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Sony Businesses Games Hardware

Sony Buys, Shuts Down OnLive 249

Posted by samzenpus from the circle-of-business dept.
Jay Maynard writes The OnLive gaming service that rose from the dead and became an inexpensive way to get high-end performance on low-end hardware has now been purchased by Sony Entertainment. Their games, desktop, and SLGo Second Life services will all end on April 30, 2015, and be free to use until then."
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Sony Buys, Shuts Down OnLive More

Sony Buys, Shuts Down OnLive

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  • The future of console games (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02, 2015 @07:25PM (#49395191)

    And this is why I refuse to buy games that require a connection to some corporate server to play.

    • How else do you expect those poor billion dollar corporations to make money?

      Sheesh, all these gamers playing a game for years have to stop, and the best way to do that is tie the game to server that you can then shutdown later and force them all to fork out the cash for a newer version.

      There out to a be law that forces these gamers to stop playing old games and buy new ones, otherwise these poor defenseless corporations could have flat or falling revenue and that can not be tollerated! These gamers playing

    • This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with it:

      Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.

      All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which

      • Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times.

        My $800 inline IPS can apply firewall rules and deep packet inspection to 26GB of traffic per second with a double-digit latency of 10us.

    • Sony doesn't think so. They think streaming "supplements" and not replaces traditional game distribution, which is why they only use it for remote play between the PS4/Vita and to offer access to the back-catalog.

  • Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @07:41PM (#49395257)
    and I hope the CEO lost money, but I bet he made out fine. The guy cheated his engineers out of millions. He paid them in stock options while they built the company from nothing and then folded the paper corporation right before the investment money came in.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

      by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @09:25PM (#49395677) Homepage

      The original CEO/investor, Steve Perlman, was forced out. The company is surely being sold for a pittance and at great loss for the investors. Even if the idea didn't work out, if the investors/CEOs hadn't made the company, the engineers wouldn't have had jobs in the first place. They can make big money, and in this case they lost a large amount. The engineers just shrugged it off and got another job.

      • Nice try (Score:3, Informative)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
        The engineers wouldn't have jobs? Do you not have the slightest clue how this works? These were top of their field guys with tonnes of job offers who took _less_ pay in exchange for stock options in a company they believed in. They literally invested their lives in the company in place of their dollars. The through some legal slight of hand it was stolen out from under them. AOL did the same thing when they merged with Time Warner. When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just sh

        • Re:Nice try (Score:5, Insightful)

          by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday April 03, 2015 @12:06AM (#49396187) Journal

          When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just shake it off".

          I did, when I did the startup thing. Well, there was some drinking involved. But that's the normal, expected outcome. for a startup. Anyone with half a brain knows this. You hope for that payoff, but it's long odds. This is why most startups these days pay pretty close to what the big guys pay, assuming they really are hiring equivalent talent.

          This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare. When the startup fails, you get a handshake. That's the game. And shipping a fine product is no guarantee at all it won't fail.

          • Re:Nice try (Score:4, Insightful)

            by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Friday April 03, 2015 @06:09AM (#49396709) Homepage

            This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare.

            That a startup succeeds is quite rare. Just considering those cases though, I don't think ones where the employees also get screwed are rare at all. The groundwork for that is usually in place from day 1, with how shares in the company are split into classes.

            For me it's been 100%: all three of the successful startups I've been involved with, all purchased by another company, did that transaction in a way that valued the common stock in employee options I owned at nothing. All the books were cooked until the company founders and, more importantly, the funding investors were paid all of the proceeds. And just to rub some extra salt in the wound there, the second also removed my name from the patent they were granted near the end of the process, to grease concerns that I'd expect more from the sale than nothing and could cause trouble with its licensing. (I signed those rights away in my employee contract, and all I really wanted was the little patent plaque)

            The third laid me off, forced me to exercise my options to keep them, then valued the common stock at zero during the sale. That one's bonus fuck used some going out of business loopholes to cancel my COBRA policy with zero advance notice the week after the sale, as if they'd gone bankrupt and couldn't afford to administer the policy anymore. The company was sold for millions to Cisco; the engineers who built its technology lost their health insurance.

            I've come to see these anecdotes as a pattern by design. Startups are not structured to make the employees happy if the company succeeds. They're setup so the majority share holder(s) get what they want. And there's a lot of rich assholes who will screw over anyone they can in that chain.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by Rakishi ( 759894 )

              None of those cases indicate the startup in question was actually successful. Being sold for 10 million when you owe investors 20 million isn't success. Presumably the common stock was worth nothing because the sale was basically a liquidation. The investors signed off on it in exchange for getting whatever money did come in but they didn't make any money on the deal since the worth of the company minus investments was in fact negative.

              Just because a startup doesn't go bankrupt doesn't mean it was successfu

        • Well, maybe these engineers would have had jobs that some other engineers had, and so some other engineers wouldn't have jobs. Somebody would have not had a job.

  • No, Sony didn't shut it down. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02, 2015 @07:47PM (#49395283)

    On Live filed for an alternate bankruptcy protection status and as part of the process sold assets to Sony. Sony didn't come in heavy handed and Buy On Live then shut it down. The headline it inflammatory.

    • Darth Vader didn't come in all heavy handed and take over the second Darth Star's construction crew. He merely found new ways to motivate them.

    • Sony didn't come in heavy handed and Buy On Live then shut it down. The headline is overly flattering to Sony

      FTFY. Seriously, I would praise any company that ruthlessly did what you describe (as long as it didn't benefit the Onlive scamsters, as the typical buyout would).

    • You know Slashdot loves it's anti-sony headlines, but what what really happened was:

      OnLive entered bankruptcy in 2012, is bought by by a venture capitalist. OnLive still can't make money but has valuable patents/technology. Owners sell the assets to Sony, who has an interest in the patents and tech to add to their Gaikai portfolio that they use with Remote Play and Playstation Now with the PS4 and Vita.

      Since Sony already HAS a streaming service, why should they keep this one up rather than incorporate it i

  • Who cares? (Score:3)

    by faragon ( 789704 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @07:54PM (#49395327) Homepage
    Network latency is going to keep all these remote game solutions as inferior. Even with fiber optic connections becoming widespread is going to be worse than local gaming.

  • I feel your pain (Score:3)

    by speedlaw ( 878924 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @08:02PM (#49395351) Homepage
    I had two of the excellent Sony HDD 250 DVRs. They are/were better than Tivo until this last generation....well built, and a good first effort. They got data from TV Guide onscreen. Listings, info, and time. TV Guide onscreen was a listing service that would download from an OTA or cable station, interlaced into the signal. It was carried by PBS in the analog era, then CBS when digital transition took place. TV Guide was sold to Rovi (Macrovision). Shortly thereafter, the listing service was shut down. Sony and Rovi were both mute as to those of us who had bought into TV Guide onscreen. I mean, really, who could get screwed by TV GUIDE ???? So much for the old economy and assumptions. We were left high and dry. There was no alternate way to get the listings. Some units with later versions of TV Guide onscreen were internet compatible, but these weren't. Now, I'm not ranting about free listings. These units would not take a time stamp from anything other than a TVGOS source, over the air... So, once the TVGOS service died, your clock did too. No, there was no "clock set" in the menu. Whose idea or requirement this was should be shot. Twice. Some convoluted work arounds were devised, but the simple fact is that you had a random clock when you plugged it in. For the normal person, you just bricked it. No TVGOS signal = no clock = no programming. Thanks Sony.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rahvin112 ( 446269 )

      Sony has always been evil. I'm always surprised when people complain about some evil sony action as if they are totally surprised by it. Don't be surprised. I stopped buying sony products before 1992 (that's about the time they bent me over and had their way with me) because they are evil and will always be evil. These stories about Sony have been around a LONG time, long before your DVR. You should have known better.

      • These stories about Sony have been around a LONG time, long before your DVR. You should have known better.

        The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were. It was before the time that I really had a reason to pay attention (since it wasn't my money that they were taking before right around that time).

        My point is that there's always someone getting impacted by their first Sony Evil Action, so it's expected that every ti

        • The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were.

          Everything about Sony has been sleazy since the 1980s. That's when their quality went into the toilet, too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      Yeah, TVGOS OTA died because it got bought out by a company called "Rovi", formerly known as "Macrovision", who didn't just shut down the OTA version, they all but sent in goons to pull the gear from engineering rooms in TV stations across the country.

      I have an old Channel Master DVR that used TVGOS, which I stopped using after I set up a MythTV. You can still set its clock (I think it also tries to auto-set the clock from in the TV signal, but most stations don't use accurate clocks for that), and it can

  • So where can I get their Bluetooth game controller at a discount? It was the only thing they had that seemed good.

  • Remember Connectix? (Score:3)

    by Zobeid ( 314469 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @10:23PM (#49395909)

    This reminds me so much of when Sony bought Connectix and killed the Virtual Game Station.

    Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]

    We didn't have a lot of games on the Mac in those days, so the CVGS filled a real need. I hated Sony so much for that. >.

    Sony: serial killer of the game industry?

  • So they are being true to themselves (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ruir ( 2709173 ) on Thursday April 02, 2015 @11:27PM (#49396089)
    Sony and pretty much Microsoft alike have a predatory, disruptive model of work. Also it is not their best interest to provide a continuity of services, and change things every so often, to create artificial needs for new products. They also do not work for the best interests of the industry or for their customers, but only for their goals. They often also do shadow or questionable moves via proxy firms in order to not tarnish more their reputation. They are not deceiving anyone. Any time they do something like this, they are only being true to their core models. You are just naive and dumb if you do business with them.

  • This is why people should get pirated copies of ANY game, program, movie, music they pay for.... Corporations are moving towards more and more DRM and subscription based "cloud" models. The more they do it the more you the consumer get screwed. Do you think they are doing this for YOUR benefit? no1 It's for THEIRS! You pay for something you don't "physically" get. Then they can take it away at any time and you get nothing and they got your $$$$. That is PIRACY to me... Yet they are allowed to do it.... So p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      Don't buy it but also don't use it. The dollar vote is how it should happen. But if you're pirating it, you're basically giving them ammos against you.

      You don't need games and movies to live. This isn't food. Play by the rules and screw them over at their own game until the rules change. If people just bypass the rules, then they end up looking like the bad guys, and there's not nearly as much incentive to change the rules themselves.

  • I love these click bait titles everyone uses these days it's all about spreading FUD cause thats more likely to get all the sheep to click. ONlive shut down after going bankrupt and Sony bought the patents nothing else at least Ars can get the facts right without manipulating the title to be all but a lie

    http://arstechnica.com/gaming/... [arstechnica.com]

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