| Title | Cloud game streaming has always had problems. Maybe Google can fix them? |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | October 1, 2018 |
https://youtu.be/sE53eSbzxoU
Google is experimenting with cloud gaming. Google has announced Project Stream to tackle the biggest issues with providing full interactive “on demand” game streaming to players…
Probably not, since the single biggest problem with cloud gaming is that it puts your games on someone else’s server and you have zero control over them.
That’s your biggest problem with it, but lots of people seem OK with services like Spotify that do the same thing.
Cloud gaming will arrive, and it will bring with it big changes to the status quo. Dismissing it out of hand because it doesn’t work exactly how you like it is silly.
Lots of people like owning their music and have big problems with services like Spotify. Also, most people just passively consume music. Having control over the actual files is not relevant in the same way it is for games. And of course, Spotify is a rental service. Most attempts to do cloud gaming that have hit the market so far used a purchase model.
I’m not saying it won’t happen, or that there aren’t ways it could be a useful tool while avoiding the “games-as-a-service dream”, but I don’t trust publishers with this technology and you shouldn’t either.
I believe the opportunity to open gaming up to a vast audience without a gaming pc or console is well worth the downside.
I sincerely hope no one ever gets this to work. In addition to losing what little control we have left over our gaming libraries, you’re also talking about the total obliteration of modding and, most likely, the end of the indie gaming scene as a meaningful commercial force. Unfortunately I suspect it’s inevitable, because we’ve seen time and again the last couple of decades that people will sacrifice literally anything on the altar of convenience.
I think it’s going to happen eventually. Millenials and younger do not care about “owning” media. They don’t place any value on media posession because they’re used to on-demand consumption. At the same time publishers want this very badly. It gives them full control over their media.
I think that the demographic of people who want to game, are unwilling or unable to invest in gaming hardware, but do have the substantial internet bandwidth and interface knowledge to successfully stream games and play them is a heck of a lot smaller than you are making out, and the potential sacrifice (i.e. the future and longevity of the entire fucking medium) much larger.
For now, maybe. But remember this is about phones, too, and lots of people have phones capable of 25 megabits right now. This isn’t just about the US and Europe. There are billions of potential gamers in other areas of the world.
I don’t think it’ll happen tomorrow. This is a five-year transition at least.
The modding scene will be the biggest loss for me.
I recently causally looked at the ps4 version of streaming and noted the disclaimer that all the games were the basic versions without DLC - unless the gave specifically was a “GOTY” edition, or otherwise noted.
Developers are going to need to figure out how to “slot in” DLCs for different streamers. I don’t even know how they would do that with modding. I think it was, Bethesda(?), that tried to control it’s own modding scene on consoles. Not sure how well that worked.
Phone games require UI specifically designed for phone gaming and even then are a terrible experience 95% of the time. I don’t see game streaming on mobile being terribly practical unless they are custom designed for mobile. And if all games start being exclusively designed for mobile we’ve got bigger issues.
Fortnite’s 80 million mobile players say “Hi!”
PS - you sound a little like a guy fighting the closure of the last Tower Records in town.
I think at the point that everything is designed for mobile, that’ll probably be it for me and gaming. I fully expect it to happen eventually, and I am not looking forward to that day. It’s also one more reason that game ownership matters!
The biggest games in the world (revenue and player count) are mobile. Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, every Asian MMO and gacha title.
I am fully aware that many people have no standards and don’t care if their gaming (or indeed viewing) experience is massively compromised. But as long as there are other venues for that content that aren’t, more power to them, I suppose.
The thing is, with streaming games, specifically, there are a lot of incentives for companies to make that the only way to access their work, regardless of the actual hardware receiving the stream.
I disagree, I do not believe the incentives are lined up for streaming only delivery. There are too many scenarios (that are capped due to physics) that make games being 100% streamed untenable. I just don’t see how that’s more economical for companies than direct sales and digital downloads, and PS Now moving towards a download system proves that to be the case.
Regardless, I"m happy if this can be streamlined. If I can bring a chromebook with me on business trips or vacations and be able to pick up my PC games off from where I left off at home I’d be in heaven.
It gives them total, essentially uncrackable control over the game. It’s the ultimate DRM. And there are plenty of examples of companies doing everything they can to assert and consolidate that kind of control, very much against the interests of consumers and arguably to their own financial detriment.
I agree that there are technical issues to overcome, which I see as the primary thing saving us for now, and I hope you are right that they won’t be able to overcome them to a degree that is publicly palatable. But I get frustrated when all the coverage is talking about the technical challenges and the potential to make gaming more accessible to what I see as a very limited demographic, and not about the implications for consumers in terms of things like modding, long term access to these games, and so on.
By your logic we should not take any steps towards innovation because it might be a slippery slope that in several decades has a very very very slight chance of eroding all of our freedoms.
Let’s turn the hyperbole down a bit. There are not only technical limitations but practical limitations to what you are suggesting will happen.
What world have you been living in for the last decade? If there’s any chance that game publishers can assert 100% control over market usage of their product, based on their history with DRM and the obvious examples in other media markets, what on Earth would lead you to believe they won’t do it?
Because Game Pass, PS Now, Gamefly, GameTap, Origin Access, and many other services hasn’t made any dent in this at all. Or the fact that I can play Monster Hunter World with mods despite it having online play and using Denuvo DRM. Or the fact that Microsoft was forced to pull back on their always online systems because it was not practical and was going to cause legitimate lost revenue and business for game developers. Or the fact that GamePass has proven to increase game sales, not decrease it. Or how about how the console market hasn’t killed the PC industry and hasn’t prevented a lot of games still being ported, despite publishers giving up control by having things on an open freedom.
There is zero evidence that game streaming will cause physical game sales to stop, even if all technical limitations are remedied (which again goes against the laws of physics). This reminds me of all the Gabe Newell and Tim Sweeney tin foil rants that never came to pass.