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Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

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Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#71

Post by iandanforth »

davemp wrote: post #56

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability. There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model. On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on…

The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared.

Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#73

Post by Jyaif »

skohan wrote: post #25
bredren wrote: post #24

Will the most powerful titles white label or use their own custom cloud gaming? For example, Dota 2 or what pubg did with its App Store. Removing the end user capital expense of a gaming rig sounds like a huge change. Would drastically reduce the cost of VR setups as well.

I can't imagine cloud gaming will be viable for VR anytime soon. It's far too sensitive to latency.

It's possible.

The trick is to render the pictures using the latest position of the headset. Include depth maps to make the rendering more accurate. Use ML to in-paint the gaps.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#74

Post by manfredo »

iandanforth wrote: post #71
davemp wrote: post #56

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability. There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model. On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on…

The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared. Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects that the player blocked at the right time from their perspective when viewing the delayed stream) I can't see how a game like that would be playable on Stadia.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#75

Post by manfredo »

politician wrote: post #61
davemp wrote: post #56

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability. There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model. On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on…

Running managed clients in a "compute at the edge" architecture that streams video to the end-user might be a good compromise. CDNs are deploying compute/lambda at the edge capabilities, so "gaming at the edge" could be seen as a reasonable expansion of that.

This seems a lot more feasible. In fact, that's what the Nvidia Shield essentially is (although the edge computation is done with the customer's desktop computer).

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#76

Post by colemickens »

Of course they are. Google is better at cloud and better at Linux, and Steam/Proton are already turning the tide for big games being available on Linux. If Stadia forces all triple-A titles to be Vulkan compatible, and more likely, Linux-compatible, Windows's strangehold on desktop gaming further weakens.

As a Linux user, cloud gaming excites me even though I have no intentions of ever using it.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#77

Post by dmitriid »

davemp wrote: post #56

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability. There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model. On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on…

Outside of most FPS and some really tight-action platformers streaming pioneered by OnLive is more than enough especially for the casual gamer.

When OnLive was operational I had no trouble playing Batman (something something Arkham?) on their American servers from a MacBook Air in Sweden. I had a similar experience later with LiquidSky which was running regular games downloaded from Steam in their cloud and streaming video to my laptop.

If they do cooperate on creating a similar service, this will definitely be a net win for the gamers.

However, if that's what happens, and if the service is successful, we might end up seeing less games tailored to run on the console's hardware with low latencies, and we'll end up having cloud-optimised games (much like we have mobile-optimised games now). But this is pure speculation at this point.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#78

Post by jerf »

loudmax wrote: post #49
shmerl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, competition is good. But it doesn't mean it should come with lock-in problems. MS learned not to mess things up on the Web (remember ActiveX and Silverlight?). But when it comes to gaming, they are still as nasty as in the '90s. And Sony is even worse in this regard. I agree about Stadia in general. I wouldn't want it to become too dominant, especially since it's like DRM on steroids - you can't back up anythin…

I think a lot of people are going to prefer to run games locally. I'm looking forward to playing strategy games on Stadia or games where lag isn't too critical. For quick reflex games, lag is important. And if VR games ever take off, lag is going to be critical.

VR is the streaming killer. I was not entirely sure they'd even be able to get 2D video streaming like they have, because that already pretty much tapped out the technical prowess we can have. Heck, just running it over a network at all means you're going to experience pauses long enough to drop frames.

Since I assume Sony & Microsoft know this, and they aren't countering with a VR push but instead trying to match them with streaming, I suspect they judge the market either isn't there yet, or may never be there (on any business-realistic time scale). Or they just can't resist the DRM and lockin.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#79

Post by rincebrain »

manfredo wrote: post #74
iandanforth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared. Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects th…

I believe they're talking about the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey trial.

Re: Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

#80

Post by cwyers »

shmerl wrote: post #18

Google finally advances Linux+Vulkan gaming using a side door that bypasses the market share blocker altogether. MS and Sony don't like it and plan to mirror Google. Instead, they should stop being lock-in jerks, and should support Vulkan as well.

How does Stadia advance Linux+Vulkan? The games run in a data center (and they're not running a standard Linux port, the presentations I saw made it sound like they were running basically another console port).
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