A little over a month ago I had thought about doing p2p resource sharing to reduce the amount travel time and latency and make game streaming an edge computing problem and I still think that might be the way to go.
P2P resource sharing in a local area. Start with PC gaming friends with the assumption that a lot of people have local friends when you want to game but not own a PC you boot up the system and it uses your friends GPU, when they play it'll bump you to another friend or in the case you don't have another friend that's where you fall back to a reduced server farm in a datacenter some where to handle that.
As people use the service you gradually expand who can resource share from friends to a general Geolocation based pool. Now you very rarely fall back to the datacenter. Problems like spot instance turnover in the cloud have forced people to solve the problem of gracefully transferring resources before spur of the moment shutdown and worst case I think you can run multiple copies that you could hard cut over to.
You'll need a pretty tight lower bound for the types of hardware that can join that network and be used as resources among other things.
Anyway I'm 100% certain I'm missing a bunch of problems and technicalities here but it seemed like a good enough idea where I still want to set this up in a small example using kube and a few friends' computers.
I dunno, I've used it on connections I consider "not too great" like at my parents house and was surprised at how well it works. Like a lot of things though I'm sure it's YMMV, maybe I got lucky.
This is plain wrong. Tech wise stadia is amazing.
If anything you're wrong here. Neat tech, swing and miss product and quality wise imo.
What do you define as unplayable? Reading your comments that you have fiber meaning low latency sounds very suspicious.
Anything with an online component including things like ESO, an MMORPG, had enough input lag where I could not realistically enjoy playing.
I can't think of an analogous comparison for this in other media, to try and make a comparison to. Either something groundbreaking needs to happen (and doesn't physics prevent this?) or if the transition truly happens, these types of games will require a fundamental change in how they work.
Another thing - if VR ever actually gets any traction, I can't imagine cloud streaming working here.
The subscription services exist because people didn't want to pay for games. The games as service model exists because trying to make what you want just leads to piracy and enough lost sales to make it not worth releasing the content. GTA V for example probably learned its lesson from the piracy of chinatown wars on portables; its GAAS forever.
This is the world you made, I guess.
I mean, even with advertising on the net; no one wanted to pay subscriptions, and people here wanted content to be free. So the people moved to a model that would get them paid, and it was much worse than if we all just subscribed to physical magazines. Monetization models are often in reaction to the audience's willingness to pay; what we are finding out is that the old model of "buying physical product and not pirating it" actually was the best way to balance value and demands from the customer.
Consequently there's a lot less sympathy for "We're not making enough money" verus "We're losing money".
Something like Genshin Impact prints money hand over fist compared to other games. If anything, the worry is that it works too well and drives out less aggressive games.
My response is, well, how much money do game devs expect to make in non-original games anyway? Perhaps they should lower their revenue expectancies.
The only question is if the tech, and especially people's internet connections will get there. Personally, I much prefer being able to 'own' games and run them on my local hardware. But I think the convenience of not having to download/install/update anything, just hitting "Play" and go will outweigh the disadvantages for most people.
Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience. Everything will be stuck again in walled gardens like Netflix, Spotify & Co are now.
> Which is sad, because I think this will make the overall experience worse for everyone, for the sake of just convenience.
I miss the convenience of pushing a physical thing that I own into a slot on a device that I own and hitting a physical button labelled 'play'. Especially when the cheap app running on an expensive tablet that connects my expensive physical speakers to the library of all the music I could possibly want to rent for some reason can't see the speakers, even though I have rebooted my wifi, logged off and back into my streaming service account, re-installed the app, updated the speaker's firmware, etc etc.
The local collection that I stopped expanding three years ago because I was now paying for a streaming service.
Clearly, it's a trade-off. I don't miss paying vast amounts for a CD that might at best have one or two tracks that I really like plus a load of fillers. I've discovered a lot of music that I wouldn't have found otherwise thanks to streaming. But I worry for some of my older relatives who can barely navigate a smartphone interface, and for whom setting up the streaming on a modern device is a hit and miss affair.
I know that feeling. When what.cd went down it was a tragedy but I was able to continue mostly as normal. I even "slimmed down" my collection to make it more portable, which was a mistake because all of the classics on streaming services are fucking remasters. God, I miss those days of music forums.
My music discovery hasn't had half the same intensity or wonder since those years. Now what, Spotify playlists? Their shitty nerfed "radio" playlists?
I miss music forums and trackers dearly. There's reddit but it's not quite the same.
And let's not even talk about selecting hardware for a pre-built PC or building a gaming PC from scratch. That's just too much to ask for, for most people.
Don't get me wrong, I love all that stuff. But I think most people don't. That's the only way I can explain why anyone would pay the premium for the awful and expensive experience that are modern game consoles.
It's a lot more common for me to have a handful of games I am interested in installed and ready to go whenever I have the urge to play.
Can't talk about all consumers but in my case I got rid of all TV services some 15 years ago because I felt bein had. Maybe longer, just do not remember exactly. So no they will not be squeezing me hard. I'll just find something else to do with my money.
If subscription gaming gets this bad, it'll go the same way. In thirty years it'll be dying a slow death because fewer and fewer people use it and most people will have moved on to whatever replaces it. After they've spent another ten years dying there'll be the inevitable Netflix (i.e. streaming TV) moment, but for streaming games. Wonderful, but ultimately just the same thing but with time rolled back fifty years.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it might (probably will) go wrong, but nobody will really suffer for it and it'll fix itself given a little patience.
Thought police. Myself I never downvote and do not give a flying fuck if I get downvoted.
As for the rest of your I totally agree.
It's definitely great to be able to get games on sale on various platforms and then rent hardware to play it on my laptop. Even with pretty heavy costs on AWS I'm still very satisfied (spot instances + one ebs-backed snapshot for the AMI + bandwidth out costs = about 1 CAD/hr played with about $10 of fixed costs). Even if I played a hundred hours per month on AWS, it would barely reach the cost of a basic desktop by the end of a year, let alone anything that has RTX cards. And I'd have to do it all over again soon as specs requirements increase.
I appreciate the ease of use of Stadia but I definitely hope that in this fight it's the generic cloud-computing crowd that wins.
And eventually you would finish the backlog, and then you can buy more to fill it again! With subscription, you are paying even if you don't got time to play!
So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
Compare this to generations old server farms that require maintenance, extreme cooling solutions, run virtualisation layers on top of virtualisation layers, necessitate 5G equipment and increasingly high internet costs and middlemen, on top of a user device in the first place.
My computer can also be used as charity for Folding At Home, run my homeservers, and train my AI models. All this instead of purchasing different subscriptions for different servers. In effect, I can optimise the hardware exactly to my needs and use it efficiently to its full extent, reducing waste completely.
Not to mention game streaming will never look as good as native rendering, and "negative latency" is physically impossible. I also don't lease cars.
The latency part is true though.
>According to research, anywhere between 30 and 55 percent of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems
Meanwhile the cooling cost for a computer in a home is probably zero.
Leasing is common because people don't quite understand they're always worse off with it (though you could make the argument that it saves hassle and could therefore be worth it).
Renting is as common as it is because for a large amount of people it's literally impossible to buy a house where they'd need it (or even at all, without significant moving distance). Renting is always a terrible idea and most people understand this, they just don't have a choice.