04 OnLive

OnLive was a cloud gaming platform that promised to do everything Stadia has difficulty doing today. Suffice to say, things did not go well. Mixed critical reception and poor performance thanks to a fundamental lack of internet infrastructure doomed the product from the outset, despite a number of decent features, such as download-free game demos and broad device compatibility. Most games experienced input lag, as the average American internet speed was below 10Mbps during OnLive’s main period of operation. An OnLive home console was launched in 2010, but failed to make any impact. Although the company was supposedly doing well and expanded into the UK with some success, plans to bring the service to Europe were scuppered after mass layoffs in 2012. An attempt to revive the firm with a new service called CloudLift failed. The dissolution of the company saw its assets sold to Sony for a fraction of their original worth, despite being valued at nearly US$2 billion at its peak.