Today has been a swirling mess of rumors, confirmations, dismissals and flat out layoffs for the cloud based gaming service OnLive. The rumors started on Twitter as an unnamed employee from the company sent out an email to devs, notifying people OnLive would no longer exist as it was. A minimum 50% of the staff is being let go as part of a company wide blood letting. The saddest part is that on top of the extreme abruptness of the layoffs is that those let go will receive no severance package and their stock holdings are now worthless. Senior management and some personnel are being kept on as the carcass of the company is allegedly being purchased by an unknown party. It’s believed the company’s massive $5 million a month operating costs are putting it in a position where it might be filing for bankruptcy protection.

If anyone happens to check the OnLive site, Twitter account or Facebook page, one would think it’s business as usual. They have gaming promotions going on, they just added Darksiders II to their list, they plan to support OUYA  plus the first series of Vizio TVs just arrived with OnLive built right in. The company says the service is still running strong with no plans to shut down. So yeah, not sure what’s going on over in Palo Alto. Stay tuned folks, me thinks this is going to be a roller coaster of a ride.

Update: OnLive has been acquired by a new company – itself. An affiliate of Lauder Partners has ponied up the cash to keep OnLive running but the company had to go through serious restructuring by selling all of it’s assets to the new version of the company which is still OnLive. So for now the cloud gaming continues but expect some interesting bit of info to come out in the next few days,

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