One of the oldest innovators of online game streaming OnLive will be shutting down later this month and selling its assets to Sony, which already owns Gaikai (which later formed the foundation for PlayStation Now.

The company stated that, “Following the termination of the company’s services and related products, OnLive will engage in an orderly wind-down of the company and cease operations.” OnLive will remain active till April 30th and those who happened to subscribe after March 28th will given refunds. Head to the official FAQ here for more details.

Sony is turning into quite the game-streaming powerhouse, given that Gaikai was OnLive’s major competition. The assets and IP acquired by Sony include “substantial innovations in cloud gaming”. Till will tell how this goes into improving PlayStation Now.

What are your thoughts on the closure of OnLive? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned for further updates on what Sony does with the assets acquired.

PlayStation Now is currently in the closed beta stage for PS4 owners, giving them an opportunity to sample Gaikai-powered service. This allows one to play PS3 and Vita titles through the magic of Cloud-based game streaming, thus granting backwards compatibility to the PS4.

Of course, while Sony recommended a 5 MBps connection to users for streaming, one beta tester recently released a video that showed significant lag at some points. Check it out above to also get an idea of how long games take to load on PS Now. Interestingly, there’s a warning that the tester’s 100MB connection isn’t enough to handle PS Now’s loads.

Then again, this is only the beta stage. Things can, and very often do, improve in the full release. Stay tuned for more information on PlayStation Now, especially as Sony is set to reveal the games that will launch for it, and let us know your thoughts on the video in the comments.

It seems that Sony are working around the clock on Gaikai, their cloud streaming technology for games. According to a number of job listings, Sony are working on improving the security and providing better management/debugging tools for the Gaikai framework.

First of all, Sony are looking for a Service Reliability Engineer who will work on state of the Gaikai network, new features and will have a say in when new features are ready for production. The candidate will also require to work alongside other teams to fasten up production cycles.

Next up is the Principal Security Infrastructure Engineer, who will primarily focus on “geographically disperse network infrastructures and understands the complexities of protecting stateless sessions streams.” This position might indicate that Sony are working to remove any kind of lag while streaming games.

Finally, a Senior Java Engineer will focus on making better tools for debugging and management of Gaikai. Furthermore, the candidate will also need to work on “libraries, frameworks, or toolkits used by multiple projects.”

Stay tuned for more news and updates.

Gaikai had already put out concept images for their upcoming game-streaming service PlayStation Now but now the site has updated to reveal potential prices for some of the games on offer. You can check it out above, and it lists games like Far Cry 3, Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us.

Far Cry 3 would cost $5.99 and Uncharted 3 would retail for $4.99 while The Last of Us will cost $49.99. This shouldn’t be taken as official confirmation of prices – it’s more than likely that these are placeholder prices.

PlayStation Now is currently in the beta stage and will release this Summer. It will aim to offer Cloud-based game-streaming to the PlayStation 4. Another game that will be heading to the service is Beyond: Two Souls.

While there’s been plenty of criticism of PlayStation Now and its overall viability by Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, there’s still plenty of potential with the service. What are your thoughts? Let us know below.

Yesterday at CES, Sony announced PlayStation Now, a streaming service for classic PlayStation games (across the original PlayStation, PS2, and PS3) that will be made available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. Today, talking on the PlayStation Blog, Sony gave us more details about the service.

For starters, they reiterated the intent to expand the service beyond just PlayStation devices, noting that the new 2014 models of the Bravia TV range will support the service. Eventually, Sony plans on expanding the Gaikai powered service to non Sony branded internet connected devices as well.

As for the actual PlayStation devices, PS4 and PS3 will get PlayStation Now first, followed shortly by PS Vita. Only PS3 games will be available to begin with (which makes the decision of putting it on a PS3 rather redundant and baffling). The service will begun to be offered this Summer.

Side note, am I the only one who realizes that this makes the PS Vita the ultimate PlayStation player device? It can now play games from PSOne, PS2, PS3, PSP, and PS4 (via Remote Play). No other PlayStation device can do that (since no other PlayStation device has compatibility with PSP and Vita games).

One clear issue with the PlayStation 4 is its lack of backwards compatibility with previous generation PlayStation consoles. Sony said they were working at addressing this issue using Gaikai, the cloud streaming company they had recently acquired, and now, at CES, we finally know what their plans were.

At CES, Sony unveiled PlayStation Now- the cloud streaming service will allow players to play classic PlayStation games from PS1, PS2, and PS3 on PS4 and PS Vita devices. Multiplayer and Trophies will fully be supported, where applicable, and the service will also be coming to a variety of other devices later, including Bravia TVs, smartphones, and tablets.

It has been announced as a subscription based service, though it’s unknown yet how it will tie in to PlayStation Plus, Sony’s existing online subscription plan; Sony also confirmed players can choose not to subscribe, and rent titles on an individual basis if necessary.

The service is planned to go live by the end of Summer 2014, with a closed beta starting later this month. Let’s hope this works as advertised.

[IGN]

A patent has been filed by Sony sort of confirming suspicions that Sony has been working on a cloud based emulator for their previous games. This emulator would essentially bring back the entire catalogue of previous PlayStation games on the PlayStation 4. The following is a series of excerpts from the actual patent which speak to the proposed usage of the PlayStation remix:

“[0006] Finding new ways to play preexisting video games can increase the longevity of older games. Instead of replaying the same level or completing the same missions repeatedly, gamers often desire new challenges when replaying legacy games. In response to this need, game designers have begun to produce mini-games. Within a mini-game, the gamer can be instructed to complete new objectives or challenge their friends for high scores in a format that was not originally designed into the legacy game. Further, since the mini-game is derived from a legacy game, the gamer already knows the characters and basic components of the game, and is therefore more likely to play the mini-game.

[0007] Mini-games often do not begin at traditional starting points that were used in the original game. For example, the mini-game may begin near the end of a level, just prior to facing a final opponent, or the boss of the level. A boss is an enemy-based challenge which is found in many video games. Bosses are generally seen at the climax of a particular section of the game, usually at the end of a stage or level. Due to the climactic nature of fighting a boss, mini-game designers may choose to use this section of the game as their starting point. In order to make the mini-game more challenging than the original version, the game designer may also want to limit the number of lives a player may use, or change other game parameters such as the amount of health the main character has remaining Other game scenarios may be chosen as starting points for a min-game. For example a mini-game may begin with the game player being the batter in a baseball game where there are two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and the batter’s team is down by one run.

[0008] However, in order to generate mini-games that start with these specific circumstances a game designer must reverse engineer the underlying code in each game and then rewrite the code to enable the mini-game to start under these specific conditions. This process is time consuming and expensive, because it may require multiple engineers to redevelop a single legacy game. Additionally since mini-games are shorter than full-length games, there is a need to produce mini-games in larger quantities”

Sony will be launching Gaikai later this year and it will be interesting as to how this ties up with the service. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: iGameResponsibly

Sony’s cloud computing service for the PlayStation 4, Gaikai, is on track for its commercial launch in 2014. According to Sony Computer Entertainment president and chief executive Andrew House in conversation with The Guardian, Sony will be aiming to eventually move the service to the Vita, Smart TVs and other devices in the future.

“We’re still on track for a 2014 launch of the commercial service. It’s a brand new proposition: we’re pioneering a different way to experience games, i.e. server-delivered from the cloud. And we’re taking a very gradual, step-by-step approach because, first and foremost, we want to ensure that it’s a good experience for consumers.

“I’m not sure I look at it as backwards-compatibility; I look at it as a different way to offer PlayStation 3 gaming experiences – eventually to a much broader range of devices. So it starts with PlayStation 4, then it’s possible on PlayStation Vita, but eventually it will move out to things like smart TVs and other connected boxes.”

Excited for the possibilities of Gaikai? Let us know in the comments below.

The PlayStation 4’s much hyped online streaming and Cloud computing service Gaikai will apparently be releasing in Q3 2014 for the North America. Though a European release date is rumoured for 2015, Sony’s Andrew House is still unsure about the same.

In conversation with Eurogamer, House stated that, “We’re on track to have a commercial service up and running in the US first within 2014. That remains the plan and we’re very much on track to reach that. But what’s important is to understand the full scope of what we’re trying to achieve and why we felt the Gaikai acquisition was important.

“Our goal is to be able to have a new form of game distribution streamed from the server side, initially to PS4 consoles then gradually moving that out to Vita. But eventually, the endgame is to have this available on a multitude of network-connected devices, essentially delivering a console-quality gaming experience on devices which are not innately capable of doing that.

“We think there’s a great opportunity to broaden the market, because you essentially remove the need to make the console purchase in order to have access to that experience. It may sound counter-intuitive, because, aren’t you replacing a business that is your bread and butter? But part of being an innovative company is being a pioneer in new forms of distribution of content, and we would like to be there first and take a leadership role.”

On the launch of Gaikai in Europe by 2015, House remarked, “I really can’t be specific on the European roll-out. It’s a brand new form of delivery. We need to prove out the technology, which we feel is good at its core, but we place – as I think is quite right – a real emphasis on delivering a quality experience for consumers.

“And that will be dependent to a degree on what the strength of broadband connection is going to be, and what our server deployment and infrastructure looks like. We’re hard at work on all of those fronts, but I’m not at a point right now where I can be specific about when our European fans are going to be able to enjoy that.”

Sony currently plans to offer backwards compatibility via Cloud streaming for PS3 games using Gaikai, with long-term plans meant to bring PlayStation titles to mobile platforms, Smart TVs, etc.

Regardless, it seems that Sony’s view of the Cloud is different from Microsoft’s. “We’ve been clear on what cloud gaming means, and that’s getting games to run on the server and sending that video signal to a distant device. The way they are using cloud computing seems very different and I totally don’t understand what they mean by that. So we can’t react to what they are saying because we don’t understand.”

“The explanation I found personally was, again, an article on Digital Foundry. They went through all the computing tasks a game goes through and for each one they checked off if it can actually be done on the server versus the client, and most of the tasks a game has to perform, they said, cannot be done on the server because of the huge latency and the bandwidth.

“There’s so much data going back and forth between the CPU and memory and GPU inside the console compared to going through the internet…There were maybe four or five tasks that actually could be done on the server. So that was very educational to me. After reading the article, the Microsoft message was even more confusing to me.”

Dubious claims by Microsoft or are there things we yet don’t know about the Xbox One’s Cloud computing capabilities? We’ll find out when the console launches on November 22nd. Meanwhile, Sony’s PS4 releases tomorrow in North America with a November 29th release in Europe.