A few years ago OnLive was coming forward and telling us what the future would be: cloud streaming. And the damnedest thing is that they were right. With that in mind, though, their foresight never really did help their business and the game-streaming service that was supposed to have us trashing all our consoles in favor of the cloud revolution never really became much more than a niché accessory for those with internet speeds faster than light. Today, rumors of OnLive’s demise have been flowing thick and fast, which prompts the ultimate question:
If OnLive dies, how ironic does that name become?
The original story came a few hours ago as the internet started crying out left, right and centre that OnLive was shutting its doors for good. There were reports that a great deal of staff were undergoing exit interviews from the company and would, as such, no longer be working for the company. These reports came not long after OnLive had announced an initiative to work with the people behind the Ouya to bring their cloud-gaming to the crowd-sourced, free to play console.
The first piece of solid information came from GamesBeat, who received word from the OnLive head of corporate communications Brian Jaquet that OnLive would was not in fact closing down, before pushing examples of OnLive’s current successes and promotions.
Not long after, Kotaku pointed out that OnLive CEO Steve Perlman set up a desperate meeting this morning in order to announce that OnLive was looking for an alternative to filing for bankruptcy and may have found one in Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, ABC’s, which is “a process that will assign its assets to an independent fiduciary and likely wind down its affairs in an out-of-court insolvency proceeding governed by State of California.” This basically means that OnLive is going to give all its assets to someone else, whilst California handles what is effectively their bankruptcy. Most explanations that I can find seem to imply that this is real lawyering and not something that anybody who is unversed in that world can really comment on definitively, although the fact that such drastic measures are being taken does make it pretty difficult to dispute that OnLive is in a bad place.
The latest punch is Engadget reporting that at least half of the OnLive staff have been laid off and that those who are not being let go have been contacted by an unknown third party company that has purchased OnLive. Several news outlets also claimed that people have been sighted exiting the OnLive headquarters with their belongings packed up.
I like to keep things fairly fun in my news posts but I’m not about to crack wise about a whole bunch of people losing their jobs. Here’s hoping that anybody affected by this unfortunate turn of events finds themselves back on their feet in the near future.
We’ll bring you more news about the OnLive developments as we hear them.
[Sources, GameBeat, Kotaku, Engadget]
Billy is 21 years old, enjoys dumb stuff and has a tendency to write when he isn’t busy welcoming our inevitable zombie/robot/alien overlords.
