OnLive, the gaming company trying to reinvent the Games On Demand service, has announced a Series C round of venture financing from AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk, and Maverick Capital. Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital have participated in previous rounds of financing as well. OnLive did not disclose the size of financing.
OnLive has been working on the launch of its cloud-based OnLive Game Service, which delivers the latest games instantly through the MicroConsole TV adapter. Unveiled in March at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, the OnLive Game Service recently went into beta testing and is speculated to officially launch this winter.
Palo Alto-based OnLive raised $16.5 million in previous funding.
errr, didn’t we just ask them about this yesterday and they denied?
Denial seems to be mean “Yes, but we can’t tell you” in the business world. And the stronger they deny, the more likely it’s true.
actually, the story seems to be worse. apparently we called them for confirmation yesterday, held as we waited for a response (they promised to call us back today but didn’t), then they ran it anyway.
OnLive is a scam. I don’t see it panning out.
They’ve shown like 1 tech demo since inception?
yes Josh, huge scam. Please contact AT&T and Time Warner, let them know they have NO IDEA what they are doing. Save them from the millions they are throwing away, because your big corporate ass knows exactly what you are doing. job well done my friend.
If anything, they are about to revolutionize the internet. gaming is only the beginning.
OnLive is already in public beta, so it hardly qualifies as a scam.
Plus, OnLive isn’t alone, when it comes to emerging online gaming services. There’s also OTOY, Gaikai, Playcast Media and TransGaming (in which Intel just recently made an investment). Check out some of the YouTube videos, for these services.
I understand there are technical challenges associated with online gaming, but the market opportunity is so large (every person & device, on the planet, becomes a potential game player) that this technology can’t afford to fail.
Armin – I wish I could save them.
HereAndNow – That’s a pretty rare public beta. Why are there not dozens of Youtube videos or blogs? Show me the product in action.
The *idea* is really cool, but with $16 million, I wan’t to see the pudding.
This isn’t a “Phantom gaming console” built to scam investors.
It’s real technology. The fact that they’ve secured investments from several of the largest tech corporations and investment firms in the world makes your cynicism laughable.
Yeah, we all want to play it. Large-scale projects take time. The last thing they need is frustrating users by launching something that can’t support the demand, before it’s ready for primetime.
Why do you rely on people proving your shallow comment false rather than elaborating on why it’s a scam? They’ve proposed a product and it seems to work. People are very interested.
Actually they were just at EmTech up at MIT last week showing off a demo. It was actually pretty cool however I am concerned how they are going to be able to do this large scale. A few thousand Beta users are fine but what happens at 5 million? The power needed to pull this off seems crazy and crazy expensive.
You’re being willfully obtuse here. Do you really think that these large companies would not do their due diligence before investing? If you’re so sure it’s a scam, explain yourself.
they are no scam they work saw it and played with it live.
I think the problem is to scale it nationally, I think u gotta be located close to their server farms and I think their business case overstates the potential.. it will work in the larger cities and with dedicated providers that are signed up. I doubt it seeing it used globally or even nationally. the latency problem is too much to overcome.
So how much is that round? that would be a good indicator where they are on the hype curve.. I bet they are a bit over valued… besides way behind their roll out schedule.
Onlive seemed like a fantastic idea BEFORE the bandwidth caps were released. It’s too bad because they spent over half a decade making and perfecting the service but now I think people would feel uncomfortable subbing to a service constantly eats up bandwidth every time they play a video game. Did anyone else noticed how the CEO of onlive felt uncomfortable when asked about the bandwidth caps in the unveiling interview? I think he said something about core gamers play about 40 hours a month on average and people could always always upgrade their internet plan.
latency?
The fact that OnLive aren’t disclosing the amount of financing they have recieved would suggest that it is a colossal amount. They had better hope that their cloud-based OnLive Game Service is a big hit, or the investors might not be very pleased!
“tens of millions” is what they’re whispering to people.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out when the other cloud gaming companies launch, which claim greater scalability and mobility.
If they can successfully pull this off–barring technological, patent, licensing, and pricing issues–this will be the most exciting jump in gaming for me since the jump from 2D to 3D.
This has huge potential. Can you imagine what it would do to the sales of PC games? It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Actually, as part of that research, Onlive went to talk with mayor ISP players and all of them agreed that speaking about bandwith they are “a very good citizen” quoting its founder words, unlike torrent users which are the reason for caps.
How about Dreamworks renting clusters for their designers instead of buying $5000 workstations for each of them, Then can use any Dell with the power of a Pixar render farm.
Picture this, using your $7000 Maya 3D suite via cloud in a 100 core cluster from Autodesk for $99/month all through a $400 laptop. The future is here and hardware has become a commodity so the subscription based model has a lot sense in world that likes energy efficient solutions.
A billion people with an 8core Intel at their homes is a thing of the past. But that same million sharing server power through a netbook, thats were green energy has a chance.
About gaming they have already proved how they can get 1 player playing Crysis in a node while 20 are playing geometry wars or any other arcade in the same node. Tech like this will allow you to play Gran turismo through your facebook web tab.
So embrace it and stop thinking of owning a super computer, rent one.
Sorry for the typos, but you get the point.
Although you’re right that this is a great idea, but based on your calculations…
5000(workstation) – 400(laptop) = 4600($ difference)
4600 / 99 ($ month) = 46(months)
46 / 12 (months in a year) = 4 (rounded years)
So you’re getting about 4 years of return vs the 5+ years off the purchased hardware. This is not counting the price you would pay for the bandwidth… I don’t think we’re there yet.
The thing is, a $5000 workstation being a 12 core Intel Skulltrail, still, doesnt offer the performance of a 100 core cluster setup.
Step 1: Open toilet
Step 2: Insert money
Step 3: Flush
I won’t go so far as to say this is a “scam”, but people glossing over the “technical difficulties” of this whole idea are really deluding themselves. And that just ignores the problems with the business side.
Armin, saying ” is investing in this, so it must not be a scam” is a ridiculously specious argument. Big companies like AT&T do stupid things on a daily basis. It’s easier for them because blame gets spread around and accountability is often lacking. This is the same group-think psychology that allows companies to dump toxic wastes on playgrounds, or hide data that indicates your new drug kills people.
By the way, I’m taking names for an interest list in funding my Flying Car business. It’s going to revolutionize global travel. I understand there are a few technical hurdles to overcome, but our engineers are working on them right now! Tethered test flights should begin next spring.
+1 Bryan
I just can’t see how their engineers are going to overcome the serious technical limitations they are facing. Also on a side note when was the last time you can recall Time Warner making a sound investment. Investors in this space really must have a hard on for cloud computing, it’s what the kids are all talking about these days.
PS: I would love to fund your flying car business.
I’ve been following this console off and on for some months now. Some of the things about this bother’s me.
First: the games are exclusive download, so it sounds like to me the modding community will be left out as well as the game stores.
Second: If this is exclusively on line, then so much for the your game when bad weather causes your internet connection to go out.
Third: The last time I read an article about this the design was going to be used with 5 strategic server farms place and everyone would have to play locally to prevent lag. I WOULD say “so much for the California kids playing with their friends in New York”, but any idiot with a router and access to Google can get around that (I plan to try it myself).
In short, I feel that as good of an idea this is, it will probably share the same fate as N-Gage.