Nobody’s going to throttle or offer paid prioritization, because the man on the street understands they’re counter to net neutrality. Instead, expect Comcast to build their own game streaming service competing with Google, Sony, Microsoft, and the rest, and exempt that service from paid bandwidth, and to offer a bundled discount if you choose Comcast’s service.
I’d be in for that service. I was really impressed with the way Project Stream worked on my pc, which is definitely not a powerful device. If I can easily stream this stuff to TV then maybe I could ditch my pc and console. Man that would make my wife happy.
Makes perfect sense to me. Vast majority of the day, my $700 videocard isn’t doing anything. I’m at work, or out and about, or at home not playing a videogame. It’s wasteful.
Based on my experience with Odyssey and Project Stream, I’d be in for a reasonable subscription. There may be too much lag for hardcore MP shooter action, but single player action games seem to work just fine at 30fps.
much rather have my own computer than use a service
When it comes to cloud business models, the explanation is never utilization of idle resources. First of all, trying to fill in the trough with batch jobs is actually really hard.
But in addition to that, Google appears do their machine learning on their own custom-built TPUs rather than on GPUs like other companies. So any existing GPU capacity they have would be for selling to GCP customers.
I think it’s just that everyone is trying to become the Netflix of games, and Google Play is the second largest game store in the world by revenue… (After the App Store).
It used to be, that’s the main reason AWS was started. It’s just grown so much farther out than that.
No, it really wasn’t. That was just Amazon’s marketing spin, and possibly an attempt to keep the competitors in the dark about how that business worked. In reality they were just printing money at 50% margins right from the start.
The problem with the theory about selling unutilized capacity is that everyone wants that capacity at exactly the same time. When does Amazon’s own traffic peak? At just the same time when their customers’ traffic peaks, both seasonally and in terms of the day-night cycle. So that’s the peak they have to provision for.
Huh? Again I"m saying that’s how it started, that’s not how it is now or even relatively recently.
AWS started because Amazon’s data centers had to have huge capacity to handle the holiday sales traffic and a lot of that infrastructure was not needed the rest of the year. This was a way to monetize that extra hardware the rest of the year without having to expand as much. A lot of web traffic is not seasonal like ecommerce is and therefore it’s not like every AWS customer back then peaked at the same time as Amazon’s storefront peaked.
It was also created because Bezos recognized very early on that SOA was going to be critical for their own scalability and AWS solved their own internal capacity management issues as well.
Except that is clearly not true. Did Amazon stop selling EC2 capacity to their customers over the holiday season in the early days? No, of course they didn’t, since selling that capacity to the EC2 customers was more profitable than any other business they were doing.
You do realize how averages work right? Sure they had to expand their peak capacity for the holiday season but by having customers pay to use their under-utilized resources the rest of the time they brought their average utilization of their infrastructure and smooth out their peaks and valleys, because again most customers do not have peaks that align with Amazon. This allowed them to have customers help pay for amazon’s own infrastructure as well and allow them to recoup the cost of expansion.
Streaming videogames wouldn’t be the google cloud’s primary use. The cloud already exists, the sparse capacity exists. Peak usage would be a rounding error for them for a very long time, and if it actually does take off well then great, they have a new business generating revenue and can buy additional hardware to support it.
Personally I wasn’t impressed with how Odyssey looked streamed to my PC. I noticed a bit of digital artifacting and banding going on in the background, and a reduced LoD. Your average gamer may not notice or care, and certainly the technology will continue to improve.
I do agree it’s likely to be the future of gaming.
Yes. I also understand that averages aren’t what matter. Provisioning has to happen based on peak usage, not average usage.
And again, that is not true.
Which part of the EC2 customer base do you think just shut down for all of November and December? Or stopped serving their own customers during prime time, and told them to come back after midnight when EC2 spot prices would be lower? Which EC2 customers did Amazon stop selling machines to?
None, obviously. Given that’s the peak they had to provision for, the “selling unused resources” argument just makes no sense. But looks like it’s a great marketing pitch, people will just eat it right up even though it makes no sense at all.
None of which applies to Google, because their primary business is selling ads, search, and their own services like Gmail, and GCloud and videogame streaming will be a small part of that. AWS was always a separate business, it wasn’t slack capacity from hosting amazon.com.
Yeah, this guy is right.
Also, when it comes to me streaming games ever in my lifetime instead of owning the hardware to play them on? Not gonna happen. I’m out of the hobby if it comes that, full stop.
Strangely, Phil Spencer has said they are designing the silicon for the next generation Xbox specifically to facilitate its use as both a game streaming platform, and and on demand cloud compute platform they can rent to clients. It sounds like that’s an iffy proposition in more ways than one.
I don’t see why. Xbones and PS4s are basically PCs. You either dedicate a set of resources, including passthrough GPU, to an Xbone VM or a Linux VM.
AC: Odyssey was added to my Uplay account today, presumably from Project Stream. Check your libraries.
Yeah, mine too