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Games

Sega Announces Mysterious "Fog Gaming" Program, Will Use Arcade Machines Somehow (gamespot.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Thanks to some Japanese-language news sources, we now know the nature of the big Sega reveal that was teased for this week's Famitsu. The publisher is working on some kind of initiative that it's dubbed "fog gaming." While it's not exactly clear what that is -- or if it's comparable to cloud gaming services like Google Stadia -- according to analyst Serkan Toto, it will likely involve using the guts of arcade machines during off-hours.
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Sega Announces Mysterious "Fog Gaming" Program, Will Use Arcade Machines Somehow More

Sega Announces Mysterious "Fog Gaming" Program, Will Use Arcade Machines Somehow

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  • Most are pc's But do Arcades keep the power on? when closed to the games?

    • Most are pc's But do Arcades keep the power on? when closed to the games?

      Or have the bandwidth to host game streaming? If they did, you'd think they would just replace the PCs with thin clients to begin with.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I would presume the theory is that arcades are more numerous and distributed. So each arcade would have to handle far fewer clients than a typical datacenter. This would also mean lower latency.

        There presumably would have to be some incentive for Arcade operators to participate.

        Also wonder if arcades are faring better in Japan than in the US. In the US, there are so few as to be pretty useless in any sort of offering of this nature.

        • There are lots and lots of very actively used arcades in çè'åZY. Floors upon floors of them, building after building.

        • This might be an interesting strategy by SEGA. Have arcade machines on at night, and arcade owners get paid for running a server farm. THe machines can run at all times, and just run a few less cores if being used by someone at that machine to reduce the load.

          I suppose you could also have a universal gaming machine, that could be updated to run the newest games - just DL the newest game. Hand controls might have to be standardized.

          Or have the machine as a client - every game is available.

          • Any such system will require a neat solution to hot-swapping components of the "cloud", to run service 24/7 on cores all which switch off each day. That's a great thing to get good at, if so. A "cloud" service usually has dedicated servers somewhere we don't care where, and they only change when the infrastructure changes (upgrades, migrations). "Fog" might mean where a server is made out of parts which all or mostly flicker on and off, between their other jobs. I predict this exact principle will be huge

      • they have the bandwidth the USA does not!

    • Depends on the size of the arcade. Mom-and-pop arcades usually turn the machines off at night. A mall arcade would leave them on 24/7 just because turning on and off 50+ machines is a PITA.

  • Gut feeling: (Score:3)

    by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Thursday June 04, 2020 @01:46PM (#60145388) Journal

    The arcade machines are mearly thin clients and the gaming happens in Sega's server rooms. The arcade owners lease the use of a machine in the server room. To maximise profits, outside of business hours, these machines can also be reached over the internet.

    It least that was the first thought I had when I received what little information was available.

    • To maximise profits, outside of business hours, these machines can also be reached over the internet.

      I agree with your assessment, but this is the part that has me scratching my head. What are they doing with them "outside of business hours" that will "maximize profits"? If not maximizing profits, what will they be doing with them "off hours"? This might be even more baffling than a ~$50 micro GameGear with 4 games times 4 colours...

      I'm going to try and ring up Sega to see if I can buy some weed from them.

      • $50 micro GameGear with 4 games times 4 colours...

        Yeah, WTF is that about? I could see $50 for a micro GameGear with maybe 20~25 games, but four? And I bet each of those four models has the one popular game that everyone wants, to force people to buy all four.

        Joke's on them, though. Nobody's going to pay $200 for four tiny consoles and a total of 16 old school games, and play with miniature controls and look at miniature displays. SNES Classic and others have the right idea: a fixed price for "all the games

    • Does Sega even have their own server rooms anymore? I figured that they would have outsourced them to AWS/Azure/GCP like everyone else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Fog computing is where to do the pressing locally on the nodes. So my guess is that the arcade machines download games from the cloud to play locally. No more board or cartridge swapping.

      Or maybe, since most arcade systems these days are just desktop PC hardware, they are renting it spare capacity. Japan has 20Gb internet connections so the "data centre" doesn't really need to be all in one place.

      • I am having a very hard time imagining a big, monolithic arcade becoming a thing in the U.S. When was the last time you have even seen an arcade at your local mall?

        Yes, there are 'mega arcades' in the US, but they are far and few between, and certainly not like it was 30 years ago.

        Every local arcade I have seen in the past decade had mostly old machines, a lot which were in serious need of repair.

        If we see these machines in the US, there willl be a couple sprinkled amongst the Donkey Kongs whose ancient CRT

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Arcades in North America are few and far between - most died because consoles pretty much killed them. In the 80s, you wanted arcades because they had superior everything and home consoles were ridiculously poor substitutes. Though you could see the writing on the wall because they started making "home console arcades" - arcade machines that played games you could get for your home console. There were NES and Genesis versions if I recall and they even took standard cartridges. You put in a quarter and got l

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Sega has their own arcades in Japan, some are quite large.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        Japanese arcades already work like that - NesicaXlive or whatever it's called connects to the server, finds out what game it's supposed to be running, checks the license, checks local cache for the game, downloads it if not found, and then runs it locally. If it can't connect to the server, it will run the last game for a while until it decides it hasn't checked the license recently enough. It's all managed online - you register the machines you own, purchase software, and configure what gets pushed out t

  • It's called "the plot of Wreck-it Ralph."

    There aren't many arcade machines at all relative to any other computing platform, and those that exist don't have some unlimited energy budget or infinite electric durability.

    (The term 'vapor-ware' comes to mind.)

    It's a producers and consumers problem.

    There's no rollout of a product to enough consumers that could be 'fed' with arcade machines spare power, AND be worth a major product launch.

    Sure - if you made it specific to one VR headset or something, and only duri

  • Fog machines? As good of an idea as the Sega Activator, at least.

  • ... gets too expensive does it become "fog" gaming? /s

    Or it fog gaming due to the lack of titles in the clouds?

  • Probably another bad translation (Score:3)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Thursday June 04, 2020 @02:10PM (#60145500)

    The Kanji symbols for cloud and fog are pretty similar.

    • Looking at the original release, they don't use either kanji, instead using the transliteration of the english words 'fog gaming'

      http://ryokutya2089.com/archives/32233
      • If not using a translator, the transliteration is immediately after the ? mark in the line of the post, in angled quotes.

    • Fog is just a cloud that happens to be at ground level. So maybe it is a "down to Earth" version of cloud computing, whatever that means.

      (At one point I was doing simulations of atmospheric science for living. Now that's what I call cloud computing!)

  • Well a marketing meaning anyway, but I wonder if fog gaming is little more than thin clients with a local central game source. I mean isn't that the idea of fog computing? "Bring the cloud to the ground". I.e. we made up a fancy marketing term for a server?

  • The publisher is working on some kind of initiative that it's dubbed "fog gaming."

    I look forward to the next round of what used to be called Vaporware.

  • Clouds are above you. Fog is all around you.

    A reasonable use of the term would be that the machines would cooperate somehow.

  • I have no idea what it is, but I would like it to be an integrated system for connecting arcade machines to content user profiles in the cloud.

    Think of a machine that plays Street Fighter III one day, then Street Fighter IV the next, because Capcom or the arcade operator decided the old one wasn't making money.

    Think of digital transferable assets or game saves, or whatever. Arcades have obvious advantages over other forms of gaming, but they also have some drawbacks. This kind of thing could open up the pos

  • A company in the same building as the startup I've been working at uses "fog computing" to refer to an ad-hoc network of devices doing a distributed computation. I don't know if this has caught on as a term of art, but they've been pushing it for several years.

    I have no idea of whether this is what Sega means. But building multiplayer, multimachine arcade games that coordinate by building an ad-hoc network and talking to each other, rather than talking to a central server, would qualify.

    So would the colle

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )
      Arcades in Japan are multi-story affairs, with hundreds and hundreds of machines. It seems conceivable to have those machines be available as physical presence or streaming over a network as available modes. Each machine would be connected to a SEGA gaming service, and users would connect to this service to find and access low-ping available machines to play games on rather than heading to the arcade..

      It would be awesome if arcade machines could perform both modes simultaneously too as newer hardware sh

    • I'm thinking it's more about being able to update the machines remotely with patches or entirely new games, and do remote diagnostics. Much easier/cheaper than sending someone out to swap boards

  • I read the headline and was imagining a new arcade using fog style holograms, instead I got some kind of cloud computing buzzword.

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