Sony buys some assets of OnLive for its cloud gaming services

Sony Computer Entertainment is buying various assets of OnLive, including 140 US and international patents for cloud gaming services.

OnLive will be shutting its operations on April 30. The company is not renewing any subscriptions, and users whose subscriptions renewed on or after March 28 will be refunded.

OnLive says that the OnLive Game Service, OnLive Desktop and SL Go (Second Life) will all be available until April 30.

According to TechCrunch, OnLive's patent portfolio alone was estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, although it's not clear whether the company was able to achieve that price because terms of the deal with Sony are not being disclosed.

Sony confirmed the deal and said the purchase opens great opportunities for their gamers and gives Sony a formidable patent portfolio.

OnLive was founded more than a decade ago by Apple and Microsoft alum Steve Perlman. It was built to offer customers a way to play visually sophisticated video games without having to own expensive computing hardware.

The way it worked was through a technology called "cloud gaming," where gaming programs would run on powerful computers in a server, and the images would be broadcast over the Internet to a gamer playing on a tablet or computer.