Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-deals/Sony-and-Microsoft-set-rivalry-aside-for-streaming-alliance

by jmsflknr • 7 years ago

322 261 7 years ago

asia.nikkei.com

matthewaveryusa• 7 years ago

Is the Akamai (largest CDN in the world) partnership with Microsoft announced last month related?

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2019-press/aka...

eclipxe• 7 years ago

No.

XzAeRosho• 7 years ago

While details have yet to be hammered out, the partnership will center on artificial intelligence and the cloud. The latter category includes plans for joint development of cloud gaming technology.

So this agreement mostly focuses on Sony using Azure infrastructure for Cloud Gaming. I wonder how will Xbox will compete in this scenario, it's kind of weird hosting your competitor.

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

Seems like Netflix and Amazon get along fine.

icxa• 7 years ago

Doesn't iCloud use Google Cloud?

devoply• 7 years ago

Amazon Prime Video is not any real sort of revenue source. But yeah giving all your game analytic info to your competitor is sort of stupid. But Microsoft probably has access to much of that info anyway.

nerdjon• 7 years ago

It's not like the tech industry is exactly new to using competing companies products.

Microsoft using Mac (not even discretely).

Apple using AWS, Google Cloud, Azure

Amazon Selling competing products

etc, etc

This may be a bit of a specialized case, but if you run a cloud hosting provider that is not your primary (or original) business you will need to accept that likely be involved in running a competing service. (I am sure AWS hosts a fair number of retailers and related technology)

eridius• 7 years ago

Apple relying on Samsung to build components for iPhones is a huge one as well.

test6554• 7 years ago

The cloud changed everything from Microsoft's perspective. They don't care what language or OS or tool you use anymore, as long as you host it in their cloud, they are making money.

LyalinDotCom• 7 years ago

First normal assessment on this thread, spot on!

remir• 7 years ago

Spotify is also using Google's cloud as well. They used AWS previously.

captainbland• 7 years ago

I suppose the risk is totally coincidental outages for Sony during critical moments in the product cycle. They'd better have a solid SLA in place!

skohan18• 7 years ago

It kind of functions as a hedge: this way they can monetize gaming even if PlayStation is winning.

Also Sony and Microsoft have a shared interest in having viable competition in the market against Stadia in case it takes off.

potrebitel• 7 years ago

it's kind of weird hosting your competitor.

Same as Apple using Samsung's tech in one way or another. Money talks after all. Different divisions, different profits, etc.

lawrenceyan3• 7 years ago

I assume this is in response to Stadia?

Waterluvian2• 7 years ago

And Nvidia GeForce Now. I'm wildly impressed by Nvidia's streaming solution.

lawrenceyan3• 7 years ago

I remember when Nvidia first launched GeForce Now in 2015 with their attempt at mobile gaming using the Android Shield. It was a good idea in principle, so I was sad to see it not do as well.

Glad that Nvidia is pivoting to moving the service back to a full computer setting. The Shield while cool, really could have done with a better screen.

shpx2• 7 years ago

By the way, Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now. Go sign up for their free beta and a couple months later you'll get an invitation

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/wa...

ssully• 7 years ago

Safe assumption since the first paragraph says they are doing this to better compete against Google

tzakrajs3• 7 years ago

Stadia has overcome the speed of light, so yes it's a viable product now and needs a response.

skohan18• 7 years ago

There might be cases where Stadia will be too high-latency for some games/gamers, but I would wager it will make huge inroads in the untapped market of people who want to play games but can't or won't invest in gaming hardware.

anongraddebt• 7 years ago

Perhaps this was mentioned on a different HN post/thread, but Azure facilities/farms are more widely distributed from a global-geographic perspective than either GCP or AWS. For game streaming, this should - in theory - provide a slight edge in speed.

vlunkr• 7 years ago

I assume if they're announcing now they've been working on the deal for a lot longer than Stadia has been around.

minimaxir• 7 years ago

Official PR from Microsoft: https://news.microsoft.com/2019/05/16/sony-and-microsoft-to-...

tcfunk• 7 years ago

Would be comical if Sony still claimed that they can't allow crossplay.

shmerl13• 7 years ago

Google finally advances Linux+Vulkan gaming using a side door that bypasses the market share blocker altogether. MS and Sony don't like it and plan to mirror Google. Instead, they should stop being lock-in jerks, and should support Vulkan as well.

skohan18• 7 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the fact that Google is embracing a Linux + Vulkan stack for gaming, but I also want them to have meaningful competition. Yes it would be a dream scenario if MS & Sony started supporting Vulkan, but it would also be a nightmare scenario if Stadia started dominating the gaming market, and gaming technology stagnated for a decade at Vega56-class GPU's because there is no competitive pressure to push the envelope.

shmerl13• 7 years ago

Sure, competition is good. But it doesn't mean it should come with lock-in problems. MS learned not to mess things up on the Web (remember ActiveX and Silverlight?). But when it comes to gaming, they are still as nasty as in the '90s. And Sony is even worse in this regard.

I agree about Stadia in general. I wouldn't want it to become too dominant, especially since it's like DRM on steroids - you can't back up anything from there. In general, I don't think regular gaming stores that sell rather than rent games are going anywhere. I.e. GOG, Steam and others are going to stay around. As long as Stadia won't be pushing exclusives, things will be good, since some will always prefer to run games locally.

deafcalculus• 7 years ago

The graphics API isn't that big a deal anymore. It's often a pretty small part of the engine codebase. Many games, especially those built on the popular engines like Unity, support both DirectX and Vulkan (and Sony's API too).

shmerl13• 7 years ago

It is a lot bigger deal than you think, including for those very engine developers who work on Unity and etc. Having to deal with all extra lock-in APIs doesn't come for free. It takes time, resources and slows down releasing features to their users.

chronogram2• 7 years ago

And OpenGL and Metal, and even the web! With a sweeping generalisation I'm going to say that a games company is either too small to care about the graphics API, or too big to care.

chronogram2• 7 years ago

How is that Google streaming gaming thing not Google being "lock-in jerks" then?

shmerl13• 7 years ago

In their context, lock-in could happen if they'll start pushing exclusives. But in technology sense, they are advancing common stack (Linux / Vulkan), unlike MS and Sony who use tools lock-in to discourage platform development by making it more costly.

skohan18• 7 years ago

Presumably if Google makes game development for Linux commercially viable, that will make for much more vibrant community support (tooling etc.) for local Linux as well. That plus what Valve is doing with Proton could potentially break the stranglehold Windows has on PC gaming. I personally would go 100% linux on my media PC if I did not occasionally play games on Windows.

zdw• 7 years ago

AMD is the big winner here, being behind the MS and Sony consoles for the last (and likely future) console generations and the Google Stadia service.

And with their GPU's going into datacenters and a move away from CUDA lock-in to OpenCL (example: https://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2019/05/14/1 ), they're in a great position to increase market share of GPU accelerated tasks like AI and deep learning.

sosodev• 7 years ago

Isn't it already confirmed that next gen Song and Microsoft consoles are still with AMD?

cududa3• 7 years ago

Microsoft has been working on this ~2008. Google only started a few years ago.

shmerl13• 7 years ago

Yet MS is clearly uneasy now, since Google kicked them with Linux+Vulkan choice which will erode MS grip on gaming development.

skohan18• 7 years ago

Yeah but Google has serious bonafides as far as delivering high-res video at scale. Stadia is just Youtube with input handling and a game renderer instead of video files producing the frames.

neilv5• 7 years ago

I'd be happy if Valve became a middleperson for AAA titles native on Linux+Vulkan. They have SteamOS and a decent controller ready to resurrect, and everyone to slap on PC hardware consoles again, given a makeover.

(Things like Wine are effectively sabotage.)

skohan18• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced they have the core competencies required to pull it off. It seemed like they had the hype and market positioning to pull it off the first time around, but just expected 3rd party hardware vendors to do the work and make SteamBox a thing via the magic of the free market. I think it might have worked if they put together an excellent 1st party product and gave it a real marketing push.

imtringued5• 7 years ago

Wine and Proton are exactly the type of solution that I want. It works and it will get better every year. Linux users can run software without explicit vendor support. (software freedom 0 [0]) It doesn't burden corporations with expensive Linux support. Everyone is happy.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

partiallypro• 7 years ago

You mean, the project Google will cancel in 3 years? Yeah, I'm sure the two gaming behemoths that have been demoing the cloud working in conjunction with games for the past decade made their decision based on that. Microsoft demoed cloud compute doing physics calculations in games...what? 8 years ago? Sony already has a game streaming service. Microsoft is expected to make an announcement this E3 on the topic.

Microsoft and Sony want to be relevant in a mobile world too...that's what this is all about. They both were shutout of the mobile piece of the pie in gaming, and they are coming back for it. Microsoft and Sony want their gaming ecosystem on mobile devices with the ability to cross-play with wired devices powered by their SaaS models, Xbox Live and Playstation Online. That market is much bigger than the market they've already captured.

cwyers3• 7 years ago

How does Stadia advance Linux+Vulkan? The games run in a data center (and they're not running a standard Linux port, the presentations I saw made it sound like they were running basically another console port).

earenndil• 7 years ago

Still, the games will have a vulkan renderer and run on some form of linux, making an official port to the actual OS more likely.

shmerl13• 7 years ago

More gaming developers becoming familiar with Linux+Vulkan, more games ported to Stadia's Linux, all that means more potential releases for normal desktop Linux as well. Not all who target Stadia will clearly do it, but potential is surely better than without Stadia. So I see it as net positive for Linux gaming.

coffekaesque• 7 years ago

Very interesting talk about Stadia, latency, Linux, Vulkan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdz4b5psrhE

The inside story of how DOOM came to life on Stadia. id Software delivers a bird’s eye view of real-world Stadia development from conception to execution. Learn how high-performance games are made on Google’s new streaming platform. Recorded at GDC 2019.

duxup• 7 years ago

Do we feel like Google's efforts are a ... viable thing yet?

Not really sure the Sony and MS thing are a reaction, and I'm not sure Google's thing is so much a thing.

Some of Google's PR about how whatever it is they're doing is going to be all things (their statements have been strange IMO) could just be unfocused PR, or just an unfocused product.

bredren2• 7 years ago

Will the most powerful titles white label or use their own custom cloud gaming? For example, Dota 2 or what pubg did with its App Store.

Removing the end user capital expense of a gaming rig sounds like a huge change. Would drastically reduce the cost of VR setups as well.

skohan18• 7 years ago

I can't imagine cloud gaming will be viable for VR anytime soon. It's far too sensitive to latency.

bredren2• 7 years ago

An alliance like this is a decades-long proposition.

Jyaif2• 7 years ago

It's possible.

The trick is to render the pictures using the latest position of the headset. Include depth maps to make the rendering more accurate. Use ML to in-paint the gaps.

ClassyJacket4• 7 years ago

Viable interactive VR will not happen over streaming (video sure). It's already tough to reduce latency to an acceptable range when games are played locally.

John Carmack has some good blog posts about this if you're interested in the details.

jxdxbx2• 7 years ago

Apple is not doing a game streaming service.

skohan18• 7 years ago

Their subscription service is looking pretty anaemic compared to this and Stadia.

pier25• 7 years ago

No, but it announced Apple Arcade which is an iOS/TVOS/macOS gaming subscription service.

jxdxbx2• 7 years ago

Right, it's a new business model, but it's odd to lump it in with Stadia etc.

phjesusthatguy3• 7 years ago

MS is contributing Azure resources, Sony is providing the camera sensors, and they're both working on AI. So they're collaborating on enhancing the panopticon and going to charge people to train it.

I wish I was kidding, but it's right there in the press release minimaxir linked[0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19931405

davemp3• 7 years ago

It seems like all the major players are taking game streaming seriously. I'm still not very sure about the viability.

There's the obvious DRM win. Accessibility will be higher with way lower or non-existent hardware costs. These probably look very enticing on a cooperate slide deck. Not to mention the subscription model.

On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on commodity hardware (see AAA 3D action titles). Latency is very important for these titles and the general rule of thumb is that 50ms of input latency is readily noticeable to humans. Average home connections have ~20-30ms round trip latencies. These speeds are not a reality everywhere or consistent. Combined with hardware input, world simulation, and rendering latencies it can be difficult to get latencies low enough to be comfortable.

Modern games just have the client run its own world simulation and rectify with the server later to hide the network latency. This strategy won't be possible with streaming. Is there some alternate optimization that can be made for streaming? The architecture will definitely be simpler with the main-frame paradigm. Maybe if there's only one client it could be feasible to send some batteries included chunk of frames that can be easily constructed based on the next set of inputs. Is there any hint that progress can be made in this direction?

If the latency problem can't be solved, I'm definitely bearish or game streaming. Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware.

politician• 7 years ago

Running managed clients in a "compute at the edge" architecture that streams video to the end-user might be a good compromise.

CDNs are deploying compute/lambda at the edge capabilities, so "gaming at the edge" could be seen as a reasonable expansion of that.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

This seems a lot more feasible. In fact, that's what the Nvidia Shield essentially is (although the edge computation is done with the customer's desktop computer).

wildmusings• 7 years ago

Without net neutrality, the companies running game streaming services will be able to pay for prioritized transmission to reduce latency and jitter.

Zekio• 7 years ago

Won't have much to do with net neutrality really since they will want the traffic onto non public fiber as fast as possible for more direct routes which will have a bigger effect

iandanforth2• 7 years ago

The Stadia trial convinced me that streaming is a near-term viable option. Latencies were not an issue. Bandwidth was, but when I got to play on a 50Mbps+ connection any issues I had encountered disappeared.

Moreover I was able to play a AAA title on my 2011 Macbook Air and that was fantastic.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

What kind of games were played? Whether or not latency is an issue is hugely dependent on the title. A game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice where the bulk of the game play revolves around precision timing is going to be killed by any significant amount of latency. Unless it does something smart like trying to compensate for the latency on the client end (e.g. make a block succeed even if it was late, if it suspects that the player blocked at the right time from their perspective when viewing the delayed stream) I can't see how a game like that would be playable on Stadia.

sidcool• 7 years ago

That's right. If Stadia does what Google says it does then gaming console business faces long term risk. I was quite impressed with Stadia demos.

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

Outside of most FPS and some really tight-action platformers streaming pioneered by OnLive is more than enough especially for the casual gamer.

When OnLive was operational I had no trouble playing Batman (something something Arkham?) on their American servers from a MacBook Air in Sweden. I had a similar experience later with LiquidSky which was running regular games downloaded from Steam in their cloud and streaming video to my laptop.

If they do cooperate on creating a similar service, this will definitely be a net win for the gamers.

However, if that's what happens, and if the service is successful, we might end up seeing less games tailored to run on the console's hardware with low latencies, and we'll end up having cloud-optimised games (much like we have mobile-optimised games now). But this is pure speculation at this point.

Faark• 7 years ago

I remember using Gaikai a bit. It was quite usable with non-reflex based games like From Dust. But that's quite common these days. I sometimes RDP over wifi to my gaming PC when to lazy to transfer saves for games like Factorio or KSP.

Still I have a hard time imagining first person games, since I despise those with significant input lag. Even just on a local PC some games have a horrible delay unless you run very high frame-rates (quite a bunch of those Unreal Engine) and I always have a hard time getting into those.

Now with an additional 20-30ms network latency... for this to be close to acceptable, they would have to get the on server delay close to nothing at the very least. I doubt that will happen while games are still release on multiple platforms.

imtringued5• 7 years ago

The casual gamer is perfectly happy with cookie clicker or Fortnite on mobile. 2D games should be able to run on almost any platform and 3D games can be toned down until they run well too. The only type of gamer that isn't served by the things above is the "core" gamer that wants high fidelity 3D graphics and real time experiences. Really the only need that streaming serves is to make DRM possible which means the companies want to have complete control over the user experience and they certainly are going to abuse that control as much as they can.

Xixi• 7 years ago

I have no idea how reliable it is, but quoting wikipedia [1]:

"Testing has found that overall "input lag" (from controller input to display response) times of approximately 200 ms are distracting to the user. It also appears that (excluding the monitor/television display lag) 133 ms is an average response time and the most sensitive games (fighting games, first person shooters and rhythm games) achieve response times of 67 ms (excluding display lag)."

These numbers are from the PS3/XBox 360 area, which certainly sold massively well. Since display lag is not included in these 67ms, this is what these streaming services would have to aim for. It doesn't sound completely insane given the 30ms round trip latencies of home connections.

On a more subjective note, I think it's going to be really hard hunting down high end gamer PCs. On the other hand lots of games don't run particularly smoothly on consoles (especially "normal" PS4 and XBox One, rather than PS4 Pro or XBox One S) that these services are directly aiming at. I can perfectly imagine a stadia version of The Witcher 3 running circles around the PS4 version that lags so much... But I don't think it would hold against the PC version.

But I don't game much at all anymore, so my knowledge is mostly outdated. The last games I played were 80 days and A Dark Room on my iPhone (both pretty good games). So I guess I'm now more in the target demographics of Apple Arcade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag

ehsankia3• 7 years ago

You can probably do even better than 20-30ms round trip if you're one of the large Cloud companies with data centers everywhere. Amazon so far doesn't seem interested, but Google and Microsoft definitely have the infrastructure to pull it off.

Sure you won't get high end PC gamers, that's not really the target demographic here. It's the millions of console and mobile gamers.

TheOperator3• 7 years ago

Actual video gamers right now go out of their way to get displays with very low input lags. 1080p144hz TN low input lag displays are used quite a bit in esports to shave a few msec. You literally win more often if you react faster. People aim to get TVs with sub 16ms input lag.

However that's not most of the market. The appeal of cloud gaming is for single player non-competitive games. These are the most pirated games and the games where input lag matters the least.

borkt• 7 years ago

I can easily notice the difference between 20 and 40 ms in FPS games. I have gotten out of FPS's due to keeping up with the hardware requirements, but a streaming service like this could make it possible. That being said, if they cant stay below 50ms I probably wouldn't waste my time.

davemp3• 7 years ago

I followed up on the wiki article. The citation was a just eurogamer article that had little to with human perception of latency. It did have this nugget: “Criterion said it was aiming for 50ms latency [for burnout paradise]” which agrees with what I’ve heard making handheld electronics. The goal was always <50ms latency.

Personally I noticed a significant improvement switching to a 165hz monitor in basically every first person game. The only difference here is going from 16ms to 6ms frame granularity (10ms off the worst case). I’m not sure how much is visual smoothness or latency, but I’d gladly take refresh rate/fps over UHD.

I’m definitely in the enthusiast group though. I didn’t even realize that console players dealt with such high latency. It will be very interesting to see how the market plays out.

romwell• 7 years ago

I have no idea how reliable it is

This is not reliable at all. You can really feel 100ms latency.

That's why in the world of pro music, barely anything above 10ms keypress-to-sound latency is deemed acceptable.

Quake III will make all these streamed games feel slow.

voldacar• 7 years ago

In arena shooters like quake and similar games, input lag of 10ms (1-2 frames) is noticeable. 200ms would be an absolute joke.

mattlondon2• 7 years ago

20-30ms seems high?

At least in the UK a typical home broadband latency is 6 to 9ms in my experience.

kn0where• 7 years ago

USA has no (local) competition for internet, it’s almost all regional monopolies or duopolies where one (cable TV company) is expensive and ok and the other (copper wire phone company) is slow and unreliable.

stcredzero4• 7 years ago

Back in the early 2000's in Ohio, under 80ms round trip latency was once advertised as 'leet gamer stuff.

ahje• 7 years ago

There's a lot of people who can't get fiber when you get outside the cities. I'd be thrilled if I could get under 35ms.

ryacko2• 7 years ago

Latency isn't an issue with games that have high time to kill or are purely exploration based, which seems to be something Stadia developers have noticed in the examples.

There will have to be local rendering for nearby objects and particles, but this is feasible.

DRM isn't totally likely, REnouveau does exist, and basic reverse engineering tools could be created to document the most common game engine functions.

Twitch shooters will never be replaced by this though.

p1necone4• 7 years ago

It's still a bit of an issue, especially if you're controlling a camera with a mouse even 50ms latency is likely to be very noticeable.

However much lower latency to these services is definitely viable in a lot of places as long as they put enough servers spread out across the country.

In the USA at least there's going to be a lot of areas where the available options for internet are just not good enough though.

imtringued5• 7 years ago

Streaming based DRM doesn't need cloud rendering to be effective. The client can download 3D models and use prediction and local collision detection while the server is still responsible for the secret sauce like combat rolls, item drops, missions. Reverse engineering is still possible but even the private MMORPG server scene is actually pretty "dead" compared to the actual games they are cloning. Adding content is expensive and replicating content is sometimes impossible so the developers basically end up building what amounts to a custom game which uses the same rendering engine as an existing game. Becoming an indie dev and working for free on your own game ideas is a far better strategy although the chances of success are low.

ManuelKiessling2• 7 years ago

Honestly I just don't get why every single time there is discussion about game streaming, the topic of lag as a potential show stopper comes up, and every time it's a hypothetical discussion, which doesn’t make sense at all - the solutions are out there! Don’t assume - just verify it.

And when you do, you will find out that there isn’t any actual issue. I’ve played games like The Witcher 3 via streaming over three years ago.

Input/output lag simply isn’t an issue, and I’m your average German VDSL user, nothing special.

From my point of view, there is no sense in any further discussion - the empirical data is already in.

ehsankia3• 7 years ago

Yeah, speed of light is actually a lot faster than people think. Honestly things such as controller and display lag are probably bigger than the round trip latency. And experimentally, anyone who has tried Stadia at GDC or I/O has said that latency wasn't an issue.

The bigger limiting factor I think will be bandwidth, especially in America with the awful internet provider situation.

TheOperator3• 7 years ago

Witcher 3 is a single player game and the users who care about lag by far the most are multiplayer gamers.

Certain games like rhythm games would also be pretty miserable with jitter...

cmsj• 7 years ago

Yep, I played a couple of the Arkham games on streaming services, the first one way back on OnLive before Sony bought them. It was fine.

I now play games with some friends and while I'm using a local PC, they use Shadow PCs (ie a VM with a GPU in a datacentre vaguely near them) and it's fine.

Maybe it'd be worse on an LTE/5G connection, but my phone is getting 25ms to the nearest Speedtest.net instance right now, which doesn't seem substantially terrible.

I would be much more concerned about the pricing of all of these things, than the technical issues. How many gaming subscription services am I going to need to add to my video subscription services?

ClassyJacket4• 7 years ago

You've specifically chosen a game that isn't sensitive to lag.

It's like saying "Switching from a car to a bike just isn't an issue - I once rode all the way to my neighbour's house!"

Try playing a multiplayer first person shooter on the same service, you'll find latency is an issue.

By all accounts, the Doom demo that Google gave was plagued with lag.

mrmuagi• 7 years ago

Mind sharing what the solution you referenced?

From a hard theory network perspective, having higher bandwidth, lower latency, lower error rate on transmission path combined with closer geographical proximity to servers seem to help mitigate increases in latency.

However, if you argue the problem is solved by your empirical evidence gained by playing Witcher 3 of all games, I disagree with your point. Play a real time strategy game, a MOBA, or a first person shooter. 70ms~ (a report for Stadia reported 70ms-130ms, may be stale data) of lag is noticeable to people. On the other hand, I don't mind streaming a turn based game.

shados2• 7 years ago

When playing online against other opponents, having the gaming machines be very close to each other might make up part of the latency introduced by the distance between the player and the gaming machine. Maybe.

Your first point is key though. Piracy is a big deal. People can say until they're blue in the face that it "helps", or that "they wouldn't have bought the game anyway", and for some unknown percentage its true, and for some other unknown percentage its a straight lie.

If they go from "optionally play a game via streaming", to "this game MUST be played via streaming" eventually, they get the second group (the ones who WOULD pay if they couldn't get it for free) instantly.

Only if it doesn't suck, obviously.

ancientworldnow2• 7 years ago

They also lose everyone not interested in streaming games (like myself). I'm sure they've run the numbers, but I know plenty of people who actively purchase games and are not at all interested in streaming them.

jeremyjh3• 7 years ago

I’ve played Bloodborne on PS Now and it works great. This game is really dependent on fast reactions and smooth camera panning. I think if you try it out you might learn something.

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

On a more technical side game streaming is only really desirable for games that don't run well on commodity hardware (see AAA 3D action titles).

I think it's actually more or less the opposite?

Twitch platformers like Celeste and Cuphead can't afford input lag, as they require very quick and precise movements from players. It so happens that these types of games almost always have low system requirements. Rhythm games and fighting games tend to be similarly lightweight. Street Fighter 5 won't run on a potato, but the hardware required is far from state-of-the-art.

By contrast, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 already contain large amounts of input lag when played locally according to Digital Foundry, and consumers don't seem to care much. This isn't to say that adding more latency is a good idea—and I have no idea if the existing latency could be whittled down to compensate for streaming—but it clearly doesn't bother people much.

readams2• 7 years ago

Also keep in mind how important multi player is for most big titles now. If you add up player -server-player latency it's actually the same. Given more consistent performance on the rendering/frontend side it's quite possible the overall experience will turn out better.

davemp3• 7 years ago

Client-side prediction does a very good job of hiding the network latency. Granted a lot of games run their servers at lowish ticks/sec (people do complain though) which is 30ms worst case at 32tps.

sterlind• 7 years ago

Rather than purely streaming frames, you could push a frontend client in e.g. webgl + wasm on demand, cache artifacts locally, and send view-independent texture/mesh streams down. Doing so is technically more complex than having a rigid client/server split, but if they start with full streaming they can progressively make the client more intelligent, without being burdened with any specific hardware/client infra choices.

It's also easy to port edge-rendered games to many platforms. It makes sense for MS to ally with Sony and shift their effort to cloud before both the Xbox and PlayStation are little more than rich web clients.

chimpburger• 7 years ago

Streaming anything but frames defeats the purpose of a frame streaming service.

Pombal• 7 years ago

Yep, see polystream.com

stcredzero4• 7 years ago

I'm working on a system that unifies single player and multi-player development. Think of it like zeit.co's "NodeJs Now" but for games, with a local-only configuration option. The way my system relates with streaming, is that the client is scaled way down in complexity. Basically, the sync protocol is a stream of positional updates from the server. The client becomes little more than a screen entity display. Then, the developer has the option to add a bit of "own world simulation" to further hide latency. (Or, in the case of the game I've implemented, just "own entity simulation" is enough.)

ezoe• 7 years ago

We care about the 50ms latency because the current games are designed for the platforms with <50ms latency. If the platform is changed, so the game too.

Latency insensitive games for the most part are not difficult to run on commodity hardware.

Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone.

That said, I don't like the current trend and I hope they failed on streaming video game.

delfinom• 7 years ago

Majority of people don't have a PC with a dedicated GPU. Or PC at all. Thanks to the Smartphone.

Problem is, smartphones still are shit for input (lol touchscreen) in any precise manners so what point is there in trying to run intensive games on it via streaming.

hyperpallium• 7 years ago

Clown gaming is compelling in every way except gaming.

mensetmanusman• 7 years ago

They will just host turn based strategy games, like yahoo chess.

kraig911• 7 years ago

I recall we all said the same crap about streaming HD movies with a monthly fee too. I think the only true problem with streaming gaming is that the quality of games will diminish even more.

giobox• 7 years ago

This kind of nuanced discussion of latency is something I only see among really serious gamers.

If you look at things like the Steam hardware survey, it becomes quickly apparent that the hardcore gamer (e.g. someone who has a high refresh rate display or similar and cares about this) appears likely a very small part of the overall gaming landscape, which is a very broad church now.

I think game streaming will ultimately win out hugely - “ordinary” (for lack of better term) gamers simply don’t care about the technical disadvantages. Huge numbers of console gamers already often add 100ms or more lag via their TV’s slow image processing and don’t even notice or care. I don’t think the average gamer is as latency sensitive as many readers here might be.

Most people are going to see that they can have a high end console/PC-like experience for a fraction of the cost of owning a high end console/PC, for the vast majority that is surely an appealing prospect. Finally, John Carmack himself believes the latency issue can be mitigated well enough for most things - that’s good enough for me ;)

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1108144741932249088...

My only real concern in all this is the future of video game mods. This is a pretty big thing now and hard to imagine this surviving well in a streaming based future. This would be a loss, creatively and functionally, for some people.

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

Additionally the market share of AAA-games is currently decreasing.

People with sensitive hearing can tell the difference if a sound arrives <1ms too late and the sound system needs adjustment.

All my bets are on bubble on this one. Maybe it could be resurrected as a zombie to offer sandboxed streaming for all those crappy mobile apps.

neilv5• 7 years ago

I didn't think this would ever happen. Sony execs presumably know the history of how alliances like that have gone (i.e., you almost invariably get backstabbed, sometimes first being given an offer you can't refuse, of a buyout).

guidedlight• 7 years ago

Sony is the biggest backstabber of them all

neilv5• 7 years ago

I haven't had that impression, relative to some in industry. My external (and non-MBA) view is that Sony is definitely money-driven, like any other big company, and they aren't stupid, but, when it comes to excesses beyond the norm, they might be more authoritarian than malevolent.

For example, consider that the PS3 Other OS mess might've been more a Japanese "we can no longer have this, and must discontinue it, for the good of the company/platform" (not that I agree that was OK), than "now is the time to screw over those other guys, on things we never intended to honor in the first place" (which has been well-known SOP of some other companies).

colemickens2• 7 years ago

Of course they are. Google is better at cloud and better at Linux, and Steam/Proton are already turning the tide for big games being available on Linux. If Stadia forces all triple-A titles to be Vulkan compatible, and more likely, Linux-compatible, Windows's strangehold on desktop gaming further weakens.

As a Linux user, cloud gaming excites me even though I have no intentions of ever using it.

colemickens2• 7 years ago

Thanks for the constructive feedback as always.

sneakernets• 7 years ago

And yet, the average American will never be able to use cloud gaming comfortably.

artemisyna• 7 years ago

I'm curious to see what the long term implications for this technology are. While game streaming is a big market, I can't imagine it being that big of a market, so it'll be interesting to see what sort of longer term plans they're aiming for.

metalliqaz2• 7 years ago

Why is it that these articles always mention Google's new Stadia service but never mention Nvidia's Geforce NOW, which has been in the cloud gaming space for years now?

KaoruAoiShiho2• 7 years ago

nvidia doesn't have the scale to endure years of losses while making enemies of half of the gaming industry in order to pursue this. AFAIK they have 0 exclusives lined up, meaning DOA.

metalliqaz2• 7 years ago

It's been operating for years already. They already have customers. In other words, the "A" has already passed.

NicoJuicy• 7 years ago

Console and when unused, a cloud gaming streaming server could reduce lag.

That's what I'm thinking about right now.

coakroach• 7 years ago

OnLive was envisioned cloud gaming in 2012 and was bought by SONY. My internet was not the best but it was quite promising. It was about tine to hear about cloud gaming. I feel like onlive was more than 10years ahead of its time.

cockroach• 7 years ago

OnLive envisioned cloud gaming really soon and was then shut up by SONY. My internet was not the best but the service was quite promising. It was about time to hear about cloud gaming again. I feel like onlive was more than 10years ahead of its time and Sony 10years late.

Ericson2314• 7 years ago

There's something depressing to me about this more than other things moving to the cloud, irrational as it may be. Yeah they already could track you, and you already didn't own the game in many sense, but this just seems extra "casino" like. PC games in particular are like the last bastion of desktop software people actually care about; it seems like the end of PCs and the desktop.

tetha3• 7 years ago

I am sad with this threads discussion. Or I'm old. This is a logical step in lock-in disguised as user experience.

Back in the day, if you could maintain the data, my 15 physical 3.5 inch rather unfloppy floppies were monkey island. I lost my personal copy, but if I moved the data, I could have my own copy of monkey island right here. I personally failed on my own maintenance there.

Then we had - skipping some steps - something like private WoW Servers. they worked 90% of the way. But Blizzard kept some code and that never worked privately. Most stuff worked on the client side, most stuff on the server side could be reverse engineered.

And now we're planning to stream games via something similar to team viewer / citrix, put bluntly. At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie? I can replay several single player games I acquired on steam off-line as long as I have the binary and a windows instance. I'm sure I can play FTL or slay the spire in 2040 without any developer interference.

If you stream those games, those games will die harder than the multitude of multiplayer only games with dead servers once the streaming servers get shutdown due to business decisions. Which can and will happen < 1 year after a failed launch in my book.

p1necone4• 7 years ago

Agreed. If we go full in on game streaming we can kiss actually preserving the art goodbye entirely. At least with streaming of non interactive media we can rip it to a hard drive somewhere.

wuliwong2• 7 years ago

I can understand that you dislike the idea of being beholden to a 3rd party in order to run your game but you lost me with

At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie?

What is an interactive movie and how does having a game stream from a remote server change a video game into one of these things?

tetha3• 7 years ago

This has been a complaint especially in the adventure game community. If I go to the cinema to watch the endgame or a john wick movie, I pay 10 bucks for 2 hours of movies. A lot of AAA games are a bunch of boring filler with some interactivity, but you end up with a much worse money per minute ratio. If you discount cutscenes, I've spent 60 bucks on less than two hour of gameplay on some games.

Now, I could replay those games after some time. That improves my overall cost-benefit ratio from 60 bucks -> 2 hours of gameplay to 60 bucks -> 4 hours of gameplay. Or, if the game is good, even more. I have a bunch of adventure games I paid 10 bucks for, and I have replayed them a lot and I will replay them a lot.

However, if you have a AAA studio, they will consider a game a failure shortly after release. You get one play-through for 60$ and that's all you get, because then they shutdown the servers for their next thing. And of course they will "charge less" and "run updates" and "keep expansions going" and such so it's less obvious. I'm jaded at this point.

renegadesensei• 7 years ago

I took it to be a comparison to Netflix. Cloud gaming is analogous to streaming movies with similar tradeoffs, the difference being that games are interactive.

ericdykstra• 7 years ago

We already see this problem with other streaming media services; just because something is available today doesn’t mean it will be available tomorrow.

I don’t want to give that much control over to someone else. I don’t need all-you-can-eat content. Just let me pay for the music/movie/book/game that I want and enjoy it for what it is, and know I always can just use my copy without needing to be plugged into the internet.

I guess this view probably makes me look like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I’ve managed to find a way to survive without signing up for Netflix, and I hope I can still play games in the future without needing to sign up for a streaming service.

keyle• 7 years ago

Yes, it really sucks when you add a movie to 'my list' and then you think about watching it tonight and poof, it's as if it was never there. It's adding insult to injury that it just vanished off '_my_ list' too.

tetha3• 7 years ago

I have lost dearly held content to the internet deciding to not host it anymore, including spotify.

At this point, I trust my backup 2x SSD mirror more than some cloud. So I guess we're two old guys yelling at clouds.

And this will just go even more fucked once the article 13 of the EU goes weaponized in 2 years.

codetrotter• 7 years ago

I am not so worried about games and movies — having access to them is a plus but I wouldn’t be too upset over not being able to revisit a specific game or rewatch a specific movie. Music bothers me a bit more because I like to listen to a lot of my favorite music again.

What worries me the most about this trend is what impact it will have on the computers we use.

Today you can buy a powerful laptop or desktop. You can write software on it, for it, for any purpose at any time. You can distribute that software to others freely, and you can permit others to run your software for any purpose under permissive terms of your liking that still protect the rights you have over your intellectual property, the software that you wrote.

I might be falling trap to the “slippery slope” fallacy here, but the way I see it, once the majority of new games, movies, music and other entertainment is all accessed via streaming, and all of the big players in software move the applications that are used in business and in education to the cloud, the computers we use may easily:

1) Become too weak to do intensive work locally, because everyone are using them as thin clients only, for interacting with software that is run in the cloud.

and/or

2) Become so locked down that we lose the ability to distribute software outside of cloud delivery mechanisms controlled by corporate entities.

I am not anti-corporate. But we cannot allow the corporations to be in control over the software that we use, in this way. Not because they are corporations or because they are capitalists or anything that. The same would be true of any entity, whether that entity be a business, a state, a body of the government, a non-profit organization or even just a person.

When we allow someone else to gatekeep access to the platforms we use, we are handing our freedoms over to them.

I use an iPhone that is running iOS. I can afford to allow my phone to be this restricted because I have other computing devices that allow me to develop software for them on them, and to run software written by others on the operating systems that those other devices are running.

But if none of my devices allowed me to do this, and no devices on the market allowed me to do it either, then where would that leave me?

And where would it leave us? The humanity.

In my opinion, the ability to develop software freely, to distribute that software to others freely, and for them to be able to run that software freely, is so essential to our society and to the future, that if we lose this then we need to take drastic measures to regain the control that we lost as quickly as possible. We would need to crowdfund the development of computers that allow us to do what these future locked down computers don’t. And we would need to ensure that these freedom-friendly computers become used by so many people that we could continue to develop these machines and be able to continue to produce them, at a reasonable price. So that the ability to develop and run any software for any purpose will always be possible.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 7 years ago

It’s not all doom and gloom, that sort of mentality is still alive and well in the indie scene. Specifically people who make games like FTL (Rimworld and Factorio are two more recent examples of fantastic games that don’t require internet connectivity) are keeping the dream alive. My rule of thumb is to never buy games on Steam and only get them through GoG or directly from the developer. Sometimes there are a few titles that I really really want to play but are too tied to Steam and not on any other platform (I’m looking at you, Tabletop Simulator!) but for the most part as long as you are ok with staying away from AAA titles you can avoid always-online lock in and still have an amazing gaming experience.

modwilliam2• 7 years ago

Cloud gaming probably isn't targeted to people like you, then. When the choice is between not being able to play the game at all (due to lacking sufficient hardware) and cloud gaming, the potential downsides of cloud gaming are worth it.

darkpuma3• 7 years ago

You're right, it's not for people like him. It's not for people that have been around the block and have learned a thing or two. They're hoping to take advantage of the young and naive.

arantius• 7 years ago

I agree with you. I dislike digital distribution in general, largely for this reason. I believe it's likely that as long as I can find (say) a working PS4, my physical media PS4 games will continue to work as long as I would like them to.

Unfortunately, the general public wants convenience over these benefits. Instant gratification.

DangitBobby• 7 years ago

Finally, someone listens! I've been saying for years that not enough services are dependent on unreliable internet infrastructure! I can't wait to add single player games to the list of things I am unable to do when my internet provider has yet another massive multi-day outage.

m3kw9• 7 years ago

Sony’s got the game connections, M$ got the clouds

dead_mall• 7 years ago

Even trying to stream via LAN is unplayable. It's especially much worse streaming from a server that's thousands of miles away from your home.

I got 200mbs download and half the upload speed, I played plenty of PS Now titles, and the only problem I have with it is the input lag. There's no escape to it. You cannot play fast-paced games with such delay, especially multiplayer-FPS games, it's just terrible. It's better to have the hardware to play than to play remotely. Unless you don't mind 1-3 second (+ additional cause you're using the internet) input lags, then game streaming is just for you

p1necone4• 7 years ago

If you find game streaming on your LAN unplayable you probably have a setup problem. If you have a solid router and you're only going through ethernet, no wifi then stuff like steam in home streaming should be basically flawless as far as framerate and input lag goes(I get ~3ms added from the streaming iirc). You will notice video compression artifacts though of course.

I do always use it with an xbox controller rather than mouse+keyboard though, so it's less latency sensitive.

thrower123• 7 years ago

I've tried to like my Steam Link, but it just isn't worth the hassle - wired with cat6 from one room to the other I've always had lags and glitches and disconnects.

Throwing in ping times of 50-100 ms to some datacenter, not to mention whatever traffic shaping shenanigans Comcast will inevitably apply, and I don't have a fuzzy feeling about the viability of this rash of streaming services.

vardump• 7 years ago

Does your HDMI cable also have "lags and disconnects"? I mean, when you have hardware compression (presumably?), it's not all that different to send it over HDMI than ethernet.

Compression latency should be in low milliseconds (1 ms should be plenty.) The latency over ethernet is going to be measured in hundreds of microseconds. Sending a compressed 100 kB frame over it takes 800 microseconds, which can partially overlap with compression. Noticing 2-3 milliseconds extra latency is going to be pretty hard.

Something is badly wrong with your setup or with Steam Link.

0_gravitas2• 7 years ago

Cloud stuff aside, the title can also read "two massive media companies will explicitly coordinate and not try to compete with one another in an otherwise practically unpopulated product space"

_nedR2• 7 years ago

This marks the beginning of the end of golden age of gaming.

Two historic foes setting aside their differences to target their common enemy - The gamer.

hacker_9• 7 years ago

I for one hope it works out, I like the idea of instantly loading any game I feel like playing for an hour. So what if I don't own it, it's a game. I don't any of the movies I watch on TV either.

LaserToy• 7 years ago

Pricing is a key. As far as I know, Game streaming currently doesn't have viable business model.

PlayStation Now (former Gaikai) was a startup that wanted to sell game ads (try before buy), and after expanding into actual game streaming struggled to make money and attract users. It is just too expensive.

To me, the biggest difference bt movie streaming and game streaming is that gamess are much more resource hungry. Video can be watched on cheap 30 bucks usb stick, for gaming you need 400$ console.

stkdump• 7 years ago

I wonder if these cloud gaming efforts will also lead to latency improvements in remote application usage such as rdp and/or vnc. We are considering using 'heavy' software dev and CAD/CAM workstations on servers in our server room or maybe even into the cloud, so that we can use lightweight machines locally.

Jemm• 7 years ago

Having tried several video game streaming services over the years, I am not optimistic that streaming games will work for fast action games like shooters. The lag between a controller move and screen response is just not adequate, even when the server is only a few hops away with low ping values on an excellent network connection.

Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance

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