We wouldn’t sniff at a spare $5 million here at PCGamesN. We’d get the place spruced up a bit, apply a new lick of paint to that banner ad, get the Ns sharpened and sanded down. But for a company like OnLive – once valued at $1.8 billion by analysts – $5 million is an insult, a mouldy two pence piece and a couple of polos.
Nevertheless, OnLive was sold to a venture capital group in August for $4.8 million, a letter from the firm handling its assets reveals.
The letter, written to Mercury Newsand picked up by the BBC, came from Insolvency Services Group president Joel Weinberg.
“Had the sale to the buyer not taken place, the assignee would have been left with inadequate capital to fund the significant costs to preserve and market OnLive’s patents and other intellectual property,” wrote Weinberg . “Thus greatly reducing expected recoveries essentially to those of a forced piecemeal auction.”
In other words, OnLive would no longer exist without its dramatic handover this summer. And so the service goes on, but at what cost? If the future really is in cloud gaming, it’s hard to believe that its name is still OnLive.