy a decent gaming laptop, get the games on sale and actually own them. And the latency isn't insane, but definitely a factor.

It really needs to be a lot cheaper for the titles they stream individually. You're not buying the game... you don't own it. Onlive is streaming it to you. Would anyone here pay $50 for a STREAMING copy of Darkness II? Or any other game? It's fucked up. It's for people without real computers at all. Or people that have a netbook and too much money to throw around who are constantly on the road. Pretty small demographic.
 
Oh thanks for the summary!

Geez that's a stupid business model. How did they even get funded to start a company like that?

Yea. Stupid enough that Sony acquired their competitor that did the same thing, and Microsoft considered buying the company in June. It sounds like they did a dick move similar to what Skype did when they were acquired by Microsoft. To keep from having to pay out all of the equity in the company that was owed the employees, they fired most of them.
 
Yea. Stupid enough that Sony acquired their competitor that did the same thing, and Microsoft considered buying the company in June. It sounds like they did a dick move similar to what Skype did when they were acquired by Microsoft. To keep from having to pay out all of the equity in the company that was owed the employees, they fired most of them.

Um...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or are upset with me. :( Are you saying Sony and Microsoft are stupid too? I'd agree with you on Sony. They're a really awful company. Microsoft is stupid because of Heatlesssun and Windows 8. And what does Skype have to do with anything? They don't stream games or even sell games.
 
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