OnLive is coming to an end. Sony has bought out “much of OnLive’s assets,” and given how they already have their own streaming service, the OnLive service will be shut down by the end of April.
Started in 2010, OnLive is the first service to offer the ability to play PC games via cloud technology. It works exactly the same way Sony’s PlayStation Now except with a different tech underneath, Sony uses Gaikai’s streaming technology, and instead of PlayStation games, it was PC games. Users don’t download anything other than the OnLive client. When they buy a game, they buy a license to play the game and nothing else.
For some, this news will probably feel like Déjà vu. Back in 2012, OnLive underwent a restructuring that involves laying off all of its employees, being completely bought out, and spawning an entirely different company to keep the OnLive service going. The new company was also called OnLive. Confused? So was everyone else.
“Overcoming the perception of being dead,” according to the company in a blog post, “has been one of the unanticipated challenges of the turnaround.” OnLive notes that to the general public, OnLive died in 2012, and points out that “recent articles” describes OnLive as “defunct” or other similar terms.
The company notes that through technological improvements and modified business models, they were starting to become more profitable. Despite this they were unable to grow any larger without outside investments. Most of the companies they approached were hesitant to invest “due to the perception that they did not know how far off in the future cloud gaming would be.”
The last day OnLive will be up and running is April 30.
