It may but it also creates new barriers in that it requires a very fast internet connection - something many countries, including places like Germany, struggle with and have struggled with for years. Not all consoles are connected, right? I don't see it greatly expanding the audience so much as potentially shifting it to the side.
Consoles also become very cheap over time - what will happen to that subscription fee? That subscription WILL add up.
...and not everyone subscribes to online services. I don't play multiplayer games, for instance, so I don't need XB Live or PS+.
The minimum internet speed for Stadia is
10Mbps, but I wouldn't even call 35Mbps "very" fast internet speed. Look at the data below and keep in mind that the world population is around
7.7 billion people, while every console generation doesn't sell more than 300 million consoles. That alone should be enough to make it clear that the amount of people that have the minimum speed to access Stadia or any other cloud gaming service of the same scale, greatly surpasses the amount of people that are able or care to buy the current gaming consoles every generation.
Find out which countries have the fastest internet speeds in the world. View global monthly comparisons of fixed and mobile internet speeds.
www.speedtest.net
Oh? There are so many mobile phones out there capable of playing games but the risk there is even greater than on consoles. Do you have any data backing up this notion that more people overall will be playing games via streaming than the traditional model? Where does that data come from?
Please don't distract yourself with the current situation of smartphone gaming and the hundreds of games that are released there daily. This is the fact that I want you to focus on. To keep things simple I will only talk about the
3.3 billion smartphone users and forget about the millions of tablet and not powerful enough to play the latest games PCs out there. Currently Stadia is not available for this group of people, what would happen if only 5% of this group starts to purchase and play console games from their smartphone? That would be 165,000,000 million people buying games that were not there before. You can change this to 1% and that would still mean 33,000,000 additional customers that can now buy from the current library of the latest console games. Think about the less than 300,000,000 million consoles sold by generation I mentioned earlier. Do you understand what I'm trying to say here? You can change this to 0.5% and that would mean 16,500,000 new customers. Do you understand how a developer would appreciate having that larger pool of customers that traditionally have not been able to buy their games, either because they don't have the money to buy consoles or because they are not interested on buying a console at their current prices? Can you see how this would mean that a game that was short by just 50,000 copies from breaking even, has a higher % of reaching that goal with a larger group of potential customers that cloud gaming will allow?
Why would it allow developers to take more risks? You still need to purchase the game, right? This isn't Netflix. Gamepass offers these same benefits. What makes streaming the superior solution over something like that? Games will still need to make money especially since they're being sold in the traditional way.
Because the larger the market the more likely it is to sell more copies of your game. There are 100 million PS4s out there and for each game you release a certain % of the 100 million possible customers will have the profile to buy your game. Let's say that a not so popular game genre (
relatively speaking) like strategy games are only purchased by 2% of all of the PS4 owners, so if your game is good, that is the market that will buy your game. You should understand that a 2% out of 200 or 300 million potential customers is more than 2% out of 100 million.
Are you sure about this? There is still a lot of concern surrounding big data centers and energy utilization without even factoring games into it. The requirements for operating games will increase the energy requirements in these data centers not to mention cooling requirements. Is there any data backing this up? I'm not convinced.
Let's talk about the 100 million PS4 out there. What is the environmental cost from transporting them all over the world to the stores that sell them or the warehouse that store them? What is the environmental cost of having a physical store that sells physical games and consoles? Once they are purchased and arrive to their owner's house, they will be used on average
6 hours per week, the remaining 162 hours of the week (648 hours per month, 7,776 out of the 8,064 hours a year has) it will be unused and it will be consuming energy during this time, if it is left on
stand by (Is this efficient to you?). Since we already know that the average play time is
6 hours per week, we know that with a lot less hardware we can cover the needs of the same amount of PS4 owners as they are not used at the same time. Let me also repeat the example I gave with Cuphead, you should be able to answer the question of how many Cuphead instances a regular PS4 can run right? For the sake of giving an example let's say 6 instances of Cuphead. With the current model, 100 million PS4s are able to play exactly 100 millions instances of Cuphead but in a server environment it would only be necessary to have 16,666,666 PS4s to cover the needs of 100 million Cuphead players (Does this sound more efficient to you?). What happens when a console breaks down and stops working, is it easier to
recycle hardware when it comes out from millions of houses or when it's concentrated in a data center? Please try to understand my example and the main point I'm trying to make here. I'm talking about efficient use of the available resources and not the possibility of a crazy scenario where the 100 million PS4 owners all try to play Cuphead at the same time. In reality there will be thousands of different games played at the same time, some will use the full server blade, while others will be able to run on instances that only require a small % of the available power. This is not a case like Spotify and Netflix and the amount of power necessary to keep those services running. A gamer that used to play on a PS4 and moves over to a Cloud gaming service exclusively, will not buy a local console and avoid the inefficiencies I described above.
Awesome
If there is truly something made that takes advantage of this technology without introducing any form of multiplayer then I may be interested. Utilizing this for computing difficult tasks and complex physics (as was promised earlier this generation) could be neat.
For me, though, I just can't see the benefit. The types of games where the cloud could be useful is something I'm interested to see but they will almost certainly be multiplayer experiences. I'm also personally limited by my internet situation which is unlikely to greatly improve.
Also, I will always demand perfection when it comes to image quality. I'm someone that hates using LCDs due to their flaws - they aren't good enough for me when it comes to gaming or movie watching. I own five CRTs of various design for different purposes. I'm looking for the absolute best. I don't believe streaming will get there in the next 10 years. It will be acceptable to the average person, maybe, but not for me...and that's outside the ownership issues.
I'm sure it WILL improve, though, because my first experiences with Stadia were very poor despite a direct connection at a Google selected site. Doom Eternal looked and ran very poorly compared to the PC next door. The skips I saw drove me nuts and people around me didn't even understand what I was talking about (including Google engineers).
Awesome, this is what I expect to happen if everything I have researched is valid. There will be servers only dedicated to run simulations that will then be shared with potentially hundreds of thousands of players playing a single player game. I was also doing some
research on how ray tracing would work in a cloud environment, but I haven't found anything clear on that. I understand how this was promised for this generation with the infamous Crackdown 3 demo, but it must be important do understand why it not happened and how cloud gaming as done in Stadia, is very different from the client server dynamic between an Xbox One and a server running the simulations hundreds of KM away.
What Internet speed do you have? Have you heard about
Starlink? I can understand your argument about image quality, but has there ever been a Netflix or any other streaming service exclusive content you have enjoyed? This is the case that I'm making for Stadia until we get to a point where even you cannot notice the difference, with the added benefit that some things will only be possible on a server environment.
