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Comment by jeffool | Hacker News Reader

>(Yes, they had some titles, but they needed bigger ones.)

The tragedy here is, they had bigger titles. At the last minute before launch, they pulled all EA titles from their service. When rival Gaikai got the rights to offer demos for EA games (not to actually sell them,) CEO Steve Perlman went batshit-crazy irate and pulled the plug. From then, even games that had been confirmed or greenlighted were pulled if Gaikai got them first.

I recommend anyone who's interested in what went wrong read this story from The Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report

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"At the last minute before launch, they pulled all EA titles from their service. When rival Gaikai got the rights to offer demos for EA games (not to actually sell them,) CEO Steve Perlman went batshit-crazy irate and pulled the plug."

Yikes, that's not a library at all. Think of this analogy "My local library was going to offer the most recent Stross novel, but it turns out that's available at the library in the next town, so they had a book burning party instead"

If you leave the battlefield to your competitor that's not really a winning strategy.

How is GaiKai doing now that OnLive has folded? Are they headed towards running out of cash as well at some point or are they doing better?

They were bought by Sony a bit back, actually.

And OnLive folded, and sold themselves to a newly created company named OnLive. So, it's still there. And I think still has a lot of potential under the right person. (With enough money.)

I still half-expect Steam to eventually offer streaming of games players already own for a small monthly fee. I'd expect them to make gangbusters if they did.

Not only were they bought by Sony, they were bought by Sony for $380 million dollars.

Shows what a difference a business model can have. They both had cloud gaming technologies, but while OnLive wanted to sell it right to consumers, Gaikai went for the publishers.

> From then, even games that had been confirmed or greenlighted were pulled if Gaikai got them first.

Maybe these titles had high licensing costs (regardless of whether any OnLive users rented them or not), and they figured if their competitor had the game less people would be playing it with OnLive? So they'd be more likely to make a loss on the licensing cost.

Former staffers told us Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins were ready and would have launched on day one if it wasn't for Steve Perlman. At GDC 2009, when OnLive revealed itself to the world in style, a rival named Gaikai did the same behind closed doors, and when Gaikai CEO David Perry came by the OnLive booth to greet his competitor, Perlman starting screaming at him. On June 17th, 2010, the day OnLive launched, Gaikai announced a multi-year deal with Electronic Arts. Perlman received the news in the OnLive booth at E3 2010. "He went ballistic," one witness recalls. "We had to slam the conference room shut and crank up the music so people wouldn't hear him."

That doesn't sound like a business decision to me...

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