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Cloud Games Entertainment

Walmart Is Looking Into Launching Its Own Cloud Gaming Service, Report Says (theverge.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the you-and-what-army dept.
Google's Stadio cloud-gaming service may be intercepted by a similar service from Walmart. According to a report from US Gamer, the American retail giant is looking into launching its own cloud gaming service. From the report: Multiple sources familiar with Walmart's plans, who wish to remain anonymous, confirmed to USG that the retail giant is exploring its own platform to enter in the now-competitive video game streaming race. No other details were revealed other than it will be a streaming service for video games, and that Walmart has been speaking with developers and publishers since earlier this year and throughout this year's Game Developers Conference. Walmart's discussions with developers for its streaming service have been secretive, and it's unclear how far along the service is in-development. But our sources are confident that this is a space Walmart is trying to move into.

Though Walmart might sound like a strange company to be jumping into the streaming tech space, the move isn't wholly unexpected. In recent years due to competition from Amazon, Walmart has been increasingly looking into more tech-focused markets beyond its traditional physical retail chain. Over time, Walmart has integrated its physical stores with its large online presence, offering deliveries, app integrations, and in-store pick up services. Walmart also has a technology arm in Silicon Valley called Walmart Labs, which has 6,000 employees and develops tech for Walmart's digital presence. In addition it boasts tools like Cruxlux, which is a search engine designed to reveal the connection between any two people, places, or things. Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data. Data centers are a centerpiece of Google's Stadia streaming service and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple also own powerful data facilities, all of whom are also coincidentally working in streaming technology.
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Walmart Is Looking Into Launching Its Own Cloud Gaming Service, Report Says More

Walmart Is Looking Into Launching Its Own Cloud Gaming Service, Report Says

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  • Bytes? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rotting ( 7243 ) on Friday March 22, 2019 @05:13AM (#58314472)

    "Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data."

    Who the hell measures their storage in bytes these days? I'm guessing they also boast the world's largest Commodore 64 cloud infrastructure to power this data center.

    • Re:Bytes? (Score:5, Funny)

      by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Friday March 22, 2019 @05:40AM (#58314516)

      This is the first thing I thought of as well.... So.... they have upwards of 13 4TB drives in a RAID-6.... wow!

    • Well their marketing department wanted to make their data center seem like a big deal where it probably is just a computer hooked up to a couple SAN Array.
      418 Terabytes isn't that much data. My workplace has double that, and we one normally serve people within 100 miles of our headquarters.
      It is common for a PCs or even a Laptops to have terabytes of storage on it. Having a data center pointing out that they have the storage of a few hundred computers isn't really that impressive. Especially due to the fac

    • Re:Bytes? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Friday March 22, 2019 @07:50AM (#58314888)

      Well it's Walmart so they have training in making shitty things look good,

    • "Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data."

      Who the hell measures their storage in bytes these days?

      Everyone. A byte is the base unit. Bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terrabytes and so on. All measured in bytes.

  • It's not even going yet and already reached peak bandwagon when walmart are trying to jump on.

  • Publisher Utopia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Friday March 22, 2019 @05:35AM (#58314504)
    20 years ago, the worst DRM dystopia anyone could imagine was still better than one in which your entire game library literally vanishes as soon as (and I do mean the same second) the DRM server stops responding.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Yeah. Back then we went, "But then the pirates will crack it."

      Not sure how they're going to crack a game with code they can't touch.

      • Not too terribly long before everything's a sealed box and it's illegal to tamper with hardware or code (just as with the right to defend oneself, there'll be demonstrably-obvious false-flag events to entice the ignorant and illogical populace to give up their rights... and they will).

      • Now the preservation argument is more important than ever. That is, assuming they end up having anything of cultural value.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          Games on Steam are not equivalent to games streamed from someone else's cloud service.

    • Don't worry, since you are just renting a product instead of owning it I'm sure digital games will be much cheaper than physical games. Right? Right?

    • 20 years ago, the worst DRM dystopia anyone could imagine was still better than one in which your entire game library literally vanishes as soon as (and I do mean the same second) the DRM server stops responding.

      So buy from Gog.

      If gog doesn't have what you like, then learn to like what they do have.

      The only way to turn the tide is to take your business to those who do it right.

  • They could try self driving cars, food delivery, AI, cloud services and electric vehicules as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      I mean they did also try selling music then later movies.

    • I'm sure they're trying most of that. But riding on coattails is a great way to cut your marketing budget. They probably aren't even near ready.

  • ...All scrambling towards getting an cloud based gaming service up on running on their own flavor of the idea, has left out one big possible bottleneck they might not have thought of:

    The Netflix problem! A huge problem Netflix faced when they had the problem with success, was bandwidth throttling. Netflix subscribers was a substantial load on every ISP's network, and while the idea of a cloud based subscription package - combined with the power of using server CPU's for the actual game processing is a good

    • Whoever gets them on board.

      Or rather, why do you think ISPs will need anyone else? Large ISPs can easily launch their own Netflix clone, and the elimination of net neutrality means that they can easily offer an inferior product and get away with it simply by degrading the quality of data delivery of anyone competing with them.

    • Except Netflix solved the problem for them. You're not going to stream a movie and a game to the same screen at the same time. And game streaming doesn't actually require more bandwidth than movie streaming. It's all just a tradeoff in picture quality. And I doubt most are going to draw the line where Google did. Wal-Mart's equivalent will be a blurry 1080p and maybe some advanced encoders that prioritize bandwidth for on-screen text (or converts that to an overlay).

      • You're not going to stream a movie and a game to the same screen at the same time

        TIL I only have one device attached to my network at home. And here I thought there were several, operated at the same time by different people.

        • You're an idiot. I'm talking about an individual person and their entertainment choice. They could already be using Netflix instead of game streaming. Very rare that the same person would do both at once.

          • You're an idiot. I'm talking about an individual person and their entertainment choice.

            TIL that each person in the house has their own individual Internet service, thus making a difference whether it's one person using Netflix and gaming, or two people, one gaming and one using Netflix.

            Alternatively, I'm not the idiot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skids ( 119237 )

      Game traffic is generally low bandwidth (but highly latency sensitive).

      It's RTT that kills current network games and the more you offload to the cloud the more opportunity for lag.

      The only hope of this industry is to introduce sedatives in the food supply so people are too wonked to play anything with twitch aspects.

    • Hrmm...I wonder why Google started this whole "Google Fiber" thing..............

  • I look forward to great Walmart brand games. Such as Super Wal Brothers. Walmart May Cry. Wal Souls. Call of Walmart: Rollback Ops. Though I realize, Walmart usually uses Equate or whatever..... Wal-brand is usually Walgreens.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dstyle5 ( 702493 )
      I'm personally looking forward to: Surviving Squalor-mart Collectors Edition

      It comes with Skeeter the meth head doll who cooks meth in the sporting goods section, a coupon for $5 off whatever you want in a real world Squalor-mart, a Squalor-mart trucker hat and you can play as Skeeter in the game. SOLD!

  • Walmart will find a few companies that crank out cheap and sub-par games for them so they can offer a cheap and sub-par game service to their cheap and used to sub-par products customers.

    In the end, I'd guess what we'll see is something along the lines of dressed up flash games with some cellphone game clones mixed in.

  • Lets get in on the action! (Score:3)

    by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Friday March 22, 2019 @10:19AM (#58315600)
    In other news:

    PetSmart has launched its own live streaming pet watching platform called FurView.
    Bed Bath and Beyond has launched its own gaming service called Game on Thrones.
    Sur La Table is launching a live streaming cooking platform...
    Dollar Store is launching a new...
    Pizza Hut is launching a new...

    • Bed Bath and Beyond has launched its own gaming service called Game on Thrones.

      This one interests me.

      *flush*

  • That good and better, I see the same article on http://www.sammypost.com/betra... [sammypost.com]

  • we went from owning your own media --> to media with drm --> to media with patches ---> to full downloads ---> to streaming the video. PROGRESS!

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