4 ms·

Just the UK CMA standing in the way then, with its flimsy decision resting almost entirely on speculation about the "cloud gaming" market. Microsoft should be

by TillE 3y ago

Just the UK CMA standing in the way then, with its flimsy decision resting almost entirely on speculation about the "cloud gaming" market. Microsoft should be offering to to swear off cloud gaming entirely, they should be delighted. Game streaming is a lousy solution that requires enormous investment in specific infrastructure, it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox.

solardev 3y ago
Oh man, I hope they don't get rid of cloud gaming. It's been amazing, especially with their new partnership with GeForce Now (which IMO is the smarter move... rather than sunsetting xCloud entirely, just partner with Nvidia to make GFN the default since most cross platform Xbox/Windows games support controllers anyway). Streaming games is an amazing convenience (and value) for those of us who don't want to be limited to an Xbox (poor graphics, limited mouse/keyboard support) but also don't want to shell out $3k for a RTX 4080 rig and all its associated noise and heat. Where Stadia failed, GeForce Now, Luna, Shadow, and Xbox and PS streaming are still alive and well. And very useful!
bob1029 3y ago
> Game streaming is a lousy solution I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and calling it a day <> streaming gaming in my view. Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds a game using it that would absolutely not be possible using traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the average player's network stack couldn't handle all of the events, so the only rational option is to render everything on some supercomputer and ship the final frames. Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one. Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-server engine architectures that will not be possible until we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time soon.
- nightowl_games 3y ago
  You can fit a ton of data down a consumer's pipe. Can you actually design a game that would have those network requirements? A single frame of video is a ton of data compared to traditional game state constructs.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    What's more exciting to me the client doesn't need that data or assets you can actually make games thatb need to be discovered though the game. No peeking local files or state for what's possible in the game.
    - bob1029 3y ago
      Along similar lines, this also solves a massive class of cheating for competitive/multiplayer gaming. You can still do the AI screenscrape mouse bots, but there are clever statistical+active hybrid approaches that can catch those assholes too.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    Pure data rate is not a fantastic example. I'd also offer up something like large or dynamic assets (I think flight simulator is a good current example of that) or a game that is simply extremely big and needs a shitload of dram or GPU memory to keep around effectively.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  And the thing is, latency can be "good enough" for some games. I tried out the top end tier of GeForce NOW for a month just to see what it was like since I've always been skeptical of game streaming. I picked Last Epoch as a game since it has (had?) a reputation for being hard to run at 4k. Even at 4k, I could play it and my views on game streaming have changed a bit. This was last year and I was using an i7 4770k based system. I can say pretty confidently that I found the local lag spikes from not having a high end gaming PC to be far more frustrating than the consistent 40ms of latency via streaming. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and don't have the same reflexes anymore, but I couldn't even really notice the latency via streaming. I also think people are seriously overlooking the trend towards secure computing. What if you put a TPM in a video card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP compliant monitor. I think it's much harder to build cheats if the client side doesn't have any data to work with beyond video that gets decrypted as it's sent to your monitor. Heck, even just a lack of local game data gets rid of most cheating, right?
failuser 3y ago
Game streaming is a death sentence for game preservation. It will also be pretty bad for quality. Are your users playing a better older game? Kill it and replace with a worse more predatory one. And no one ever will be able to play the older game again.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox. in the same way that nintendo thought it was smart to ignore online gaming for some 15 years, sure. It was true for a while. Until it wasnt MS isn't doing this because it's immediately profitable. They feel it's the future, and they can iron out the technical issues. They want to be in the forefront when that arrives instead of playing catchup. Also, more obviously: Gamepass is on Android and Android isn't playing those games natively. It's another way to target the mobile market.

by TillE 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

Oh man, I hope they don't get rid of cloud gaming. It's been amazing, especially with their new partnership with GeForce Now (which IMO is the smarter move... rather than sunsetting xCloud entirely, just partner with Nvidia to make GFN the default since most cross platform Xbox/Windows games support controllers anyway). Streaming games is an amazing convenience (and value) for those of us who don't want to be limited to an Xbox (poor graphics, limited mouse/keyboard support) but also don't want to shell out $3k for a RTX 4080 rig and all its associated noise and heat. Where Stadia failed, GeForce Now, Luna, Shadow, and Xbox and PS streaming are still alive and well. And very useful!

bob1029 3y ago

> Game streaming is a lousy solution I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and calling it a day <> streaming gaming in my view. Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds a game using it that would absolutely not be possible using traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the average player's network stack couldn't handle all of the events, so the only rational option is to render everything on some supercomputer and ship the final frames. Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one. Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-server engine architectures that will not be possible until we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time soon.

nightowl_games 3y ago
You can fit a ton of data down a consumer's pipe. Can you actually design a game that would have those network requirements? A single frame of video is a ton of data compared to traditional game state constructs.
- postalrat 3y ago
  What's more exciting to me the client doesn't need that data or assets you can actually make games thatb need to be discovered though the game. No peeking local files or state for what's possible in the game.
  - bob1029 3y ago
    Along similar lines, this also solves a massive class of cheating for competitive/multiplayer gaming. You can still do the AI screenscrape mouse bots, but there are clever statistical+active hybrid approaches that can catch those assholes too.
- bob1029 3y ago
  Pure data rate is not a fantastic example. I'd also offer up something like large or dynamic assets (I think flight simulator is a good current example of that) or a game that is simply extremely big and needs a shitload of dram or GPU memory to keep around effectively.
donmcronald 3y ago
And the thing is, latency can be "good enough" for some games. I tried out the top end tier of GeForce NOW for a month just to see what it was like since I've always been skeptical of game streaming. I picked Last Epoch as a game since it has (had?) a reputation for being hard to run at 4k. Even at 4k, I could play it and my views on game streaming have changed a bit. This was last year and I was using an i7 4770k based system. I can say pretty confidently that I found the local lag spikes from not having a high end gaming PC to be far more frustrating than the consistent 40ms of latency via streaming. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and don't have the same reflexes anymore, but I couldn't even really notice the latency via streaming. I also think people are seriously overlooking the trend towards secure computing. What if you put a TPM in a video card? Then your video for the game stream can be encrypted and only gets decoded just before being sent to your HDCP compliant monitor. I think it's much harder to build cheats if the client side doesn't have any data to work with beyond video that gets decrypted as it's sent to your monitor. Heck, even just a lack of local game data gets rid of most cheating, right?

failuser 3y ago

Game streaming is a death sentence for game preservation. It will also be pretty bad for quality. Are your users playing a better older game? Kill it and replace with a worse more predatory one. And no one ever will be able to play the older game again.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>it would be smart to ignore it and focus on their great subscription service that only requires a $500 Xbox. in the same way that nintendo thought it was smart to ignore online gaming for some 15 years, sure. It was true for a while. Until it wasnt MS isn't doing this because it's immediately profitable. They feel it's the future, and they can iron out the technical issues. They want to be in the forefront when that arrives instead of playing catchup. Also, more obviously: Gamepass is on Android and Android isn't playing those games natively. It's another way to target the mobile market.