Mashable: “According to a source close to the situation, the company called an all hands meeting at 10am PT, at which the entire staff was fired.”
OnLive Responds: “No comment on the news other than to say the OnLive service is not shutting down.”
The Verge: “OnLive officially sold to ‘newly-formed company,’ will continue service”
Mashable reported that the cloud gaming service, OnLive is about to shut down. Sources inside OnLive told Mashable that “the entire (OnLive) staff was fired” this morning. According to the piece, “many employees blame the failure of the company squarely on the CEO — who refused to sell the company many times, to companies including HP. There is speculation that the future company may simply be a pure intellectual property play, selling access to patents.”
The story continued to unfold tonight. The Verge is reporting that OnLive released a statement confirming the company has been sold:
We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services.
We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed, and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.
OnLive is a service that allows gamers to play high end video games on low powered devices. The company processes these games on cloud based servers, then streams them to internet connected devices such as tablets, smartphones, and smart TVs. OnLive also provides a service that brings a Microsoft Windows desktop and a 10 gigabit cloud based internet connection to iPads and other devices.
