OnLive founder was source of company’s problems

Recently it emerged that OnLive had been taken over by another company and shed possibly 50 to 90% of its workforce. The latest rumour from the rumour mill suggests that OnLive founder and former Chief Executive Officer Steve Perlman caused the financial difficulties at OnLive and created a number of issues that simply didn’t need to exist.

Sources from OnLive stated that the rivalry OnLive developed with Gaikai, which Perlman took as a personal matter, meant that relations with many publishers became more difficult than they should have been.

Apparently, Perlman yelled at David Perry, the founder of Gaikai, during the 2009 edition of the Game Developers Conference and had a strong reaction to the deal that the rival company made with Electronic Arts in 2010. After not receiving EA exclusivity Perlman ordered that all EA games be pulled immediately from OnLive.

Perlman also created a rule that any game which appeared on Gaikai was banned from appearing on OnLive, including hits like The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and Bulleststorm. Perlman also managed to ruin a deal with Ubisoft after giving them an ultimatum about working with Gaikai which they refused.

Gaikai was recently bought by Sony for $384 million and it seems that the company has long term plans to use the streaming service in order to offer an OnLive alternative among other things.

Since OnLive was sold to Lauder Partners (the new owner) for just $4 million, Steve Perlman has been released from the company and the company has hired back a small number of staff. However, the company still has much work to do to get more than just 1600 paying customers and get their OnLive vision to actually take off because cloud computing is the future – apparently.

Read more of a very interesting report at the source.

Source