A lot of the goodwill towards game pass is rooted in its lack of exclusivity. If MS were to make its first-party games exclusive, that would turn a lot of people off. But I agree, it’s extremely plausible that Elder Scrolls 6 ends up a Game Pass only title. After all, that’s the only thing that would get me personally to subscribe.
Google had a ton of grand plans for Stadia, and building their own platform was necessary to realize them fully. Then they completely gave up on Stadia and none of that stuff happened. Launching on Linux wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, if they had invested the hundreds of millions of dollars required to get AAA games to not only port to their platform but to exploit the cool new stuff they were promising.
So I don’t see the difference between that and letting you buy Elder Scrolls 6 on Steam, just like they’re letting you buy Microsoft Flight Simulator and Master Chief Collection on Steam. But they just don’t put the game on other subscription services.
It was a terrible idea. Making things as easy as possible for developers is paramount unless you have some sort of massive base to begin with which they didn’t in gaming. Having to support Linux/Vulkan is a pain and many have just said no thanks.
Amazon’s new Luna cloud gaming platform is powered by Windows servers and Nvidia GPUs. Luna supports more than 100 games thanks to this Windows support, allowing developers to quickly move their existing Windows games over to an AWS instance and provide cloud streaming access to subscribers. This backend Windows support also allows publishers like Ubisoft to host their own digital services (Uplay) on Amazon’s Luna platform
Amazon has confirmed to The Verge that Luna will run on a standard version of Amazon’s EC2 G4 server instance running Windows, complete with Nvidia’s T4 GPUs and Intel’s Cascade Lake CPUs. Nvidia’s T4 is based on the company’s Turing architecture that also powers the previous generation RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. A single T4 GPU (Amazon might be using multiple) provides 8.1 teraflops of performance and support for Microsoft’s DirectX raytracing technology.
They aren’t available day and date, though, as far as I’ve seen.
Regarding ports, like I said, that was necessary for Google’s grand Stadia vision. Remember they were going to offer all kinds of cool stuff that simply wouldn’t have been possible running Windows executables, like pulling in unlimited elastic compute resources for AI when required, or rendering games at 8k then sampling down to 4k for higher image quality, etc. And of course the jump-in YouTube stuff they demoed then never released too.
It’s easy to say this was a mistake now, because Stadia sucks. But it sucks because Google tossed it in the garbage, they didn’t invest in the platform as required to make it viable. Microsoft’s Game Pass is an example of the sort of investment required. Tossing heaps of cash on a bonfire, literally buying subscribers to build a critical mass.
All those things are OS agnostic, so they can also be done on Windows. Choosing Linux as a big bet, and I believe it’s because they figured that with all the top engines supporting Linux - albeit mostly halfassed - that Linux was safe. Plus, no instance Windows licensing fees to Microsoft.
I think the infrastructure requirements for this kind of service are overstated. Your ping times in sub-Saharan Africa aren’t a litmus test of whether a service can be successful.
It isn’t just about ping times. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon already have the infra. They can host their services on largely already sunk costs. That’s a huge advantage and honestly I can’t see anyone else beating them without that prior investment that’s already paying off.
Cheaper than Microsoft? Probably not but less than operating data/server centers of their own. Netflix shut theirs down and moved everything they do over to Amazon AWS service because it was cheaper.
“Luna is probably going to win the game streaming battle” is simply wrong. Microsoft is absolutely going to win. Nobody else is willing to burn money to buy subscribers like MS.
You clarify further on that you were talking about second-place and yeah, they’ll certainly beat Stadia, but that isn’t a high bar.
I don’t think they are using Azure for PS Now yet. That deal is purely forward looking, and given it apparently was a purely top down decision that the people working on this didn’t know about before the public announcement, I doubt they’ve yet managed to migrate anything at all over to Azure.
Not quite. They still run their own CDN for actually distributing the videos. Which is the part where they have unique scale (they are one of the two biggest users of end user bandwidth in the world), and where Amazon can’t provide them with service that would be as good or as cost effective they do themselves.
So the question becomes whether the gaming use case is general purpose cloud computing, totally fungible with anything else. Or if it requires custom hardware such that you can’t run the gaming workloads on general purpose hardware, and don’t want to do the inverse.
Google clearly believed the latter, since they explicitly specced out the hardware that Stadia runs on. Sony seems to believe it as well, otherwise going with MS instead of Amazon makes no sense. I couldn’t find details on what Nvidia is doing, though it seems hard to believe that with their pricing structure it could be just been an AWS middleman.
I.e. I don’t buy the idea that general purpose cloud computing scale is destiny for this use case, just like it wasn’t for distributing video.
This is what I stated - and I think I need to unwrap it for clarity.
“So, that Amazon went with Windows as it’s basis for Luna is a major issue that simply can’t be overstated because it’s the fastest path of resistance. And it’s precisely why - if they [Amazon] don’t blow it somehow - Luna is probably going to win the PC game streaming battle.”
1st, I am talking from the standpoint of both a dev (don’t have to mess around with Vulcan) and a gamer (with access to more games: because Windows). Both of these are connected because with Windows being the fastest path to getting games, it means a larger games catalog and quicker time to market for them.
2nd, Microsoft’s xCloud is focused on console games - which can also be streamed to a PC. That’s not the same thing.
Also, as I said, Amazon can still blow it - much like everything they’ve blown thus far in that whole games making business because throwing money at a problem without proper guidance and steering, is just a waste of money. Microsoft has a lot going for it; aside from the fact that they understand the games industry more than most, and they’re always laser focused on what they need to do, and how they do it.
For now, as I see it, Amazon is probably going to leapfrog to the top of the class of PC games streaming if they stay on track. Microsoft will probably remain focused on consoles, and continue to treat PC gaming as the necessary evil they can’t ignore. Nobody will remember Stadia by end of the year because they blew it - right off the bat.
The really sad part is that Stadia - as I said - is years ahead of its time. Like OnLive and Gaikai which Sony bought some years back, Stadia really had a lot going for it; but as we’ve all seen, every single person who said “Google is going to fuck this up” is probably nodding right about now.
As I had written in the past, Stadia didn’t need to be unveiled when it did, and they probably rushed to market because they wanted to leapfrog xCloud and whatever Amazon was already rumored to be working on at the time. In the end, the anemic games catalog - which we all collectively lamented - led to decisions months later for them to buy/build studios to make first-party games. An effort that’s 3-5 years depending on the kind of game, studio size, budget etc. Even that isn’t a guaranteed solution as we’ve seen with Amazon’s own efforts at the whole games making thing. And that’s why Microsoft keeps buying studios with a hits driven & proven track record, thus upending that whole “go big” notion. Why? Because Microsoft has people who understand games and the business of making games.
I’ve been in this business so long that I have friends and peers at most companies; and the sentiment is always the same: if people at the top don’t get out of the way and let the people who understand and make games do their thing, failure will always be the outcome. I hear this literally every single day. The really sad part is that most of this falls on deaf ears because in between shilling internally for shitty projects, most of the “voices” can’t say/do squat because of politics, favoritism, consequences, retaliation etc. Heck, for example, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single game dev who understands the Stadia challenges who would voice any sort of critical commentary on it. Most of us* who would otherwise be making games for it, knew - right off the bat - that it was destined to fail if Google didn’t take drastic steps to change course.
Google’s missteps with Stadia, are Amazon’s gains with Luna - if they don’t blow it.
*Disclosure: I actually have a Vulcan path in my next upcoming game’s engine and which I went back to work on because I figured that, if nothing else, Stadia as derivative income was definitely worth doing. Especially given the anemic and “also ran” games catalog that it was going to be saddled with for months - if not years - on end. It’s like the AR/VR app landscape in that the less competition you have, the more chances you have of making money on the platform.
