OnLive Snags Major Cash Injection

Experimental cloud gaming company OnLive has announced that it has secured a “serious jolt” of funding from people willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Y’know, launching a new service has to be pretty expensive. Launching a new service that aims to pioneer a new revolution in a multi-billion-dollar industry? That has to be pretty expensiveer. OnLive is a cool idea, and if it succeeds will be hugely earthshaking, but it’s one hell of a gamble – what if gamers don’t go for it? What if the tech is a flop?

Apparently, though, there are people willing to bet on OnLive’s success, and these are people who have money. A post on OnLive CEO Steve Perlman’s blog reads as follows:

Big news today-OnLive has closed a major round of funding with participation from AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital. The funding is much larger than our previous rounds and gives us a serious jolt of rocket fuel as our Beta progresses and we look forward to launching the OnLive® Game Service.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen an enormous upheaval in the media business as the written word, photos, music, and video have been steadily moving away from physical media to online delivery. One major category that still remains largely based on physical discs is fast-response interactive media-in particular, video games. And, of course, OnLive’s goal is to enable that last remaining transition.

We are both pleased and inspired that our investors share this vision with OnLive. Not only do they see the value in OnLive in particular, but they also understand the significance of what OnLive is doing to lead a massive sea change in interactive media distribution. We are grateful that they have not only provided OnLive with their support, but they have also provided OnLive with such a strong endorsement.

All fueled up, there’s only open road ahead.

You certainly need money to do something like this, so this is definitely good news for OnLive. The next major hurdle it looks like they’ll have to tackle, though, is not just ensuring that the service works, but trying to overcome gamers’ skepticism about the whole thing. If gamers don’t like it, no amount of money pumped into marketing will make them stop treating it like a joke – just look at Sony.

Still, money is a good thing for an experimental service. Hopefully we’ll start seeing the fruits of this labor sometime soon.