Amazon is Working on Game Streaming Service, Report Says (geekwire.com) 57
Amazon is looking to get into game streaming, joining its tech titan contemporaries Microsoft and Google, according to a report from The Information. From a report: Amazon is reportedly developing its own game streaming service, and it is talking to publishers about distributing games on its platform. Citing "two people briefed on the plans," The Information reports that the service likely won't launch until next year at the earliest.
This worries me (Score:2)
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They can try all they want, this will not change the download speed of my ISP account nor my monthly quota.
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Nah, there's a third type of game streaming service, where you never get to install the games locally, and instead the video and audio of the game is streamed to your computer. Your inputs are sent back to their servers.
Obviously this has latency issues, but it's apparently the new future of ultimate game DRM: you never even get a chance to buy the game, let alone pirate it, your only option is to rent games for a monthly fee.
This is what Amazon (and Sony, and Microsoft, and pretty much every major game dev
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It will never work. The people behind that aren't gamers, just MBAs.
Yes I know 'never' is a long time. But C is constant.
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If you think the speed of light in glass is faster, you need to get a refund on your degree.
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Educated people understand how C affects network latency. I'm not going to try and explain it to you, you clearly don't have the technical grounding.
Why are you on /.? People that belong here understand this argument.
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Listen up, retard. He referenced c because c and the distance between you and the game streaming server dictate the absolute minimum latency involved.
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They don't need "gamers" to like this. We have been a minority for decades, now.
They want to sell this thing to everyone else.
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I believe they are talking about game streaming service like GeForce NOW or ParSec. Considering all the cloud computing power they already own, it would be a natural fit.
As I've written here before, cloud gaming is going to be a game changer for the industry. Those of you who are saying, "it can't work" and, "there will be too much lag", have never played games on one of these services. The
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Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
They can't make your pings low enough for any sort of dexterity game. No amount of money will change the speed of light.
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You're wrong, and you clearly have never tried playing your games on a virtual system in the cloud.
The most popular games on GeForce Now are the FPS arena shooters that are so popular these days. People have been playing these games on virtual systems for over a year and having a great time.
Why are you so mad at the very idea of cloud gaming. I mean, you're just fuming about it.
Here's an Engadget review of the service from a year ago.
htt [engadget.com]
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Well if a 'guy' on Reddit said that it must be settled.
When all players are equally laggy, it might be technically 'playable'. But it still _sucks_balls_.
IT CAN'T WORK!
Do you realize how many tricks they do with game state packets to overcome lag? They are passing around 2nd and 3rd derivatives to project motion of other players into frames not yet communicated and reconciling that data later. That just isn't going to help when you're waiting on your video frames, frames can't be shown until they are
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It works.
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Not the GP, but I think the issue is that it's just too tough to make the math work from an end user perspective.
The "get all the games" argument is tough to make. I tend to play one of maybe half a dozen games when I have time to play games. Steam sales and the Humble Bundles make it cheap to get last year's AAA games; even EA has figured that out - I just bought Titanfall 2 Kitchen Sink Edition for $8. Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheap
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Interesting)
You better take a look at the system requirements for some of the current AAA titles.
OK, you misunderstand what the service does. You don't pay to get the games, you have to already own the games. They're yours. You just run them on nVidia's or Amazon's hardware in the cloud. Your Steam account fires up in the cloud and you can just play any game you own. Same with UPlay. Origin isn't part of this (I'm guessing they're going to end up offering their own service).
Thing is, we have no idea what the price point is going to be yet. If it's $20/month, it would be cheaper than upgrading my PC every 2 years. We just have to wait and see.
Also, it's not just going to be Chromebook users. I can play current AAA games that have not been released for OSX on an old Macbook Pro. Don't have to download the game, just fire it up. You can run Steam without having it installed on your computer. And everything runs on ultra.
Now, maybe I'm blessed by being relatively close to one of the servers. I've been playing games a long time and I really can't detect much in the way of lag. On a game like Witcher 3 or Far Cry 5 or Wolfenstein, or Prey, I doubt even a pro gamer would notice.
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You better take a look at the system requirements for some of the current AAA titles.
Far Cry 5's requirements list an a Radeon R9 270 or GTX 670. Newegg has RX570's and GTX1050Ti's for $150-$200. Running it on Ultra on a MBP for $0/month, I get. Even if they charge $20/month for the service, it's still a wash vs. getting a card in a desktop in under a year.
Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service.
OK, you misunderstand what the service does. You don't pay to get the games, you have to already own the games. They're yours. You just run them on nVidia's or Amazon's hardware in the cloud. Your Steam account fires up in the cloud and you can just play any game you own. Same with UPlay. Origin isn't part of this (I'm guessing they're going to end up offering their own service).
That makes it even less of a bargain. If it's only offsetting the cost of hardware, then I can't imagine there being a price point high enough for Amazon to make a profit while also being low enough to compare favorably to just getting a
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I like games too much to use a console.
I don't know. There are more big companies entering this space. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. I'm glad I got to use nVidia's service for a year for free though.
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And then there is the matter of bandwidth. There's a vast difference between having a connection that can handle playing online, and one that can receive a constant video stream in 1080p.
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Brother, I hope it stays in beta forever. I'm using it for free and loving it. I don't know how much I'd be willing to pay for it. But they seem to be building it out with servers all over and adding lots of new beta testers. The service seems to scale.
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or perhaps you're just a shill for financial reasons..or you've never played competitively.
cloud gaming will turn it into a shitty e-casino subscription service.. it's already bad enough with the current generation.
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It sounds like you don't know what cloud gaming is all about. You still buy your own games. You own your own games (as much as any Steam game is "owned"). You just play them on virtual gaming PCs in the cloud.
Most people don't play games competitively. These services will change the entire industry.
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Just admit you don't play games (except perhaps Bridge).
Most people play competitively, not in tournaments, but they sure aren't there to lose.
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Hello PopeRatzo!!
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You sure aren't winning much blathering about the speed of light in a vaccum and failing to browbeat people with your 1337_511LLZ, derp. If there's anything "competitive" about you it's your self-proclaimed worship of dishonesty.
Can I come live in your world of zero transmission time?
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change it how? make it more 'accessible'? ..and of course the quality of the titles will suffer, too, in order to conform to this new lower average standard of expectation, ability, and presentation technology.
It's not all that different to what 'social justice' is doing to critical institutions in order to make them more 'accessible'. I'll pass.
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The best games to play on cloud systems are the AAA titles. You can play them on ultra even with a machine that doesn't meet even basic system requirements.
It's uncanny how well it works. If you weren't such a jerk, I'd hook you up. Since I've been beta-testing it for a year, they sent me some invi
Not in most of the US (Score:2)
Cause you need the opposite for this.
Also, nothing mention on a way to lower input lag. Without a lower one, you wont be able to play a lot of games.
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Input lag is only half the problem. Round trip lag is the problem you are looking for.
All multiplayer games have 'round trips'. But a game state packet is always going to be much faster than frames of 1080 video. Good luck convincing the worlds admins that streaming video game frames deserve to be treated as ping critical.
The Tightest DRM Leash & Choke Chain (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to be behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 100mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that a streamed game service would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
Amazon already has Amazon AppStream and PCoIP tech (Score:2)
Amazon already offers Amazon AppStream [amazon.com] so this is a natural development. It uses NICE DVE protocol. [nice-software.com]
They also have had a similar service for displaying Adobe Flash content on Fire tablets which looks and feels remarkably like AppStream.
Similar technology is used in the Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop service but that one uses the Teradici PCoIP protocol. I've used to display both Adobe Flash and YouTube content with virtually no latency.
The GPU-equipped instances render graphics on the server and send th
fine by me (Score:2)
as long as it won't turn into the same exclusivity story as we see happening now with video streaming.
games from publisher x only available on game streaming service y and games from a only available on b.