OnLive Gaming Service Fires Entire Staff, Purchased By Unknown Firm

Updated Monday, August 25, 2012 8:00 pm CST by Wolff Bachner

Following up on yesterday’s article by James Johnson on the sale of OnLive, Inquisitr has now received further information on the fate of OnLive’s employees. OnLive originally fired 200 of their employees, but today they announced that 100 employees have been offered jobs with the restructured company. The company said they will be bringing back even more of their former staff in the near future.

Commenting on the situation, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said in an email, “I don’t think that they set out to hurt employees, but it’s unfortunate that people are going to end up unemployed over this. They probably should not have expanded as rapidly as they did, but it’s clear that they were spending more than they could afford, so they restructured to right size the company.”

One of the original investors in Onlive, Lauder Partners, has been named as the first investor in the restructured company.

-End Of Update-

OnLive fired its entire staff on Friday morning, calling an all-staff meeting to announce that the company was being acquired by a yet to be announced firm. At first OnLive did not comment directly on the acquisition but announced that the game streaming service would remain in operation.

A source at gaming publication Kotaku says OnLive CEO Steve Perlman revealed the company would file for “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC) status in the state of California. That filing will largely protect OnLive from creditors as it takes the time needed to restructure.

Electronista spoke to a source that confirmed the firings and Twitter feeds began to showcase employees leaving the OnLive headquarters with moving boxes.

On Friday night the company announced it had been acquired by a new company which would operate OnLive game and Desktop services while supporting the company’s apps, devices and content partnerships.

The company says the new buyer plans to hire back some of OnLive’s staff and than add substantially more workers into the mix as the company comes under new control.

In a statement sent to TechCrunch the company announced:

“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.”

OnLive was launched in 2009 and allows customers to play games remotely from their computer, tablet, smartphone or console specific devices. OnLive went on to rent and sell games for specific time periods while renting out a number of titles on a monthly basis.

OnLive had been granted a cloud gaming patenting and eventually launched in the UK.

Do you think OnLive services will continue to forge ahead with new ownership guiding its destiny?