Ahh you were focusing on PC game streaming. I gotcha. Yes, if you consider that xCloud is only console games and want to play with a keyboard/mouse or games that only release on PC then that’s totally correct.
If you imagine a world where Google invested hundreds of millions into Stadia paying off studios and devs to port to their platform, purchased AAA studios like Microsoft, and offered consumers deals “too good to be true”, they could have been a contender. But like I said from the start, Google doesn’t care about Stadia. They priced it like it was going to make a profit day 1. And that obviously wasn’t going to, and didn’t, work.
Releasing early wasn’t necessarily a misstep either. Google is known for releasing products super-early and keeping them in beta for years. But when a product isn’t really ready for primetime it needs to be priced accordingly.
Regarding Nvidia, their service is priced right for consumers, and since they aren’t Google, Microsoft, or Amazon with their own distributed infra, they’ve got to be burning money like crazy too. Remember GeForce Now allows non-paying users to use it for free, and their paid model is only $5/month.
There’s no reason streaming services couldn’t support mods just like Steam. They would need to be in an approved list and you can’t install whatever you want, of course.
As I’ve <HRosed> in here many a time, game streaming is manifest destiny. It will be the way normal people game at some point. It just isn’t quite there yet. And again, that doesn’t mean enthusiasts won’t own their own local hardware, that just won’t be a mainstream thing.
Sad but true. I see future consoles disappearing – why sell hardware when you can just have people subscribe to your service? PCs will hopefully stick around.
Nvidia has tech to allow splitting a single physical GPU into multiple vGPUs that can be used across multiple VMs. Their consumer drivers and firmware don’t permit consumer-level GPUs to do that.
Yup - I am aware of that because I am familiar with the tech. That’s not what Luna is doing though. AFAIK, they’re using single G4 (Accelerated Computing) instances which, by default, come with a single GPU that’s not virtualized. I guess is they’re going to spin those up depending on the game type, though it’s still going to be challenging for high performance games I think.
I thought that since the AMD Radeon VII has been out for over a year now, that they would go with that choice instead.
I’m a bit annoyed at that article - I thought it would have some usage stats showing that Amazon Luna has higher usage than Stadia from the headline but it’s actually just a generic review.
I’m kind of surprised at the positive title, when the description of how well the tech worked was probably the most negative I’ve seen for a game streaming service.
Amazon has opted for a clever “channel” strategy. Think of how you access various movies and TV series on a streaming box (like, ya know, Amazon Fire TV). You pay Netflix, Hulu, and others a monthly fee, then visit their portals for specific content. Amazon Luna works the same way, with only Amazon’s “Luna+” channel available as of press time. Amazon has already announced that Ubisoft will have its own Luna channel, which will require a separate monthly subscription (price not yet confirmed).
I hate this stuff when I’m trying to click on shows or movies in Amazon Prime Video, and it turns out to not actually be part of Amazon Prime.
^this. And there’s no way to filter it out from the settings either. I don’t sub to Cinemax, Starz, IMDB, Hulu or any of that - yet shows from those services show up in my feed. Pretty sure they’re paying Amazon to do that stuffing.
The mobile app has a “show only free to me” switch, but it is sorely missing from the TV apps. It also doesn’t save that setting, so you have to flip it every time you open the app again.
On my LG TV app, the channel stuff is segregated into its own row except for the channels you subscribe to. It doesn’t show up in the recommended/featured rows.
Prime shows have a little white ribbon in the top left corner of the thumbnail. (At least on Roku.) I can barely see the ribbon on my screen though and have to really squint.
I should note they just added a “free to me” option on the roku app. Long overdue, and it still can’t be made the default, but at least it finally exists.
