Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very curious what these changes are. Last I looked at PWAs they would get you 95% of the way there for most things, but a number of issues made the use of them as an alternative to native apps untenable (namely the reliable persistence of any data). If Amazon can pull off streaming arbitrary content, full screen with low-latency touch streaming in a way that doesn't feel janky, that'd be a pretty exciting workaro…
The reliability of local data controversy was overblown. Local storage only has a 7 day expiry when the page is not saved to the Home Screen. https://love2dev.com/pwa/ios/ Unused web apps that have not been added to the homescreen will have their cached assets purged after 7 days. This is less of a problem than most think. Also, iOS devices routinely perform better than Android devices with respect to web rendering a…
Luna – Cloud gaming service
221–230 of 288 posts
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#222The power to be had offloading rendering could totally kill console and PC one day just from a technical angle. Imagining a Pixar like experience coming soon, straight from AWS. Can a home PC or console ever compete with a render farm?
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#223I like strategy games and I enjoying modding / editing various aspects of these games. I don't think Cloud gaming will allow me to do these.
no, you're SOL on that one, but fortunately strategy games don't (usually) have very high spec requirements. I have geforce now and used Stadia before, and use them to play the high-end games I have on steam that I wanted to play but would never bother getting an actual machine for. A decent gaming rig is worth more than I'm willing to pay for, so this is a good compromise.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have tons of PC games I "own" but can't play anymore. One of my favorite tycoon games was Sid Meier's Railroads, but it can't run stable on any machine with more than 4GB of RAM. Sure I could spin up a Windows XP VM but that's not a reasonable solution in any way. Same thing with Full Spectrum Warrior, just doesn't run on modern OSes. I can play Unreal Tournament 2003 or older Call of Duty games or... if I can find…
My Steam account has 282 game going back 15 years. I'm sure there's a few that don't work anymore, but I've never come across one. PC has a great compatibility track record even if a few games from the early 2000's don't work.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#225The price looks really good compared to Stadia, and being able to use a dirt cheap Fire Stick that many already have instead of a $100 hardware investment is a huge plus. To really drive adoption they could cut the price of the controller and make some games available for Prime members. That said, I think there's a tendency to pooh-pooh the "gamer" concerns about streaming far too much in the rush to declare that the…
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reliability of local data controversy was overblown. Local storage only has a 7 day expiry when the page is not saved to the Home Screen. https://love2dev.com/pwa/ios/ Unused web apps that have not been added to the homescreen will have their cached assets purged after 7 days. This is less of a problem than most think. Also, iOS devices routinely perform better than Android devices with respect to web rendering a…
iPhone's SoCs are really great but I doubt iOS Safari's WebGL+JavaScript performance outperforms Android's native app.
If the top of the line Android phones are slower than the $399 SE, can you imagine how slow the average Android phone is?
But I think this is all a moot point, there shouldn’t be any heavy lifting on the client and all phones have special hardware to handle streaming video.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#227The Venn diagram for target audience and situational use cases of these services has always seemed very small to me. At least the subscription model and game selection seems better than Stadia. edit: Also, it seems to me like the target audience is for the same sort (and I’m not trying to denigrate) that watch movies on their TV with internal speakers or can’t fathom why you’d pay more than 30 bucks for headphones or…
Yes. Its that high. PS4 sold ~115M units. XB1 ~50M. Switch ~70M. Steam has ~100M MAUs. There's overlap in those, and those numbers also really under-represent China and the huge PC gaming scene there, but I think we're in the right magnitude.
By and large, this group's interest in cloud gaming would only significantly extend to being able to access the games they already play on the hardware they have, when out and about. Xbox, Nvidia, PlayStation, and whatever Valve releases will own this group. They're not re-buying games on Stadia or Luna and locking themselves into that platform, nor dealing with locked cross-saves, cross-achievements, cross-social, its just not happening.
Second group: Lets say iOS users. Representing 1.5 billion people worldwide, significant overlap with the previous group. These users probably wont get too heavily invested into any cloud streaming service, because they are all inaccessible on their mobile device. Yeah, there's a Luna web app: I'm sure it'll be horrible.
Third group: People with bad or no internet. 160 million Americans lack broadband. Some of them still buy game consoles and suffer through weeks of downloading updates. Most don't. Online play sucks, but 150 ping is manageable. You learn to play with the ping. These people will never use any cloud streaming service.
We could go on, but the point I'm reaching is: I, too, have no clue who will be signing up for these services. It really feels like these cloud companies just have graphics cards laying around and are supremely uncreative with how to get value from them. Or, they want to own the world and its taken them thirty fucking years to recognize that, hey, gaming is a thing and boy are they late to the party.
Gaming hardware is not expensive. A Switch costs $200; a brand spanking new Xbox Series S, $300. You don't need a two thousand dollar PC to play all the great games out there. Stadia and Luna want you to buy their controllers and their dongles, the upfront cost is not zero, and consumers are not blind to the ongoing cost and expensive games (Game Pass anyone?! Its a fucking steal! And it practically comes with xCloud! Why do people still think Amazon and Google can compete with this?)
If there was some investment vehicle which allowed me to specifically short Stadia and Luna, I would put every cent in my savings and retirement into it, down to the last penny. Cloud streaming has a future, but it won't be via these two products.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhone's SoCs are really great but I doubt iOS Safari's WebGL+JavaScript performance outperforms Android's native app.
The average Android device is not exactly a top of the kind phone on top of that, Java based Android apps aren’t exactly known for performance. If the top of the line Android phones are slower than the $399 SE, can you imagine how slow the average Android phone is? But I think this is all a moot point, there shouldn’t be any heavy lifting on the client and all phones have special hardware to handle streaming video.
I agree that iPhone SE is steal cheap for chip performance.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think 5G can definitely help here, assuming it provides faster and more reliable connection. It used to be unthinkable before 4G for people to watch videos everywhere on their mobile phones.
Most providers softcap at 50 to 100 gb . At best I'd get 10 hours of gaming here. Don't get me wrong, I want this to succeed. I want to be able to play COD or Halo from anywhere with a 5g connection. But with such high data usage it's DOA
At best you don't use high quality 1080p on a bus. That's 3.5x the max bitrate twitch uses.
Re: Luna – Cloud gaming service
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know, I got playstation now a year ago and played a bunch of games in the cloud with my playstation and it worked pretty flawlessly. I was surprised.
In my experience the video compression on PS Now is very noticeable, especially in dark scenes. Lag is usually fine at least for games that aren't particularly lag sensitive, but there are days when it's spiking so much it's unplayable (and online games installed locally are fine). I haven't been using the streaming much recently, though: now that it lets you download most PS4 games there's not much point to the stre…