HTC has had a hard enough time keeping its finances in check on its own, so it never helps when your $40 million investment in another company has to be written off as a loss only a year and a half later. If you follow technology news, you may have heard that OnLive was sold over the weekend, resulting in massive layoffs. The high cost of running the OnLive game streaming service never turned a profit as subscription rates never really took off.
HTC announced its $40 million dollar investment in OnLive at Mobile World Congress in 2011 with the unveiling of the HTC Flyer. The hope was that HTC devices would be among the first to have access to quality PC games on their Android tablets. OnLive eventually unveiled its Android offering later in 2011, but it didn’t have enough of the games consumers actually wanted in order to justify the monthly subscription cost.
For now, OnLive is still up and running, but we wouldn’t recommend anyone jump in until we hear what the new owners of the service have planned. We know that HTC has plans to release PlayStation Suite certified devices, but we’re not exactly sure when they will be coming to market. We’re guessing that the HTC One X+ will be the first device certified for PlayStation Suite, but the handset launch is not expected for a new more months.
Source: CNET
