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Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance
- matthewaveryusa 7y agoIs the Akamai (largest CDN in the world) partnership with Microsoft announced last month related? https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2019-press/akamai-expands-partnership-with-microsoft-azure.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2019-press/aka...
- eclipxe 7y agoNo.
- XzAeRosho 7y ago>While details have yet to be hammered out, the partnership will center on artificial intelligence and the cloud. The latter category includes plans for joint development of cloud gaming technology. So this agreement mostly focuses on Sony using Azure infrastructure for Cloud Gaming. I wonder how will Xbox will compete in this scenario, it's kind of weird hosting your competitor.
- cameronbrown 7y agoSeems like Netflix and Amazon get along fine.
- icxa 7y agoDoesn't iCloud use Google Cloud?
- knd775 7y agoYes
- devoply 7y agoAmazon Prime Video is not any real sort of revenue source. But yeah giving all your game analytic info to your competitor is sort of stupid. But Microsoft probably has access to much of that info anyway.
- cameronbrown 7y agoIt's a great selling point for Prime which is more than enough.
- nerdjon 7y agoIt's not like the tech industry is exactly new to using competing companies products. Microsoft using Mac (not even discretely). Apple using AWS, Google Cloud, Azure Amazon Selling competing products etc, etc This may be a bit of a specialized case, but if you run a cloud hosting provider that is not your primary (or original) business you will need to accept that likely be involved in running a competing service. (I am sure AWS hosts a fair number of retailers and related technology)
- eridius 7y agoApple relying on Samsung to build components for iPhones is a huge one as well.
- test6554 7y agoThe cloud changed everything from Microsoft's perspective. They don't care what language or OS or tool you use anymore, as long as you host it in their cloud, they are making money.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- LyalinDotCom 7y agoFirst normal assessment on this thread, spot on!
- remir 7y agoSpotify is also using Google's cloud as well. They used AWS previously.
- captainbland 7y agoI suppose the risk is totally coincidental outages for Sony during critical moments in the product cycle. They'd better have a solid SLA in place!
- skohan 7y agoIt kind of functions as a hedge: this way they can monetize gaming even if PlayStation is winning. Also Sony and Microsoft have a shared interest in having viable competition in the market against Stadia in case it takes off.
- potrebitel 7y ago>it's kind of weird hosting your competitor. Same as Apple using Samsung's tech in one way or another. Money talks after all. Different divisions, different profits, etc.
- lawrenceyan 7y agoI assume this is in response to Stadia?
- Waterluvian 7y agoAnd Nvidia GeForce Now. I'm wildly impressed by Nvidia's streaming solution.
- lawrenceyan 7y agoI remember when Nvidia first launched GeForce Now in 2015 with their attempt at mobile gaming using the Android Shield. It was a good idea in principle, so I was sad to see it not do as well. Glad that Nvidia is pivoting to moving the service back to a full computer setting. The Shield while cool, really could have done with a better screen.
- deckar01 7y agoThe only thing they pivoted on was their pricing model. GeForce now was just them beta testing on shield users. Once they were feature complete they flipped on the switch for PC and started charging more money.
- Waterluvian 7y agoThey're charging money? I'm in a closed beta for free.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoOne of my friends has a Shield, and let me play with it for a while (on and off). I really liked it- everything was so snappy and it was so powerful. I wish nVidia would bring it back, TBH.
- shpx 7y agoBy the way, Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now. Go sign up for their free beta and a couple months later you'll get an invitation https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/waitlist/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/wa...
- minimaxir 7y agoOfficial PR from Microsoft: https://news.microsoft.com/2019/05/16/sony-and-microsoft-to-explore-strategic-partnership/ https://news.microsoft.com/2019/05/16/sony-and-microsoft-to-...
- tcfunk 7y agoWould be comical if Sony still claimed that they can't allow crossplay.
- shmerl 7y agoGoogle 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.
- chronogram 7y agoHow is that Google streaming gaming thing not Google being "lock-in jerks" then?
- shmerl 7y agoIn their context, lock-in could happen if they'll start pushing exclusives. But in technology sense, they are advancing common stack (Linux / Vulkan), unlike MS and Sony who use tools lock-in to discourage platform development by making it more costly.
- la_barba 7y agoCan you explain how its not a lock-in? It seems to require a Google account and is limited to games that are blessed by google. AFAIK, I don't think I can download Stadia and run it on a home server and stream games to multiple PCs in my own home. If Google made it open source, then yes, I'm 100% with you...
- shmerl 7y agoLock-in as in requiring to use Stadia to get certain games. Store lock-in (exclusivity) isn't much better than technology lock-in.
- skohan 7y agoPresumably if Google makes game development for Linux commercially viable, that will make for much more vibrant community support (tooling etc.) for local Linux as well. That plus what Valve is doing with Proton could potentially break the stranglehold Windows has on PC gaming. I personally would go 100% linux on my media PC if I did not occasionally play games on Windows.
- jxdxbx 7y agoApple is not doing a game streaming service.
- bredren 7y agoWill the most powerful titles white label or use their own custom cloud gaming? For example, Dota 2 or what pubg did with its App Store. Removing the end user capital expense of a gaming rig sounds like a huge change. Would drastically reduce the cost of VR setups as well.
- skohan 7y agoI can't imagine cloud gaming will be viable for VR anytime soon. It's far too sensitive to latency.
- bredren 7y agoAn alliance like this is a decades-long proposition.
- skohan 7y agoRecently I saw a talk where John Carmack said he is working with camera manufacturers to find ways to reduce firmware overhead on the image coming out of the sensor for VR/AR applications to reduce latency. A lot can happen in a few decades, but this is a very hard problem to solve.
- Jyaif 7y agoIt's possible. The trick is to render the pictures using the latest position of the headset. Include depth maps to make the rendering more accurate. Use ML to in-paint the gaps.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoMS is contributing Azure resources, Sony is providing the camera sensors, and they're both working on AI. So they're collaborating on enhancing the panopticon and going to charge people to train it. I wish I was kidding, but it's right there in the press release minimaxir linked[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19931405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19931405
- davemp 7y agoIt 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 commodity hardware (see AAA 3D action titles). Latency is very important for these titles and the general rule of thumb is that 50ms of input latency is readily noticeable to humans. Average home connections have ~20-30ms round trip latencies. These speeds are not a reality everywhere or consistent. Combined with hardware input, world simulation, and rendering latencies it can be difficult to get latencies low enough to be comfortable. Modern games just have the client run its own world simulation and rectify with the server later to hide the network latency. This strategy won't be possible with streaming. Is there some alternate optimization that can be made for streaming? The architecture will definitely be simpler with the main-frame paradigm. Maybe if there's only one client it could be feasible to send some batteries included chunk of frames that can be easily constructed based on the next set of inputs. Is there any hint that progress can be made in this direction? If the latency problem can't be solved, I'm definitely bearish or game streaming. Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware.
- politician 7y agoRunning managed clients in a "compute at the edge" architecture that streams video to the end-user might be a good compromise. CDNs are deploying compute/lambda at the edge capabilities, so "gaming at the edge" could be seen as a reasonable expansion of that.
- manfredo 7y agoThis seems a lot more feasible. In fact, that's what the Nvidia Shield essentially is (although the edge computation is done with the customer's desktop computer).
- TheOperator 7y ago
- neilv 7y agoI didn't think this would ever happen. Sony execs presumably know the history of how alliances like that have gone (i.e., you almost invariably get backstabbed, sometimes first being given an offer you can't refuse, of a buyout).
- guidedlight 7y agoSony is the biggest backstabber of them all
- neilv 7y agoI haven't had that impression, relative to some in industry. My external (and non-MBA) view is that Sony is definitely money-driven, like any other big company, and they aren't stupid, but, when it comes to excesses beyond the norm, they might be more authoritarian than malevolent. For example, consider that the PS3 Other OS mess might've been more a Japanese "we can no longer have this, and must discontinue it, for the good of the company/platform" (not that I agree that was OK), than "now is the time to screw over those other guys, on things we never intended to honor in the first place" (which has been well-known SOP of some other companies).
- colemickens 7y agoOf course they are. Google is better at cloud and better at Linux, and Steam/Proton are already turning the tide for big games being available on Linux. If Stadia forces all triple-A titles to be Vulkan compatible, and more likely, Linux-compatible, Windows's strangehold on desktop gaming further weakens. As a Linux user, cloud gaming excites me even though I have no intentions of ever using it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- colemickens 7y agoThanks for the constructive feedback as always.
- sneakernets 7y agoAnd yet, the average American will never be able to use cloud gaming comfortably.
- artemisyna 7y agoI'm curious to see what the long term implications for this technology are. While game streaming is a big market, I can't imagine it being that big of a market, so it'll be interesting to see what sort of longer term plans they're aiming for.
- metalliqaz 7y agoWhy is it that these articles always mention Google's new Stadia service but never mention Nvidia's Geforce NOW, which has been in the cloud gaming space for years now?
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agonvidia doesn't have the scale to endure years of losses while making enemies of half of the gaming industry in order to pursue this. AFAIK they have 0 exclusives lined up, meaning DOA.
- metalliqaz 7y agoIt's been operating for years already. They already have customers. In other words, the "A" has already passed.
- NicoJuicy 7y agoConsole and when unused, a cloud gaming streaming server could reduce lag. That's what I'm thinking about right now.
- coakroach 7y agoOnLive was envisioned cloud gaming in 2012 and was bought by SONY. My internet was not the best but it was quite promising. It was about tine to hear about cloud gaming. I feel like onlive was more than 10years ahead of its time.
- cockroach 7y agoOnLive envisioned cloud gaming really soon and was then shut up by SONY. My internet was not the best but the service was quite promising. It was about time to hear about cloud gaming again. I feel like onlive was more than 10years ahead of its time and Sony 10years late.
- Ericson2314 7y agoThere's something depressing to me about this more than other things moving to the cloud, irrational as it may be. Yeah they already could track you, and you already didn't own the game in many sense, but this just seems extra "casino" like. PC games in particular are like the last bastion of desktop software people actually care about; it seems like the end of PCs and the desktop.
- tetha 7y agoI am sad with this threads discussion. Or I'm old. This is a logical step in lock-in disguised as user experience. Back in the day, if you could maintain the data, my 15 physical 3.5 inch rather unfloppy floppies were monkey island. I lost my personal copy, but if I moved the data, I could have my own copy of monkey island right here. I personally failed on my own maintenance there. Then we had - skipping some steps - something like private WoW Servers. they worked 90% of the way. But Blizzard kept some code and that never worked privately. Most stuff worked on the client side, most stuff on the server side could be reverse engineered. And now we're planning to stream games via something similar to team viewer / citrix, put bluntly. At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie? I can replay several single player games I acquired on steam off-line as long as I have the binary and a windows instance. I'm sure I can play FTL or slay the spire in 2040 without any developer interference. If you stream those games, those games will die harder than the multitude of multiplayer only games with dead servers once the streaming servers get shutdown due to business decisions. Which can and will happen < 1 year after a failed launch in my book.
- p1necone 7y agoAgreed. If we go full in on game streaming we can kiss actually preserving the art goodbye entirely. At least with streaming of non interactive media we can rip it to a hard drive somewhere.
- wuliwong 7y agoI 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?
- tetha 7y agoThis 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 those games after some time. That improves my overall cost-benefit ratio from 60 bucks -> 2 hours of gameplay to 60 bucks -> 4 hours of gameplay. Or, if the game is good, even more. I have a bunch of adventure games I paid 10 bucks for, and I have replayed them a lot and I will replay them a lot. However, if you have a AAA studio, they will consider a game a failure shortly after release. You get one play-through for 60$ and that's all you get, because then they shutdown the servers for their next thing. And of course they will "charge less" and "run updates" and "keep expansions going" and such so it's less obvious. I'm jaded at this point.
- DangitBobby 7y agoFinally, someone listens! I've been saying for years that not enough services are dependent on unreliable internet infrastructure! I can't wait to add single player games to the list of things I am unable to do when my internet provider has yet another massive multi-day outage.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 7y agoSony’s got the game connections, M$ got the clouds
- dead_mall 7y agoEven trying to stream via LAN is unplayable. It's especially much worse streaming from a server that's thousands of miles away from your home. I got 200mbs download and half the upload speed, I played plenty of PS Now titles, and the only problem I have with it is the input lag. There's no escape to it. You cannot play fast-paced games with such delay, especially multiplayer-FPS games, it's just terrible. It's better to have the hardware to play than to play remotely. Unless you don't mind 1-3 second (+ additional cause you're using the internet) input lags, then game streaming is just for you
- p1necone 7y agoIf you find game streaming on your LAN unplayable you probably have a setup problem. If you have a solid router and you're only going through ethernet, no wifi then stuff like steam in home streaming should be basically flawless as far as framerate and input lag goes(I get ~3ms added from the streaming iirc). You will notice video compression artifacts though of course. I do always use it with an xbox controller rather than mouse+keyboard though, so it's less latency sensitive.
- thrower123 7y agoI've tried to like my Steam Link, but it just isn't worth the hassle - wired with cat6 from one room to the other I've always had lags and glitches and disconnects. Throwing in ping times of 50-100 ms to some datacenter, not to mention whatever traffic shaping shenanigans Comcast will inevitably apply, and I don't have a fuzzy feeling about the viability of this rash of streaming services.
- vardump 7y agoDoes your HDMI cable also have "lags and disconnects"? I mean, when you have hardware compression (presumably?), it's not all that different to send it over HDMI than ethernet. Compression latency should be in low milliseconds (1 ms should be plenty.) The latency over ethernet is going to be measured in hundreds of microseconds. Sending a compressed 100 kB frame over it takes 800 microseconds, which can partially overlap with compression. Noticing 2-3 milliseconds extra latency is going to be pretty hard. Something is badly wrong with your setup or with Steam Link.
- 0_gravitas 7y agoCloud stuff aside, the title can also read "two massive media companies will explicitly coordinate and not try to compete with one another in an otherwise practically unpopulated product space"
- _nedR 7y agoThis marks the beginning of the end of golden age of gaming. Two historic foes setting aside their differences to target their common enemy - The gamer.
- hacker_9 7y agoI for one hope it works out, I like the idea of instantly loading any game I feel like playing for an hour. So what if I don't own it, it's a game. I don't any of the movies I watch on TV either.
- LaserToy 7y agoPricing is a key. As far as I know, Game streaming currently doesn't have viable business model. PlayStation Now (former Gaikai) was a startup that wanted to sell game ads (try before buy), and after expanding into actual game streaming struggled to make money and attract users. It is just too expensive. To me, the biggest difference bt movie streaming and game streaming is that gamess are much more resource hungry. Video can be watched on cheap 30 bucks usb stick, for gaming you need 400$ console.
- stkdump 7y agoI wonder if these cloud gaming efforts will also lead to latency improvements in remote application usage such as rdp and/or vnc. We are considering using 'heavy' software dev and CAD/CAM workstations on servers in our server room or maybe even into the cloud, so that we can use lightweight machines locally.
- Jemm 7y agoHaving tried several video game streaming services over the years, I am not optimistic that streaming games will work for fast action games like shooters. The lag between a controller move and screen response is just not adequate, even when the server is only a few hops away with low ping values on an excellent network connection.