It teetered on the edge of bankruptcy with all staff laid off and only half offered new positions. Perlman ‘was asked to stay’ but he has other projects ”in need of my focus and attention”.
Reports indicated that OnLive was floating on around just 1600 concurrent users for the streaming service, leaving the company to spiral into a fiscal void. Gary Lauder is the new head of OnLive.
”I’d like to ask everyone to please give the OnLive team a chance to regroup and get rolling again,” Steve Perlman beseeched the community. ”It’s the same people who created the amazing stuff you’ve been enjoying over the years, and Charlie is the guy who’s kept the service running 24/7 since launch. No small feat.”
It was rumoured that Perlman would continue to helm the company despite new owners, but this wasn’t to be. ”For me, the end of last week was the first time in a very long time where I could actually consider the possibility of moving on without having to worry about the company,” he explained.
”As we said in our last post, Gary did want me to stay, but OnLive is by far the longest project I’ve ever worked on, I have other projects long in need of my focus and attention, and Gary needed to lock down the structure for the new company. In the balance, it was a good time to move on, and Gary understood.”
These statements from Perlman flies in the face of recent rumblings from sources within OnLive who claim the founder had a foul temper, and made many ‘ego lead’ decisions which endangered the company. Apparently Perlman saw Gaikai as a very real threat and began dropping titles from OnLive that appeared on the ‘rival service’.
”For me, it’s hard to leave my creation behind, but there is also a huge sense of relief that I can finally step off the treadmill and know that OnLive is in good hands,” Perlman continued.
”Thank you all for helping OnLive since Beta days to become a reality, and thank you for all of the feedback and ideas that has helped OnLive pioneer this entirely new field of computing and entertainment.”
