5 ms·
The article makes two points, one centered around the profitability of making games under current business models, the other one centered around the environment
by jhanschoo 7y ago
The article makes two points, one centered around the profitability of making games under current business models, the other one centered around the environmental impact of the newer games-as-a-sevice models.
The point that the traditional games publishing model is bad for profits holds, but the point about environmentalism is ridiculous.
First, high environmental impact would mean nothing for the ability for the GaasS models to draw a profit.
Secondly, GaaS should actually be good for the environment. The alternative to computing in data centers is computing in personal computers and consoles, which leads to worse environmental outcomes both in the hardware itself and in their lower efficiency. Besides, computing in data centers leads to more opportunities for efficiency since redundant computations among different devices and users can be parallelized.
The main environmental impact here is one the author completely misses: the energy required for the bandwidth of streaming videos.
- matteuan 7y agoI agree with you. I would add another huge efficiency advantage of a data-center over a console, that is better heat dissipation.
- moate 7y agoAlso shipping. You only need to ship the platform in a GaaS model once, and you build a data center once. From there you're just uploading/transferring code. With physical games you need to produce the games and ship them each time a new one comes out. Not to mention packaging etc.
- wilg 7y agoWell, but most games are delivered digitally now (https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physical-game-sales-in-the-us-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physi...). I wonder how the bandwidth to deliver the full game compares to the bandwidth to stream video of the game if you're playing it 100% over the internet.
- matteuan 7y agoI think we can consider the devices where the content is accessed as thin clients. There is some literature supporting the thin client architecture (e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf) and it seems that the power consumption can reduce significantly (3x). These studies do not take in account this particular case but I think they can give you an idea of the scale.
- matteuan 7y agoIt would also reduce the ratio players:console. A personal console stays most of the time off, in a data-center you can increase usage by an order of magnitude. So at the end, even if they buy new hardware every year it would cost less physical resources overall.
- wilg 7y agoYou mention the bandwidth for streaming video, and I am wondering if the efficiencies of scale for running the game in a data center is wiped out by the need to then shoot the video over the internet and also run the client. Anybody know a good way to estimate that trade off?