[HN Gopher] A deep-dive into the future of subscription gaming
___________________________________________________________________
A deep-dive into the future of subscription gaming
Author : jsnell
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-03-08 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eurogamer.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eurogamer.net)
| npteljes wrote:
| With subscriptions, control is higher for publishers, so the only
| thing they need to do is making it a better deal than owning a
| game. As an important milestone, digital distribution paved the
| way so now people don't expect actual ownership over games, it's
| enough to be able to pay and then download and run. Along this
| system, I think an indie scene will remain that distributes games
| as traditional downloadable software. As long as we'll have
| computers able to do generic computation of course.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| i think subscription is here to stay and solves the "new game are
| expensive but i want to play them" problem. on the other end of
| the spectrum you have all these game stores selling old games on
| heavy discount sales or epic store giving away a free game each
| week and this solves the i want to own, even if i'm years later,
| cheaply solution. i think there's room for both
| [deleted]
| 0xy wrote:
| I've heard this one before!
|
| What we're sold: a low monthly price to enjoy all the content we
| could ever want.
|
| What we get: rapid balkanisation of service offerings.
|
| Disney+, Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube
| Premium, Prime Video, Crackle.
|
| Soon: Xbox Game Pass, PS Game Pass, Steam Game Pass, Ubisoft Game
| Pass, Take Two Game Pass, Activision Game Pass.
|
| It's worse than bundles! Not to mention publishers just giving up
| on live service games and switching off servers. Games are art,
| and art should not be ephemeral.
|
| I'll be able to fire up SimCity for DOS in 50 years. I won't be
| able to fire up SimCity (2013) in 5 years, let alone 50.
|
| This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions
| permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always online",
| paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > This industry is rapidly hollowing out. Microtransactions
| permeate every single AAA release, everything is "always
| online", paywalls for content and disastrous releases.
|
| That's not true. there are good games that dont come with BS
| exploit gamers for every cent.
|
| Hades, Disco Elysium, Valheim are my most recent games i played
| last year that are without microtransactions.
|
| Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| None of those games are from AAA studios, so you haven't
| exactly rebutted the OP's comment which was
| "Microtransactions permeate every single AAA release".
| dagw wrote:
| _Hades, Disco Elysium, Valheim_
|
| None of those are "AAA" games. Don't get me wrong Hades and
| Disco Elysium where great (haven't played Valheim), but if
| your idea of a good time is CoD, Fortnite and Madden I won't
| blame you for not enjoying them.
| samwestdev wrote:
| > Also FUCK EA for destroying SimCity
|
| Amen bro
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Well, we got Cities: Skylines out of their mistake, so...
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| I feel like I'm alone in saying this, but I found
| Skylines to be a pale imitation of SimCity 4. It's a
| city-building game, where SC4 is much more of a city
| management game; you fill the map in Skylines, and
| there's almost nothing else to do.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Skylines is sandbox and traffic simulator, or more less
| traffic jam simulator
| jboog wrote:
| Counterpoint: Most people get WAY more value out of their
| Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max subs than they ever did paying
| Comcast $200 a month. And at a fraction of the cost!
| izacus wrote:
| The counterpoint is renting and buying DVDs/VHS tapes, not
| Comcast cable though.
| josefresco wrote:
| > And at a fraction of the cost!
|
| ... _big_ fraction these days. I "cut the cord" a couple of
| years back and am now paying close to what I was paying
| before.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I'm in Eastern Europe, I pay around 15$ monthly for Cable
| TV with around 100 channels, and high speed giga level
| internet.
|
| Once Steam came up, and our standard of living increased,
| we pretty much stopped pirating games due to the
| convenience. When Spotify came up, and all the other music
| streaming services, we pretty much stopped pirating music.
| When Netflix popped up, most of the torrent sites
| dissappeared over night.
|
| Now, a lot of people seem to turn back to piracy, and I
| suspect money is not the primary reason.
| dawg- wrote:
| > art should not be ephemeral
|
| Why not?
| mrec wrote:
| It'd be a sadder world if modern audiences could no longer
| enjoy Homer, or Shakespeare, or P.G. Wodehouse, or _Firefly_.
| It 'd be a poorer world if current art could no longer build
| on or remix older art. Does this really need an argument?
|
| Good art can and often does contain topical references which
| are mostly ephemeral, but I can't think of anything I've ever
| seen which was both a) _entirely_ ephemeral and b) worth a
| damn.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >a) entirely ephemeral and b) worth a damn.
|
| I can look back to some really really good fireworks shows.
| mrec wrote:
| Fair point, although this example is ephemeral by
| necessity rather than by design. If you could experience
| those shows again whenever you felt like it, maybe via
| some improved VR setup, and share them with your
| friends/kids/postman, wouldn't that be strictly better?
| trixrabbit wrote:
| Check "Game as a service is a fraud" :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
| mrpotato wrote:
| Playstation Plus is what lead to my eventual move to PC Gaming. I
| didn't (and still don't) see the benefit of having to pay monthly
| just to play games that I want to play. At the time (ps3/4 era),
| most if not all the free games were all indy games and games I
| had no interest in playing. That meant that I was paying full
| price for games I wanted to play and I had to pay a monthly fee
| just to play online multiplayer (and internet of course). Moving
| to PC saved me something like 30$/month for something that gave
| me little to no value.
|
| If the future of gaming is a subscription model, I'd rather just
| stop gaming.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I've always been a PC gamer, on Linux mostly (Steam enables so
| much).
|
| After enjoying a SNES mini for a while, I considered maybe it
| could simplify life by getting a dedicated modern console
| rather than use PC, for playing the latest games.
|
| However, then reading about how modern consoles are online
| connected and let you wait while they auto-download updates,
| makes it look exactly like PC, so not adding any value. So PC
| gamer I stay :)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> so not adding any value.
|
| Adding nothing and removing much. I have yet to see a console
| that can handle mods properly. There is no greater sin for a
| console developer than to allowing the player to _edit_ game
| files. That road leads to cheating and piracy. I don 't think
| Minecraft would have become what it did without mods, without
| the creativity displayed by PC gamers.
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| Also, historically consoles promised high quality technical
| experience - no major bugs and consistent high FPS, while
| currently it's no longer guaranteed. It's basically PC gaming
| without the hassle of GPU driver incompatibilities.
| scaladev wrote:
| When was that? I spent quite a bit of time on PS1, then
| PS3, and then PS4, and enjoyed my share of that sweet 24
| FPS "cinematic" experience. That heavy post-processing as
| an attempt to hide the (sometimes extremely) low texture
| resolution. The atrocious load times.
|
| Never again.
| m463 wrote:
| They say in the article:
|
| > For Xbox this coming generation is about "going beyond the
| console," as Ahmad says, "and really trying to reach as many
| people on mobile and PC" as possible.
|
| ugh
| elliekelly wrote:
| I have nothing but good things to say about the Xbox game
| pass but I absolutely _loathe_ the recent push for Xbox (and
| even Steam) to become some sort of social media platform.
| Sure, sometimes its fun to play with friends but quite often
| I just want to be left alone while I play and recently that
| seems to be (intentionally) more and more difficult.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| All products evolve to contain a social network, or are
| replaced by those that can.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| As a counterpoint I got an Xbox Series X because the cost of
| building a decent gaming computer has become ridiculous.
|
| Just the GPU would cost me as much as the whole console and as
| my desktop PC has an ancient motherboard, RAM, CPU etc. I'd
| have to replace everything.
|
| The Game Pass has been a pretty good deal so far, but I agree
| that having to pay just for online multiplayer is ridiculous
| and of course they could jack up the Game Pass price tomorrow
| and I'd have little recourse.
|
| Quick Resume and being able to play on the sofa is decent as
| well when I don't have much time.
|
| The main thing I miss is all the smaller games like Valheim
| etc. especially since AAA games have become less appealing as
| they just seem like time-sinks aimed to optimise "engagement".
| FooHentai wrote:
| For me the cost of gaming on PC is just whatever I need to
| add on top of a standard workstation, which is mostly just a
| bumped up graphics card. Only late last year did I finally
| upgrade the bones of a PC I've been running since 2009, which
| is a hell of a cycle.
|
| If you're chasing top performance and regular upgrade cycles
| I agree, it can be a pit of (up to) infinity monies.
|
| The current situation with GPU prices and coin mining etc
| does make things especially tricky right now if you're not
| already set up with a gaming rig from the past ~5 years.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| Yeah, my PC is from 2015 (and it wasn't state of the art
| then..) so it's quite a pain to replace.
|
| Also I have an Ultrawide monitor which perhaps isn't the
| best for gaming, but is far superior for work.
| vsareto wrote:
| There's some cards which lasted a while (1080 Ti, or the
| Titan cards, probably the high end 3x series and AMD's
| equivalent), but consoles are made obsolete pretty regularly.
| It's more worthwhile if you haven't already bought a
| work/life non-gaming PC though or need to upgrade that. If
| you don't have a good TV for the console, that might be an
| additional cost.
|
| Can't beat the ergonomics of chilling on your couch with a
| controller, but you _could_ set that up with a PC if you
| really wanted to.
| nathanasmith wrote:
| >the cost of building a decent gaming computer has become
| ridiculous
|
| I don't know, I have a GTX 980ti and an overclocked
| Sandybridge Core i7 2600k in my gaming computer, both bought
| many years ago, and I haven't had any problem playing new
| games. I'm sure there may be some stuff it would struggle
| with but Doom Eternal, the latest Deus Ex, Far Cry 5, etc.
| play perfectly well as far as I can tell.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| To be fair we're in one of the worst chip shortages in a long
| time, GPUs are supposed to be like 3-600 for low to early
| high range. Still one of the most expensive parts for sure
| but right now is especially atypical.
| Hinrik wrote:
| >To be fair we're in one of the worst chip shortages in a
| long time, GPUs are supposed to be like 3-600 for low to
| early high range.
|
| What's your point exactly? The recently released PS5 and
| Xbox Series X had launch prices of $400-$500 in the U.S.
|
| So, even without the chip shortage, GP's point about the
| GPU alone costing more than a console still stands.
| kibwen wrote:
| You don't need a beefy rig to play games. The majority of
| developers are already struggling to produce art assets
| that can put a strain on top-tier hardware. The PS5
| launch was dominated by two games: Demon's Souls, a jaw-
| droppingly beautiful game that made great use of the
| hardware, and Bugsnax, whose graphics looked like it
| could have been a Gamecube game (don't take this as a
| denigration). The hyped PC game of the past two weeks has
| been Valheim (having the fifth most-simultaneous players
| of any Steam game ever), whose graphics compare favorably
| to Tribes 2, a game from 2001. A select number of AAA
| studios have the resources to invest in pushing the
| graphical envelope; everyone else can get by just fine on
| five year-old hardware.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| At even $600 a GPU will last you longer than the quality
| of a similar gaming device like that. I guarantee the
| games on the console begin to look dated and lose out on
| features much sooner than building your rig.
|
| If a console is $500 and lasts 3 years your $600 gpu, and
| overall build (mine is about $1200 new but has features
| that I splurged on for work and could be 300 cheaper for
| just gaming) will last at least double if not a little
| more than double that time. At least that's been my
| experience.
|
| I would say looking at lifetime value building your own
| rig is much more cost effective and has a much higher
| lifetime on graphical features that are added.
|
| As an example my 1070 that I _only_ replaced this year
| and _only_ because I felt like it was easily still
| getting me 80+ fps in modern games and supporting new
| features like DLSS.
|
| I could have easily kept using it and been fine for a few
| more years with new features and updates all the time.
| whynaut wrote:
| why would a console last 3 years (barring failure obv.)?
| Typical generation is 5-7 years.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Generation yes but I don't remember a whole lot of
| fidelity updates occurring to my xbox 360 or my xbox one
| past the first couple years is what I was trying to say.
| Where as my NVIDIA cards get regular tweaks and
| improvements for much longer. I'm mainly a PC gamer
| though so I could be wrong here.
| NationalPark wrote:
| What $600 GPU is going to look like a PS5 though? The new
| consoles run games at 60fps/120hz on top of the line
| screens, that's a lot of performance for a budget PC.
| jboog wrote:
| 1. You don't need a $300 GPU to play modern games on a
| gaming PC. 2. Sony and Microsoft subsidize the cost of
| the hardware. They lose money on every console that goes
| out the door and make their cash on online passes,
| accessories and individual games. After a couple years
| the cost to produce goes down and they start to make some
| margin on them.
|
| This is the way they've been doing it for several console
| generations now.
| PhillyG wrote:
| I have a memory of reading that the strategy Nintendo
| have used from the n64 days, was always make a slight
| loss on each console but make big profit on games and
| developer licences, so that they start making profit
| after the third or fourth game sold per console
|
| Edit: looked for proof but for the life of me I can't
| find evidence amongst all the results for articles and
| blog posts reminiscing about old games and consoles!
| mikewhy wrote:
| People will say "you don't need a $500 card to play PC
| games", but they'll never acknowledge the caveat that a
| budget card won't run games anywhere near as nice as a
| PS5/XSX.
| Noos wrote:
| You really don't see the benefit of paying USA $60 to rent 24
| high quality games a year indefinitely? I mean really? thats
| almost a $1000 value.
|
| I mean literally, you will get more games (and AAA ones too)
| for pennies. I have PS plus, and they throw games at you. It's
| a problem because it probably suppresses people's desire to buy
| new games; like why buy control at launch when chances are it
| hits plus later?
| simion314 wrote:
| My son only plays same 3 games but I have to get the Plus for
| the online features. I think you are lucky if you enjoy 20%
| of the games on the Plus offer that you do not already own.
| If they really want my money each month then OK, fine but let
| me chose(put my money in the wallet and I buy what I want or
| put a giant list of games so I have some kind of choice).
| whynaut wrote:
| to be fair, they are making this change somewhat. on PS5,
| Ps Plus members have access to the "PS Plus Collection"
| which is I believe 15-20 of the best PS4 games, and one
| free PS5 game a month in addition to the usual PS Plus
| offerings.
| FpUser wrote:
| Why would I give a hoot about that $1000 value. It only
| exists in the heads of corporate people who are trying to
| hook me up. The only thing that matters to me would be do I
| like games X,Y,Z and how much am I willing to pay for it.
| Noos wrote:
| You pay less with plus for most of the games. Like I paid
| $60 for the PS4 Final Fantasy 7 remake, when I could have
| waited and paid what works out to be $2. They threw it on
| PS plus. Like I literally at one point got 6 games a month
| from it, since they gave them away for ps3, ps4, and ps
| vita. You literally pay the cost of one AAA game to get
| access to 24 for a year or more.
|
| If you think it's not a value, you're mistaken.
| benrbray wrote:
| If you're the kind of person who wants to play the entire
| PlayStation catalog, I can see the value. For me, I paid
| for PS plus just to play Battlefield One. I downloaded
| the plus games every month (when I remembered to) and
| most of them didn't really interest me (e.g. Just Cause
| and Batman I just didn't enjoy after giving them a shot).
| Noos wrote:
| Looking at my PS Plus library.
|
| Read only 2064 memories
|
| Amnesia Collection
|
| Absolver
|
| All three Bioshock games
|
| Bloodborne
|
| Cities: Skyline
|
| Conan Exiles
|
| Control
|
| Day of the Tentacle
|
| Dead by Daylight
|
| Fall Guys
|
| God of war 3
|
| Guacamelee
|
| Metal Gear Solid V
|
| Nioh
|
| Rise of the Tomb Raider
|
| Soma
|
| Uncharted 4
|
| What remains of edith finch
|
| Yakuza Kiwami
|
| If I wasnt already conditioned to buy physical games i'd
| legit not need to buy one ever. It's not like they throw
| junk at you.
| whynaut wrote:
| Every game I've played on this list is amazing. I could
| add a few more if I booted my console.
|
| I understand the frustration of having to pay to play
| online, but Sony has definitely made great steps towards
| making PS Plus a value beyond that.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"If you think it's not a value, you're mistaken."
|
| I am not mistaken. I do what I want how I want where
| possible and that alone is of great value to me. And they
| would not be squeezing me later when they think that
| there are enough people on the hook and the alternatives
| are few so lets raise the price.
| moistbar wrote:
| What value is gained from being forced to pay for internet
| access that you've already paid for? What value comes from
| owning $1000 worth of games I don't care about?
| melomal wrote:
| I agree here, everyone seems to just be on some rabid rampage
| talking about the if's, what's and maybe's.
|
| I couldn't access my Xbox for 2 months, I got it setup over
| the weekend. Downloaded 5 new games thanks to Game Pass,
| there's a lot more there as well but I need to play them and
| all for basically nothing.
|
| Netflix - everyone pays $5 per month for the pleasure of
| scrolling. Add in Amazon, Hulu and everything else and you
| have over $50 worth of scrolling to do to watch the same
| movies and TV shows that was watched many times over.
| jboog wrote:
| People on these forums just can't fathom the idea that they
| aren't the "average" consumer. They think because game
| passes don't make sense for THEM, that it's a bad idea.
|
| Therefore any decision made by game developers are awful,
| they are all idiots, people who spend time on niche
| tech/gaming forums are all geniuses who understand their
| market better etc. etc.
| melomal wrote:
| Yeah, to be fair you are right. It's amazing when you
| speak to non-tech people about some of the subjects
| discussed in HN and they honestly wouldn't care or know
| what anything is about.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| How much did your PC cost? What games do you play?
| eafkuor wrote:
| The good news is that you have about 3 decades worth of great
| games (1990 to 2020 roughly) to enjoy for the rest of your life
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| Totally agree with this. There are a huge number of good old
| games with great re-playability. There are lots of great new
| games too, but sometimes it is worth diving into the old
| stuff to find an oldie-but-goodie. I played Gothic 2 for the
| first time a couple years ago and loved it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I don't know. I know many people just want to play all the new
| AAA games and then move on. For those subscription services seem
| perfect.
|
| Me? I buy Albums and listen to them a lot. I don't use Spotify. I
| buy games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker (1283h), Slay the Spire
| (1011h), Stellaris (762h). I sink a lot of time into those games
| I actually love. I might buy games that I don't enjoy enough, but
| in the end for me it still wouldn't be worth it to buy a
| subscription like gamepass.
|
| But I think there are a lot of people who want that.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Counterpoint: I bought a Xbox Series S for 380$CAD and 3 years of
| Game Pass Ultimate for 240$, both before taxes.
|
| I could have paid 400$ for a Switch and then buy 3 games at 80$
| and play the same games all the time and I'd be bored in less
| than a year.
|
| I used to love renting games as a child. My family wasn't well
| off and if it wasn't for renting games I would have missed many
| gems.
|
| Now with Gamepass I have almost 300 great games to play, I
| finished 3 games already and I'm currently playing Hollow Knight.
| After that, I'll play FF7 original and then all the Kingdom
| Hearts.
|
| I won't have to spend a penny on games for the next 34 months,
| legally.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I'm also enjoying Gamepass, especially when the alternate trend
| that's been making buckets of money for the industry is
| microtransactions. Yes, I absolutely wish that the model of
| just making a really good game and selling it directly was the
| standard. But hey, we live in an economic system that demands
| unlimited revenue growth and out of all the options that
| preserve the creation of games that I like to play,
| subscriptions are by far the best option. If you don't like it,
| take it up with capitalism.
| Bancakes wrote:
| You will buy Stadia. You will purchase temporary licenses for
| limited access to games (one per platform). You will own nothing
| and be happy.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Sadly, I believe that this is correct. Look at what happened to
| music and movies.
|
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| antihero wrote:
| Or you can just plug your laptop/tablet into your speakers
| and play your local music collection.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > and play your local music collection
|
| 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.
| nightski wrote:
| It's kind of amusing because if you have a good enough
| internet connection to stream, the "pain" you describe of
| download/install/updating games is virtually non-existant. It
| takes 2 clicks to install a game on steam or other platform
| and updates are automatic.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| You're right, the automatic downloads have made things much
| easier. But it's still not anywhere near instant play. I
| have very fast internet at home but games can get tens of
| gigabytes big. If I have half an hour to play a quick game,
| that's a non-starter.
|
| 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.
| whynaut wrote:
| I don't think it was the case on PS4/XB1, but on PS5 I
| can choose to play a game while it updates. Did last
| night with Sackboy.
| nightski wrote:
| Sure, if you are playing a new game. I suppose if you
| like to dabble in huge games that are 10s of gigs in size
| that might be a problem.
|
| 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.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| As long as you wait for them to stop patching, you'll be
| fine \s.
| npteljes wrote:
| As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will be
| squeezed hard. The same thing will happen that happened with
| for example the cable television: initially paying for it made
| sense because it did away with commercials and offered a more
| diverse selection. Now? You pay and also there are commercials,
| and the selection is quantity over quality.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"As soon as subscription is the dominant way, consumers will
| be squeezed hard"
|
| 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.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Stadia without a very good connection is basically unplayable.
| Even the fact they have a data center near most population
| centers who would use Stadia isn't enough to combat it.
|
| 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.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > Stadia without a very good connection is basically
| unplayable.
|
| 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.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I play on gigabit hardwired and fiber and it was basically
| unusable for me. They need to do a lot better than that if
| they want mass adoption imo.
| Thaxll wrote:
| "Stadia without a very good connection is basically
| unplayable."
|
| This is plain wrong. Tech wise stadia is amazing.
| Bancakes wrote:
| It's a glorified VNC client with all its inherent
| drawbacks.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Actually you have to integrate Stadia in your engine so
| it's pretty far from a simple VNC, that's why it's better
| than other solutions.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I mean if you read any of the launch articles or people's
| experiences including my own you'd know it's incredibly hit
| or miss.
|
| If anything you're wrong here. Neat tech, swing and miss
| product and quality wise imo.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I played Doom on my tv ( 10 years old with Chromecast
| ultra ) over wifi with a 50mb connection ( VDSL ) and was
| really impressed by the quality, responsiveness, how to
| setup things ect ... It's basically plug and play and it
| just works.
|
| What do you define as unplayable? Reading your comments
| that you have fiber meaning low latency sounds very
| suspicious.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I would push a button and it was taking 1-2s to respond
| in Destiny 2 playing Stadia in chrome on linux. Playing
| on windows the input lag is less significant but enough
| where I can push a button and the action happens at
| basically a high ping couple hundred ms feeling.
|
| Anything with an online component including things like
| ESO, an MMORPG, had enough input lag where I could not
| realistically enjoy playing.
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| Better than the alternative IMO: Buying to own a bunch of games
| on Steam every time they go on sale and never even bother to
| play them because you have a huge backlog of games to work
| through.
| chii wrote:
| but nobody is forcing you to buy, and what you have bought
| will not cost anything to maintain your ability to play them
| (other than a PC).
|
| 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!
| Noos wrote:
| Considering none of you want to pay full price for anything
| ever, get used to it. I don't see people complaining about how
| Netflix isn't making DVDs and Blu-ray for their content, or
| buying physical games even any more. You all want the moon; you
| want digital content forever at rock bottom prices.
|
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| Unlike the situation with paid media and adblocking, for
| games, the big boys were usually profitable aside from the
| occasional flop which was mostly related to bad games or
| aggressive monetisation. There are probably more examples of
| games killed by aggressive financial models in the recent
| past than by piracy.
|
| Consequently there's a lot less sympathy for "We're not
| making enough money" verus "We're losing money".
| Noos wrote:
| nah, if anything aggressive financial models seem to work
| better, because they increase the limit of what people
| spend on a game. People pay $30 just to own a mount now;
| and its easy to make a lot of mounts for people who buy
| them. A fighting game like Dead or Alive costs you
| literally a thousand dollars for a "complete" version with
| all DLC. To the point where they just toss the base game
| for free.
|
| 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.
| Bancakes wrote:
| It's easier than ever to make any game and Netflix is known
| for miniseries. What this means is it's easier than ever to
| push a commercial product.
|
| 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.
| donaldo wrote:
| Not sure if this is sarcasm or not but I completely agree. It's
| ridiculous that for housing and cars (the most important
| assets), leasing and renting is quite common but it's suddenly
| taboo when it comes to something almost just as important like
| my video games. Also less wasteful for the environment to rent
| and play from a central supercomputer than have to buy my own
| computer and buy games.
|
| So whenever people express the point you were mocking, I just
| tell them about the environmental impact and they agree.
| Bancakes wrote:
| I can afford to buy the latest 7nm components, with TDP no
| more than I need, undervolt them to my performance
| specifications, use them their entire functional lifetime or
| sell them to someone. Either way, these are components fully
| utilised and easy to run on green energy (500W is enough for
| a beast gaming rig, 250W for most people). There is minimal
| waste and no overhead to speak of.
|
| 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.
| donaldo wrote:
| Good points, I completely agree with everything you brought
| up. Can you try to find data on electrical usage per hour
| of a series of centralized RDPs vs your computer?
| gruez wrote:
| Random result: https://www.dataspan.com/blog/data-center-
| cooling-costs/
|
| >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.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| That all sounds good. Maybe you personally can make it
| work. In reality, for most people it's a cycle of buying
| new big hardware (consoles, desktop, laptop) every few
| years, using them very sporadically and then turning them
| to e-waste. I don't see how a centralized solution could be
| more wasteful than that.
|
| The latency part is true though.
| Bancakes wrote:
| It's not letting me reply to your second post but you can
| find me some RDP, and I'll compare it myself.
| FpUser wrote:
| Housing - I did not have enough money to buy it outright so
| no choice for me here. For cars I do so would never lease
| one. As for environmental impact - go preach to bitcoin
| miners and other heavy users. I would suggest starting with 3
| percenters.
| pityJuke wrote:
| I could see this happening for quite a lot of games, sure.
| But... I'm skeptical just because the experience for some games
| would be so, so much worse. Anything requiring fine input goes
| straight out of the window, such as a tactical FPS like CS:GO,
| or VALORANT. MOBAs, maybe, except when you get to a high level
| where it, once again, requires precise inputs. Hell, even CoD,
| FIFA require it when laying against other players. Fortnite
| gets quite difficult when you consider the prevalence of
| building in that game - lord knows I struggled with accuracy
| even on a good machine. I guess Destiny 2 has demonstrated some
| aspects working, but AFAIK, quite a bit of the game is PvE.
|
| 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.
| antihero wrote:
| This is why I like GeForce NOW or ShadowPC. You own the
| licenses to the games but rent the hardware.
| cmehdy wrote:
| I discovered cloud gaming through Stadia but I now direct all
| of my attention towards GFN and, for the lack of availability
| of Shadow and equivalent, to G4dn instances on AWS with
| Parsec.
|
| 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.
| swiley wrote:
| I've given up on commercial games after online DRM. I'll play the
| game when the source is on github.
| ioulian wrote:
| Have a look at https://www.gog.com/. I only buy new games from
| them. You can download the whole package to store offline and
| play in a few years without needing to "login" or being online
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