So OnLive isn't dead -- it just sold all its assets to a new owner
After being on a death watch all day, the cloud gaming service confirms the sale of its assets to unidentified acquirer. Oh, and apologizes -- sort of -- for misleading everyone all day.
OnLive ended the guessing game about its future late Friday, confirming the sale of its assets to an unnamed suitor who will continue to offer its cloud gaming service.
For most of the day, the company did its best not to engage with reports that it might have fired all of its employees and was prepping for a bankruptcy filing.
OnLive has now released the following statement:
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.
It's unclear who the buyer is. The company, which emerged in 2009 and launched the next year promising console-like speeds over broadband, was led by serial tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman.
In evasive statements to various publications today, OnLive representatives insisted, essentially, that all was well. Consider this reply to VentureBeat, in which OnLive corporate-communications head Brian Jaquet wrote "of course not" when asked if OnLive was shutting down, then immediately went on to highlight "exciting news" about Google TV stream players that included the OnLive app.
The drama surrounding OnLive's future then amped up when Martyn Williams, a correspondent for the IDG News Service, tweeted from outside the OnLive offices about seeing employees leave with moving boxes. "In the last 20mins have seen three people walk out of #OnLive with leaving boxes. Still unclear what's happening inside," he tweeted. Meanwhile Game Politics had quoted an unidentified staffer describing an all-hands meeting today where Perlman gathered the company together to announce the firing of the entire staff.