Sony has pulled out its pocketbook to snap up streaming game businesses before, and is doing so once again. Today it announced that it has acquired streaming game service OnLive for an undisclosed sum. Interestingly enough, OnLive will not become some new tentacle of Sony's gaming empire, but is shutting down at the end of the month.

"It is with great sadness that we must bring the OnLive Game Service to a close," OnLive told users in a notice today, adding that it would keep the lights on until April 30th without charge to existing subscribers. With that said, users who purchased the company's PlayPass games won't be able to play them after the service shuts down, nor will they be able to use its OnLive game system or controller peripheral on any other platforms. However the company is giving refunds to people who purchased either of those two pieces of hardware on or after February 1st.

Bad news if you bought OnLive's console

OnLive managed to have a storied history in its nearly five-year run. The company bet big on the idea of people paying a subscription to stream games instead of investing in standalone game consoles or PC hardware. The real work was being done on server farms, something that promised to let gamers play high-end games on low-end hardware. That all sounded good on paper, but the company burned through money, ultimately laying off its employees in 2012. It relaunched last spring after a wilderness year with a new service called Cloudlift, which was more aggressively priced and tied into Valve's popular and ubiquitous Steam platform. The same platform was also pitched to enterprises as a way to stream workforce software.

Sony's last cloud gaming purchase was in 2012, when it bought Gaikai. It ended up baking that technology into the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita for remote playing. It's also what powers Sony's PlayStation Now streaming subscription service, which is making its way to TVs this year.