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Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

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Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#511

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These Xbox cloud instances seem like 5-15 ms away while on my home wifi, and like 30-40ms when on my phone.

wifi/celluar have insane jitter than make them completely unusable for competitive gaming if I ping my router on wifi it ranges from 2-10ms 40-100ms on celluar (whereas ethernet is consistently about 100us)

A 5 minute average ping to microsoft.com on my phone while walking around just now was 19ms. Max of 29ms. Pixel 6a on Mint, a $15/mo plan

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#512

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> love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with Interesting take. Why do you think that is? They just fallen out of fashion or something else?

Not the GP but I’ll give my take: The long term value for an RTS is with the multiplayer. The problem is that the games are incredibly demanding to play. It takes a lot of practice and experience to get good enough to get off the “bottom rung” of the online ladder, just to be able to reach close to a 50% win rate. Many gamers find this too stressful to deal with. They end up quitting the game and moving on to somethi…

Hit the nail on the head. The execution requirements for RTS games are steep and the competition is fierce. You have to completely re-arrange your priorities from "win games" to "be better than I was last match, and I'll get there eventually", and it's something that modern audiences don't see often and struggle to engage with.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#513

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I love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with, and it's hard to justify risking putting a lot of money behind them. It's a shame, because I love all of these genres, but I wouldn't be…

Fighters are arguably bigger than they’ve ever been. SF6 alone has made massive inroads in terms of level of entry to the field. Hell one need only look at the size of this years EVO.

Fighting games can simultaneously be bigger than they've ever been but nowhere near the level of success that other genres reach. You either have to be cool with losing 9/10 matches you play or have a large amount of knowledge and/or mechanical execution. Simplifying mechanical execution only goes so far because mechanical execution is just a foregone conclusion at a certain level of play, and most of the game becomes a mental exercise. Many people struggle to accept that they are the problem and the reason they're performing poorly, and this is something that's massively exacerbated by the prevalence of team-based multiplayer games. Prize pools at flagship events are always ridiculously low. One-on-one mentoring is by and away the easiest way to get into the genre, and it is also probably the most "expensive" way to introduce people bar none.

I love the genre; it's in a great place, and it doesn't need to change. I'm glad the playerbase is very cautious about losing some of the magic chasing after mass market appeal. The downside is just that it's hard to justify throwing a lot of money at these games.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#514

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I am pretty sensitive to it. It never dropped into low framerates. Sometimes I'd get a quick blast of compression noise but not often. It's not 4K 120FPS, but on a 1080p laptop the quality was fine. Maybe unacceptable when playing on a 70" TV, but a 14" laptop or a 1920x1200 27" screen it's fine. Not as nice as natively rendered, but way nicer than what that $300 laptop could have done on its own! It never dropped in…

Compression artifacts, spotty connections etc. all of those can be issues with remote gaming. What is never an issue is framerate or graphical fidelity (minus video compression artifacts), which makes sense, considering you tend to have a nice machine remotely that plays your game (e.g. a 4080 on GeForce Now).

One thing I noticed was loading times on Starfield were even faster than on my desktop with an NVMe drive.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#515

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RTS is such a great genre. I know everyone loved StarCraft but I enjoyed Warcraft II and 3 more… along with C&C, Red Alert and Age of Empires. Not sure why. Warcraft 3 was a great balance between micro and macro management due to the Hero concept. SC always just felt like a game of numbers… but I am sure I just wasn’t as experienced. Regardless I would love it if the genre stayed alive and I am glad Age is continuall…

Ms bought Nokia - out of business Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era MS bought Lynda.com- who? MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it? MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.

I live near Linkedin HQ, and judging by their MASSIVE number of sprawling headquarters buildings, quite a few people do pay to use it

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#516

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HN is the only place on the net where I've ever seen people defending the premise of cloud gaming and it's usually (not always) people saying something like "Well I don't game much myself but cloud gaming sounds compelling..." I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some larg…

I do game a good bit, and I like cloud gaming. I find myself away from my gaming desktop often, which makes cloud gaming pretty enticing. And overall it's currently incredibly cheap, a good value.

I get this use case, but I don't think it's very common. Most gamers are near their gaming hardware most of the time. Gamers who travel often usually have some mobile gaming hardware already. The number of people who would game but can't because they travel often and aren't satisfied with existing mobile gaming hardware is minimal. Not zero, but not a huge untapped market either.

Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#517

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RTS is such a great genre. I know everyone loved StarCraft but I enjoyed Warcraft II and 3 more… along with C&C, Red Alert and Age of Empires. Not sure why. Warcraft 3 was a great balance between micro and macro management due to the Hero concept. SC always just felt like a game of numbers… but I am sure I just wasn’t as experienced. Regardless I would love it if the genre stayed alive and I am glad Age is continuall…

Ms bought Nokia - out of business Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era MS bought Lynda.com- who? MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it? MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.

> does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

Some do apparently

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#518
post #297

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I think the technology is about 80% there. To my eye, the graphics and performance are the same as running the game locally. Provided you have a good internet connection, if you could just run a AAA game off of your crummy computer or tv, why would you buy an expensive graphics card? It is definitely where things are going.

You can't just have a "good" internet connection. For some games the difference between 30ms and 100ms latency is a great experience vs being almost unplayable. This is not exaggeration, this is fact and millions of gamers who actually measure their ping will tell you the same.

Rocket League is an extremely twitchy game, especially in 1s. Several of the best 1s players in the world were playing from KSA for years on well over 100 ping. They were winning tournaments without a single loss against players on single-digit ping.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#519

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Does this mean World of Warcraft will eventually be playable on Ubisoft's competitor to Nvidia's GeforceNow?

Does Ubisoft even have a competitor to Geforce Now? But presumably they could sell their rights or license them to others, so who knows how this will actually play out.

Yes, Ubisoft’s competitor is xCloud. That’s what the deal that the CMA forced Microsoft to make does.

Re: Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

#520

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The technology they chose to power the experience, Rainway, seems to have needed a huge amount of work to get good enough for commercial adoption. There have been large differences between app vs browser vs xbox streaming, too.

I wonder if this is a part of the quality difference. I've only used the app version, never the web.

On the same wired pc with the same internet, playing through the app has consistently been a better experience than through a browser.
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