In the news|April 07, 2015 03:42 EDT
OnLive Shutdown News: Sony Buys OnLive Patents - Ends Streaming Service
The online game streaming service, OnLive, is closing down at the end of the month after selling its collection of patents to Sony, according to Electronista.
The website had a total of 140 United States and international patents, which Sony will use to help its own game streaming service, called PlayStation Now.
The servers of OnLive will be officially shut down on April 30th.
The service has 80 employees, but Sony has not yet made any statement about whether or not these employees will be accepted by them, along with the patents.
OnLive made its debut in 2010, and allowed customers to play games in its cloud servers using streaming video. This allowed for systems of all kinds to play games at a relatively high quality.
Since then however, the company has been quite rocky. It laid off its entire staff in 2012 and lost HTC an estimated $40 million dollars in investments.
Even after all of this, OnLive, which also ran through desktop and mobile apps, continued to survive by selling its assets to a venture capitalist for less the $5 million dollars.
The company also attempted a relaunch last year, introducing the CloudLift enterprise service. The company's main competitor is Gakai.
According to Electronista "Gakai seemingly fared better, being bought by Sony in 2012 for $380 and used to power PlayStation Now, a system that worked under the same cloud gaming concept, but streamed games solely to Sony game consoles".
OnLive's support pages tell users that PlayPass games will no longer be available after April 30th.
In addition, all saved data and achievements will be deleted if they were not stored on CloudLift, in which case they would be transferred to Steam.