8 ms·

Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing

by moksly 6y ago

Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.

ryandrake 6y ago
The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
- brundolf 6y ago
  Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    Apple's moving to the M1 chip for desktop/laptop Macs. That's going to make the target look more like top-end Mac hardware… and the iPhone. The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end' market. But that could evolve, I think.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people that actually pay for games, and all major engines support Metal. Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them. Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    > Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't. Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something. I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
    - simonh 6y ago
      KSP has been 64-bit on Mac from around the same time as Windows and is still fully supported. A lot of games did drop off the Mac when it moved to 64-bit only though.
- wheybags 6y ago
  Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding), and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if you do make the port, they will be about 1% of your users. Or less. So, to summarize, mac support is expensive, difficult, and not profitable. Should we still do it? I tend to think you're better of spending your time on linux support.
  - shurane 6y ago
    Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense. I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.
brundolf 6y ago
I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry: 1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that. 2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones. 3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as... 4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful: An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well. That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that. Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders). And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool. But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people. Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
nerfhammer 6y ago
nvidia has a competing service that supports that title, and it honors your steam account instead of needing you to re-buy it https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/
- akiselev 6y ago
  Unfortunately Stadia is the only one that supports 4K (I'm a casual user of Nvidia's service since it was in beta)
  - Agingcoder 6y ago
    Does 4k matter? The way you state it makes it sound like it's a major issue (disclaimer: I've never seen a 4k game) This is an honest question, since I don't game much (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) , and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely curious.
    - Duralias 6y ago
      Would describe Stadia 4k to be inline with native 1080p, at least when playing stadia in a browser. Stadia 4k may look better using a chromecast ultra, but I haven't tried that. And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means nothing to most people.
      - Ruthalas 6y ago
        At least with game streaming services, I suspect advertising resolution serves the double purpose of being understandable to most consumers, while specifically obfuscating bitrate, which is the sacrificed statistic.
      - bscphil 6y ago
        > It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement. And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does. Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.

by moksly 6y ago

ryandrake 6y ago

The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?

brundolf 6y ago
Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Apple's moving to the M1 chip for desktop/laptop Macs. That's going to make the target look more like top-end Mac hardware… and the iPhone. The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end' market. But that could evolve, I think.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people that actually pay for games, and all major engines support Metal. Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them. Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  > Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't. Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something. I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
  - simonh 6y ago
    KSP has been 64-bit on Mac from around the same time as Windows and is still fully supported. A lot of games did drop off the Mac when it moved to 64-bit only though.
wheybags 6y ago
Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding), and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if you do make the port, they will be about 1% of your users. Or less. So, to summarize, mac support is expensive, difficult, and not profitable. Should we still do it? I tend to think you're better of spending your time on linux support.
- shurane 6y ago
  Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense. I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.

brundolf 6y ago

I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find a market, but I think there are several hurdles that (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no experience in the industry: 1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that. 2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones. 3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as... 4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful: An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well. That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that. Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders). And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool. But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people. Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above

nerfhammer 6y ago

nvidia has a competing service that supports that title, and it honors your steam account instead of needing you to re-buy it https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/

akiselev 6y ago
Unfortunately Stadia is the only one that supports 4K (I'm a casual user of Nvidia's service since it was in beta)
- Agingcoder 6y ago
  Does 4k matter? The way you state it makes it sound like it's a major issue (disclaimer: I've never seen a 4k game) This is an honest question, since I don't game much (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) , and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely curious.
  - Duralias 6y ago
    Would describe Stadia 4k to be inline with native 1080p, at least when playing stadia in a browser. Stadia 4k may look better using a chromecast ultra, but I haven't tried that. And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means nothing to most people.
    - Ruthalas 6y ago
      At least with game streaming services, I suspect advertising resolution serves the double purpose of being understandable to most consumers, while specifically obfuscating bitrate, which is the sacrificed statistic.
    - bscphil 6y ago
      > It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement. And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does. Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.