Surely, they could afford $5 million dollars to buy out OnLive, which "was" bigger than Gaikai.

There is no way to monopolize "cloud gaming". It's not like OnLive and Gakai are the only people that understand streaming technology, Nintendo and Microsoft could very easily hire people with expertise to create a similar service if they really wanted to. In fact I believe Microsoft scooped up a lot of OnLive talent already.

Sony was stupid quite frankly to spend so much on Gakai.

Completely different way of streaming games. Online required you to buy the box and controller. Gaikai you can play the games on top graphics straight from your browser!

2 different things
Gaikai Technology is much more advanced and more suited for the future.
As the poster above said > Gaikai = direct playing without anything else.

Sort of agree with the other people, except you could play OnLive without a box.

My best guess is -- Gaikai was successful financially, OnLive went into massive amounts of debt trying to build up a customer base quickly. Gaikai suits Sony's needs --- If Sony has bought OnLive, that means another console they would have to look after and make it successful. It also means an entrance into the PC cloud buisness, which OnLive did not have a large portion of.

As others have said, these two aren't the only cloud streaming services as well.

Most of the time, you want to buy in as little as possible bc buyouts are money losers 80% of the time. If they already have the tech with Gakai, then it makes no sense to buy anything else. they already have it, time to get to work!

Didn't onlive come with truckloads of debt?

Too soon to tell. Have to wait and see.

They should have just developed it themselves. It's really not very complicated. Unless they needed the patents in which case patents suck.

The tech, the talent, the patents and the already established (and expanding data centers) among other things. It was a great deal for Sony. OnLive was valued much higher at the time and we see how they ended up now don't we? Sony went with the right choice.

And besides, none of us here will truly know what ideas/projects Gaikai pitched to sony. They are working on multiple projects for them now. I'm excited to see how it turns out