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Amazone is also working on a gamingstream service
Dragnelus
Member EpicPosts: 3,503
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Dragnelus
Member EpicPosts: 3,503
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Comments
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
What happened? All my life movies and books have warned about the dystopian future where evil megacorps run everything and increase the divide between the haves and have-nots. And everyone I know who was scared of this has gone full crazy and now love, cheer, and support every evil megacorp there is.
Its scary.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/11/18179048/verizon-gaming-video-game-streaming-service-vzg-nvidia-shield-android
Verizon is currently conducting alpha testing of Verizon Gaming, a game streaming service that would represent a major new initiative for the home and mobile internet giant. The Verge can report that Verizon Gaming is already up and running on the Nvidia Shield set-top box and will, according to the company’s documentation, eventually make its way to Android smartphones. In either usage scenario, the service can be played using a paired Xbox One controller. Verizon has not publicly advertised Verizon Gaming or even really acknowledged its existence.
Verizon has quietly been recruiting players to take part in the test, which currently involves over 135 games. Participants are promised a $150 Amazon gift card upon completion. They’re given a free Nvidia Shield, Xbox One controller, and a login for the test.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon looked into becoming an ISP one day. Could help them lock in the gaming market as a bandwidth provider.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
That means that at least one of two things must happen:
1) A lot less money ends up making it to game developers, which will end up meaning that a lot fewer games get created than would have otherwise.
2) A lot of people end up paying a lot more money for games than they would otherwise.
If it's (2), don't bet on it being that you get what you want for less while only all those other people pay a lot more.
Now, there might well be game streaming services that cost $20/month for a relative handful of the games out there. But if that service offers 100 games, 95 of which you don't care about at all, and three others of which you've already played enough that you're sick of them, is $20/month for the other two games really such a great deal?
If $20/month is the price tag, it's only going to be due to fragmented gaming services. You want to play ten games, of which this $20/month service has one of them, this $30/month service has two of them, this other $30/month service has two more, including the one that the $20/month service offers, some other services have one or two, and three of the games are only available via download through a service such as Steam.
That means that to get access to all of the games you want costs $100/month for a variety of streaming services, you lose access to your saved files when you cancel a service, and you still have to buy some games up front the way you do now. That's a lot more likely outcome than the $20/month streaming service that has all of the games you care about, at least apart from the people who only care about a few games. Maybe you'll be content to pay for one $20/month streaming service and ignore the other 90% of games that aren't available on that service, but most gamers will go where the games they want to play are.
1) Your ISP by definition has infrastructure near you. Cloud vendors like Microsoft and Amazon usually don't. That makes an enormous difference, both for latency and cost, as you'd much rather stream from a server five miles away than five hundred. The last mile may be by far the most expensive, but the other miles all have a cost, too. Having to traverse far fewer hops and far less distance means much less latency. That could be the difference in gaming experience between mediocre and awful.
2) Your ISP by definition has the cooperation of your ISP. Other companies likely don't, or at least not unless they pay the ISP a ton of money to get their cooperation, and pass the added cost along to you. If you stream games a ton and use 2 TB/month of bandwidth, your ISP is probably losing money on you. They've gone after their huge bandwidth users in a variety of ways in the past, and this is likely to end up as the latest round of it. All that they'd have to do is to give you just enough hiccups while using large amounts of bandwidth to make you hate game streaming--and that wouldn't meaningfully disrupt anything else besides game streaming, so it's easy to sabotage purely by looking at bandwidth usage. If your ISP is the one selling you a game streaming package, it's going to be priced to be profitable for them, and they're going to want it to work.
Traditional cloud infrastructure is built for giant data centers that can host a ton of users at once. That makes sense for what they build them for, as they're usually not sensitive to latency, so they don't need to be physically near their customers. Game streaming is extremely sensitive to latency, so Microsoft and Amazon may have a ton of infrastructure, but it's designed all wrong for game streaming.
The advantage that companies like Microsoft or Amazon have is that they have a backup plan in case their game streaming effort flops as badly as you'd expect. They just sell access to the same hardware to other customers. The same video cards that you use to render games can also be used for compute. They'd still lose some money on a failed effort, but they wouldn't take an enormous hit from having a bunch of hardware that they have no use for. Even if Microsoft builds infrastructure out of a bunch of Xbox One X hardware and later pulls the plug on the effort, that's actually a terrific compute part for purposes where you'd don't need a lot of memory but would normally be severely bottlenecked by PCI Express to a discrete GPU.
I'll go into shut down mode and ignore all of it.
Play the games I have on Steam now, adding one here and there, maybe !
Wait for Pantheon and SoL play the hell out of them.
I'll then wait several years or more. When VR gets 5 generations ahead of what it is now, I'll buy the 4th generation that will be years advanced from what it is now for $50
Easy..... Grand total of spending a few hundred dollars !
Do enough people have access to unlimited bandwidth to make a game streaming service a go? I know that movie, tv services are all over the place now...but i am not sure i see a game streaming service alone being popular enough.
I do believe that quite a few big players see this going the way you do. MS, Amazon, Sony ,some others, they have been moving towards the "service" type of business model. Where streaming (along with the rest of their business) is a way to go.
Maybe some type of mergers and or other type of businesses working together will change something to make these streaming services work together. Just think we are not quite to a point that our internet and infrastructure can handle everything being streamed. Moving that way...but think we are a ways off yet.
Even if I'm mistaken about that and Steam sees a bunch of players leaving for game streaming services, they'll just mimic the business model that works for others and parcel out money to game developers in the same way. That they can readily offer a better service for less money would allow them to undercut pricing of streaming services while still being far more profitable than game streaming.
Valve isn't 100% committed to a model where players pay separately for each game, or perhaps bundle of related games. Neither are Epic, EA, Ubisoft, or anyone else with a game store. They're committed to making money, and if consumers want subscriptions for large packages of games rather than buying games individually, and are willing to pay more that way than for individual game purchases, then that's what they'll deliver.
I think "Game Streaming" could work very well with just something as simple as an ArenaNet style patcher - the game is still running on your local hardware, but your just streaming files as you need them in small logical chunks, rather than a big bulk download.
There will probably be some resource sharing, I'm sure cloud compute will get leveraged somehow, but I don't think it can stray too much beyond what we currently see with MMO client/server style architecture -- the server may run the world, but your local actions still get handled locally.
As far as it being "cheaper" -- maybe if competition steps up. But given United States history, I think it will be a wild west show starting out, and you see a lot of services attempting to out-innovate and under-cut, but eventually it will consolidate down to just a couple of major players, and once it starts to hit that point is where the consumer starts to get squeezed.
We already have plenty of "Netflix" style gaming services: XBLive pass, PSNow, Humble Trove, Origin All-Access, Nintendo Online, etc. Some of them just provide "buffet all-you-can-eat" style access, some attempt to stream a game online... I don't know that the distinction really lay in the method the game gets to the consumer, I think that's a technical detail that most won't care about so long as it works well enough.
I think "Game Development" as a whole had already hit that point (let's just count the AAA players... I can think of only a handful that are relevant and still trying to sell $60 boxes). But mobile gaming and the potential for streaming has upended that somewhat, as development and distribution in the past had been pretty closely linked. Now we are starting to see the shakeup with distribution and a broader decoupling of development from distribution.
I can perfectly understand why developers and distributors believe that cloud-based "gaming as a service" is the holy grail.
A large barrier to entry it the hardware requirement that the consumer must possess. If you can eliminate that initial investment, you gain a larger audience.
Setting aside "speed of light" and latency arguments - which are valid points, and the availability of high speed internet, which I think is just as important...
It's certainly technically possible to get to where you could run a AAA-quality game on "MAX ULTRA" settings on anything that could feasibly run a display. And this is what the developers want - you don't need a $2,500 PC to play the latest game with great visuals. And it's certainly technically possible to make this entirely hardware agnostic - it could play on almost any PC regardless of CPU/GPU, it could play on almost any tablet, it could play on almost any console, it could play on the entertainment center in your car, it could play on your phone - and it could do this all with the same graphics and visuals and fidelity (obv control input would vary, but that's another technical detail I'm glossing over)
And that sounds great... the consumer would probably love it. And it certainly presents the broadest possible market for developers.
But distributors absolutely will not do that. They want you locked into their ecosystem, or at least make sure their cut of the money isn't getting pulled away by going outside of that. This is why everyone and their brother are trying to start up services now. All the AAA shops for the most part have their own service, and they don't allow their games to be distributed on other services.
I think this will end up with even more fracturing than we already have, unfortunately. The only difference between what "streaming" with cloud compute and what we already have today, is that the hardware required will be less expensive. Instead of needing a $400 Playstation to play Playstation games, you will need a $50 "PSLinK" (seems they had a box that did this at one point), which will be a glorified SteamLink box that only connects to Sony services. And they will likely sell an App on Android/iOS that allows access to the service there as well (but you will be required to subscribe outside of that app, so Google/Apple can't get at that revenue).
And Microsoft will have their own. And Nintendo will have their own. And probably EA or Activision will probably splinter off and decide to make their own. TenCent and S/E and maybe a few other larger distributors will decide they don't need the middleman either and make their own. It will turn into the modern equivalent of a hardware DRM dongle.
Steam has already pushed that route, but they didn't decouple theirs from the PC. which is why it largely didn't catch on fire. Steam doesn't do anything with respect to Cloud Computing/Remote Processing.... Yet - it may come back if they ever decide to go that route. They haven't shown any indication of heading that direction though, and that may be their demise if the market does shift this way.
It will have a cash shop.... and be Play-to-win.
1) Make it so that enormous latency isn't a problem, so that you can compress across time and it's okay if it takes a full second for anything the user inputs to affect anything that isn't rendered locally, or
2) Make it so that most pixels of most frames are exactly identical to the corresponding pixel on the previous frame, so that all that you need to transmit is what changed.
By the same token i have absolutely no interest in mobile games, small screen fiddly control interfaces, never going to happen.
As you say though streaming is a lot more expensive than simply selling. However companies like Amazon, Netflix etc. are making money out of streaming.
And in the case of Amazon they are already in the business of streaming. Potentially they might have to stream TV 24 hours a day to all of their Prime customers - reasonable to assume that they will have "expected" demand that drives costs and hardware capabilities etc. but they already have the "basic" capability. Now for online gaming they may need to step up a gear but they could - probably reasonably - take the view that if someone is playing a game they are not watching TV, or listening to music etc.
And it is another reason to make Amazon peoples "one stop".
In one place I lived - in the US - the speed was dire. I think it still is. In most of Europe though whilst some rural areas still only have decently good connections most places have superfast and getting faster broadband.
So ISP is absolutely a factor. Amazon are a worldwide though.