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Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

asia.nikkei.com

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

#141

Post by cududa »

skohan wrote: post #83
cududa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been working on this ~2008. Google only started a few years ago.

Yeah but Google has serious bonafides as far as delivering high-res video at scale. Stadia is just Youtube with input handling and a game renderer instead of video files producing the frames.

Wrong. Microsoft perfected this years ago with their Azure hosted desktop product. They’ve been working on high-res compression of GPU frames before Google even put a dedicated GPU cluster in their data centers

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

#143

Post by sterlind »

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…

Rather than purely streaming frames, you could push a frontend client in e.g. webgl + wasm on demand, cache artifacts locally, and send view-independent texture/mesh streams down. Doing so is technically more complex than having a rigid client/server split, but if they start with full streaming they can progressively make the client more intelligent, without being burdened with any specific hardware/client infra choices.

It's also easy to port edge-rendered games to many platforms. It makes sense for MS to ally with Sony and shift their effort to cloud before both the Xbox and PlayStation are little more than rich web clients.

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

#144

Post by davemp »

readams wrote: post #133
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…

Also keep in mind how important multi player is for most big titles now. If you add up player -server-player latency it's actually the same. Given more consistent performance on the rendering/frontend side it's quite possible the overall experience will turn out better.

Client-side prediction does a very good job of hiding the network latency. Granted a lot of games run their servers at lowish ticks/sec (people do complain though) which is 30ms worst case at 32tps.

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

#145

Post by neilv »

guidedlight wrote: post #102
neilv wrote: post #65

I didn't think this would ever happen. Sony execs presumably know the history of how alliances like that have gone (i.e., you almost invariably get backstabbed, sometimes first being given an offer you can't refuse, of a buyout).

Sony is the biggest backstabber of them all

I haven't had that impression, relative to some in industry. My external (and non-MBA) view is that Sony is definitely money-driven, like any other big company, and they aren't stupid, but, when it comes to excesses beyond the norm, they might be more authoritarian than malevolent.

For example, consider that the PS3 Other OS mess might've been more a Japanese "we can no longer have this, and must discontinue it, for the good of the company/platform" (not that I agree that was OK), than "now is the time to screw over those other guys, on things we never intended to honor in the first place" (which has been well-known SOP of some other companies).

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

#147

Post by cameronbrown »

skohan wrote: post #83
cududa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been working on this ~2008. Google only started a few years ago.

Yeah but Google has serious bonafides as far as delivering high-res video at scale. Stadia is just Youtube with input handling and a game renderer instead of video files producing the frames.

'Just'? I'd say game streaming is an order of magnitude more difficult of a problem. YouTube has high throughput yes, but latency is the far more difficult problem, and potentially unsolvable with American ISPs the way they are.

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

#148

Post by cameronbrown »

devoply wrote: post #13
cameronbrown wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like Netflix and Amazon get along fine.

Amazon Prime Video is not any real sort of revenue source. But yeah giving all your game analytic info to your competitor is sort of stupid. But Microsoft probably has access to much of that info anyway.

It's a great selling point for Prime which is more than enough.

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

#149

Post by mr_toad »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #134
ehsankia wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think. Honestly things such as controller and display lag are probably bigger than the round trip latency. And experimentally, anyone who has tried Stadia at GDC or I/O has said that latency wasn't an issue. The bigger limiting factor I think will be bandwidth, especially in America with the awful internet provider situation.

"Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think" This would only be relevant if you had a direct fibre link in a straight line from your house to the service. It's packet switching\routing etc. that introduce latency. And even if you DID have direct fibre, the worst case scenario for distance - server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms, even half…

> server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms

In practice, it’s a lot worse than 200ms. 500-700ms are typical for servers on the other side of the planet.

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #138
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.

Viable interactive VR will not happen over streaming (video sure). It's already tough to reduce latency to an acceptable range when games are played locally. John Carmack has some good blog posts about this if you're interested in the details.

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