Sony is acquiring all the company's assets

Apr 3, 2015 12:06 GMT  ·  By

Video games online streaming service OnLive will shut down at the end of April, selling off all of its assets and patents to Sony.

The news is not entirely surprising, as OnLive has continually struggled to find footing in spite of the fact that it had been essentially the first major game streaming service in the world.

The company was one of the earliest industry adopters of the video games streaming concept, attempting to make it work and to gain traction with the crowds, but it unfortunately faltered one time too many.

The company will cease its services later this month, and as of today, no subscriptions will be renewed. Furthermore, customers who renewed their subscription after March 28 will be given a full refund, and the service will remain active and free until April 28, after which point it will be permanently shut down.

"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 in an online statement.

Those of you with active subscriptions or who are owners of OnLive hardware and are seeking to learn more about what comes next can check out the FAQ page, detailing everything there is to know about the future of services that utilized OnLive as a platform.

Sony scooped it all up and put a lock on it

Sony stepped in and acquired all the company's assets, including a sizable portfolio of patents pertaining to innovations in the field of cloud gaming.

OnLive was among the few who tried to crack the tough nut of cloud gaming, a prospect that sounds really good on paper but seldom works in practice, due mainly to the large bandwidth requirements, and above all, to the need for a connection with extremely low latency.

Many people who gave the service a try complained about experiencing massive input lag and frame drops, the issues ranging from making the games unplayable to them being severely annoying, which made using the platform a hassle.

For the time being, there is not telling what Sony intends to do with everything it acquired, but it's worth noting that Sony also bought OnLive's biggest competitor, Gaikai, back in 2012, for what was seen as a huge and unjustified sum at the time.

Since then, the move started to make much more sense, as the technology developed by Gaikai served as the framework behind Sony's PlayStation Now service, and its PS4 to PlayStation Vita streaming capabilities.