In early August 2012, OnLive employees told us that the cloud gaming company was close to falling apart. Despite creating an impressive service rooted in a futuristic idea -- playing bleeding edge PC games on the highest settings, remotely, streaming from the cloud to virtually any device -- a cocktail of financial issues all crested at once. The result was mass layoffs ("at least" 50 percent), including lead evangelist and company CEO Steve Perlman. OnLive had a new owner, venture capitalist Gary Lauder, and a renewed directive to become profitable. Then, the company went silent.
"My focus has been on turning this from proof of concept into a real business."- Gary Lauder
Its services continued operating -- business as usual, as it! were -- and as media, we didn't hear a peep. The usual trade show appearances and interview opportunities dried up. Our last post about OnLive before this was in February 2013. Today, that's changing: the company is re-opening the lines of communication, announcing two new initiatives in CloudLift and OnLive Go.
The first, CloudLift, takes the cloud streaming concept of OnLive and applies it to games you already own. By logging in with a Steam account (required, at least for now), games you've got attached will be "unlocked" in the cloud, playable using the OnLive client or Microconsole anywhere else (including save data that syncs between devices). Of course, not all games registered or bought through Steam will work with CloudLift; just 20 games are launching with the service today, with "dozens more planned." Lauder told us OnLive's game onboarding process has been streamlined significantly, specifically with the intent to bring more games, more rapidly to OnLive.
| Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY | Batman: Arkham City GOTY |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | Darksiders II |
| Dead Island GOTY | Dead Island: Riptide |
| LEGO The Lord of the Rings | Metro 2033 |
| Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition | MX vs. ATV Reflex |
| Painkiller: Hell and Damnation | Red Faction: Armageddon |
| Saints Row IV | Scribblenauts Unlimited |
| Strike Suit Zero | The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles |
| The LEGO Movie Videogame | The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief |
| Truck Racer |
Interested? OnLive's hoping you're interested enough to drop $15 every month for the functionality (there's also a seven-day trial). It goes live today.