Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

asia.nikkei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–268 of 268 posts

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

#261

Post by giobox »

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…

This kind of nuanced discussion of latency is something I only see among really serious gamers.

If you look at things like the Steam hardware survey, it becomes quickly apparent that the hardcore gamer (e.g. someone who has a high refresh rate display or similar and cares about this) appears likely a very small part of the overall gaming landscape, which is a very broad church now.

I think game streaming will ultimately win out hugely - “ordinary” (for lack of better term) gamers simply don’t care about the technical disadvantages. Huge numbers of console gamers already often add 100ms or more lag via their TV’s slow image processing and don’t even notice or care. I don’t think the average gamer is as latency sensitive as many readers here might be.

Most people are going to see that they can have a high end console/PC-like experience for a fraction of the cost of owning a high end console/PC, for the vast majority that is surely an appealing prospect. Finally, John Carmack himself believes the latency issue can be mitigated well enough for most things - that’s good enough for me ;)

> https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1108144741932249088...

My only real concern in all this is the future of video game mods. This is a pretty big thing now and hard to imagine this surviving well in a streaming based future. This would be a loss, creatively and functionally, for some people.

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

#262

Post by dmitriid »

imtringued wrote: post #247
dmitriid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of most FPS and some really tight-action platformers streaming pioneered by OnLive is more than enough especially for the casual gamer. When OnLive was operational I had no trouble playing Batman (something something Arkham?) on their American servers from a MacBook Air in Sweden. I had a similar experience later with LiquidSky which was running regular games downloaded from Steam in their cloud and streaming…

The casual gamer is perfectly happy with cookie clicker or Fortnite on mobile. 2D games should be able to run on almost any platform and 3D games can be toned down until they run well too. The only type of gamer that isn't served by the things above is the "core" gamer that wants high fidelity 3D graphics and real time experiences. Really the only need that streaming serves is to make DRM possible which means the com…

Most 3D games don't even have to be toned down. Because if you stream video, you don't care if you send a video of a 2D game or a 3D game. And that's the main appeal of such services: you don't need to spend large sums of money to be able to play modern games in high or ultra high settings. All you need is a beefy internet connection with low enough latency.

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

#263

Post by lawrenceyan »

kingosticks wrote: post #239
shpx wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not and probably won't be any time soon, if ever. https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/1034029/pc/geforce-...

Is it naive to think these services might ever work through the browser and be truly cross-platform? Like I'm just streaming a video almost?

Probably when Stadia is released, you’ll be able to pay directly through Chrome.

Especially with how ubiquitous Chromebooks are, and how the original beta for Stadia was given to players through Chrome, it’s pretty much a certainty.

Since Microsoft and Sony have a more vested interest in keeping their traditional consoles afloat, you might have less luck with them.

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

#264

Post by ehsankia »

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…

Right, which is exactly big Cloud companies such as Azure and GCP have a huge advantage over most other smaller companies, as they have their own dedicated backbone, allowing them to minimize the number of hops.

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

#265

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

Additionally the market share of AAA-games is currently decreasing.

People with sensitive hearing can tell the difference if a sound arrives All my bets are on bubble on this one. Maybe it could be resurrected as a zombie to offer sandboxed streaming for all those crappy mobile apps.

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

#266

Post by ryacko »

p1necone wrote: post #219
ryacko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency isn't an issue with games that have high time to kill or are purely exploration based, which seems to be something Stadia developers have noticed in the examples. There will have to be local rendering for nearby objects and particles, but this is feasible. DRM isn't totally likely, REnouveau does exist, and basic reverse engineering tools could be created to document the most common game engine functions. Twi…

It's still a bit of an issue, especially if you're controlling a camera with a mouse even 50ms latency is likely to be very noticeable. However much lower latency to these services is definitely viable in a lot of places as long as they put enough servers spread out across the country. In the USA at least there's going to be a lot of areas where the available options for internet are just not good enough though.

Just watch a VR video. They stream in a full 360 degrees.

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

#267

Post by wuliwong »

tetha wrote: post #176
wuliwong wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that you dislike the idea of being beholden to a 3rd party in order to run your game but you lost me with >At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie? What is an interactive movie and how does having a game stream from a remote server change a video game into one of these things?

This has been a complaint especially in the adventure game community. If I go to the cinema to watch the endgame or a john wick movie, I pay 10 bucks for 2 hours of movies. A lot of AAA games are a bunch of boring filler with some interactivity, but you end up with a much worse money per minute ratio. If you discount cutscenes, I've spent 60 bucks on less than two hour of gameplay on some games. Now, I could replay t…

I do think it's possible that streaming game services and what you are talking about wind up a little different. I could imagine that streaming game services could spin up and down servers more dynamically depending on demand. There would be a lot of motivation to do this in a more automated fashion than regular game studios because the streaming service will be dealing with 1000's of titles not just a handful. I think generally you keep your saved game info locally and then it is fed to a server which starts you at the appropriate place? I'm making a lot of assumptions but I do think the basis of my argument 1000's of titles vs ~10 is a pretty good reason to think this won't be handled in the same way.

Also, games like GTA V have been supported for a crazy amount of time. Transitioned into online play. People have probably gotten 1000's of hours of gameplay from a $60 purchase. I play things like fallout and minecraft so I also get a huge gameplay time to cost ratio, so I'm not very sensitive to this from my personal experience.

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

#268

Post by dangus »

skohan wrote: post #97
dangus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it isn't the technical part of Stadia that will determine its success, but its business model. Without the pricing information, not much can be said about it. I'm a little surprised that Google hasn't been more up-front about how much it's going to cost. PS Now accounts for about half of all game subscription service revenue, so half of 273 million (quarterly). Doing the math, that leaves you with somewhere i…

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not a subscription model, and they monitize like any cloud service. As a user you just pay for the games, and the publisher has to figure out how to pay for the bandwidth.

I think I'm starting to see why Google hasn't said anything about pricing:

> The tech giant believes that game developers will no longer be limited to computing and will be able to create games with "nearly unlimited resources". [1]

So the paradigm shift is that as a developer, your game simply consumes the amount of cloud resources that it requires to run, and nothing more. i.e. Stardew Valley is cheaper to run ("publish") than Red Dead Redemption.

So perhaps the idea is that the game publisher has to pay for the compute time and price the game accordingly.

Post reply on HN