Hasta La Gadget!

After a lot of back and forth from the rumor mill and official OnLive channels, we now have what we believe to be a far clearer view of precisely what is happening right now at OnLive headquarters in Palo Alto. We’ve spoken with a (now former) employee of the gaming service who ran down today’s events for us. According to the account, a meeting was held at OnLive’s offices at 10AM this morning, wherein the company’s CEO announced a massive staff layoff — at least 50 percent of the staff, according to our source’s numbers. The layoffs come as part of across the board cuts to the company, and all those out of a job will have their key cards deactivated as of 4PM local time today. The source was understandably baffled by the abruptness of the news, along with the added blow that no severance will be offered and stock holdings are essentially worth nothing.

The move apparently comes as OnLive is being purchased by an unknown party. Those being kept on have reportedly received offer letters from the new company. Why the sudden move? The source believes it may have something to do with the company’s massive operating costs, which we’re told are around $5 million a month. Certainly those concerns line up with a story dug up by Kotaku highlighting the company’s plans to file for Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors as a result of the company’s troubled financial situation. We’re still gathering information as to the nature of the buyout.

Update: According to our source, the writing wasn’t on the wall at the company per se, but OnLive had reportedly been entertaining acquisition offers ahead of the news from companies including HP.

Update 2: Our source has offered up some additional information on the matter, putting the average concurrent user number for the service at 1,100 to 1,500, peaking at around 1,800 on a given day — not exceptional by any means in the face of reported $5 million a month operating costs. The number of layoffs, meanwhile, may well be greater than originally suggested, with our source putting the number of employees staying on board at around 10 to 20 percent.

Filed under: Gaming

Source: OnLive undergoing buyout in wake of dire financials, laying off ‘at least 50 percent’ of staff originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The LCD multi-touch trackpad on Razer’s Blade gaming laptop was just about the only truly unique thing about it. Fortunately that cutting edge device is no longer exclusive to the laptop, because Razer has incorporated it into its latest gaming keyboard.

The 4″ trackpad is available on the high end variant of the DeathStalker keyboard, the DeathStalker Ultimate. As with the Blade, the LCD can be used either to display information when you’re gaming or browsing, but it can also be used as a multi-touch trackpad. It also comes with 10 buttons with customizable icons and functions – bind commands, macros and other things that need to be bound.

There are also a variety of apps built-in for use with the trackpad, such as a macro recorder, apps for Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, and two game specific apps, one for Battlefield 3 and one for Star Wars: The Old Republic. That’s kinda sad, but I guess it’s better than nothing.  Razer has also launched a cloud service called Synapse to make it easier for users to save and sync their configurations.

As for the keyboard itself, it has anti-ghosting technology enabling up to 10 simultaneous key presses, chiclet keys with changeable backlighting, a fixed wrist rest, braided fiber cable and a name that absolutely cannot be topped. Unless Razer names its next keyboard the DeathDeader. The DeathStalker Ultimate will be available on Razer’s online store in September and will be sold for $250 (USD).

[via Electronista]

EA has announced something exciting that fans of the Command & Conquer franchise are sure to be happy about. The announcement came at Gamescom in Germany this week. It turns out that the previously announced Command & Conquer: Generals 2 has been transformed into a free-to-play video game, and will run on the Frostbite 2 engine, which powers the graphics in Battlefield 3.

Of course as is the case with most free-to-play games, you can bet that if you want to advance, you’ll need to spend some money. Buying upgrades is how these free-to-play titles make their money. The game will allow players to play an all-out war and take control of multiple factions, compete for resources, and build up bases of operation.

Players will be able to command massive batteries of tanks, soldiers, and aircraft during battle. The game promises to offer fully destructible environments, highly detailed units, dynamic physics, and exciting visual effects. The free game will be offered for PC only sometime in 2013, and you can register for the Beta here.

After invading living rooms with his Space Invaders couch (which btw are now for sale), Igor Chak imagines the king of shelves, patterned after one of the most famous videogame stages ever made: the construction site aka Barrels stage from the legendary 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong.

The concept took shape when Chak imagined where the props in games are taken after they’ve served their purpose. He thought of a way to “encourage Mario” – who has since moved on to pipes and bricks – to take back these old steel beams and ladders. I’m not sure if Mario owns the construction site, but I’m sure both he and Donkey Kong would love to have this shelf in their cribs. After all, they owe a lot to this pixelated scene.

Insert a token in your browser and jump to Chak’s website for gorilla-sized versions of the images. I sense a trend of platformer-inspired shelves incoming.

[via HiConsumption]

Old consoles never die, they just get digitized. The Game Boy Color is one such system. You can find emulators of it running on PCs, Macs, PSPs, smartphones and even calculators. Here’s a GBC emulator for the cloud age: a JavaScript & HTML5 emulator that you can play on your browser.

The emulator was written by Software Engineering student Grant Galitz. Like most browser games, it doesn’t need you to install anything on your computer. It even has built-in games! You can also load .gb or .gbc files, although I wasn’t able to test that. I also don’t know how the emulator handles game saves.

Technically the emulator can run even on mobile browsers, but it was slow and unplayable on my iPad 2. Perhaps newer devices will fare better. Check out the emulator on Grant’s website before Nintendo falcon punches it down. You can also check out its source code at GitHub.

[via TechCrunch]