OnLive

» see onlive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

onlive was steve perlman's cloud-gaming startup, announced at gdc 2009 with a stage demo where crysis appeared to run on a netbook. the trick was that crysis was running on a server somewhere in palo alto, and the netbook was just decoding a video stream. the demo was real. the business was not.

onlive launched in june 2010 with a service that worked, badly, for people who lived close to its us data centers. by august 2012 the entire company collapsed into a restructuring under lauder partners that fired every employee in one day. the brand limped on under new management for two more years selling a cloudlift service that nobody bought, and then on april 2 2015 sony announced it had bought the patents. the service died on april 30.

onlive never reached turkey in any meaningful form. the math was simple: cloud gaming needed five-megabit-stable downlink and sub-80-millisecond round-trip latency to a us server, and on ttnet adsl in 2011 you got maybe one of those on a good night. by the time fiber arrived and the latency math could have worked, onlive was already gone. the idea got resurrected several times after that. google's stadia tried it in 2019 and folded by 2023; microsoft's xcloud-via-game-pass is the one currently making the math work for the median home connection.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

perlman was the webtv guy. he sold webtv to microsoft for $425 million in 1997 and spent the decade after that on patents for rear cinema cameras and other consumer-tech ideas. around 2007 he turned his attention to cloud gaming. the onlive pitch was simple: heavy gpus belong in data centers and thin clients belong in living rooms. the only thing standing between you and a gaming pc was a fat enough internet pipe. as a thesis it has aged well. as a 2010 product it died of physics.

~ the bandwidth wall ~

the launch hardware was a $99 microconsole that did nothing locally. plug it into a tv and sign in, and a game list appeared. titles were either rented one at a time or accessed through a $9.99 monthly playpack subscription, and they ran in a server room hundreds of miles away. if the server was close and your isp was kind, you could play. if you were on cable in the wrong suburb, you watched a slideshow with controller lag.

the uk version launched via british telecom in september 2011 and lasted barely a year. nowhere outside north america and the uk ever got a real service. cloud gaming is a network product, and onlive was selling a network product into a network that wasn't built yet.

~ the postmortem ~

the august 2012 collapse was the real death. onlive went into a corporate restructuring called an assignment for the benefit of creditors. lauder partners bought the assets out of it for $4.8 million, and every employee was let go in a single morning meeting. the shell that remained ran on a skeleton crew until sony made its move in april 2015. by then onlive's user base was somewhere between rounding error and ghost. the april 30 shutdown notice was less a death than a coroner's report.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »