It was with great sadness that I read that SL Go from Onlive will be closing its services on April 30th. Sadness may be an understatement, there was much profanity. The reason for the closure of not only SL Go, but other OnLive games related services is due to Onlive selling patents to Sony as Kyle Orland explains over at Ars Technica.
Sony are of course a corporation and therefore it would be easy to paint Sony as the evil corporate villain. Fans of Science Fiction know where corporations are leading us, but to be fair to Sony they have a fairly decent reputation, therefore they’re not exactly in the same league as the Tyrell Corporation or Omni Consumer Products. More importantly, there’s probably more to this than meets the eye. The details of the deal haven’t been made public. I’ll find it hard to stay annoyed at Sony, especially as my annoyance may be misplaced.
In Kyle Orland’s article there’s a quote from a statement by Sony Computer Entertainment VP of Global Business Development, Philip Rosenberg :
“These strategic purchases open up great opportunities for our gamers, and gives Sony a formidable patent portfolio in cloud gaming,”
“It is yet another proof point that demonstrates our commitment to changing the way gamers experience the world of PlayStation.”
The point being missed there, by a country mile, is customers of OnLive were not playing on the PlayStation. However there may be some good news for those who would like to give SL Go a try, even though it’s closing down on April 30th.
Inara Pey and other bloggers have posted details from an email they have received from OnLive’s product manager for SL Go, Dennis Harper :
The OnLive and SL Go services will continue to operate in full capacity until April 30. All services will be free to anyone who has or creates an account. All prices for the service have been set to $0.00, including SL Go.
However the recently announced pay by Linden Dollars option is no longer available. I’ve also read elsewhere that OnLive are not allowing customers to create new accounts, so it may be that there has been an exception made for SL Go, or there may be some confused communications.
The email from Dennis Harper also states :
On a personal note; you all have been so supportive of SL Go. You have my heartfelt thanks for all you have done. I have made some good friends in SL and it greatly saddens me that this project is ending. You all have accepted us n00bs into your community and mentored us on what Second Life really is. I have learned so much! My sincere thanks to all of you.
OnLive has had a troublesome history, back in 2012 Kyle Orland reported : OnLive fires all staff, service’s future unclear (updated). OnLive denied that they had fired all their staff, but they were most definitely in trouble at that point. An interesting point about what happened back in 2012 is that a lot of commentators suggested the value with OnLive lay not in its customer base or service, they suggested its value lay with its patents.
However whereas many people recall OnLive’s troubled past, not so many seem to remember their relaunch last year : OnLive launches new download/streaming hybrid service plan. SL Go was of course, part of that relaunch. I’ve seen a lot of comments in articles regarding Sony’s purchase of OnLive’s patents from people who didn’t realise OnLive was still around.
Whilst OnLive were experiencing difficulties in 2012, another streaming service, Gaikai, were being purchased by Sony for a reported $380m. This purchase has been reported as resulting in providing the backbone for the infrastructure of Sony’s Playstation Now, which is by all accounts, a very good service.
The sunken ship at SL Go’s Island in Second Life currently paints a very bleak picture of what has happened for those of us who enjoy SL Go. The move may be good for Sony, but it’s another bleak day for consumers of tech. This reminds me somewhat of Yahoo’s acquihire of Cloud Party. In that case, as in this one, the consumers lost out, although a glaring difference between SL Go and Cloud Party is that Cloud Party did not appear to have that many paying consumers. However consumers were creating, testing the product, pointing out issues and basically engaging in proof of concept.
As we witness the burning embers of what has been a pretty damn good service for Second Life, we should not let our disappointment shroud the fact that some of us got the chance to experience something rather ground breaking.
As reported by Inara Pey, there’s currently a petition to Sony to try and save SL Go. I doubt that this will have much impact, there are currently over 100 signatures on the petition though. I do wish the petition the best of luck but I feel it will fall on deaf ears.
What’s good for Sony isn’t good for consumers of SL Go, that’s a cold harsh reality. Sony don’t really have an interest in providing a service for Second Life users and they’ve recently closed their own virtual world of PlayStation Home. There’s an interesting quote in that IGN article by Chloi Rad and it’s one that will resonate with SL Go users. The quote comes from nDreams CEO Patrick O’Luanaigh :
My feeling is one of sadness not because Home is closing, but because Sony doesn’t appear to appreciate what an incredible experiment PlayStation Home was.
Many of us feel that Sony doesn’t appear to appreciate what an incredible experiment SL Go was. However none of us outside the business circles know whether SL Go was making money, whether it was financially viable and whether it had any sort of long term future. The concepts of SL Go are not going to go away, companies are going to want to stream games and apps, unfortunately for those of us who used SL Go, one example of this sort of technology will soon vanish from the world.
SLURL To SL Go HQ : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunny%20Dream/230/147/22
The petition will fail. As I’ve tried to hint in replying to comments in my own article, and Dennis Harper (bless him and the SL Go team at OnLive for all their considerable hard work), has clearly stated, Sony didn’t acquire OnLive’s services; they acquired the patents to run those services.
They have zero interest in the services themselves, merely the capability they represent, which Sony can now re-purpose for their own needs.
The blog post from OnLive, which I cover in the article after this one, does help to pain a more clear picture about what has happened and what has been sold, so yes, the petition is very unlikely to get anywhere, although it’s nice to see people care enough to create one.