Varying reports of what is going on at cloud gaming service Onlive today. Kotaku report that a source says they will be filing for a form of bankruptcy. Engadget, on the other hand, are reporting that they're being bought out and laying off 50% of staff. Either way it doesn't look good for them.
Its kinda sad, but I suppose me having an onlive console and controller is a nice thing. Shame the console will end up being a brick and I can tether the controller to my pc
I think it was a bit ahead of its time, and not marketed to the correct people. Selling it to those with consoles as a way into PC gaming would have been a better target than existing PC players.
Sad for the people losing their jobs, but personally I'm happy to see it fail and I can only hope Gaikai goes the same way. Nice technology (despite its caveats) and a great gimmick concept, but the last thing the games industry needs is for gamers to have even less control of the games they pay for and for things like modding to be made even harder to do. When OnLive was first announced I hoped it'd fail. Now I hope its failure is seen as a warning for others who would attempt the same. I'm sick of 'the cloud' in general, to be honest.
the pricing model was really expensive. Who was going to pay £15 a month a whatever for onlive then pay £30-40 a game on top ? but stop your subsciption to onlive and you lose the games you bought, no thanks its like steam charging everyone monthly to access games they paid for ????
Wholeheartedly glad it failed. The inherently bad lag had to be addressed if they wanted it to have any chance of success. Just need Win8 to fail too and that's me done for the year .
Looks like it hasn't failed, but they are actually just dissolving, and then restarting with different investors under a new company name, and supposedly re-hiring most of the staff.
This post is a bit rubbish mate! uninformed comments like this probably didn't help the service. There was no subscriptions unless you wanted access to the onlive playpack bundle which gives you instant access to 200+ games at your leisure, some very decent at the price of about £7 a month, it was an optional thing and you could opt in and out, of course if you cancel the sub, you can't access the playpack games bit like Netflix. Of course you could buy the game individually outside of subscription. You kept the games you actually bought outside of subscription. Games were priced alright too, much like Steam, sometimes cheaper, I have a couple on there and used to play them on my Asus Transformer and netbook which isn't very good at playing PC games due to lack of grunt, thought it was a great idea and was looking forward to the day there were actually some servers in the UK to cutdown on the lag in faster paced stuff, though lag rarely affected me. Guess that won't happen now. Also worked as a great demo service as you could free trial all the games without the need to download or install anything, instant demo, great stuff, this is something that Steam could do with.
fair enough but those games you bought for onlive will be lost now surely ? because your not buying games your leasing them so no service, no games ?
Its a shame really, as I was quite looking forward to when you could go on a plane, and play some proper games. As someone said, it was a bit ahead of its time as not everyone has a stable internet connection (much the same problem with D3).
Agreed, maybe in 5 years or so when quality broadband is more ubiquitous this would be properly viable. I'd imagine the overheads of the server farm and licensing for the various games is quite considerable. The service would have to be generating bucketloads of cash to keep afloat, I'd guess. That's the risk when trying something new I suppose, but props to them for trying it.
except I have them all* actually on my hard drive, so if steam did go belly up, all I'd need is a crack. *well, not ALL of them, but the ones I play regularly anyway.
smells like a tax dodge, i wouldn't be surprised if the new company taking them over was less then a week old.
I think it might just be restructuring as the codec it uses to stream 1080p is phenomenal and 4035876587474x better than the youtube 1080p codec.
Restructuring ? By liquidating the old company, firing all your employees, moving all assets to a new company and rehiring most of your former employees you just fired ? No, that is not "restructuring".
Sounds like debt-dodging to me. They probably needed new investors, but the new investors did not want to take on the old debt. If they are shafting any publishers by doing this they had better be careful.
