OnLive employees ganked by possible acquisition

The Verge is reporting that “widely spread — but still unconfirmed — reports of massive layoffs” at OnLive went down today. It is estimated that 50 perfect of the companies employees have been laid off due to a new owner. This may point at a possible acquisition being announced in the upcoming days.

You do have to sit back and wonder how wrecked your weekend would be if you had to pack up shop on a Friday. OnLive ex-employees have been dropping the “currently working” at title from their resumes on LinkedIn throughout the day.

The employees that were let go were disposable since the company acquiring OnLine is only taking their intellectual property, branding, and patents.

Now lets all take guesses at who is going to snatch up OnLive? My bets are on Microsoft? Any other takers? I want to say Apple but a stunt like this feels a bit out of their playbook. To be honest I was not sure if we were going to report about this… because lets face it OnLive is not a gamer service. It is build for the casuals.

[UPDATE]

OnLive has released an official email response.

“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services.

We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed, and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.”