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The Venn diagram for target audience and situational use cases of these services has always seemed very small to me. At least the subscription model and game s

The Venn diagram for target audience and situational use cases of these services has always seemed very small to me. At least the subscription model and game selection seems better than Stadia. edit: Also, it seems to me like the target audience is for the same sort (and I’m not trying to denigrate) that watch movies on their TV with internal speakers or can’t fathom why you’d pay more than 30 bucks for headphones or earbuds. Some people just don’t care about the latency, hiccups, or compression artifacts. And that’s fine, but I’m not part of that group.

MikusR 6y ago
Hawe you actually tried Stadia or Geforce Now?
- chaostheory 6y ago
  I don't have fiber, so I'm at the mercy of how much demand there is for Comcast at any given time. Sometimes it works great, other times not so much. I'd rather just install games locally like with Game Pass, Steam, or EPIC. My local computer can handle these games just fine. I'm definitely not the target audience since I can afford the hardware. The only place I can think of in the US with fiber are university dorms. Outside of providing a cheap substitute for hardware, the only other use case I can see this for is for MMO's that have drastically changing environments like Rec Room, VR Chat or anything like 2nd Life
  - MikusR 6y ago
    You don't need fiber. As for use cases, i just now played an hour of The Division 2 on my laptop (with intel integrated gpu) using 4g connection from my phone.
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      You do if you don't want lag or weird graphical artifacts. You need fiber if you want a local install experience.
      - ehsankia 6y ago
        1. You'll never have a local install experience 2. Anything above ~25mbps connection will give you the optimal experience you can have So no, you do not need Fiber, you just need a decent broadband connection.
      - MikusR 6y ago
        The experience playing on 4g was about the same or even better than local install with Geforce 1050.
        chaostheory 6y ago
        My connection degrades depending on peak demand, because cable, and because internet duopolies. It's great that yours doesn't, but that's not reality for everyone. Also for most people in the US, 4G has significant usage caps.
        Mupuff 6y ago
        Also - not everyone lives in the US :)
        chaostheory 6y ago
        That’s why I brought it up. Our internet services are worse than most industrialized countries. It’s both slower and more expensive. To my knowledge only Canada’s internet services are worse
        vel0city 6y ago
        Currently, Ookla ranks the US's average fixed broadband speeds as 11th globally. This outranks Sweeden, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, and so many others. It might be more expensive than many other countries, but its definitely not the slowest average internet out there. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
  - vel0city 6y ago
    > The only place I ca think of in the US with fiber are university dorms While definitely nowhere near the majority of the US, there are many metro areas with large residential fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments. Suggesting it is only available at university dorms is massively misrepresenting reality. In pretty much all the areas I've lived for the last decade, FTTH has been extremely common. I'm certain lots of other people have had very different experiences from me. Lots of other people have had experiences vastly different from yours. https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map... https://www.att.com/shop/internet/gigapower/coverage-map.html https://www.att.com/shop/internet/gigapower/coverage-map.htm... https://www.verizon.com/home/fiosavailability/ https://www.verizon.com/home/fiosavailability/
- wjdp 6y ago
  Just tried Geforce now as I spotted they had a free offering that links to my Steam library. Booted up "Just Cause 3" (first one I spotted that was supported and I had). The first bit of the game has you on top of a plane shooting at ground targets. I'm on a 40Mb/s connection with 22ms of ping to 8.8.8.8. All wired ethernet, no wifi. The latency was awful, felt like ~1s from mouse move to action. I could not aim at the targets at all. 0/10 unplayable ;)
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Bear in mind: While very few consumers benefit from cloud-based gaming, the outcome of dragging consumers over to it for businesses is huge. Why sell software and hardware once when you can sell software, the hardware it's hosted on, and the support and services to manage that software and hardware every single month. It's why companies like Adobe and Microsoft have tried to push their main, relatively static[1] software packages like Office and Creative Suite over to a rent-seeking model. And it's why selling cloud services is all the rage. It's not a good way to do things, it's not good for any consumer or user of those things, but it prints money on a stable and continuous basis in perpetuity, because people lose everything they paid for when they stop paying. That's why cloud gaming is going to keep coming up year after year, no matter how impractical or stupid it is. [1] For the vast majority of users, the difference between any given version of Office or Creative Suite and one released five or six years prior is nearly zero. Almost nobody needs to continually buy these.
- alexwebb2 6y ago
  > very few consumers benefit from cloud-based gaming > It's not a good way to do things, it's not good for any consumer or user of those things > no matter how impractical or stupid it is Hard disagree on this take. I would personally love a stable, smooth gaming-as-a-service experience - where I can pay based on my usage level, access any games I want to, pick up my saved game from any device, and never have to worry about sitting around for hours waiting for updates or downloads. I expect there's a _massive_ market for that. You may not be in it, and that's fine, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > and never have to worry about sitting around for hours waiting for updates or downloads Here's the thing though. Those downloads and updates have a massive efficiency factor. Once you have downloaded your assets, they don't have do be downloaded again to be used. With these game streaming platforms, it doesn't matter that you have downloaded 100GB in screen frames. They can only be used once and then are discarded. In some cases this is a benefit - on Flight Simulator 2020 the servers only have to send you a fraction of their terrain data. But that's a small part of it. > stable, smooth gaming-as-a-service experience Netflix and the like work because you can buffer. Is your connection a bit choppy today? Hit pause and let it buffer a bit, hopefully it will stabilize. But games do not tolerate ANY latency issues. Even things like Steam Link - using only your local network - can struggle if there's too much traffic or interference. Then there's the business model. I don't want a 'subscription'. If I buy a game today I may be spending $60 upfront(if the game has been out for a while, often much less), but I can play as much as I want. Do you have fantastic internet connectivity, an under-powered device, and you want to quickly shuffle through different games from an online selection? Ok, this could make sense. Still, this sounds like a far better deal for corporations, as opposed to consumers.
vmception 6y ago
The latency is the only “situational use case” to care about. This has been mitigated more and more. The rest is just gatekeeping gamers imagining what a larger group of wallets would care about and being strong. Chronic problem in that community. Isnt the biggest protest amongst enthusiast gamers based around at what point they will pay the company anyway? Hard to take any stance there seriously when there is zero power over what happens, companies dont get cancelled, 2% of their audience just doesnt preorder the thing they were going to buy anyway, amazing. Hiccups and artifacts are largely solved and where they aren't, the market tolerates it just fine. There has been a whole decade of this stuff. The arguments are literally from last decade and they weren’t issues even with the inferior infrastructure then. I dont think any of these services have proven themselves as a profitable endeavor on their own yet, but as far as advertising or a competitive ecosystem for a larger brand, theyve done really well.
- dx87 6y ago
  It's not just people gatekeeping, developers are usually going to target whatever gives them the biggest return. PC games have been gimped for a long time because the developers make sure the game runs on consoles as well, and if cloud gaming takes off, it'll be even less likely that people develop games with PC players in mind. I can't blame people for wanting cloud gaming to fail; if it's succesful it could cause major changes to their hobby as games are developed for the lowest common denominator.
  - nightski 6y ago
    Not to mention it makes modding dead on arrival. I get it, most gamers do not mod. But being able to write mods and work with Microsoft Flight Simulator in the 90s is what got me hooked on computing in the first place.
    - vmception 6y ago
      F
spbaar 6y ago
At this point, even after Stadia, if Amazon is getting into, and i trust Amazon biz and market analytics more than Google or Xbox, the only conclusion I can come to is that they know the venn diagram is small but they must have data showing that it's getting bigger. They must be targeting people growing up just playing on their phones already paying subscription who want to play those cool AAA games with the smallest investment possible. That's me backing into this conclusion. I'll look forward to see what the next Deconstructor of Fun podcast says about this. They focus on the biz/money part of games and have been appropriately bearish on streaming (Stadia) in the past.
ehsankia 6y ago
I disagree, I think pay once for a game probably matches better with the VEnn diagram of the target audience, which probably are people who don't game enough to buy a whole console/PC, but want to try the latest NBA or big game like Cyberpunk. Paying a one time 60$ for one game seems better than subscription if you play a few hours a week.
Waterluvian 6y ago
I used to care about those things and then I had kids and my priorities changed and I just want real quick access to 45 mins of media or games. I bet that will change yet again when they get older. I really like your perspective: there’s millions of consumers out there with different priorities. You don’t have to “get” it you just have to appreciate that they exist.
013a 6y ago
First, you have people who are "real" gamers. Whatever that means, but we'll define it as owning some piece of hardware that was bought for the purpose of gaming (PS4, Xbox, Switch, PC). This number is between 250-500 million people. Yes. Its that high. PS4 sold ~115M units. XB1 ~50M. Switch ~70M. Steam has ~100M MAUs. There's overlap in those, and those numbers also really under-represent China and the huge PC gaming scene there, but I think we're in the right magnitude. By and large, this group's interest in cloud gaming would only significantly extend to being able to access the games they already play on the hardware they have, when out and about. Xbox, Nvidia, PlayStation, and whatever Valve releases will own this group. They're not re-buying games on Stadia or Luna and locking themselves into that platform, nor dealing with locked cross-saves, cross-achievements, cross-social, its just not happening. Second group: Lets say iOS users. Representing 1.5 billion people worldwide, significant overlap with the previous group. These users probably wont get too heavily invested into any cloud streaming service, because they are all inaccessible on their mobile device. Yeah, there's a Luna web app: I'm sure it'll be horrible. Third group: People with bad or no internet. 160 million Americans lack broadband. Some of them still buy game consoles and suffer through weeks of downloading updates. Most don't. Online play sucks, but 150 ping is manageable. You learn to play with the ping. These people will never use any cloud streaming service. We could go on, but the point I'm reaching is: I, too, have no clue who will be signing up for these services. It really feels like these cloud companies just have graphics cards laying around and are supremely uncreative with how to get value from them. Or, they want to own the world and its taken them thirty fucking years to recognize that, hey, gaming is a thing and boy are they late to the party. Gaming hardware is not expensive. A Switch costs $200; a brand spanking new Xbox Series S, $300. You don't need a two thousand dollar PC to play all the great games out there. Stadia and Luna want you to buy their controllers and their dongles, the upfront cost is not zero, and consumers are not blind to the ongoing cost and expensive games (Game Pass anyone?! Its a fucking steal! And it practically comes with xCloud! Why do people still think Amazon and Google can compete with this?) If there was some investment vehicle which allowed me to specifically short Stadia and Luna, I would put every cent in my savings and retirement into it, down to the last penny. Cloud streaming has a future, but it won't be via these two products.
- sumedh 6y ago
nazgulnarsil 6y ago
being able to game while also being cheap laptop only is something huge numbers of teens with disposable pocket money have. These services (fortnite, csgo, etc) want the billions all those pocket money slices add up to.

MikusR 6y ago

Hawe you actually tried Stadia or Geforce Now?

chaostheory 6y ago
I don't have fiber, so I'm at the mercy of how much demand there is for Comcast at any given time. Sometimes it works great, other times not so much. I'd rather just install games locally like with Game Pass, Steam, or EPIC. My local computer can handle these games just fine. I'm definitely not the target audience since I can afford the hardware. The only place I can think of in the US with fiber are university dorms. Outside of providing a cheap substitute for hardware, the only other use case I can see this for is for MMO's that have drastically changing environments like Rec Room, VR Chat or anything like 2nd Life
- MikusR 6y ago
  You don't need fiber. As for use cases, i just now played an hour of The Division 2 on my laptop (with intel integrated gpu) using 4g connection from my phone.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    You do if you don't want lag or weird graphical artifacts. You need fiber if you want a local install experience.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      1. You'll never have a local install experience 2. Anything above ~25mbps connection will give you the optimal experience you can have So no, you do not need Fiber, you just need a decent broadband connection.
    - MikusR 6y ago
      The experience playing on 4g was about the same or even better than local install with Geforce 1050.
      - chaostheory 6y ago
        My connection degrades depending on peak demand, because cable, and because internet duopolies. It's great that yours doesn't, but that's not reality for everyone. Also for most people in the US, 4G has significant usage caps.
        Mupuff 6y ago
        Also - not everyone lives in the US :)
        chaostheory 6y ago
        That’s why I brought it up. Our internet services are worse than most industrialized countries. It’s both slower and more expensive. To my knowledge only Canada’s internet services are worse
        vel0city 6y ago
        Currently, Ookla ranks the US's average fixed broadband speeds as 11th globally. This outranks Sweeden, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, and so many others. It might be more expensive than many other countries, but its definitely not the slowest average internet out there. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
- vel0city 6y ago
  > The only place I ca think of in the US with fiber are university dorms While definitely nowhere near the majority of the US, there are many metro areas with large residential fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments. Suggesting it is only available at university dorms is massively misrepresenting reality. In pretty much all the areas I've lived for the last decade, FTTH has been extremely common. I'm certain lots of other people have had very different experiences from me. Lots of other people have had experiences vastly different from yours. https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map... https://www.att.com/shop/internet/gigapower/coverage-map.html https://www.att.com/shop/internet/gigapower/coverage-map.htm... https://www.verizon.com/home/fiosavailability/ https://www.verizon.com/home/fiosavailability/
wjdp 6y ago
Just tried Geforce now as I spotted they had a free offering that links to my Steam library. Booted up "Just Cause 3" (first one I spotted that was supported and I had). The first bit of the game has you on top of a plane shooting at ground targets. I'm on a 40Mb/s connection with 22ms of ping to 8.8.8.8. All wired ethernet, no wifi. The latency was awful, felt like ~1s from mouse move to action. I could not aim at the targets at all. 0/10 unplayable ;)

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Bear in mind: While very few consumers benefit from cloud-based gaming, the outcome of dragging consumers over to it for businesses is huge. Why sell software and hardware once when you can sell software, the hardware it's hosted on, and the support and services to manage that software and hardware every single month. It's why companies like Adobe and Microsoft have tried to push their main, relatively static[1] software packages like Office and Creative Suite over to a rent-seeking model. And it's why selling cloud services is all the rage. It's not a good way to do things, it's not good for any consumer or user of those things, but it prints money on a stable and continuous basis in perpetuity, because people lose everything they paid for when they stop paying. That's why cloud gaming is going to keep coming up year after year, no matter how impractical or stupid it is. [1] For the vast majority of users, the difference between any given version of Office or Creative Suite and one released five or six years prior is nearly zero. Almost nobody needs to continually buy these.

alexwebb2 6y ago
> very few consumers benefit from cloud-based gaming > It's not a good way to do things, it's not good for any consumer or user of those things > no matter how impractical or stupid it is Hard disagree on this take. I would personally love a stable, smooth gaming-as-a-service experience - where I can pay based on my usage level, access any games I want to, pick up my saved game from any device, and never have to worry about sitting around for hours waiting for updates or downloads. I expect there's a _massive_ market for that. You may not be in it, and that's fine, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > and never have to worry about sitting around for hours waiting for updates or downloads Here's the thing though. Those downloads and updates have a massive efficiency factor. Once you have downloaded your assets, they don't have do be downloaded again to be used. With these game streaming platforms, it doesn't matter that you have downloaded 100GB in screen frames. They can only be used once and then are discarded. In some cases this is a benefit - on Flight Simulator 2020 the servers only have to send you a fraction of their terrain data. But that's a small part of it. > stable, smooth gaming-as-a-service experience Netflix and the like work because you can buffer. Is your connection a bit choppy today? Hit pause and let it buffer a bit, hopefully it will stabilize. But games do not tolerate ANY latency issues. Even things like Steam Link - using only your local network - can struggle if there's too much traffic or interference. Then there's the business model. I don't want a 'subscription'. If I buy a game today I may be spending $60 upfront(if the game has been out for a while, often much less), but I can play as much as I want. Do you have fantastic internet connectivity, an under-powered device, and you want to quickly shuffle through different games from an online selection? Ok, this could make sense. Still, this sounds like a far better deal for corporations, as opposed to consumers.

vmception 6y ago

The latency is the only “situational use case” to care about. This has been mitigated more and more. The rest is just gatekeeping gamers imagining what a larger group of wallets would care about and being strong. Chronic problem in that community. Isnt the biggest protest amongst enthusiast gamers based around at what point they will pay the company anyway? Hard to take any stance there seriously when there is zero power over what happens, companies dont get cancelled, 2% of their audience just doesnt preorder the thing they were going to buy anyway, amazing. Hiccups and artifacts are largely solved and where they aren't, the market tolerates it just fine. There has been a whole decade of this stuff. The arguments are literally from last decade and they weren’t issues even with the inferior infrastructure then. I dont think any of these services have proven themselves as a profitable endeavor on their own yet, but as far as advertising or a competitive ecosystem for a larger brand, theyve done really well.

dx87 6y ago
It's not just people gatekeeping, developers are usually going to target whatever gives them the biggest return. PC games have been gimped for a long time because the developers make sure the game runs on consoles as well, and if cloud gaming takes off, it'll be even less likely that people develop games with PC players in mind. I can't blame people for wanting cloud gaming to fail; if it's succesful it could cause major changes to their hobby as games are developed for the lowest common denominator.
- nightski 6y ago
  Not to mention it makes modding dead on arrival. I get it, most gamers do not mod. But being able to write mods and work with Microsoft Flight Simulator in the 90s is what got me hooked on computing in the first place.
  - vmception 6y ago
    F

spbaar 6y ago

At this point, even after Stadia, if Amazon is getting into, and i trust Amazon biz and market analytics more than Google or Xbox, the only conclusion I can come to is that they know the venn diagram is small but they must have data showing that it's getting bigger. They must be targeting people growing up just playing on their phones already paying subscription who want to play those cool AAA games with the smallest investment possible. That's me backing into this conclusion. I'll look forward to see what the next Deconstructor of Fun podcast says about this. They focus on the biz/money part of games and have been appropriately bearish on streaming (Stadia) in the past.

ehsankia 6y ago

I disagree, I think pay once for a game probably matches better with the VEnn diagram of the target audience, which probably are people who don't game enough to buy a whole console/PC, but want to try the latest NBA or big game like Cyberpunk. Paying a one time 60$ for one game seems better than subscription if you play a few hours a week.

Waterluvian 6y ago

I used to care about those things and then I had kids and my priorities changed and I just want real quick access to 45 mins of media or games. I bet that will change yet again when they get older. I really like your perspective: there’s millions of consumers out there with different priorities. You don’t have to “get” it you just have to appreciate that they exist.

013a 6y ago

First, you have people who are "real" gamers. Whatever that means, but we'll define it as owning some piece of hardware that was bought for the purpose of gaming (PS4, Xbox, Switch, PC). This number is between 250-500 million people. Yes. Its that high. PS4 sold ~115M units. XB1 ~50M. Switch ~70M. Steam has ~100M MAUs. There's overlap in those, and those numbers also really under-represent China and the huge PC gaming scene there, but I think we're in the right magnitude. By and large, this group's interest in cloud gaming would only significantly extend to being able to access the games they already play on the hardware they have, when out and about. Xbox, Nvidia, PlayStation, and whatever Valve releases will own this group. They're not re-buying games on Stadia or Luna and locking themselves into that platform, nor dealing with locked cross-saves, cross-achievements, cross-social, its just not happening. Second group: Lets say iOS users. Representing 1.5 billion people worldwide, significant overlap with the previous group. These users probably wont get too heavily invested into any cloud streaming service, because they are all inaccessible on their mobile device. Yeah, there's a Luna web app: I'm sure it'll be horrible. Third group: People with bad or no internet. 160 million Americans lack broadband. Some of them still buy game consoles and suffer through weeks of downloading updates. Most don't. Online play sucks, but 150 ping is manageable. You learn to play with the ping. These people will never use any cloud streaming service. We could go on, but the point I'm reaching is: I, too, have no clue who will be signing up for these services. It really feels like these cloud companies just have graphics cards laying around and are supremely uncreative with how to get value from them. Or, they want to own the world and its taken them thirty fucking years to recognize that, hey, gaming is a thing and boy are they late to the party. Gaming hardware is not expensive. A Switch costs $200; a brand spanking new Xbox Series S, $300. You don't need a two thousand dollar PC to play all the great games out there. Stadia and Luna want you to buy their controllers and their dongles, the upfront cost is not zero, and consumers are not blind to the ongoing cost and expensive games (Game Pass anyone?! Its a fucking steal! And it practically comes with xCloud! Why do people still think Amazon and Google can compete with this?) If there was some investment vehicle which allowed me to specifically short Stadia and Luna, I would put every cent in my savings and retirement into it, down to the last penny. Cloud streaming has a future, but it won't be via these two products.

sumedh 6y ago

nazgulnarsil 6y ago

being able to game while also being cheap laptop only is something huge numbers of teens with disposable pocket money have. These services (fortnite, csgo, etc) want the billions all those pocket money slices add up to.