OnLive waives the white flag, will shut down on April 30 and sell patents to Sony

[Shawn Knight]

OnLive, the cloud gaming platform that spearheaded the idea of remote gameplay, is closing its doors and selling its patents to Sony.

The idea behind the Mountain View-based company’s service was to allow gamers to play the most demanding games without the need for beefy hardware. Through its service, games were played remotely over the Internet running on OnLive’s powerful servers.

The concept, from technology entrepreneur Steve Perlman (QuickTime, WebTV, pCell), was groundbreaking but unfortunately, the service never really caught on with consumers due in part to a subscription model that left a lot to be desired. In 2012, the company filed for bankruptcy and laid off a bunch of staff in the process.

The company carried on under new ownership but was never able to turn the page.

OnLive spawned a number of copycat platforms including Gaikai, which Sony scooped up for $380 million in 2012. The Japanese electronics giant used the company’s technology to create a streaming service of its own called PlayStation Now. Nvidia also jumped on the bandwagon with GRID.

With the departure of OnLive, Sony Computer Entertainment is swooping in to buy 140 of its cloud gaming patents. Neither company revealed how much the patents sold for.

OnLive will remain functional until April 30 at which time the service will go dark. The company is no longer accepting new members and those that renewed subscriptions on or before March 28 will get a refund.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/60257-onlive-waives-white-flag-shut-down-april-30.html

 

[Arris]

Shame, but I'd have to say I never saw this taking off in the first place.

 

[SeiveD]

So they're bypassing the white flag?

 

[Guest]

Real computer gamers love the power of the rig they built. A proud PC gamer doesn't use cloud servers to play games!

I was an Onlive subscriber. Never liked the "limited" eye candy I could get with cloud gaming. And only 30fps. Could never set graphics higher than what was allowed.

I was glad to let my PC to do all the work. It's much more satisfying. Much better graphics!

 

[TomSEA]

I'm with Arris. In fact, if I wanted to take the time, I could dig out my comments posted on this site where I stated how this would be a failed experiment when it was first announced.

 

[EEatGDL]

I'm with Arris too. Too bad for them, but I tried them when they were starting and a year later; never saw its possibility to take off. Internet connections aren't something reliable yet for gaming, just because of the latency.

 

[oranuro]

Good riddance.

 

[Puiu]

At least they proved that it can be done. Time for Sony to step up their game with the new patents.

 

[slamscaper]

I never liked the idea of it. I want to render the graphics on my own system, rather than basically interacting with a streamed video over the internet. It's a cool concept to be able to play the latest games on a basic PC, but it's an implementation that was destined to fail. Perhaps they were just ahead of their time with this idea... We'll just have to wait and see, but honestly I don't ever see cloud gaming taking off to a point where local rendering becomes obsolete.