PlayStation 5

Except with streaming tech. I can, right now, play the most current games on the highest graphics settings with my 10 year old PC by streaming it from a Shadow PC. No reason, except to goose console sales, that Sony couldn’t offer PS5 games to PS4 owners using PS Now.

Definitely no technical reason, but rolling out a worldwide network of hardware capable of doing this is no small feat.

Source: I work for Shadow.

I would pay good money for a PS5 compatible with every single previous Playstation.

I think you are going to (mostly) get that with the PS5. It will, by default, be nearly 100% backwards compatible with PS4, and PS Now will let you play PS3/PS2/PS1 games that are made available.

I would be very surprised if it wasn’t 100% backwards compatible with the PS4. PS1/2/3 will come through the same means as on the PS4, emulation and/or streaming.

I do predict streaming will kill consoles as a mainstream product, but that probably won’t happen in the beginning of this generation. More of a 2022+ thing.

Streaming won’t replace high-end gaming hardware in this generation at all, and probably not in the next either. That’s more of a PC thing though.

I actually don’t think streaming will ever supplant the highest-end. Those folks love building their PCs or at minimum picking just the right mix of parts, so that’s a big part of their hobby. The money is no big deal.

Totally right, it will never replace the highest-end. Eventually they will be a boutique enthusiast club, like classic cars or hifi equipment.

I do think many gamers, including people on this very forum, would be perfectly happy streaming though. I might be myself.

I’d pay a little extra over the base model.

I don’t see streaming gutting the console market until we have nationwide, uncapped, reliable, high-speed internet. Certainly it’ll make a dent (anyone else seen the renewed marketing for PS Now with the $9.99/mo price drop?) but there’re a lot of customers who simply can’t work in that model.

You don’t need high speeds to stream at 1080p and even 4k60 you only need like 40 Mbps. But it does need to be a consistent connection in both bandwidth and latency and yes caps are a clear blocker.

Most monthly wired internet caps in the US are 1TB, which is 56 hours of 40Mbps gaming. Of course that doesn’t count all your other internet use, and is only for 1 person, so yes caps would probably need to increase.

I’ve got an ersatz preview of that with the XBX in my office. Because it’s not my ‘home’ Xbox, any hiccup in the connection causes the “do you own this game” screen to pop up. Even games I have on disc do this if I’ve bought dlc for them. Can’t say I would embrace streaming given the instability of current implementations.

That and I have teenagers who crunch through bandwidth and cause slowdowns with local connectivity and video streaming, let alone with streaming where ping time matters. And a wife who loves binge watching. They can easily overwhelm my Eero’s traffic management as it is.

Depends a lot on the games, I think.
For some games, slower games, sure.

But it is illusory to think that connections everywhere will ever be fast and reliable enough for the fastest games, especially when playing online.

Also, you have to keep in mind that just because the user doesn’t have to have the “proper” hardware for a game, someone somewhere has to have it. Imagine even half of the current gamers’ PCs/tablets/consoles having to sit in some centers around the planet.
I have my doubts if this will even be doable on that scale. Hosting a game for a single user is a lot more expensive than what is usually done in the cloud.

On the other hand, now that Google has seemingly made a silent breakthrough in quantum computers, who knows what we’ll all be gaming with in 10 years…

Most games are great streaming now. Serious gamers will probably steer away from titles that require very fast reactions, like Super Meat Boy or Street Fighter, but everything else is fine.

Connections will be fast enough at some point. It’s silly to say they won’t ever get there. I’ve had gigabit symmetric fiber for a couple years now myself.

Regarding hardware, that’s an argument for streaming. How often do you play video games, as a percentage of your life? The rest of that time, your high-end expensive hardware is sitting completely idle.

Quantum computing won’t have any immediate or even medium-term gaming impact. Codebreaking yes, gaming no.

It’s not even really raw speed. We can push a great experience at 5 megabits, but only if that’s a consistent 5 megabits. In Europe, where connections are largely DSL or fiber it’s great, even if their advertised speeds are lower. In the US, where it’s mostly cable internet, it’s a totally different story. You could do a speedtest on Wednesday afternoon and see 400 megabits, and then run it again on Friday night and see less than 2 megabits. And then a minute later it’s 150, then 20, then 300. It’s a big challenge.

But in general, the nay saying about whether cloud gaming actually works at all is just old-school thinking by people who haven’t really tried it recently, or by people who truly are part of the pcmasterrace and see it as a threat to their hobby.

Yes, I wrote about consistency earlier in the thread. That’s critical.

I doubt you can hit 1080p 30fps at 5Mbps, much less 60fps which is really the minimum I would consider interesting. Not without really compromising the image, anyway. But that’s a very low starting point.

Yer nuts, @stusser. Streaming will never be fast enough if you play fast action games, nor will it ever be reliable enough in my lifetime IMO. It might be fine for you fuddy duddy’s that only play strategy games and Grand Theft Auto, but I’ll stick with the hardware under my TV, thanks.

Or you know, if you live in one of the largest cities in the world with a gigabit connection… yea, it’s probably fine. :P

Well my internet still goes down more often than my power. I still like being able to do things without internet.

I have a 14ms roundtrip ping time to google.com on my home connection. Average human response time is around 250ms. Even if you’re substantially faster than the average, it’s still unnoticeable.

Network latency is only part of the problem, there’s also latency in the datacenter running the game and compressing the video.

There’s 60-90ms latency just from your video card to your eyeballs. TVs can add as much as 200ms more. Again, the people who suggest it can’t possibly work for fast games are simply wrong. It does work, today, and it doesn’t require some exotic combination of network infrastructure and hardware.