91–100 of 268 posts
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The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared. Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.
What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects th…
This is actually already done in many AAA titles. The idea is to basically always be showing a prediction of what will have happened in ~70 ms, and update your state model accordingly. Given a datacenter to run the games on and all of the announcements about being able to take a snapshot of the state, this doesn't sound super far-fetched.
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Stadia has overcome the speed of light, so yes it's a viable product now and needs a response. /s
There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.
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 in the realm of 2.38 million active subscribers (273 million *.52 / $60).
The PS4 installed base is about 86 million consoles. That means only about 2 or 3 percent are active PS Now subscribers.
Source: https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/ps-now...
If Stadia comes out with a massive Steam or PS Store type of catalog where you can access any game, I think it'll be a runaway success.
If it's just PS Now (along with a similarly small catalog) without the need to spend as much on hardware, I don't see it being anything more than a ~2-5 million user subscription service.
It's a nice pile of revenue, but it's not "overtake the rest of the market as the preferred way to play games" type of numbers.
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…
At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.
Google finally advances Linux+Vulkan gaming using a side door that bypasses the market share blocker altogether. MS and Sony don't like it and plan to mirror Google. Instead, they should stop being lock-in jerks, and should support Vulkan as well.
I'd be happy if Valve became a middleperson for AAA titles native on Linux+Vulkan. They have SteamOS and a decent controller ready to resurrect, and everyone to slap on PC hardware consoles again, given a makeover. (Things like Wine are effectively sabotage.)
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…
20-30ms seems high? At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.
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…
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…
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.
Twitch shooters will never be replaced by this though.
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Sure, competition is good. But it doesn't mean it should come with lock-in problems. MS learned not to mess things up on the Web (remember ActiveX and Silverlight?). But when it comes to gaming, they are still as nasty as in the '90s. And Sony is even worse in this regard. I agree about Stadia in general. I wouldn't want it to become too dominant, especially since it's like DRM on steroids - you can't back up anythin…
I think a lot of people are going to prefer to run games locally. I'm looking forward to playing strategy games on Stadia or games where lag isn't too critical. For quick reflex games, lag is important. And if VR games ever take off, lag is going to be critical.
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Still, the games will have a vulkan renderer and run on some form of linux, making an official port to the actual OS more likely.
The Xbox One has an NT kernel and DirectX as the graphics API. Stadia's use of Linux and Vulkan are probably about as helpful for a port to desktop Linux as an Xbox One game is for a Windows port.