Game streaming service OnLive shuts down, Sony acquires assets

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By Sherif Saed-VG-247
OnLive, the first major game streaming service, will shut down this month and sell its assets to Sony.
OnLive, one of the industry’s early attempts at cracking the game streaming nut, will cease its game services later this month. No subscriptions will be renewed after today and refunds will be made to anyone who renewed theirs after March 28. The service will remain active until April 30.

“Following the termination of the company’s services and related products, OnLive will engage in an orderly wind-down of the company and cease operations,” the company wrote.

The company’s IP and select assets have been acquired by Sony, which include a patent portfolio with “substantial innovations in cloud gaming”.

Sony bought OnLive’s number one competitor, Gaikai, for $380m back in 2012. A move which didn’t make too much sense at the time, but was later revealed to be a huge part of Sony’s future in the form of PlayStation Now, a game streaming service that relies on Gaikai technology.

 

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Gaikai founder blames OnLive's PC focus for its demise
Andy Chalk-PCGamer
OnLive, as you may have heard, is dead. For real, unlike the last time, its corpse chopped up into little bitty pieces and buried—or, more precisely, sold off to Sony. It was just a few years ago that Sony acquired Gaikai, OnLive's one-time competitor in the streamed gaming space. And Gaikai founder David Perry has a few thoughts about what went wrong.

Perry described OnLive as "a heck of a competitor" in a recent blog post, and said that it was "very worrying" that virtually every significant choice OnLive made was different from Gaikai's. Particularly with regard to platform: OnLive was a PC-centric service, but Gaikai felt it was too problematic to effectively support.

"PC games (for keyboard and mouse) were becoming really difficult to get running across a myriad of TV’s, Phones, Set-Top-Boxes, and websites from the cloud, especially as a lot of great games are no longer supported by anyone, even their publishers have disappeared," Perry wrote. "You probably were not aware that we had to modify the PC games in realtime, hiding legacy buttons, icons and features that no longer made sense etc. It was a nightmare."

Gaikai felt that consoles would be a better fit for streamed games because of their standardized hardware and control schemes, a philosophy that was validated when Sony came along and threw $380 million at it. OnLive, meanwhile, went through some restructuring, laid off some employees, took on new leadership, and stuck with the PC.

"Again their games group stayed focused on PC gaming and at Gaikai we knew just how difficult that was to maintain," Perry wrote. "After two more years of trying to source and onboard PC games they have finally closed their doors."

I'd always assumed that inadequate infrastructure would be the downfall of streaming game services, so it's interesting to read that platform variations were actually such a big problem, especially since "runs on anything" universality was one of OnLive's big selling features. But it did actually express interest in moving to consoles: In late 2011, well ahead of Sony's acquisition of Gaikai, OnLive UK chief Bruce Grove told Eurogamer that he would "love to have" discussions with Sony and Microsoft about integrating the technology into their consoles, and said it actually had OnLive running on a PlayStation 3, before Sony killed Linux support.