3 ms·

The large players in the game industry have been making strategic moves in this regard for a few years now. In all likelihood, AAA titles and similarly high-pro

The large players in the game industry have been making strategic moves in this regard for a few years now. In all likelihood, AAA titles and similarly high-production cost products will be available via streamed SaaS models. Stadia isn't a lone abherration; Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft et al have all various experiments and/or large strategic positions in this regard. The fact is, the market is hostile to creators that rely on purchasers to finance them. We're moving rapidly away from that model, and it will be considered as old-fashioned as renting time with a human calculator. Indie games are their own thing. Only time will tell how they persist, but I suspect it will be via passion rather than any reasonable chance at profit.

michaelmrose 7y ago
Streaming games inevitably burns substantial resources per hour for compute and streaming while not generating revenue commensurate to costs unless you convince people to pay more for less and worse. It's tempting to compare $60 to say 30 hours of usage and ignore the fact that multiple people per household and in fact multiple households may have shared or bought and sold a disk. Every user buying a new copy and paying by the month will be more expensive than the cost of a console. Even the machine you access it is liable to be more expensive than a ps4. This isn't even touching the actual hard problem of latency and increasing hardware burden over time. Rendering the game at the users premises just makes too much sense to go away.
- dleslie 7y ago
  Many households are already streaming multiple high resolution feeds at once; and availability of the appropriate connectivity will improve with time. The vast majority of gamers hardly spend more than an hour or two in total on each game they own, on average. The proposition isn't to aim to serve 40 to 100 hours of gameplay per purchaser, it's to provide a couple of hours for most and unlimited for the minority. Latency isn't that big of a deal. The industry giants involved can afford to be within 30ms round trip of most anyone in EU/NA/Jp, and most people can tolerate a 100ms+ input latency. Their TVs are slow as it is, many consumer models having a 100+ms latency already. And the big wins? No hackers. No secondary markets. No patching. No consumer hardware/software incompatibility. And so on.

michaelmrose 7y ago

Streaming games inevitably burns substantial resources per hour for compute and streaming while not generating revenue commensurate to costs unless you convince people to pay more for less and worse. It's tempting to compare $60 to say 30 hours of usage and ignore the fact that multiple people per household and in fact multiple households may have shared or bought and sold a disk. Every user buying a new copy and paying by the month will be more expensive than the cost of a console. Even the machine you access it is liable to be more expensive than a ps4. This isn't even touching the actual hard problem of latency and increasing hardware burden over time. Rendering the game at the users premises just makes too much sense to go away.

dleslie 7y ago
Many households are already streaming multiple high resolution feeds at once; and availability of the appropriate connectivity will improve with time. The vast majority of gamers hardly spend more than an hour or two in total on each game they own, on average. The proposition isn't to aim to serve 40 to 100 hours of gameplay per purchaser, it's to provide a couple of hours for most and unlimited for the minority. Latency isn't that big of a deal. The industry giants involved can afford to be within 30ms round trip of most anyone in EU/NA/Jp, and most people can tolerate a 100ms+ input latency. Their TVs are slow as it is, many consumer models having a 100+ms latency already. And the big wins? No hackers. No secondary markets. No patching. No consumer hardware/software incompatibility. And so on.