God of War 3 is what almost 10 years old? It had it’s day. It got the millions from people who paid full price and instead of going to pasture they can certainly stick it on some streaming service.
I just don’t see how we have devs over in one corner saying I want more money, need more money, to do great things with the employees i can keep with more money and require a curation process so people can see and buy our stuff and then over here, hey this is the future, streaming forever, let’s throw all our shit on a streaming service, either copy cable and make it stupid expensive or maybe copy Netflix, make it cheap and be surprised when they start doing more in-house stuff, or maybe something like Spotify and hope we have enough people going through mounds of games so that mine gets enough “play” each month to pay the bills and then some. And that’s just how it looks like, to me, for the devs.
Of course if we had access to a bunch of older titles available, maybe that would work but why pay for this new shiny multi-million dollar budget title that requires multi-million in sales to cover it when some parent can hand out 15 dollars for good enough games . I feel like I am pulling a Mr. Wonderful here, how are they going to make money on this? The musicians bitch about Spotify as it is. Netflix puts out meh movies that works for them as they lose external content, and everyone is starting a competing service against them. HULU yanked free all together. And meanwhile, the kids are still playing Fortinite and gobbling up video game playing videos.
Good points, yeah economically it looks like a disaster to me as well all around. Everyone loses.
In my opinion (I am NOT speaking for my employer here) now is the time for successful developers to be emulating HBO and going direct to the customer more than signing up for other peoples services.
Wait, they see what we play and what we do in the games? I think there’s a series about this, something about people playing Dead Red Redemption in real life, lots of violence and really cool music. It doesn’t end well…
I think game streaming will work best in a windowed release schedule. Sony doesn’t put their first party games on PS Now day one because they are too valuable. They’re on a roll of 10+ million selling hits. It’s the same way I don’t think Disney are going to release Avengers: End Game and Toy Story 4 on their streaming service the same day as theaters. They’ll come later.
That’s not to say Sony couldn’t be more aggressive about adding their own games to PS Now. They’re not all as old as God of War 3, Bloodbourne is on there, for example. But they could definitely establish a regular cadence for when first party games come to PS Now. Even if it was after 2 year from release, that would be better than the “will they, won’t they” approach being used now.
If the idea, or at least the potential, is to be even more like Netflix, in that there is a significant lag between the new releases and when it becomes available for the subscription services, that makes sense… but I wouldn’t call that the future of gaming like some others are kind of saying it is. It would be more like an additional service, sort of supplemental one that might target a group that isn’t hugely being served right now, maybe.
Spotify does current but the costs are smaller and there is still some disagreement between content creators and Spotify in terms of who is getting paid and how much because… well that’s a hard one. And again that is in addition to the radio and the albums and the concerts, not instead of.
And if it helps anyone, I’ve got a 100/20 Mbps cable internet connection last I checked. They have been slowly boosting speeds to compete with the local FiOS peeps, but I’m pretty sure that’s where I’m at.
Yeah, I think the “sea change” talk is totally out of whack with reality. Practically speaking, music cost nothing to record, and nothing to stream. By contrast, a AAA game costs as much as a blockbuster movie to make, and is exponentially more expensive to stream. The economics will have to settle somewhere sustainable.
Well if we have theater goers (people with the hardware and maybe high/extreme expectations) and Netflix goers (subscription group, patient) well then fine. Netflix exists just fine alongside theater goers. It’s not like no one is seeing movies in theaters because Netflix showed up.
That was exactly my speeds when I was playing AC:O on the Google streaming thing, and it worked pretty well, but there were definitely a few times when it glitched out and slowed down.
I’ve since upgraded to a 500/50 connection plus changed out my rickety old router/extender home network for a mesh wi-fi system, and I really wish I could try it again on the new, fast network.
Hard to say if it will be be successful or not, but it definitely looks like Google is vested in trying to make this work. Definitely seems like a 5+ year commitment to me.
DOOM is a pretty twitchy game, if it works well they’ve got the implementation down. I don’t think streaming will ever work for games that require extremely fast responses like Super Meat Boy or fighting games.
I mean, “noticeable” input lag is just worse than what I can do right now with a PC. Why would I ever want this? It’s like telling me how great it would be if I stopped using my OS directly and did everything within a virtual machine… hosted in the cloud. With a monthly fee.
Any PS3 game is streaming only, and PS4 games are download only on your PS4, but you can play PS Now games on your PC via streaming as well. For a long time it didn’t have PS4 download support either so I would assume that most of it’s rise has been streaming.
Sure - but I think the appeal is more around the idea that you can do this on machines w/o the graphic power to run locally but with a decent wireless connection. Like maybe you’re on your work laptop and bring up a browser screen to play Witcher 3 for a few hours before turning in.
Sure, I guess. I think the disconnect here for me is that sort of use case doesn’t interest me (not to mention I can’t imagine employers being cool with it) for a variety of reasons. For one, when I’m playing a game I like to be where I’m comfortable, not using some shitty mouse from the office. And if you need the controller, I’m not sure how useful it is to bring that to the library, work, a hotel, or wherever I may be that I just have to bust out some Doom. And again, I can’t imagine this doesn’t require a good amount of data to transfer between host and client, which is going to be something someone notices if that’s the sort of thing someone has to keep an eye on.
And for those that don’t have a console or a decent gaming PC and instead pay for this (which I assume is a subscription model, it would be even more useless if it’s just a store front for games you can only play from the cloud) that’s just … a bad way to invest your funds, imo. I mean, anyone with a good enough internet connection to take advantage of this probably already has a gaming rig/console, I would bet (or they aren’t gamers and have a lot of bandwidth for other reasons, but they probably won’t be subscribing either).
I think the potential for the tech is neat, but like folding phones, it doesn’t do much for me.
This seems to be the key point. The only way it seems to make a lot of sense is as a big bet on 5G. At the moment, the market of people with top-notch bandwidth and no data caps, but no real gaming hardware, has to be pretty small. If 5G a) works as advertised, and b) takes off, that’s going to change. Big ifs, though, at least for the next few years.
