Once Valued at $1.8B, OnLive Was Sold For Only $5M 168
gabebear writes with details of what happened to OnLive back in August: "In a firesale, OnLive, which was once valued at $1.8bn, was sold for practically nothing. Workers are mostly losing their jobs and stock options and investors are having to write off their investment."
More details.
OMG! (Score:5, Insightful)
They may have even discovered that gamers don't tolerate an internet connection level of input delay in their games! And that serious gamers want to own their own gear! And that gamers do other things than games on their computer so they own a faster computer anyway! And that rendering a 1920x1080 video stream locally also takes a fast computer!
Valuation (Score:4, Insightful)
I once valued my microwave at $1,100,000 but ended selling it for $20 on Craigslist. There was disappointment all around.
As well, I once had an idea for a jetpack that I valued at $20 billion AUS dollars ("billion" with a "b"). Unfortunately I sold that idea for a pint of Fosters to work colleague.
Re:Network conectivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but their whole basis was that they were streaming it from the Cloud.
Why if I have a 20gb BW cap would I stream HD content when I could go buy the game on DVD and play it locally?
Are people acutally surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OMG! (Score:5, Insightful)
OMG you know what this means?! They FINALLY realized that you can't stream 60FPS video streams of 1920x1080 over the internet!
They may have even discovered that gamers don't tolerate an internet connection level of input delay in their games! And that serious gamers want to own their own gear! And that gamers do other things than games on their computer so they own a faster computer anyway! And that rendering a 1920x1080 video stream locally also takes a fast computer!
they didn't realize that yet. they realized that they can transfer the valuable assets for pennies on the dollar to an entity they control while screwing the other investors and employees out of their shares.
the ceo(and most of the board) were assholes and still are, simple as that.
Re:No surprise to us: Thats the real story (Score:2, Insightful)
No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money. It was a bad idea and people who invest in bad ideas lose their money. As a result of companies they invest in losing their money, ultimately, they don't have money anymore to invest. The people who end up with money to keep investing are the ones who are better at it.
Posit a theoretical public/government technological investment equiv. What makes you think the members of that board wouldn't have invested just as poorly? All the evidence points to them making worse investment choices, not better ones. After all, it's not their money, it's your money, so they have a different incentive in their investing. A much more political incentive with goals other than simply finding the most useful technology that people will want to pay for. And after this government equiv.'s investment failed? They'd either keep pumping in money to prop it up, or at the very least, the people making the bad investment decisions would just keep making them. After all, the government has more of your money to spend, right?
Please go learn some Public Choice economics. You'll understand the world a lot better.
Re:OMG! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, what happened was pretty scummy. After all, what happened was all of a sudden, an unconfirmed rumor popped up that OnLive was bankrupt. The official company line though was everything was fine. Then two weeks later everyone got the news that OnLive was taken over by OnLIve.
Effectively, the investors in the original OnLive could've gotten out (but instead lost it all), while the CEO and management, and half of the engineers got "transferred" to the new company and the rest were pretty much shown the door.
The execs losing their investment? Most likely not - it pwas probably written in that they got 100 cents on the dollar for their investments by the new OnLive. Everyone else, got screwed as usualy.
Hell, even the employees with no jobs were basically kicked out without severance, or the option to plead their case in bankruptcy court. The company effectively went bankrupt, fired everyone, got "bought out", management re-hired, and half the fired engineers re-hired.
It's basically a way to downsize without paying benefits and screwing over investors, while management walks away with nothing's changed. Probably a very creative loophole in the law.
Re:No surprise to us: Thats the real story (Score:3, Insightful)
It is necessary if starvation and homelessness threaten to break down public order.
This has happened many times in the history of human civilization. Don't pretend it can't just because your head is full of naive libertarian ideas about how you wish the world worked.
Whenever the shit really hits the fan, libertarians disappear into the cracks like scattering cockroaches.