531–540 of 834 posts
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I've silently listened on Discord to two different friends trying to get GFN working (for Among Us) in the past couple weeks. It's crazy how hard it can apparently be to install and set up for the average person.
I just downloaded it, booted it up, signed in, and it launched my game.
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They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama... This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great dea…
I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it. Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards.
I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet.
Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error)
However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
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Valve can do this stuff because they are a private company. Gabe has publicly stated that he does not believe in game streaming services, because he thinks computation is best done at the edge.
If Valve fully backed cloud gaming, that would have downstream effects on publishers and PC gaming as a platform. Who would sign on to publish a competitive, reaction driven game if the market is segmented between the high-latency cloud where anyone can play, and physical hardware only purchased by a relatively diminishing market? The audience for tactical precise shooters, MOBAs, RTSs, etc would deteriorate and with…
Maybe, but I tend to think that it wouldn’t diminish, and that this idea that very many will just “get over” latency is something VPs and PMs have convinced themselves of and not something that would bare out in the data.
The first time I gamed on a 120hz display was life changing in a way, I was never totally satisfied playing any sort of competitive multiplayer game at 60hz again, it’s like wearing hazy scratched glasses when the competition doesn’t. And all it took was playing on a friends PC with a 120hz display for half an hour. I think considering how great the push to >120Hz has been in PC gaming, and that High-hertz are now being adopted in smartphones and tablets I’m not alone in this experience.
My point being here that a large part of why people choose to play competitive, reaction driven games, is precisely because they are competitive and especially because they are very fast paced. So fast paced that 8ms of output latency makes a significant difference to a large segment.
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There are less games on Stadia because we are just over 1 year into a 10 year platform growth story. Just because Google is Google doesn't mean they don't suffer from the same chicken and egg problems that startups have. Especially when the market is over 1T and has incumbents like MSFT and sony. Give it time.
All the other gaming platforms have Fortnite (or insert other popular game ) on them, why not Stadia?
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> Obviously you need a strong, steady internet connection for Stadia to shine, but I'd guess that the HN crowd skews towards that. Sad Australian internet noises. > don't want to drop $1k+ on a gaming rig, check out Stadia. Or, or, do buy the gaming rig, because it will still work and you’ll still have the games 3 years after Google inevitably shuts down stadia and you’re left with nothing.
The amount of times in my life that I've gone back to play an old game I've already played is like...three. I'm not a curator or collector, I just want to play some games here and there. If owning games forever is important for you, then buy the hardcopy. For me, being able to play games now on the devices I already own is a huge win.
I guess people who play chess or soccer are "curators" and "collectors" considering how old those "game" concepts are?
Some people may only see video games as a replacement for popcorn movies, a vapid session of watching characters talk about meaningless things and occasionally press a button or two as an illusion of interactivity with something.
But some of us get attached when there's something actually -good- out of it and time memorable beyond the technology used to build it. Thoughtful set of rules that allow a person to either challenge themselves or others. Some of us will always continue to play Starcraft, Counter Strike, Street Fighter or arcade shmups. They don't need a "revision" much like Chess doesn't need to be modified into a game that isn't Chess and soccer doesn't need to become handegg.
Stadia is to gaming what MTV is to music.
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> partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing I tend to agree. In these cloud game streaming wars, Steam is a reservoir of totally untapped crude oil. Its the largest and most active western game platform, period, its beloved by its users, and Valve hasn't even remotely signaled an intention to compete. Companies and products like Steam are one in a million; Stadia, Luna, GeForce Now, xCloud, PSNow, are n…
Valve also has shipped exactly one first-party game since Dota 2 in 2013, outside of VR stuff, and it's a card game. I don't think they're tops on the list of studios that could give Google a big hit game to put on their new cloud console.
But I'm also happy they haven't. These cloud streaming ecosystems are the apex of locked down closed systems. Valve is built on a culture of modding, revving games to make new ones, and being fair to users in a way that doesn't compromise being fair to developers. Cloud streaming systems, by and large, are not. They're built by big-tech megacorps that are looking to buy-in then cash-out on an industry they know nothing about (except Nvidia; if there were one cloud streaming service I'd support, its theirs. Nvidia isn't perfect, but its definitely within their wheelhouse, not a cash grab).
Beyond that, you're marginalizing Valve's dominance in the gaming industry. Of the top ten games by players on Steam right now, again, the most popular western gaming platform ever made, three are made by Valve (CS:GO #1, Dota2 #2, TF2 #4, and #3 is Rust, the monthly TwitchFad). Overall, the only non-Steam western PC games which compete with their numbers are Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, Fornite, Minecraft. The one theme with most of these games is that they're pretty old. People love games they know; when the developer sticks around, builds out a fair monetization scheme, and iterates on the gameplay, the games become unbeatable pillars on whatever service they're distributed on (the few that aren't old: Fortnite/Valorant will get there, and CoD has this in a way, but is definitely the most different every year). Valve is a rock-solid game developer; the fact that they don't release new games every year just speaks to their commitment to their existing communities.
And, they also made Half Life Alyx last year. Its legitimately the most groundbreaking game to be released in the past decade, that unfortunately so few people are able to play. You physically cannot play that game and not have a shit-eating grin on your face the whole time. It is the only game I've ever played in VR (on Valve Index) that made me think "if this game were in both non-VR and VR, I would choose to play it in VR".
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In Lumberyard's case, the engine is free but you're locked in to AWS for any cloud services
Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider? I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files.
So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
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Right... I thought as an idea, it was perfectly sound. The types of technology required to make cloud gaming work seemed to play to Google's strengths. They just really screwed up on the content side. And, well, anecdotally I've heard the tech isn't so great either compared to Google's peers—no idea how that happened, really.
Google had to solve same problem any new traditional gaming console has to solve -- get publishers interested in creating for that console. Good luck with that. The moat is so high that even if you have tech from year 2222, the business side trumps technology.