That's the way these things go, first tell people that they won't really be losing anything and when proven wrong, tell them they're in the minority so they don't matter.
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[VG247] Google Stadia is the future of gaming, whether you like it or not
- Thread starter Deleted member 18944
- Start date
I'm predicting that the data for this year is probably 12% physical sales. The reason why game streaming is even coming into the market is because of this.
For actual games released at retail IIRC companies are reporting that they are finally seeing 50% digital sales.
So keep that in mind; numbers for the overall market might include any number of things, including entire markets that are download only (like mobile gaming.)
Revenue wise Sony/MS have been over 50% digital for a bit, but that includes digital only titles + digital only DLC/MTX/etc.
Huh... well it's 2019 and I'm in South Carolina with a basic internet connection and I played Darksiders for 2-3 hours last night on it with zero issues. I need to check to see if I accidentally subscribed to the quantum package on my ISP.
I haven't read all the messages here and it's not throwing dirt. Different opinions are welcome, but we also have to question the reasoning behind it all. It's not like I texted the other folks here to post that too to throw dirt on VG. It's a question which probably won't be answered anyway.
They say something so I ask a question back although it could have been in a different way I agree with that.
Owning movies was never even THAT big of a thing in the first place.
Another huge reason comparing games to movies is dumb. Movies have theaters, television, and historically had rental companies. Most people rented movies at most, very few ever had large collections, especially pre-DVD.
It's why the switch to streaming wasn't some massive ownership issue for people; most people never cared to own movies in the first place.
Whereas most people playing a videogame bought that videogame; whether digital or physical, it's something they bought.
Music is an even worse comparison because the files are so small streaming is just not much of an issue for anyone, and the way people consume music works really well for streaming. Making a playlist from 1 billion songs on spotify > having a giant collection of CDs and needing a giant CD-changer to have a playlist that crosses albums.
Large game files/installs has certainly made gaming slightly less convenient. But you play a game for days, weeks, months... and only occasionally have to deal with the pause of a large download. Also kind of a catch-22 because as people's internet improves to handle game streaming, it will improve even faster to handle game downloading.
Game streaming is the future of some mainstream casual gaming, whether you like it or not
FTFY.
FTFY.
Maybe not. 5G starting a "wide roll out" in 2020. Meaning it is right in time for Next gen and the future thereafter. Let's try not to pretend that this space doesn't move quickly when the big Telcoms all try to beat each other, especially in the United States. Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile are all incentivized to beat each other here. That's great news for us.
That's because you think for some reason that the goalposts are "There's a difference between streaming movies and games" and not "Streaming is going to have a huge impact on console gaming in the future". Check the thread title.
This side discussion isn't meant to point out that they arent 1:1. Its meant to point out that modding is not a going to be a hurdle that keeps streaming from proliferating in the future. Im not sure how you miss that in a thread that literally talking about the future of streaming.
This is all marketing fluff right now as telecoms try to convince people to buy new devices and upgrade their services. LTE's rollout took years to offer proper coverage on most networks, and even struggled long after it was commonplace depending on your location. 2020 is not going to be the year 5g becomes commonly used.
The "competition will be great for us" mentality when it comes to US telecoms is a fairy tale that the telecoms have proven time and time again isn't something that actually motivates them.
OP
OP
VR raises the barrier to entry to gaming, Streaming practically eliminates it.
I can see streaming becoming a healthy ecosystem for games in the future where it coexists with actual hardware. It will serve that audience that doesn't want to deal with cables (lol) and doesn't have any sort of internet limits but I do not think it will ever take over the video game industry and claim it its own.
There are simply too many things against it to work properly and make it a worldwide thing.
As long as data caps, bandwidth constraints and poor speeds exist, streaming will simply not be *the* future of gaming.
There are simply too many things against it to work properly and make it a worldwide thing.
As long as data caps, bandwidth constraints and poor speeds exist, streaming will simply not be *the* future of gaming.
All computer and videogames would likely include PC gaming which is nearly 100% digital, as well as mobile gaming.
And quite possibly is a revenue number, not just game sales, so MTX and whatnot.
Consoles are still far more physical sales; although obviously shrinking at a decent rate.
For instance, overall revenue wise (not just game sales) I think this last FY was the first time Sony crossed the 50% threshold:
Individual games though are mostly more like 30%.. although recently some have reported inching closer to 50%. Some publisher announced that recently.
edit: Sony actually did report that for THEIR games, they have gone over 50%.. but that number is going to include some essentially digital only games:
And they specifically didn't include 3rd parties for some reason.
I tend to agree. Not necessarily with Stadia, but with the idea of streaming games to many different devices. I believe 10 years from now that will be the mainstream way to play games. Not sure if it will be Google, MS, Sony, someone else or all of them, but it will happen. There will still be dedicated gaming HW available, but that will be considered a niche market by then. I'm ok with it. To me the actual game experience is what matters, not the platform I use. I do not collect pieces of plastic and I also do not care about "owning" a game any more than I care about owning a movie or TV show on Netflix. That's my 2c.
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I'm not sure I even buy into this whole "streaming is inevitable in 20+ years thing".
The failure of Moore's law has led to the slow flattening out of computer power – your console already isn't that much worse than your PC, which is already only so much better than your phone, and your PC is almost certain more powerful in a lot of ways than what most websites are hosted on – none of which was true two decades ago. The core counts in the average consumer's desktop are starting to resemble what until very recently very expensive physical servers, and most "cloud" computing doesn't even bother renting physical hardware, because simply renting a VM on commodity hardware that is often less powerful than your average PC is already the default. Again, none of this was true two decades ago.
Twenty years is a long, long time. Is there even an advantage to running anything non-locally in 20 years? Or is your everything just about as powerful as anything else in 20 years, such that there's no reason to not run things locally, a PC and a phone are just form factors and not a large computing difference, and the only thing cloud hosting really offers over local is uptime guarantees?
I don't claim to know the answers, but "the cloud will remain relevant and capable of delivering computing benefits that local computing can't compete with" is not something I'm entirely convinced of given current trends. The overall trend in computing has been democratization of access to increasingly large local amounts of computing power, not centralization. I don't see that changing the closer we move to the physical limits of "Moore's Wall"
The failure of Moore's law has led to the slow flattening out of computer power – your console already isn't that much worse than your PC, which is already only so much better than your phone, and your PC is almost certain more powerful in a lot of ways than what most websites are hosted on – none of which was true two decades ago. The core counts in the average consumer's desktop are starting to resemble what until very recently very expensive physical servers, and most "cloud" computing doesn't even bother renting physical hardware, because simply renting a VM on commodity hardware that is often less powerful than your average PC is already the default. Again, none of this was true two decades ago.
Twenty years is a long, long time. Is there even an advantage to running anything non-locally in 20 years? Or is your everything just about as powerful as anything else in 20 years, such that there's no reason to not run things locally, a PC and a phone are just form factors and not a large computing difference, and the only thing cloud hosting really offers over local is uptime guarantees?
I don't claim to know the answers, but "the cloud will remain relevant and capable of delivering computing benefits that local computing can't compete with" is not something I'm entirely convinced of given current trends. The overall trend in computing has been democratization of access to increasingly large local amounts of computing power, not centralization. I don't see that changing the closer we move to the physical limits of "Moore's Wall"
People totally drank the coolaid on 5G, I remember during my final CompSci semester someone was doing a presentation on 5G and they were talking about the latency of 5G and how its so low that it will allow doctors across the world to remotely operate surgical robots.....
User Banned (3 days): Trolling over a series of posts, platform wars
Imagine posting this.
I like to operate in fact, data, and empirical evidence.
- 9 years ago Verizon Launched 4GLTE. From the mashable article: " The network will support 5 - 12 Mbps download speeds and uploads of 2 - 5 Mbps. These speeds are about the same as many home broadband connections in the U.S., which makes it extremely fast by mobile standards. It's not quite the speed of lighting from the commercial, but it is about 10 times faster than Verizon's existing 3G network " Fast forward today, - we know for sure the Verizon LTE speeds has operated well above that threshold for YEARS. Within two years of it's roll out, 250 million people were covered just by Verizon.
- T-Mobile is late to the party, but from the time it begins its roll out in March 2013 a year later in 2014 it covers 200 million Americans.
- Currently, Verizon and T-Mobile have both led the charge into a new 5G future. If they have started this year then by conservative estimates by 2021 or 2022 5G will have completely arrived.
It's bizarre because the latency, while low, is not beating out something like a good wired fiber connection. The latency thing has been driving me nuts on this forum for a good year; "5G will solve latency!" Yeah maybe for someone with an awful old DSL connection. 5G isn't really better than even a good modern cable connection, let alone fiber, when it comes to real world latency. It's supposed to get better and potentially pass up cable, but initial rollouts really aren't.. and it's not like cable/DOCSIS are stagnant techs.
Yes it's cool tech, yes it should improve a lot of things... but pretty much ALL of the marketing leaves out that it's an improvement over wireless tech and really bad wired tech, not good wired tech.
The other hilarious example the 5G companies use is game streaming for VR lol
5G has some advancements that are going to be big for business; I work for a tech consulting company and 5G is exciting for our IOT practice for instance. It should eventually be a big improvement for stuff like censors on trucks for the shipping/fulfillment industries and that sort of thing. But like almost all internet techs, let alone wireless ones, your software has to be built to handle signal interuptions. That was one of the huge changes that happened with software when the internet was first introduced in general, as opposed to expecting an always on LAN connection you had to code for "disconnected" scenarios. Game streaming CANT disconnect, it is more demanding than just about any envisioned use of computing TBH.
You have to understand Google Stadia's tech to talk about Latency effectively with it concerns 5G. All Google needs it s a constant stream of high download capability - not upload. Stadia basically streams an HD Video to your device and using techniques like last frame projection - you interact with the video by uploading kilobytes of data back to the server.
Streaming introduces it's own caveats. The Stadia kit is $130. It's only a little cheaper than a low end console right now. It also requires significant amounts of bandwidth, and introduces more input lag, and video compression, etc.
The thing is, swap all the "Stadia" in the article to "Streaming" and the opinion would be the same. It's very weird that this piece uses Stadia to represent streaming, and kinda disrespectful to xCloud, PSNow etc.
Doesn't mean this is 100% confirmed as a PR piece (or even the first possibility), it may as well be just a way to use Stadia as a buzzword to incite rage from people to get a lot of clicks.
Either way, it's bullshit.
Nothing wrong with the "I think game streaming is the future" opinion and i don't think people in this thread are implying this.
Um, I understand game streaming tech.
Nothing you just said has anything to do with latency.
The kit is a paid beta. When the service is live, you'll be able to immediately play on a laptop with keyboard and mouse or practically any controller. No hardware purchase required.
The input lag and compression is surprisingly negligible. Most people are not going to care about the difference and I include gamers in that.
I do think the controller is too expensive. You should be able to buy a Chromecast+Controller kit at best buy for $99 next year. When MS and Don't are likely asking $500 for next gen hardware, $100 for the Stadia kit is quite a lot cheaper. Also Chromecast is useful.
Conversely, who is to say that by the time everyone is able to enjoy streaming (as in it becomes the preferred way to play games) Google will be even there with Stadia anymore.
My internet connection isn't fast enough for Stadia. The One S was cheapter on Black Friday than the Stadia Premiere Edition (99€ vs. 129€).
And Xbox Gamepass offers more than Stadia Pro and is cheaper as well.
Stadia specifically? No.
Streaming in general? It will be a large part of the future, maybe even the largest part of it. But for many reasons, running games locally will have a fair amount of staying power too... it's not gonna turn into the ultra-niche that maintaining a personal collection of music or movies is.
Streaming in general? It will be a large part of the future, maybe even the largest part of it. But for many reasons, running games locally will have a fair amount of staying power too... it's not gonna turn into the ultra-niche that maintaining a personal collection of music or movies is.
1. American ISPs have done a wonderful job of holding back fiber to the home and gouging customers for sub-par service. Game streaming is collateral damage.
2. Say it with me: LAY-TENN-SEE. Latency. Latency doesn't affect music or movies, or books, or basically any sort of media...except video games.
Latency was (and is) not a focus of ISPs because people don't buy latency, they buy bandwidth, measured in Mbps (or Gbps if you're lucky). When have you ever seen an ISP touting how few milliseconds it takes them to reach various Data centers? The answer is never.
Want game streaming to be a thing? cool! Make 95% of people's connection a fiber one with 2 or less milliseconds roundtrip to the nearest major datacenter (with microsoft, Google, and Sony servers). Then you have an extra 9-10 milliseconds to encode your video AND decode it client side if your game is 60FPS or less, this will give you a latency of 12 ms, let's say 16 ms once we factor in tiny lag spikes (taking your ping from 2 ms to 6 ms).
This is one frame of delay, and imperceptible to virtually everyone. Once you get into more than 1 frame of delay, game streaming will be worse than the local experience.
And god forbid you want to reach for 100Hz or 144Hz gaming, all of a sudden, the time you have to encode your video drops to 4 ms, and you have virtually no room for lag spikes. <--Currently, only VR requires those kinds of speed, but 144Hz gaming IS a thing on PC and has been for a long time, so eventually, there is no reason why it wouldn't percolate down to consoles.
tl;dr: fiber for all and 2ms ping to data centers, until then, game streaming will suck. Good luck!
2. Say it with me: LAY-TENN-SEE. Latency. Latency doesn't affect music or movies, or books, or basically any sort of media...except video games.
Latency was (and is) not a focus of ISPs because people don't buy latency, they buy bandwidth, measured in Mbps (or Gbps if you're lucky). When have you ever seen an ISP touting how few milliseconds it takes them to reach various Data centers? The answer is never.
Want game streaming to be a thing? cool! Make 95% of people's connection a fiber one with 2 or less milliseconds roundtrip to the nearest major datacenter (with microsoft, Google, and Sony servers). Then you have an extra 9-10 milliseconds to encode your video AND decode it client side if your game is 60FPS or less, this will give you a latency of 12 ms, let's say 16 ms once we factor in tiny lag spikes (taking your ping from 2 ms to 6 ms).
This is one frame of delay, and imperceptible to virtually everyone. Once you get into more than 1 frame of delay, game streaming will be worse than the local experience.
And god forbid you want to reach for 100Hz or 144Hz gaming, all of a sudden, the time you have to encode your video drops to 4 ms, and you have virtually no room for lag spikes. <--Currently, only VR requires those kinds of speed, but 144Hz gaming IS a thing on PC and has been for a long time, so eventually, there is no reason why it wouldn't percolate down to consoles.
tl;dr: fiber for all and 2ms ping to data centers, until then, game streaming will suck. Good luck!
You're gonna be in for a bumpy ride downloading 200GB games on next gen consoles.
How many days did it take to download Gears5 via Gamepass?
1) Next year marks the tenth anniversary of OnLive's launch. Stadia's latency is not a noticable improvement over what OnLive produced back in the day. The "internet infrastructure will improve" argument is bunk.
2) 5G will have worse latency than a wired connection. Largely because 5G is itself reliant on wired connections. Remember: latency and bandwidth are largely separate issues.
3) Every time a bunch of games journalists loudly declared X is the future of gaming, X then proceeds to fail within a couple of years. In this case, X is game streaming as a whole. It's failed before, and I fully expect Xcloud will follow PSNow in being a niche interest. Stadia's is already a punchline.
2) 5G will have worse latency than a wired connection. Largely because 5G is itself reliant on wired connections. Remember: latency and bandwidth are largely separate issues.
3) Every time a bunch of games journalists loudly declared X is the future of gaming, X then proceeds to fail within a couple of years. In this case, X is game streaming as a whole. It's failed before, and I fully expect Xcloud will follow PSNow in being a niche interest. Stadia's is already a punchline.
Perhaps not their business model, but streaming will be a big part of gaming once the internet can keep up for most people.
My impression too upon reading excerpts like that. Icky.
I still think streaming is the future, but Stadia in particular? Probably not.
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This thread is full of comments saying it isn't the future and or other takes about how people won't be playing video games if it is the future.
Years ago, people said the same thing about VR, where is it now? At least VR is a unique experience and not a much worse version of one that already exists.
Are you just a blatant troll or something? Why did you bring up upstream bandwidth? Nobody was talking about it because it barely has an effect considering the tiny amount of data needed to be sent upstream.
*posted from a VM running in Azure*
I see what you're driving at, but I'm not buying the whole google kills everything. If you're a founder you'll understand with the constant feedback, customer service, etc.
Game streaming services are gonna need to tussle with data caps if they want it to replace consoles. As stadia kinda goes through caps like candy if you go hard