Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard

I'm talking about better versions of this for example: https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/10/nvidia-video-bandwidth/

I forgot to address the Steam Home Streaming with my earlier comment, and I did want to bring that up as well. I didn't even think about it, as the smoothness of cloud gaming just completely pushed this capability out of my mind.

Steam Home Streaming works pretty well on a LAN. Quality-wise, with my desktop at home its even higher quality than Xbox Cloud Gaming. I've got many hundreds of hours on my Steam Link. I just wished they'd make it work well outside of the LAN. I've had mixed experiences trying to run it on a few different VPN stacks. I ran into challenges of it not seeing the other computers, the stream being very unstable and crashing, and other issues. Plus, it means I need my computer's local console unlocked at home, but I prefer my computers to get locked automatically. And even then I've had games get in some stuck state launching or closing where I had to manually intervene on the local console to fix it.

Meanwhile, with cloud gaming I just click launch and the game is going. There's no waiting for updates. There's no managing a local console. I don't even need a gaming rig.

Also, you mention "Most of the United States in particular", I am in the United States. This has been my experience in one of the larger metro areas in the US (DFW). I don't get why it would be viable here but nowhere else in the US. 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage. I haven't been on many trips since getting it, but even a few years ago I could manage to sometimes make Steam Home Streaming work from a hotel WiFi on VPN at various places around the country, even with its challenges I mentioned above. I've got family who game a good bit with PlayStation cloud gaming service on a 5G home internet connection.

43% fiber and 60% 5G definitely isn't 100%, I agree. But it does mean there's a pretty big chunk of consumers who can use this, today. I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me. 43% of ~330 million people is >140M people with home fiber internet, nearly 200M people with 5G coverage, today. And that's just ignoring all the consumers with actually decent cable internet connectivity.

You're not a child but a child is what enables that behavior. I do not have a child nor am I a child. If I am out of the house I am driving, engaged in an activity, or there socially. When I was a kid I had my gameboy and I'd play it nonstop. Then I started driving and having adult responsibilities and all of a sudden I'm not able to do that.

Then again, I wouldn't have gone to the park to watch my infant while I played games. I could do that at my house.

The 43% number came from a study done last year, I imagine its even higher today:

https://fiberbroadband.org/2022/01/05/fiber-broadband-enters...

And once again that's only FTTH. Loads of coax networks have enough throughput and low enough latency to make it work. Either way, I'm still just pointing out its out there. Fast enough internet is in a lot of places, as mentioned even the WiFi at a few coffee shops and bars around me have had fast enough speeds for a decent quality experience. Which makes sense, as the cable provider in the area offers 300Mbit as a minimum speed for only $65/mo on their business plans with WiFi6 APs. The fiber provider offers like 500Mbit symmetrical for the same on their business tier. Every little shop has at least a few hundred megabits of internet if they need to get their POS terminals online.

Mint Mobile offers "unlimited" (aka throttled after 40GB) for $30/mo without any promotional pricing. Visible offers unlimited for $25 for their basic plan and $35 for their plus plan which includes ultra-wideband and a "premium network experience" whatever that means. From my experiences Xbox Cloud Gaming uses ~1GB/hr. And yeah, within my home or my office building my cellular connectivity is pretty poor. But at the same time both places also have WiFi6/6E APs and gigabit+ fiber connections.

And I'm gonna go ahead and reply to the other comment here so we can re-unify this chain. Apologies for breaking it earlier.

> a child is what enables that behavior

Yeah, in that specific circumstance a child is what enabled that specific instance. And I had the infant at the park because we were all going to the park and had other things to do walking around after that, it didn't make sense for me to just stay at home the whole time. However, you're just ignoring the other instances I've shared. Here's another recent one. A family member was out of town for a while and wanted me to check in and socialize with their cat who gets anxiety without friendly humans around every now and then. So I went over, cleaned up after the cat, hopped on the couch with the cat in my lap, and played games for an hour on their WiFi. No kids involved in that story.

Mobile gaming is a growing market. Its a nearly $60B industry these days. People seem to really enjoy the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, phones with larger screens continue to get more and more popular. Cloud Gaming can enable these lower power devices to run much more computationally demanding games with similar experiences to game console or gaming PC performance while only consuming a few watts of power. A lot of people are finding time to play games on handheld devices, the real question IMO is if the economics of cloud gaming really work, because for a large chunk of the country all the technology is already there.

I'll stop replying after this because it's gone outside the realm of a sane conversation, but...

> Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.

You're conflating irrelevances. You're talking specifically about Steam player count. Cyberpunk on PC was Steam and Epic. Both at same price. At launch, Starfield on PC at launch was split between Steam (70usd) and XBox App (0usd for ~30m GP subs, or ~16/mo). Of course GP will take a bigger chunk sales from Starfield as if you don't expect to play a game forever, it's cheaper to buy GamePass and play it for 4 months than to buy it on Steam.