This was basically the argument deployed against movie and music streaming over a decade ago: “people like to own things”. Except it turns out they don’t care, really, if the service is good enough and is priced reasonably. And there’s a generation coming behind that doesn’t even really understand the idea.
On what? I didn’t say it was for zero or negative latency, but for reducing it. Unless you’re saying Factorio does it with magic (which I would believe, mind).
Of course, for a AAA that can barely afford a single cycle for the shinny ,it can’t work without sacrificing something.
Anyway, I’m not sure why the scoffery. This is a nascent technology, but it’s already here and it works. It will be successful or it won’t. I totally understand taking a position that it’s not for you, but dumping on the idea that it’s for anyone seems silly. Core gamers really are one of the most conservative groups of people on the internet. It’s really odd that this is true for folks whose passion relies so heavily on leading edge technology.
The generation that brought back vinyl? I wouldn’t be so sure. Especially after a bad crisis where subscriptions have to be the first to be cut.
Well the generation that took music streaming from miniscule 5 years ago to 2/3 of music industry revenue today.
I love vinyl, but the recent vinyl craze is a fashion statement, not a statement of purpose.
It’s funny because latency reduction techniques like this have been a common part of twitch multiplayer games for the last 20ish years. And they absolutely depend on having zero-latency access to local player input.
All sides of the network in those cases are running the actual game and just exchanging some subset of the data. The local machine runs the same code and corrects when something changes or was inaccurate. Streaming is only running the game on one side. Predict all you want, but the resulting frame still takes whatever time it takes to get to the player.
Yes, like I said, the fundamental error you’re making is that you’ve decided that “gamers” are the market that matters, and the only people who qualify as “gamers” are people like you. Don’t want to / are not able to spend a lot of money on special purpose gaming hardware? Get lost loser, games are for real gamers.
The first group you list has zero value. They don’t play games.
That is, of course, not true. Those people play a lot of games. They also spend a lot of money on games. What they don’t play is graphically intensive games, because that’s not an option given the devices they own. It’s like you have zero empathy for the people who can’t plonk down a few hundred on a console just to get started.
I suspect a lot of parents would have been very happy if no-subscription streaming had been viable six years ago, when their kids started demanding a console to play Minecraft on.
Google has to convince actual gamers to fundamentally change how they play and “own” a game.
“For Spotify to succeed, they have to convince actual audiophiles to fundamentally rethink how they listen to music.” That’d be a totally moronic statement. Audiophiles are the last group of people that Spotify would need to convince. And the same applies to game streaming.
It is totally obvious that the current core gamers are not going to be interested in Stadia for a long time, if ever. They have very little to gain from it to start with since they can already run the games at least as well locally, are going to be very sensitive to latency and frame rates, and are going to be extremely reactionary about any changes. And even if the current population of gamers was interested in streaming, why would they go with Google rather than the eco-systems they’ve already bought into? (XBox, PS, and almost certainly Steam pretty soon).
If the business plan is built around capturing the existing console / high-end PC games market, the people running this project would have to be running a scam on a project they know will fail, and the people controlling the funding would have to be the most gullible people on earth.
No, the play simply has to be that they’re expecting streaming to expand the market, and for Google to be better positioned to compete for those new customers than the incumbents. (And the announcement press conference made it pretty darn obvious where thy think that edge will come from.)
I was laughing at the fact that, in a discussion about Stadia’s ludicrous claims, you cite technology that’s apparently here and thus somehow lends credibility (it doesn’t) to their claim.
The issue isn’t even about negative latency. It’s about the fact that someone at Google really, truly, believes that input prediction is going to solve a problem that’s inherently unsolvable (to any reasonable degree) on a platform that’s based on data streaming.
It’s nonsense. All of it.
Also, citing the existence of something like GGPO, which is a link layer tech, that the tech somehow exists and thus Google “can totally do it”, made me laugh even harder for the mere fact that for that to the be case, they’d have to intercept (they don’t btw) every single networking layer interface from the client (the game) before even touching it. Well, guess what happens when you have the game’s own networking layer in the mix.
Whatever Stadia thinks they’re doing, I’m sure they’ve added their own sauce to the mix, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to be that much different from similar tech (OnLive, Gakai, PS Now et al) that came before it.
I personally think the idea of Stadia is brilliant - if they can pull it off to any reasonable degree. Back in the day, I recall when we all used to buy music and movies on media. Most of us haven’t bought any such media in decades. In fact, I stopped buying music years ago having signed on to literally every music streaming service in existence at some point or another. Same with movies.
Google has the most finicky consumers on planet Earth for their test bed: gamers. And those guys are going to kill it right out of the gate. It’s inevitable. Then once they figure that out, they’re going to kill it like they did every other failed (there’s a shocking list somewhere) Google experiment. Until then, there are some very talented people (most from our gaming sector) working on making it a viable proposition.
Yup - pretty much
That’s basically my reaction as well, except my view is that streaming actually works pretty well for most types of games right now, and that will only improve as time passes. All mainstream gaming will be streamed in <10 years.
Of course enthusiasts will have powerful consoles and gaming PCs at home in 2030, but the mainstream won’t.
At that point I thought we were arguing about whether predicting and going back was a possible way to hide most of the lag for some games. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say it was easy or completely solvable, because a) physics b) I’ve talked about how you can’t just bolt net code a few times, even by quoting the distributed systems “Bible” in the SC thread a couple of years ago.
I thought I had been more clear, but apparently I wasn’t, since I saw others replying first and I thought I wouldn’t be adding anything. It’s clear the games need to be built around being able to rewind, which will always add some lag and higher requirements that high performance games can ill afford.
Stadia is going to be a hit unless Google really drops the ball. Their YouTube integration and one click to start playing games has the same potential to hit the same massive demographic of people that play fortnight but never had a steam account.
It’s just a matter of companies taking advantage of f2p and demos to get no friction buy in.
I wouldn’t go out on a limb and say Stadia in particular will be successful. But I do think streaming games will be, given a long enough time horizon.
Well like I said. If streaming is successful but stadia isn’t then they have totally dropped the ball. Being able to one click play games off of a YouTube vod or live stream has the best marketing potential that Microsoft doesn’t really have. They will probably fumble and turn it to a Google wave or YouTube gaming scenario but they have the biggest marketing advantage than any of the other streaming players.
Bingo. If you re-watch the Stadia announcement event, they were really making two main points. One that they though there was this massive untapped audience. And two, that Youtube would be how they reach that audience. (The number they gave was something like several hundred million people watching gaming videos on Youtube each day.)
The other large point of differentiation seems to be having a tier requiring no subscription. But unlike Youtube, at least that’s something that the competitors can replicate if it turns out to be successful.
Right. But I’d say that the time horizon is 1-2 years. The tech seems to be in place. And new consoles launch in a year, which is exactly when people will need to consider what hardware to go with, and when the consoles will be at their most expensive. And there’s surprisingly much activity just in September-November.
- The price of PS Now just dropped to $10/month.
- Stadia launching at the Pro tier next month (though it’s the Stadia Base level where it gets interesting, and that’s not until next month)
- xCloud beta is supposed to be this month
- EA Atlas closed beta last month
The PS Now price change is particularly interesting. It seems like the first time the price of any of these services has made sense from the consumer perspective, and it’s also telling us a lot about what the economics of this business actually are.
There seem to be four ways people are trying to arrange the business model:
- Buy games upfront, don’t pay for streaming them, no ability to play without streaming (Stadia)
- Bundle both limited-time access games and the ability to stream them in one subscription; can’t stream games that aren’t part of the subscription even if you own them (PS Now)
- Buy games up-front, or buy limited time access to games via subscription; pay for streaming any games you have access to (xCloud)
- Buy games from other sources, then pay a ton for streaming them since the streaming provider didn’t get a cut of the sale (Shadow)
The Shadow model feels like a total non-starter. I can only assume they’re trying to get bought by Amazon or one of the major game publishers. Sony’s model is deeply unappealing to me due to the limits on exactly what can be streamed. I’m never looking to play just something, I want to play a specific game. But he Google and the Microsoft approaches look like they’d work, it’s just that the target audiences are quite different.
Your list is a bit off.
The Stadia subscription offers a limited number of free games every month or so like Xbox Live and is also required for 4k. I do suspect the 4k restriction will be lifted.
For xCloud, we don’t know its business model or pricing yet.
Shadow is the most expensive option, but it also lets you play your entire Steam library, which beats out every other competitor these days when almost every game releases on PC and PC sales are far superior to consoles. Problem is there’s no reason why anyone would have an extensive Steam library without a gaming PC in the first place.
Remember how Halo took shit over by making the game so loose and bullet-spongy and auto-aimy that “holy shit FPS is super fun on a gamepad”?
I look forward to the further endumbening of game design to make up for the jankiness of the platform.
(I also don’t give a single shit about FPS or really most action games any more in my old age, so whatevs, but still.)
Stadia Pro is basically the model that PS Now was until a year ago. I don’t think it’s an competitive model due to the forced bundling. Stadia Base with no recurring costs is the approach that’s unique at the moment, and also the one that would be the most effective at growing the audience.
We don’t know the exact pricing, but Phil Spencer was pretty clear on the broad strokes of their business model during the Giant Bomb E3 interview.
What’s the contradiction here to what I wrote? Shadow doesn’t get a cut off the game or in-game purchase revenue, and never will since nobody would ever prefer their store to Steam. So the prices end up being unreasonable (the price it’s showing me is $33/month), which means there no reasonable target market there.