Pyrian on 14/9/2014 at 02:37
Well... What about South Korea? Don't they have a large gaming community and some of the best connectivity on Earth? Surely streaming gaming would be better there than anywhere else, for the time being.
Renzatic on 14/9/2014 at 03:06
It'd work in South Korea. But here? Our ISPs are whining about Netflix every chance they get, and are out claiming 12mbps connections are more than fast enough for the vast majority of people. I'd hate to see their reaction to something as bandwidth heavy as a streaming gaming service.
Starker on 14/9/2014 at 13:56
If streaming ever gets popular, this will have several consequences...
1) The publishers could have near total control over a game -- since the players can't access the game files, there will be no piracy (and also no modding) and the game will be available when they want it and for how long they want it.
2) There will be more single player games that are designed to account for input lag and more games in the genres where input lag doesn't matter.
3) Digital downloads can essentially be replaced by rental -- you'll likely either pay something like a full 60$ subscription for the game or something like 10$ for a shorter period.
This will only affect a certain portion of games, and it doesn't mean that digital downloads will disappear, but there will surely be games where you'll hear how it's absolutely necessary for the game to be available via streaming only, not entirely unlike the justifications provided for Diablo 3 or SimCity online requirements.
Now, the big question is how likely is this to happen -- how feasible this is (keeping in mind that technology keeps advancing), how sustainable and how profitable? Valve, for example, has made a bet (
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/07/future-imperfect-valve-still-not-sold-on-cloud-gaming/) that it isn't worth pursuing.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear a lot of the publishers, media companies and telecommunication companies really want to make it happen. In 2012, a cloud gaming company called Gaikai was bought by Sony and they recently rolled out Playstation Now. Gaikai becoming a subsidiary of Sony was a 380 million dollar bet Sony made on cloud gaming. Even Onlive is actually (
http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/05/onlive-cloudlift-onlive-go/) still hanging on. And there are other companies like (
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-01-08-ciinow-cloud-gamings-tipping-point-will-come-this-year) CiiNOW and (
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/07/12/ubitus/) Ubitus who want to get in on the action and grab a share of the imaginary future. These companies are absolutely taking it seriously.
catbarf on 15/9/2014 at 04:36
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
In a world where gamers complain that IPS monitors aren't as good as TN monitors because of that extra 5ms of lag
Those gamers are the ones that already have two-thousand-dollar rigs and clearly aren't the target audience for streaming gameplay in the first place. I think there could be a considerable market for gamers who don't want the large investment of a gaming PC or next-gen console, or want a portable gaming setup. Some games just aren't going to work perfectly due to latency, like anything that requires twitch reflexes, but slower-paced games should work fine with a tiny bit of input lag.
Also, let's not forget that there's a huge market for shooters on consoles, where they're often locked to 30fps. The difference between 60fps and 30fps is 17ms versus 33ms between frames, so I imagine that for a lot of gamers a slight increase in latency (20ms or less) may be acceptable even for fast-paced games.
Shadowcat on 15/9/2014 at 05:30
Not to mention that companies who are taking this seriously will be certain to develop games for which that sort of input lag is not a problem.
(I envisage that this will quickly become known as "dumbed down for streaming".)
Mr.Duck on 15/9/2014 at 09:44
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
In a world where gamers are threatened by the limiting of their bandwidth due to the tyrannical ISP Overlord, only one man...one duck...is willing to fight back. MrDuck is Duck Sauce in: Stream Hard. Coming to Netflix soon........when we have the capacity to actually stream it without pauses.
:cool:
demagogue on 15/9/2014 at 10:49
I think Duck's mind may be run by an in-the-clouds service.
Renzatic on 15/9/2014 at 21:34
WEE........
........WEE
Muzman on 15/9/2014 at 21:55
I think similar things were said about traffic problems with video over the net back in the day; it'll never work, you can't see videos very smoothly or in high enough quality and maybe silicon valley and Finland will have nice service. But the mere existence of youtube and so forth made people struggle with it over shitty internet for long enough and eventually things improved.
Now, things have improved quite a bit over that time but they could still be much better in many places and even with those pretty big improvements proper gaming over the 'net is probably asking for an order of magnitude more improvements in network speeds and service quality. This I realise. But I suspect the thinking is similar; that for the right kind of service to hit with people, it won't matter in the long term how shitty the service is or how it won't work for faster games, the kids are gonna want it.
For the right kind of service.
Of course, it could never work but I think they're going to keep trying for this reason. Also for the reason that the world's tech providers think the whole world will be a better place if people aren't in control of their own stuff and can't wait to put everything in the cloud. So there's that.
Gryzemuis on 16/9/2014 at 01:07
Video on the Internet works because all we need is a lot of bandwidth. And bandwidth has been growing since the eighties. And is still continueing to grow. What you don't need is low delay (aka low Round-Trip-Times, aka low "ping"). You can be on the moon, and YouTube and NetFlix will still work fine.
Gaming over the Internet is different. Bandwidth is not important. Because gaming is about response-times (RTT). And the very important factor in response-time is the speed of light. Regardless of whether you have a 10 Mbps or a 1 Tbps link, at both speeds the signal still only carries with the speed of light (180 km per millisecond through fiber-glass). This number will never ever improve.
Gaming with streaming-services takes the worst of both. You need a lot of bandwidth, because you brute-force transmit a whole HDMI signal. And you need fast response-time. Because it's a game. Raw graphics signals require insanely high bandwith. HDMI is 1920x1080 pixels, 3 bytes = 24 bits per pixel, and 60 frames per seconds. That is roughly 3 Gbps. Will we ever have that bandwidth in the future ? Sure. But by that time PCs will have 12000 x 4000 resolution screens, running at 200 frame-per-second, and 32 bits color depth. Which requires ~300 Gbps. You could compress/decompress such a signal. But then you need extra compute-time, which increases response-time (lag). And you'll need more compute-power on the end-station (to decompress the received signal).
Game-streaming-technology is an inferior technology solution. It just is. Even if you can make it work, it'll be more expensive for the average gamer than the current technology.
The only benefit is that it gives 100% DRM. And that is why large corporations keep trying. I hope they'll lose a lot of money, and all go broke. I rather see them invest money in developing great games. For a more diverse audience than just the Call of Duty and BattleField audience.
