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It's interesting to me that about 5 years ago John Carmack was talking up game streaming quite a bit in his annual QuakeCon talk. From what I remember he was p

by tdicola 12y ago

It's interesting to me that about 5 years ago John Carmack was talking up game streaming quite a bit in his annual QuakeCon talk. From what I remember he was pretty confident it would be the future of gaming at the time. However I'd love to know what went wrong and why game streaming as a whole has pretty much completely fizzled. Was it just too much hype and optimism that the technology would improve and latency wasn't an issue, or perhaps bad business models that doomed it from the start? IMHO game streaming is pretty much doomed if the future of gaming is ultra low latency and high framerates for virtual reality. There's just no way a streamed game could work with Occulus Rift, etc. and have low enough input and display latency to be believable. edit: I think it was his 2012 QuakeCon talk: https://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=3522 https://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=3522

m_mueller 12y ago
I'm thinking that in a few years there will still be games with intense graphics that aren't VR - these will just be a new type of casual game. In the last months the barrier to use high-end engines has been significantly lowered, which should make these tools available even to such lower budget titles (but sometimes with a huge following). VR helmets will probably stay a 'nerdy thing' for a while, taking over the gaming world from the top end and (hopefully) through arcades.
wsc981 12y ago
I don't think streaming is dead. I think it's mostly suited to casual gamers though. And the casual gamer market should be much bigger compared to the hardcore gamer market anyway. I did like OnLive on my MacBook Air quite a lot, but their game selection was quite limited.
forthefuture 12y ago
The problem with streaming will always be that computers get better faster than Comcast (or w/e internet service you have) does. Just going off a quick search for GPUs, pretty much every metric has doubled in the last 5 years. My internet speed over the same period has literally not changed. Not to say that the GPU is directly responsible, but that if memory usage in games is growing at even a linear rate (which is conservative), it's still impossible for internet speeds to match that improvement.
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
It's probably things like resolution. I mean, we now have 5K screens in homes. Gaming on a high res (not 5k, but at least full hd) has become the norm, and internet speeds did not grow as quickly. I think at some point the timing will be better because the growth speeds will reverse. i.e., the human eye cannot see the difference between refresh rates and pixel per inch density once it becomes too large. I doubt after 5k we really need more pixels. Of course by then we'll come up with new stuff to use bandwidth capacity for instead so it's hard to tell. But with everything moving to the cloud & wireless, the notion that we'll wirelessly be outputting video to a monitor, or running graphics software in the cloud, it's not far fetched.

by tdicola 12y ago

m_mueller 12y ago

I'm thinking that in a few years there will still be games with intense graphics that aren't VR - these will just be a new type of casual game. In the last months the barrier to use high-end engines has been significantly lowered, which should make these tools available even to such lower budget titles (but sometimes with a huge following). VR helmets will probably stay a 'nerdy thing' for a while, taking over the gaming world from the top end and (hopefully) through arcades.

wsc981 12y ago

I don't think streaming is dead. I think it's mostly suited to casual gamers though. And the casual gamer market should be much bigger compared to the hardcore gamer market anyway. I did like OnLive on my MacBook Air quite a lot, but their game selection was quite limited.

forthefuture 12y ago

The problem with streaming will always be that computers get better faster than Comcast (or w/e internet service you have) does. Just going off a quick search for GPUs, pretty much every metric has doubled in the last 5 years. My internet speed over the same period has literally not changed. Not to say that the GPU is directly responsible, but that if memory usage in games is growing at even a linear rate (which is conservative), it's still impossible for internet speeds to match that improvement.

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

It's probably things like resolution. I mean, we now have 5K screens in homes. Gaming on a high res (not 5k, but at least full hd) has become the norm, and internet speeds did not grow as quickly. I think at some point the timing will be better because the growth speeds will reverse. i.e., the human eye cannot see the difference between refresh rates and pixel per inch density once it becomes too large. I doubt after 5k we really need more pixels. Of course by then we'll come up with new stuff to use bandwidth capacity for instead so it's hard to tell. But with everything moving to the cloud & wireless, the notion that we'll wirelessly be outputting video to a monitor, or running graphics software in the cloud, it's not far fetched.