10 ms·

Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? If in the future, all software will only run on servers, more and more control will be taken away from u

Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? If in the future, all software will only run on servers, more and more control will be taken away from users. If Google shuts down the service, or bans your account with no recourse, as they like to do, everything you've purchased is gone.

Titan2189 4y ago
Sooo, I take it you have 0 games purchased in your Steam account then?
- cloogshicer 4y ago
  At least there you could crack it and keep it running if the service shuts down. But I agree, the dependence on Steam is concerning too.
- memorable 4y ago
  I like how the OP and your account both created in 2018.
  - Titan2189 4y ago
    what does that tell you?
    - bhelkey 4y ago
      I think they are implying you two are the same person? I am not sure.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Far easier to crack in the worst case of service shutdown. At least if you have downloaded the game. Of course also not an ideal solution.
  - Thaxll 4y ago
    You think people have their entire Stam lib on disk... at most they have 4-5 games.
    - account42 4y ago
      Depends, I have a couble of TiB of Steam games installed right now but not my entire library. At least with Steam you have that option preserve the games and perhaps more importantly, pirates^Warchivists have the option to backup the game for those of us that did not have the foresight/care to do so. A potential future game that is streaming only will be gone for good once shut down.
    - wincy 4y ago
      I know 5 torrent sites I could go to right now and download the cracked versions of every single game I own, though. That would be impossible if the binaries never existed on my machine.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        Not impossible ( as movies have shown ), but definitely a lot harder. Not to mention, cracked games deal with their own issues that make people like me hesitate ( malware and so on ).
        shkkmo 4y ago
        There are significant fundemental differences between copying a video being streamed and a game being streamed. The former is just capturing the bits sent to the screen and doing some math, the latter is trying to reverse engineer code for an application when all you have access to is the UI. The only practical way to do the latter is to find an exploit in the game that gives you control over the server where the game is running. So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder, and requires breaking more laws.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
bfgoodrich 4y ago
No, it isn't scary. These are just additional options. Personally I prefer Geforce Now which lets me use my own Steam catalog versus buying specifically for a niche service, but people make their own choices. Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand asset pile. I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it years down the road.
- account42 4y ago
  > I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. Just because you don't care about preserving our culture does not make those that do hoarders or fear mongerers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bfgoodrich 4y ago
pjmlp 4y ago
That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the purse. Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them. The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect use case for timesharing. Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.
  - freeone3000 4y ago
    Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price is increased to what the market will bear.
    - highwaylights 4y ago
      I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games on the browser. I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space. For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically): 1). Gaming PC 2). Xbox Series 3). Playstation 5 With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH): 1). Google Stadia 2). Microsoft xCloud 3). PlayStation Now 4). Amazon Luna 5). GeForce Now 6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow) 7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic 8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.
moduspol 4y ago
I'm with you, but I'm pretty impressed by this demo, too. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this concept took over gaming the same way F2P games did. In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at least) a single instance of the server-side game platform available open source, or freely available. Even if the game itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd align incentives for that, though. I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering, cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in the future.
avereveard 4y ago
Or they lose your saves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920
jeroenhd 4y ago
For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices. If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech? There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often gets ridiculed because of how new the model is. The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam or any other games store. Very few people have all their games on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates. The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap. In reality, all you really need to backup for single player games are your save games because if you get banned, you can just download a cracked copy of the games you like.
- account42 4y ago
  > For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices. Only way to play state of the art graphics-focused games at the limit of what personal computers can do, sure. But not the only way to play games period. Laptops and even phones these days are quite powerful and can achieve a lot. Due to diminisshing returns with even more powerful hardware, the gap in graphical fidelity between what a top end PC can run and what a cheap laptop can run will only get smaller.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Similar to the web has evolved to eat RAM and CPU because of ever faster browsers and machines, games have become harder to run even for similar graphic fidelity. The close to the metal, often hacky, super complicated performance trickery that was necessary years ago isn't relevant anymore. Like the rest of modern software, improved base specs are allowing for more developer comfort at the cost of some performance, bringing out more features quicker rather than running simple games at incredible frame rates. There are titles that will run on pretty much anything with a moderately powerful GPU (league of legends, rocket league) but you'll have a hard time running Cyberpunk on integrated GPUs, no matter how much you crank the settings down. On my laptop I've tried running Skyrim (the latest rerelease) on my 10th gen Intel integrated GPU and the results were choppy and nearly unplayable. It all depends on the games you want to play and how well they've been designed to operate in restricted performance environments. For sure a laptop made five years from now will run current high-end titles at decent frame rates if you set them up right, but that doesn't solve the problems of wanting to play a game now, or wanting more than the minimum graphical spectacle at playable frame rates. A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could run Windows, and that's the performance level many people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that. Both AMD and Nvidia are still finding ways to squeeze more performance out of their chips and even Intel is joining in with competent dedicated GPUs from what the leaked specs seem to indicate.
havblue 4y ago
I think it's scary in the conventional drm sense. You are correct that Google has not been known to support it's products sufficiently so it's far less likely that this will remain available than, say, a similar cloud streaming product from Microsoft.
meibo 4y ago
AAA publishers will 100% push for this as soon as it's technologically viable, even if it's a "worse experience". It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.
- fallat 4y ago
  Would be nice for someone to keep and publish a list of exclusives so we can track this.
ortusdux 4y ago
I would be much more comfortable with their service if they offered the ability to migrate out purchases, though there would need to be limitations in place to prevent abuse. I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service, but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  You can already stream your current steam library from your home computer. It works best on LAN, but not limited to it.
izacus 4y ago
What do you mean "in the future"? On Xbox One Series S/X, most games don't boot without internet check anymore and can't be modified or copied. This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you see?
- account42 4y ago
  The difference is the scale of the effort required to preserve the game. For DRM (whose complexity and invasiveness remains limited by how much it is allowed ot impact performance) this a lot more feasible than for something where the code was never available to run locally at all and you would have to essentially recreate the entire thing from scratch.
  - izacus 4y ago
    In the case I mention, the game data doesn't even exist on disk anymore (just old, partial version). It needs to be pulled from the server and it's encrypted at rest.
circa 4y ago
yes, i agree. Its the same reason I still buy vinyl w/ music downloads and even 4k blu-rays of my favorite movies. Call me crazy, but I want the media in my possession!
npc12345 4y ago
Don't purchase DRM'ed or hosted bits. There's the solution. I haven't bought software or games in years.
- hourago 4y ago
  Telling people to just stop participating in society seems an extreme approach. Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society. Laws for consumer protection seem a better time tested way of aligning consumer and companies goals.
  - npc12345 4y ago
    > Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society. Young people are broke where I live, they either pirate or just outright not have game consoles (most do not have consoles)., They're managing just fine, they play stuff on their phones or hang out and talk and eat some ice cream, or have parties/get togethers.
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    Where did they say that? You can get lots of drm-free games and software. Going out of you way to do that is like only getting fairtrade whatever, a bit unusual and restrictive but hardly "stop participating in society".
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      Yeah, but my friends may not care. Unless I select my friends based on free software views or enforce my dogma on my friends, participating in society will often require compromises.
      - mrtranscendence 4y ago
        True that compromises of some sort are always necessary, but I think you folks are overstating the degree to which refraining from DRM would be tantamount to withdrawing from society. All sorts of people could in principle almost entirely limit themselves to DRM-free software and media with minimal withdrawal from society. You happen to have friends you want to play online games with, but my brother doesn't, and neither does my girlfriend, or other people I know. There are other challenges (maybe they work with companies that require them to use Office 365), but they could limit their contact with SaaS or DRM in their personal lives. They won't -- they frankly have no particularly good reason to from their perspective -- but they could.
Termitiono 4y ago
There will always the mainstream consumer side and the open source side. Am I scared? No. And let's see if games are becoming only available through the cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc. Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no bank around anymore ;)
sascha_sl 4y ago
I honestly think it's amazing for online games that don't work without an online service anyway. EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in London is particular roles because they were more likely to lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command arrive" issue.) For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better than installing their kernel mode anticheat.
treis 4y ago
Eh, the expectation of going back to play games doesn't usually meet the reality. For the most part it's play for 1-2 months and then never pick it up again. Out of the couple dozen games I've bought on steam only 3 games really get significant repeat play. If that library went poof I'd only be out $50 or so. Compared with the cost of replacing a gaming computer it's insignificant.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  I have a hard enough time actually finishing games, I rarely if ever go back to repeat them. The only games I've ever played more than once (IIRC) are Dead Space I & II and Hollow Knight.
raducu 4y ago
> Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important in VR), but it would be perfect for me.
bambataa 4y ago
It serves a niche but I hope it doesn’t become the standard for everyone. Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.
throw_m239339 4y ago
Been buying games for cheap on Epic games store and playing them on Geforce Now in my browsers for 2 years now. IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store in my browser.
cookiengineer 4y ago
Basically what's going on on steam for years now. I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine) on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam existed. Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games. On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  Both GOG and humble bundle sell some DRM free games. I do dislike the push to DRMs and online platforms but at least there are still some alternatives and I try to only buy from DRM free sources.
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    Steam sells some DRM free games. Steam leaves the DRM question up to the developer\publisher of the game.
- morsch 4y ago
  You can play loads of games on Linux, it's way easier than it has ever been. You just refuse to do so, on principle.
hayd 4y ago
"you'll own nothing and be happy" !
snarkyturtle 4y ago
Not a new thing. SEGA had a service that let you play games through a coax cable for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel. It loaded everything into RAM and got deleted as soon as you reset the console.
redox99 4y ago
Nah, it will never happen. Cloud gaming might become more popular, but will never fully replace local gaming. First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full of GPUs 10ms away from every person. And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more noticeable. You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing each year.
- zython 4y ago
  People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are. PC Gaming is a big initial investment for some people so making it more accesible will maybe also attract some of the mobile market who want to play AAA titles but dont want a console or a PC. That being said I dont think we'll be saying goodbye to the desktop gaming PC anytime soon.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Mobile gaming is ultimately nothing like PC gaming. It's become a weird offshot of monetization and different mechanics. Very very few games are the same between the two and I double that anyone who plays PC games would be satisfied with mobile as a replacement.
  - redox99 4y ago
    What did people say about mobile gaming? But anyway it's probably minimal the amount of PC gamers that migrated to mobile gaming. And cloud gaming will probably be similar. In fact I think it's doing pretty poorly already in terms of adoption. Remember I'm not arguing that cloud gaming will never become popular. I'm arguing that we shouldn't worry about gaming becoming cloud only.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    >People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are. ... With whales subsiding the industry due to gambling addiction? I for one expected mobile gaming to revitalize story-driven, turn-based traditional RPGs like 2d Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, etc... Boy was I wrong :|
solardev 4y ago
Sure, that fear was there since OnLive first demoed this technology a decade ago, but it still hasn't come true. Stadia is just one service out of many, like Xbox, Playstation, GeForce, Luna, etc. Some of those operate off your existing libraries (Steam, Epic, etc.), others tie into publisher subscriptions (Uplay, EA). Most games really aren't archival quality anyway. You play them for a few weeks/months and then forget about it, and maybe come back to it years later when it's either 10% of its original launch price or abandonware that can be easily pirated anyway. And for the games you really really want to keep forever, there's still GOG.com. But really, Steam does a much better job at keeping my games safe than I ever have. When you think about it, the Web itself is similarly ephemeral. Most services are just subscriptions we use, dependent on the company that provides them. But they are still tremendously useful. Or Netflix, for that matter. These online gaming services offer convenience and usability, which are way more important to most people than whether their purchases/rentals will still be there 20 years from now. It's just entertainment.

Titan2189 4y ago

Sooo, I take it you have 0 games purchased in your Steam account then?

cloogshicer 4y ago
At least there you could crack it and keep it running if the service shuts down. But I agree, the dependence on Steam is concerning too.
memorable 4y ago
I like how the OP and your account both created in 2018.
- Titan2189 4y ago
  what does that tell you?
  - bhelkey 4y ago
    I think they are implying you two are the same person? I am not sure.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
Far easier to crack in the worst case of service shutdown. At least if you have downloaded the game. Of course also not an ideal solution.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  You think people have their entire Stam lib on disk... at most they have 4-5 games.
  - account42 4y ago
    Depends, I have a couble of TiB of Steam games installed right now but not my entire library. At least with Steam you have that option preserve the games and perhaps more importantly, pirates^Warchivists have the option to backup the game for those of us that did not have the foresight/care to do so. A potential future game that is streaming only will be gone for good once shut down.
  - wincy 4y ago
    I know 5 torrent sites I could go to right now and download the cracked versions of every single game I own, though. That would be impossible if the binaries never existed on my machine.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Not impossible ( as movies have shown ), but definitely a lot harder. Not to mention, cracked games deal with their own issues that make people like me hesitate ( malware and so on ).
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        There are significant fundemental differences between copying a video being streamed and a game being streamed. The former is just capturing the bits sent to the screen and doing some math, the latter is trying to reverse engineer code for an application when all you have access to is the UI. The only practical way to do the latter is to find an exploit in the game that gives you control over the server where the game is running. So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder, and requires breaking more laws.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

bfgoodrich 4y ago

No, it isn't scary. These are just additional options. Personally I prefer Geforce Now which lets me use my own Steam catalog versus buying specifically for a niche service, but people make their own choices. Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand asset pile. I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it years down the road.

account42 4y ago
> I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. Just because you don't care about preserving our culture does not make those that do hoarders or fear mongerers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bfgoodrich 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the purse. Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them. The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.

highwaylights 4y ago
To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect use case for timesharing. Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.
- freeone3000 4y ago
  Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price is increased to what the market will bear.
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games on the browser. I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space. For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically): 1). Gaming PC 2). Xbox Series 3). Playstation 5 With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH): 1). Google Stadia 2). Microsoft xCloud 3). PlayStation Now 4). Amazon Luna 5). GeForce Now 6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow) 7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic 8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.

moduspol 4y ago

I'm with you, but I'm pretty impressed by this demo, too. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this concept took over gaming the same way F2P games did. In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at least) a single instance of the server-side game platform available open source, or freely available. Even if the game itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd align incentives for that, though. I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering, cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in the future.

avereveard 4y ago

Or they lose your saves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920

jeroenhd 4y ago

For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices. If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech? There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often gets ridiculed because of how new the model is. The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam or any other games store. Very few people have all their games on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates. The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap. In reality, all you really need to backup for single player games are your save games because if you get banned, you can just download a cracked copy of the games you like.

account42 4y ago
> For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices. Only way to play state of the art graphics-focused games at the limit of what personal computers can do, sure. But not the only way to play games period. Laptops and even phones these days are quite powerful and can achieve a lot. Due to diminisshing returns with even more powerful hardware, the gap in graphical fidelity between what a top end PC can run and what a cheap laptop can run will only get smaller.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Similar to the web has evolved to eat RAM and CPU because of ever faster browsers and machines, games have become harder to run even for similar graphic fidelity. The close to the metal, often hacky, super complicated performance trickery that was necessary years ago isn't relevant anymore. Like the rest of modern software, improved base specs are allowing for more developer comfort at the cost of some performance, bringing out more features quicker rather than running simple games at incredible frame rates. There are titles that will run on pretty much anything with a moderately powerful GPU (league of legends, rocket league) but you'll have a hard time running Cyberpunk on integrated GPUs, no matter how much you crank the settings down. On my laptop I've tried running Skyrim (the latest rerelease) on my 10th gen Intel integrated GPU and the results were choppy and nearly unplayable. It all depends on the games you want to play and how well they've been designed to operate in restricted performance environments. For sure a laptop made five years from now will run current high-end titles at decent frame rates if you set them up right, but that doesn't solve the problems of wanting to play a game now, or wanting more than the minimum graphical spectacle at playable frame rates. A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could run Windows, and that's the performance level many people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that. Both AMD and Nvidia are still finding ways to squeeze more performance out of their chips and even Intel is joining in with competent dedicated GPUs from what the leaked specs seem to indicate.

havblue 4y ago

I think it's scary in the conventional drm sense. You are correct that Google has not been known to support it's products sufficiently so it's far less likely that this will remain available than, say, a similar cloud streaming product from Microsoft.

meibo 4y ago

AAA publishers will 100% push for this as soon as it's technologically viable, even if it's a "worse experience". It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.

fallat 4y ago
Would be nice for someone to keep and publish a list of exclusives so we can track this.

ortusdux 4y ago

I would be much more comfortable with their service if they offered the ability to migrate out purchases, though there would need to be limitations in place to prevent abuse. I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service, but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.

fartcannon 4y ago
You can already stream your current steam library from your home computer. It works best on LAN, but not limited to it.

izacus 4y ago

What do you mean "in the future"? On Xbox One Series S/X, most games don't boot without internet check anymore and can't be modified or copied. This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you see?

account42 4y ago
The difference is the scale of the effort required to preserve the game. For DRM (whose complexity and invasiveness remains limited by how much it is allowed ot impact performance) this a lot more feasible than for something where the code was never available to run locally at all and you would have to essentially recreate the entire thing from scratch.
- izacus 4y ago
  In the case I mention, the game data doesn't even exist on disk anymore (just old, partial version). It needs to be pulled from the server and it's encrypted at rest.

circa 4y ago

yes, i agree. Its the same reason I still buy vinyl w/ music downloads and even 4k blu-rays of my favorite movies. Call me crazy, but I want the media in my possession!

npc12345 4y ago

Don't purchase DRM'ed or hosted bits. There's the solution. I haven't bought software or games in years.

hourago 4y ago
Telling people to just stop participating in society seems an extreme approach. Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society. Laws for consumer protection seem a better time tested way of aligning consumer and companies goals.
- npc12345 4y ago
  > Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society. Young people are broke where I live, they either pirate or just outright not have game consoles (most do not have consoles)., They're managing just fine, they play stuff on their phones or hang out and talk and eat some ice cream, or have parties/get togethers.
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  Where did they say that? You can get lots of drm-free games and software. Going out of you way to do that is like only getting fairtrade whatever, a bit unusual and restrictive but hardly "stop participating in society".
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    Yeah, but my friends may not care. Unless I select my friends based on free software views or enforce my dogma on my friends, participating in society will often require compromises.
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      True that compromises of some sort are always necessary, but I think you folks are overstating the degree to which refraining from DRM would be tantamount to withdrawing from society. All sorts of people could in principle almost entirely limit themselves to DRM-free software and media with minimal withdrawal from society. You happen to have friends you want to play online games with, but my brother doesn't, and neither does my girlfriend, or other people I know. There are other challenges (maybe they work with companies that require them to use Office 365), but they could limit their contact with SaaS or DRM in their personal lives. They won't -- they frankly have no particularly good reason to from their perspective -- but they could.

Termitiono 4y ago

There will always the mainstream consumer side and the open source side. Am I scared? No. And let's see if games are becoming only available through the cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc. Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no bank around anymore ;)

sascha_sl 4y ago

I honestly think it's amazing for online games that don't work without an online service anyway. EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in London is particular roles because they were more likely to lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command arrive" issue.) For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better than installing their kernel mode anticheat.

treis 4y ago

Eh, the expectation of going back to play games doesn't usually meet the reality. For the most part it's play for 1-2 months and then never pick it up again. Out of the couple dozen games I've bought on steam only 3 games really get significant repeat play. If that library went poof I'd only be out $50 or so. Compared with the cost of replacing a gaming computer it's insignificant.

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mrtranscendence 4y ago
I have a hard enough time actually finishing games, I rarely if ever go back to repeat them. The only games I've ever played more than once (IIRC) are Dead Space I & II and Hollow Knight.

raducu 4y ago

> Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important in VR), but it would be perfect for me.

bambataa 4y ago

It serves a niche but I hope it doesn’t become the standard for everyone. Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.

throw_m239339 4y ago

Been buying games for cheap on Epic games store and playing them on Geforce Now in my browsers for 2 years now. IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store in my browser.

cookiengineer 4y ago

Basically what's going on on steam for years now. I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine) on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam existed. Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games. On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.

nicolas_t 4y ago
Both GOG and humble bundle sell some DRM free games. I do dislike the push to DRMs and online platforms but at least there are still some alternatives and I try to only buy from DRM free sources.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  Steam sells some DRM free games. Steam leaves the DRM question up to the developer\publisher of the game.
morsch 4y ago
You can play loads of games on Linux, it's way easier than it has ever been. You just refuse to do so, on principle.

hayd 4y ago

"you'll own nothing and be happy" !

snarkyturtle 4y ago

Not a new thing. SEGA had a service that let you play games through a coax cable for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel. It loaded everything into RAM and got deleted as soon as you reset the console.

redox99 4y ago

Nah, it will never happen. Cloud gaming might become more popular, but will never fully replace local gaming. First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full of GPUs 10ms away from every person. And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more noticeable. You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing each year.

zython 4y ago
People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are. PC Gaming is a big initial investment for some people so making it more accesible will maybe also attract some of the mobile market who want to play AAA titles but dont want a console or a PC. That being said I dont think we'll be saying goodbye to the desktop gaming PC anytime soon.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Mobile gaming is ultimately nothing like PC gaming. It's become a weird offshot of monetization and different mechanics. Very very few games are the same between the two and I double that anyone who plays PC games would be satisfied with mobile as a replacement.
- redox99 4y ago
  What did people say about mobile gaming? But anyway it's probably minimal the amount of PC gamers that migrated to mobile gaming. And cloud gaming will probably be similar. In fact I think it's doing pretty poorly already in terms of adoption. Remember I'm not arguing that cloud gaming will never become popular. I'm arguing that we shouldn't worry about gaming becoming cloud only.
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  >People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are. ... With whales subsiding the industry due to gambling addiction? I for one expected mobile gaming to revitalize story-driven, turn-based traditional RPGs like 2d Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, etc... Boy was I wrong :|

solardev 4y ago

Sure, that fear was there since OnLive first demoed this technology a decade ago, but it still hasn't come true. Stadia is just one service out of many, like Xbox, Playstation, GeForce, Luna, etc. Some of those operate off your existing libraries (Steam, Epic, etc.), others tie into publisher subscriptions (Uplay, EA). Most games really aren't archival quality anyway. You play them for a few weeks/months and then forget about it, and maybe come back to it years later when it's either 10% of its original launch price or abandonware that can be easily pirated anyway. And for the games you really really want to keep forever, there's still GOG.com. But really, Steam does a much better job at keeping my games safe than I ever have. When you think about it, the Web itself is similarly ephemeral. Most services are just subscriptions we use, dependent on the company that provides them. But they are still tremendously useful. Or Netflix, for that matter. These online gaming services offer convenience and usability, which are way more important to most people than whether their purchases/rentals will still be there 20 years from now. It's just entertainment.