Gilgamesh on 18 August 2012
Sony Computer Entertainment’s $380 million purchase of cloud company Gaikai earlier this year was a big deal – the division’s largest to date. But the service could already be in trouble.
With OnLive having gone bankrupt and preparing to reboot with less than half the staff due to an unknown investor, all sorts of rumors are coming out of the employees who were sadly laid off. One source allegedly told Joystiq:
Steve got all excited when Gaikai got acquired, because it kind of validated everything we did.
Continuing to say that, around the same time, OnLive’s patent for gameplay streaming was approved:
So all of a sudden, Steve was like ‘When the time is right, we’re going to hit them with our patent because we’re not going to let some two-bit company ride our coattails.
I guarantee that some time in the future, Steve is going to go to court and sue the shit out of them for stealing our ideas.
How important the patent exactly is is probably something that will be left to the courts, but was previously described as “fundamental” to cloud-gaming by CEO Steve Perlman. OnLive also holds several other patents that could also possibly be used a court case against Gaikai, putting Sony’s plans for the costly company at risk.
