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Sony Acquired OnLive Patents, Gaming Service To Close At End Of Month
OnLive, the pioneering streaming games portal, has sold several of its patents to Sony. As a result, the company is closing its service on April 30.
According to an IGN report, "Sony now owns several of OnLive's assets, including its US and International portfolio patents on cloud gaming."
Later, OnLive confirmed the news on its Facebook page, telling users:
"The OnLive Games Service Will Be Coming to an End
It is with great sadness that we must bring the OnLive Game Service to a close. Sony is acquiring important parts of OnLive, and their plans don't include a continuation of the game service in its current form. Your service should continue uninterrupted until April 30, 2015. No further subscription fees will be charged, and you can continue to play all of your games until that date.
After April 30, 2015, our data centers will shut down and the service will be offline. All accounts will be closed, and all data deleted including game save data, achievements, and credit card data will be deleted. If you purchased a Steam game from OnLive, that game will still be available on Steam. No refunds will be available for any game purchases, hardware purchases, or subscriptions.
We will have extremely limited coverage for customer service over the next 30 days. We hope the FAQs below will answer all of your questions. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being an OnLive customer, and we wish you all the best."
Sony presumably wanted the patents to enhance its own PlayStation Now service, which launched officially this year and was based on the technology of another streaming company that it acquired, Gakai.
OnLive launched in 2010, and allowed users to stream games to a number of devices, including PC and mobile platforms.
Our Take
The writing has been on the wall for OnLive for some time. However, it's worth lauding the company for pioneering something larger companies like Sony wouldn't try until years later. Perhaps it will go down like services like the Sega Channel as being before its time.
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