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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. Accessibilit

by davemp 7y ago

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 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 ago
Running 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 ago
  This 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
    I see this as being a more plausible implementation for say multiplayer twitcg shooters. Market needs to scale up a lot for this to be viable though...
marcoperaza 7y ago
Without net neutrality, the companies running game streaming services will be able to pay for prioritized transmission to reduce latency and jitter.
- Zekio 7y ago
  Won't have much to do with net neutrality really since they will want the traffic onto non public fiber as fast as possible for more direct routes which will have a bigger effect
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Yeah the bandwidth needs are going to be high enough that laying dedicated fiber is not only an advantage in terms of latency but also absolutely necessary because the regular lines will be at maximum capacity if everyone streams video games at 20mbit/s but ISPs will still refuse to upgrade their infrastructure.
iandanforth 7y ago
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.
- manfredo 7y ago
  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 that the player blocked at the right time from their perspective when viewing the delayed stream) I can't see how a game like that would be playable on Stadia.
  - rincebrain 7y ago
    I believe they're talking about the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey trial.
    - iandanforth 7y ago
      Yep!
  - shaftway 7y ago
    > Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end 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.
    - manfredo 7y ago
dmitriid 7y ago
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 video to my laptop. If they do cooperate on creating a similar service, this will definitely be a net win for the gamers. However, if that's what happens, and if the service is successful, we might end up seeing less games tailored to run on the console's hardware with low latencies, and we'll end up having cloud-optimised games (much like we have mobile-optimised games now). But this is pure speculation at this point.
- Faark 7y ago
  I remember using Gaikai a bit. It was quite usable with non-reflex based games like From Dust. But that's quite common these days. I sometimes RDP over wifi to my gaming PC when to lazy to transfer saves for games like Factorio or KSP. Still I have a hard time imagining first person games, since I despise those with significant input lag. Even just on a local PC some games have a horrible delay unless you run very high frame-rates (quite a bunch of those Unreal Engine) and I always have a hard time getting into those. Now with an additional 20-30ms network latency... for this to be close to acceptable, they would have to get the on server delay close to nothing at the very least. I doubt that will happen while games are still release on multiple platforms.
- imtringued 7y ago
  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 companies want to have complete control over the user experience and they certainly are going to abuse that control as much as they can.
  - 7y ago
Xixi 7y ago
I have no idea how reliable it is, but quoting wikipedia [1]: "Testing has found that overall "input lag" (from controller input to display response) times of approximately 200 ms are distracting to the user. It also appears that (excluding the monitor/television display lag) 133 ms is an average response time and the most sensitive games (fighting games, first person shooters and rhythm games) achieve response times of 67 ms (excluding display lag)." These numbers are from the PS3/XBox 360 area, which certainly sold massively well. Since display lag is not included in these 67ms, this is what these streaming services would have to aim for. It doesn't sound completely insane given the 30ms round trip latencies of home connections. On a more subjective note, I think it's going to be really hard hunting down high end gamer PCs. On the other hand lots of games don't run particularly smoothly on consoles (especially "normal" PS4 and XBox One, rather than PS4 Pro or XBox One S) that these services are directly aiming at. I can perfectly imagine a stadia version of The Witcher 3 running circles around the PS4 version that lags so much... But I don't think it would hold against the PC version. But I don't game much at all anymore, so my knowledge is mostly outdated. The last games I played were 80 days and A Dark Room on my iPhone (both pretty good games). So I guess I'm now more in the target demographics of Apple Arcade. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag
- ehsankia 7y ago
  You can probably do even better than 20-30ms round trip if you're one of the large Cloud companies with data centers everywhere. Amazon so far doesn't seem interested, but Google and Microsoft definitely have the infrastructure to pull it off. Sure you won't get high end PC gamers, that's not really the target demographic here. It's the millions of console and mobile gamers.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  Actual video gamers right now go out of their way to get displays with very low input lags. 1080p144hz TN low input lag displays are used quite a bit in esports to shave a few msec. You literally win more often if you react faster. People aim to get TVs with sub 16ms input lag. However that's not most of the market. The appeal of cloud gaming is for single player non-competitive games. These are the most pirated games and the games where input lag matters the least.
mattlondon 7y ago
20-30ms seems high? At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.
- kn0where 7y ago
  USA has no (local) competition for internet, it’s almost all regional monopolies or duopolies where one (cable TV company) is expensive and ok and the other (copper wire phone company) is slow and unreliable.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Some places (mine) are, by local ordinance, unable to receive high speed internet because the company that owns the rights/stupid ass poles that they run everything on along the road offers high speed internet access ALREADY. . . . SO COOL!! How do they do it? By defining high speed as dial-up speeds in the ordinance they helped the local small, technologically inept government craft! God Bless The USA
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Back in the early 2000's in Ohio, under 80ms round trip latency was once advertised as 'leet gamer stuff.
- ahje 7y ago
  There's a lot of people who can't get fiber when you get outside the cities. I'd be thrilled if I could get under 35ms.
  - mattlondon 7y ago
    6-9ms is not fibre here - I was referring to copper ADSL that is available pretty much everywhere in the UK (apart from some really isolated tiny villages/hamlets)
ryacko 7y ago
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. Twitch shooters will never be replaced by this though.
- p1necone 7y ago
  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.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    Just watch a VR video. They stream in a full 360 degrees.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Streaming based DRM doesn't need cloud rendering to be effective. The client can download 3D models and use prediction and local collision detection while the server is still responsible for the secret sauce like combat rolls, item drops, missions. Reverse engineering is still possible but even the private MMORPG server scene is actually pretty "dead" compared to the actual games they are cloning. Adding content is expensive and replicating content is sometimes impossible so the developers basically end up building what amounts to a custom game which uses the same rendering engine as an existing game. Becoming an indie dev and working for free on your own game ideas is a far better strategy although the chances of success are low.
ManuelKiessling 7y ago
Honestly I just don't get why every single time there is discussion about game streaming, the topic of lag as a potential show stopper comes up, and every time it's a hypothetical discussion, which doesn’t make sense at all - the solutions are out there! Don’t assume - just verify it. And when you do, you will find out that there isn’t any actual issue. I’ve played games like The Witcher 3 via streaming over three years ago. Input/output lag simply isn’t an issue, and I’m your average German VDSL user, nothing special. From my point of view, there is no sense in any further discussion - the empirical data is already in.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  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.
  - ClassyJacket 7y ago
    "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 of which would be noticeable in many games. I'm not saying it's impossible to do game streaming, but you can't just divide the distance by the speed of light and say it's low. That's not really the issue.
    - mr_toad 7y ago
      > server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms In practice, it’s a lot worse than 200ms. 500-700ms are typical for servers on the other side of the planet.
shados 7y ago
When playing online against other opponents, having the gaming machines be very close to each other might make up part of the latency introduced by the distance between the player and the gaming machine. Maybe. Your first point is key though. Piracy is a big deal. People can say until they're blue in the face that it "helps", or that "they wouldn't have bought the game anyway", and for some unknown percentage its true, and for some other unknown percentage its a straight lie. If they go from "optionally play a game via streaming", to "this game MUST be played via streaming" eventually, they get the second group (the ones who WOULD pay if they couldn't get it for free) instantly. Only if it doesn't suck, obviously.
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  They also lose everyone not interested in streaming games (like myself). I'm sure they've run the numbers, but I know plenty of people who actively purchase games and are not at all interested in streaming them.
  - shados 7y ago
    For sure, I'm in that camp too. I was in the anti-Steam camp back in the days too, and well...that didnt work out for me.
    - ancientworldnow 7y ago
      The other consideration is bandwidth. Streaming a game is far more intensive than just playing it and many US households are under tight data caps (not to mention throttling under peak hours). I just am not convinced by the advantages, for much of the gaming demographic.
jeremyjh 7y ago
I’ve played Bloodborne on PS Now and it works great. This game is really dependent on fast reactions and smooth camera panning. I think if you try it out you might learn something.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> 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). I think it's actually more or less the opposite? Twitch platformers like Celeste and Cuphead can't afford input lag, as they require very quick and precise movements from players. It so happens that these types of games almost always have low system requirements. Rhythm games and fighting games tend to be similarly lightweight. Street Fighter 5 won't run on a potato, but the hardware required is far from state-of-the-art. By contrast, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 already contain large amounts of input lag when played locally according to Digital Foundry, and consumers don't seem to care much. This isn't to say that adding more latency is a good idea—and I have no idea if the existing latency could be whittled down to compensate for streaming—but it clearly doesn't bother people much.
readams 7y ago
Also keep in mind how important multi player is for most big titles now. If you add up player -server-player latency it's actually the same. Given more consistent performance on the rendering/frontend side it's quite possible the overall experience will turn out better.
- davemp 7y ago
  Client-side prediction does a very good job of hiding the network latency. Granted a lot of games run their servers at lowish ticks/sec (people do complain though) which is 30ms worst case at 32tps.
  - readams 7y ago
    You can do similar tricks in a cloud setup also though; notably you can do hit detection based on what the user was seeing when they entered the input rather than what the server was doing later. This is pretty similar to client side prediction.
sterlind 7y ago
Rather than purely streaming frames, you could push a frontend client in e.g. webgl + wasm on demand, cache artifacts locally, and send view-independent texture/mesh streams down. Doing so is technically more complex than having a rigid client/server split, but if they start with full streaming they can progressively make the client more intelligent, without being burdened with any specific hardware/client infra choices. It's also easy to port edge-rendered games to many platforms. It makes sense for MS to ally with Sony and shift their effort to cloud before both the Xbox and PlayStation are little more than rich web clients.
- chimpburger 7y ago
  Streaming anything but frames defeats the purpose of a frame streaming service.
- Pombal 7y ago
  Yep, see polystream.com
stcredzero 7y ago
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? I'm working on a system that unifies single player and multi-player development. Think of it like zeit.co's "NodeJs Now" but for games, with a local-only configuration option. The way my system relates with streaming, is that the client is scaled way down in complexity. Basically, the sync protocol is a stream of positional updates from the server. The client becomes little more than a screen entity display. Then, the developer has the option to add a bit of "own world simulation" to further hide latency. (Or, in the case of the game I've implemented, just "own entity simulation" is enough.)
ezoe 7y ago
We care about the 50ms latency because the current games are designed for the platforms with <50ms latency. If the platform is changed, so the game too. > Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware. Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone. That said, I don't like the current trend and I hope they failed on streaming video game.
- delfinom 7y ago
  >Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone. Problem is, smartphones still are shit for input (lol touchscreen) in any precise manners so what point is there in trying to run intensive games on it via streaming.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Clown gaming is compelling in every way except gaming.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
They will just host turn based strategy games, like yahoo chess.
kraig911 7y ago
I recall we all said the same crap about streaming HD movies with a monthly fee too. I think the only true problem with streaming gaming is that the quality of games will diminish even more.
giobox 7y ago
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?s=21 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.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Additionally the market share of AAA-games is currently decreasing. People with sensitive hearing can tell the difference if a sound arrives <1ms too late and the sound system needs adjustment. 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.

by davemp 7y ago

politician 7y ago

Running 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 ago
This 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
  I see this as being a more plausible implementation for say multiplayer twitcg shooters. Market needs to scale up a lot for this to be viable though...

marcoperaza 7y ago

Without net neutrality, the companies running game streaming services will be able to pay for prioritized transmission to reduce latency and jitter.

Zekio 7y ago
Won't have much to do with net neutrality really since they will want the traffic onto non public fiber as fast as possible for more direct routes which will have a bigger effect
- imtringued 7y ago
  Yeah the bandwidth needs are going to be high enough that laying dedicated fiber is not only an advantage in terms of latency but also absolutely necessary because the regular lines will be at maximum capacity if everyone streams video games at 20mbit/s but ISPs will still refuse to upgrade their infrastructure.

iandanforth 7y ago

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.

manfredo 7y ago
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 that the player blocked at the right time from their perspective when viewing the delayed stream) I can't see how a game like that would be playable on Stadia.
- rincebrain 7y ago
  I believe they're talking about the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey trial.
  - iandanforth 7y ago
    Yep!
- shaftway 7y ago
  > Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end 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.
  - manfredo 7y ago

dmitriid 7y ago

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 video to my laptop. If they do cooperate on creating a similar service, this will definitely be a net win for the gamers. However, if that's what happens, and if the service is successful, we might end up seeing less games tailored to run on the console's hardware with low latencies, and we'll end up having cloud-optimised games (much like we have mobile-optimised games now). But this is pure speculation at this point.

Faark 7y ago
I remember using Gaikai a bit. It was quite usable with non-reflex based games like From Dust. But that's quite common these days. I sometimes RDP over wifi to my gaming PC when to lazy to transfer saves for games like Factorio or KSP. Still I have a hard time imagining first person games, since I despise those with significant input lag. Even just on a local PC some games have a horrible delay unless you run very high frame-rates (quite a bunch of those Unreal Engine) and I always have a hard time getting into those. Now with an additional 20-30ms network latency... for this to be close to acceptable, they would have to get the on server delay close to nothing at the very least. I doubt that will happen while games are still release on multiple platforms.
imtringued 7y ago
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 companies want to have complete control over the user experience and they certainly are going to abuse that control as much as they can.
- 7y ago

Xixi 7y ago

I have no idea how reliable it is, but quoting wikipedia [1]: "Testing has found that overall "input lag" (from controller input to display response) times of approximately 200 ms are distracting to the user. It also appears that (excluding the monitor/television display lag) 133 ms is an average response time and the most sensitive games (fighting games, first person shooters and rhythm games) achieve response times of 67 ms (excluding display lag)." These numbers are from the PS3/XBox 360 area, which certainly sold massively well. Since display lag is not included in these 67ms, this is what these streaming services would have to aim for. It doesn't sound completely insane given the 30ms round trip latencies of home connections. On a more subjective note, I think it's going to be really hard hunting down high end gamer PCs. On the other hand lots of games don't run particularly smoothly on consoles (especially "normal" PS4 and XBox One, rather than PS4 Pro or XBox One S) that these services are directly aiming at. I can perfectly imagine a stadia version of The Witcher 3 running circles around the PS4 version that lags so much... But I don't think it would hold against the PC version. But I don't game much at all anymore, so my knowledge is mostly outdated. The last games I played were 80 days and A Dark Room on my iPhone (both pretty good games). So I guess I'm now more in the target demographics of Apple Arcade. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag

ehsankia 7y ago
You can probably do even better than 20-30ms round trip if you're one of the large Cloud companies with data centers everywhere. Amazon so far doesn't seem interested, but Google and Microsoft definitely have the infrastructure to pull it off. Sure you won't get high end PC gamers, that's not really the target demographic here. It's the millions of console and mobile gamers.
TheOperator 7y ago
Actual video gamers right now go out of their way to get displays with very low input lags. 1080p144hz TN low input lag displays are used quite a bit in esports to shave a few msec. You literally win more often if you react faster. People aim to get TVs with sub 16ms input lag. However that's not most of the market. The appeal of cloud gaming is for single player non-competitive games. These are the most pirated games and the games where input lag matters the least.

mattlondon 7y ago

20-30ms seems high? At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.

kn0where 7y ago
USA has no (local) competition for internet, it’s almost all regional monopolies or duopolies where one (cable TV company) is expensive and ok and the other (copper wire phone company) is slow and unreliable.
- Loughla 7y ago
  Some places (mine) are, by local ordinance, unable to receive high speed internet because the company that owns the rights/stupid ass poles that they run everything on along the road offers high speed internet access ALREADY. . . . SO COOL!! How do they do it? By defining high speed as dial-up speeds in the ordinance they helped the local small, technologically inept government craft! God Bless The USA
stcredzero 7y ago
Back in the early 2000's in Ohio, under 80ms round trip latency was once advertised as 'leet gamer stuff.
ahje 7y ago
There's a lot of people who can't get fiber when you get outside the cities. I'd be thrilled if I could get under 35ms.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  6-9ms is not fibre here - I was referring to copper ADSL that is available pretty much everywhere in the UK (apart from some really isolated tiny villages/hamlets)

ryacko 7y ago

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. Twitch shooters will never be replaced by this though.

p1necone 7y ago
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.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Just watch a VR video. They stream in a full 360 degrees.
imtringued 7y ago
Streaming based DRM doesn't need cloud rendering to be effective. The client can download 3D models and use prediction and local collision detection while the server is still responsible for the secret sauce like combat rolls, item drops, missions. Reverse engineering is still possible but even the private MMORPG server scene is actually pretty "dead" compared to the actual games they are cloning. Adding content is expensive and replicating content is sometimes impossible so the developers basically end up building what amounts to a custom game which uses the same rendering engine as an existing game. Becoming an indie dev and working for free on your own game ideas is a far better strategy although the chances of success are low.

ManuelKiessling 7y ago

Honestly I just don't get why every single time there is discussion about game streaming, the topic of lag as a potential show stopper comes up, and every time it's a hypothetical discussion, which doesn’t make sense at all - the solutions are out there! Don’t assume - just verify it. And when you do, you will find out that there isn’t any actual issue. I’ve played games like The Witcher 3 via streaming over three years ago. Input/output lag simply isn’t an issue, and I’m your average German VDSL user, nothing special. From my point of view, there is no sense in any further discussion - the empirical data is already in.

ehsankia 7y ago
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.
- ClassyJacket 7y ago
  "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 of which would be noticeable in many games. I'm not saying it's impossible to do game streaming, but you can't just divide the distance by the speed of light and say it's low. That's not really the issue.
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    > server on the other side of the world, but with no other latency accounted for - is about 200ms In practice, it’s a lot worse than 200ms. 500-700ms are typical for servers on the other side of the planet.

shados 7y ago

When playing online against other opponents, having the gaming machines be very close to each other might make up part of the latency introduced by the distance between the player and the gaming machine. Maybe. Your first point is key though. Piracy is a big deal. People can say until they're blue in the face that it "helps", or that "they wouldn't have bought the game anyway", and for some unknown percentage its true, and for some other unknown percentage its a straight lie. If they go from "optionally play a game via streaming", to "this game MUST be played via streaming" eventually, they get the second group (the ones who WOULD pay if they couldn't get it for free) instantly. Only if it doesn't suck, obviously.

ancientworldnow 7y ago
They also lose everyone not interested in streaming games (like myself). I'm sure they've run the numbers, but I know plenty of people who actively purchase games and are not at all interested in streaming them.
- shados 7y ago
  For sure, I'm in that camp too. I was in the anti-Steam camp back in the days too, and well...that didnt work out for me.
  - ancientworldnow 7y ago
    The other consideration is bandwidth. Streaming a game is far more intensive than just playing it and many US households are under tight data caps (not to mention throttling under peak hours). I just am not convinced by the advantages, for much of the gaming demographic.

jeremyjh 7y ago

I’ve played Bloodborne on PS Now and it works great. This game is really dependent on fast reactions and smooth camera panning. I think if you try it out you might learn something.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> 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). I think it's actually more or less the opposite? Twitch platformers like Celeste and Cuphead can't afford input lag, as they require very quick and precise movements from players. It so happens that these types of games almost always have low system requirements. Rhythm games and fighting games tend to be similarly lightweight. Street Fighter 5 won't run on a potato, but the hardware required is far from state-of-the-art. By contrast, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 already contain large amounts of input lag when played locally according to Digital Foundry, and consumers don't seem to care much. This isn't to say that adding more latency is a good idea—and I have no idea if the existing latency could be whittled down to compensate for streaming—but it clearly doesn't bother people much.

readams 7y ago

Also keep in mind how important multi player is for most big titles now. If you add up player -server-player latency it's actually the same. Given more consistent performance on the rendering/frontend side it's quite possible the overall experience will turn out better.

davemp 7y ago
Client-side prediction does a very good job of hiding the network latency. Granted a lot of games run their servers at lowish ticks/sec (people do complain though) which is 30ms worst case at 32tps.
- readams 7y ago
  You can do similar tricks in a cloud setup also though; notably you can do hit detection based on what the user was seeing when they entered the input rather than what the server was doing later. This is pretty similar to client side prediction.

sterlind 7y ago

Rather than purely streaming frames, you could push a frontend client in e.g. webgl + wasm on demand, cache artifacts locally, and send view-independent texture/mesh streams down. Doing so is technically more complex than having a rigid client/server split, but if they start with full streaming they can progressively make the client more intelligent, without being burdened with any specific hardware/client infra choices. It's also easy to port edge-rendered games to many platforms. It makes sense for MS to ally with Sony and shift their effort to cloud before both the Xbox and PlayStation are little more than rich web clients.

chimpburger 7y ago
Streaming anything but frames defeats the purpose of a frame streaming service.
Pombal 7y ago
Yep, see polystream.com

stcredzero 7y ago

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? I'm working on a system that unifies single player and multi-player development. Think of it like zeit.co's "NodeJs Now" but for games, with a local-only configuration option. The way my system relates with streaming, is that the client is scaled way down in complexity. Basically, the sync protocol is a stream of positional updates from the server. The client becomes little more than a screen entity display. Then, the developer has the option to add a bit of "own world simulation" to further hide latency. (Or, in the case of the game I've implemented, just "own entity simulation" is enough.)

ezoe 7y ago

We care about the 50ms latency because the current games are designed for the platforms with <50ms latency. If the platform is changed, so the game too. > Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware. Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone. That said, I don't like the current trend and I hope they failed on streaming video game.

delfinom 7y ago
>Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone. Problem is, smartphones still are shit for input (lol touchscreen) in any precise manners so what point is there in trying to run intensive games on it via streaming.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Clown gaming is compelling in every way except gaming.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

They will just host turn based strategy games, like yahoo chess.

kraig911 7y ago

I recall we all said the same crap about streaming HD movies with a monthly fee too. I think the only true problem with streaming gaming is that the quality of games will diminish even more.

giobox 7y ago

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?s=21 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.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Additionally the market share of AAA-games is currently decreasing. People with sensitive hearing can tell the difference if a sound arrives <1ms too late and the sound system needs adjustment. 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.