DF: We were arch-sceptics for years - but cloud gaming can work

[ethomaz]

It is an article about how cloud gaming got better thought the years.
And now it is more close to console like experience (still not there).

We were arch-sceptics for years - but cloud gaming can work

This week's Digital Foundry Direct Weekly delivers yet another content coverage 'war story' as we tried to do our best …

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Nhomnhom]

Good for you Nvidia, I would much rather just have reasonably priced GPUs instead of renting them and having to deal with connection issues and compression.

The whole running the game at 120hz or more seems like an absurd solution for AAA games (pretty much the only games where resorting to cloud would make sense). Will upcoming AAA Unreal 5 games be running at 120hz too? I doubt it, just look at the state of every single recent PC release.

The solution for people that can't afford expensive rigs is simple, instead of paying $19.99 a month just buy a PS5 for $399 and play on that for 8 years or more and forget about cloud.

 

[Bryank75]

Doesn't matter how good it gets, I don't want that shit and I don't think many real gamers want it either.

Nobody is waiting for it to get a few ms faster to finally jump in.... if they wanted to get into cloud gaming they would have...

The issue is demand is WAY lower than these companies think.

Console gaming is pretty accessible and for cloud gaming you still need a controller and at that point, why not just buy a console for a bit more?
Giving you reliability and gaming even if your internet goes downm, ownership of your games, profile, friends list etc....

instead of all that being locked behind a cloud fee and turning gaming fully into yet another bill.

It's not fun, it's objectively worse as an experience, it benefits corporations, not gamers, it gives away all your consumer power and turns gaming into more a service than a product.... and we have seen what services like Gamepass result in, when it comes to game quality.

 

[Satoru]

Digital Fakery doing Phil's work as per usual.

 

[AshHunter216]

Digital Fakery doing Phil's work as per usual.

I actually think them arguing for the potential of the cloud subtly helps justify the CMA's decision to block the ABK deal.

 

[BigMclargeHuge]

The only good thing cloud gaming ever did was get the abk deal shit canned.

 

[Thief1987]

Digital Fakery doing Phil's work as per usual.

Yep, seems like they received new spreadsheet from ms.

 

[ethomaz]

Digital Fakery doing Phil's work as per usual.

Actually they are doing the opposite in the article...

Saying CMA is right because Cloud can work and MS with Activison Blizzard can have the monopoly in the future.

 

[Gamernyc78]

Sony remote play and cloud gaming has always worked great for me but I've always had 200mb and up connevtions. I am now 1 gig plus fiber. I remember playing drive club streaming it and it feeling native to me but I know thts not everyone's experience or internet situation.

 

[ethomaz]

I actually think them arguing for the potential of the cloud subtly helps justify the CMA's decision to block the ABK deal.

Yes... they are supposting CMA decision showing Cloud have the potential to be big and with Activision Blizzard deal MS is in a very advantageous position for monopoly.

 

[ethomaz]

Sony remote play and cloud gaming has always worked great for me but I've always had 200mb and up connevtions. I am now 1 gig plus fiber. I remember playing drive club streaming it and it feeling native to me but I know thts not everyone's experience or internet situation.

What exactly is great?

PS5/PS4 connected to LAN with very faster router.
And Local Remote Play is still not ideal... it can be played (I most play turn based games that way) but when you try to do a Raid in Destiny 2 you will fell how bad the response is... of couse you start to predict things to hit the Jump or Fire button early (that is how I could coordenate in most Raids using Remote Play to not drag the team).

I'm sure the experience is even worst thought internet.
Sony Remote play is well playable... not ideal and far away from playing on console.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Doesn't matter how good it gets, I don't want that shit and I don't think many real gamers want it either.

Nobody is waiting for it to get a few ms faster to finally jump in.... if they wanted to get into cloud gaming they would have...

The issue is demand is WAY lower than these companies think.

Console gaming is pretty accessible and for cloud gaming you still need a controller and at that point, why not just buy a console for a bit more?
Giving you reliability and gaming even if your internet goes downm, ownership of your games, profile, friends list etc....

instead of all that being locked behind a cloud fee and turning gaming fully into yet another bill.

It's not fun, it's objectively worse as an experience, it benefits corporations, not gamers, it gives away all your consumer power and turns gaming into more a service than a product.... and we have seen what services like Gamepass result in, when it comes to game quality.

2 billion people that live in India are just waiting for it to get slightly better so they'll finally start playing AAA games.

 

[Gamernyc78]

What exactly is great?

PS5/PS4 connected to LAN with very faster router.
And Local Remote Play is still not ideal... it can be played (I most play turn based games that way) but when you try to do a Raid in Destiny 2 you will fell how bad the response is... of couse you start to predict things to hit the Jump or Fire button early (that is how I could coordenate in most Raids using Remote Play to not drag the team).

I'm sure the experience is even worst thought internet.
Sony Remote play is well playable... not ideal and far away from playing on console.

Nahhh I frecuently play COD online via remote play 150 miles away from my house and usually am in the top 3. Any single player game to me feels native and online games work well "for me" with lag but still serviceable. Tht has always been "my" experience from ps4 days and up. Again everyones experience is different abd I know I have better internet than most which is why my experience may be so good but even wgen I had 200mb dl it was good.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Digital Fakery doing Phil's work as per usual.

Phil friendship with cloud is over now that xCloud flopped it's way into killing the ABK deal.

 

[flaccidsnake]

The Steam Deck kinda killed my interest in cloud gaming. It's so awesome to bring practically the whole history of gaming anywhere without worrying about connection quality.

 

[Ezekiel]

Where's the datacenter situated in relation to the device streaming? A big part of the latency issue is caused by your distance from a datacenter, and not your bandwidth.

From my limited testing, streaming image quality is noticeably worse than native.

 

[flaccidsnake]

Where's the datacenter situated in relation to the device streaming? A bit part of the latency issue is caused by your distance from a datacenter, and not your bandwidth.

From my limited testing, streaming image quality is noticeably worse than native.

This is the semi-monopolistic advantage for MS, Google, and Amazon. All being massive cloud service providers, the speed of electrons to your router is not the biggest limiting factor. Google failing so hard with Stadia and giving up so quickly maybe points to bigger problems with cloud streaming. Consumer rejection being a major one. I thought Stadia's image quality and latency was generally pretty good via a Chromecast Ultra.

 

[Yurinka]

Where's the datacenter situated in relation to the device streaming? A bit part of the latency issue is caused by your distance from a datacenter, and not your bandwidth.

From my limited testing, streaming image quality is noticeably worse than native.

Assuming you have a great internet connection (fiber with good speed) and play wired (RJ45), a big part of the latency comes from the distance between the server and the user.

The image quality often gets limited by the maximum streaming resolution (most don't go above 1080p) and also their compression (pretty similar to youtube) and also the internet traffic or internet connection quality.

This is the semi-monopolistic advantage for MS, Google, and Amazon. All being massive cloud service providers, the speed of electrons to your router is not the biggest limiting factor. Google failing so hard with Stadia and giving up so quickly maybe points to bigger problems with cloud streaming. Consumer rejection being a major one. I thought Stadia's image quality and latency was generally pretty good via a Chromecast Ultra.

Because each cloud gaming system uses their own cloud gaming infrastructure and in some cases (as in GPU and PS cloud gaming) dedicated hardware for their servers, so can't use the ones from Azure, Google Cloud or AWS. So it's irrelevant the size of their cloud server infrastructure.

It's more important to have a physical server dedicated to this cloud gaming service as close as possible to the user. One dedicated to this cloud gaming service, not shared with other stuff, since cloud gaming spends way more bandwith than the average app server, game server video streaming server, website or anything else and unlike them each user requires a dedicated transmission that can't be cached and reused for other players.

Companies like Sony can place their cloud gaming server in any datacenter hosted by any company, because they use their own PS cloud gaming servers hardware and software. Most datacenters around the world are owned by local smaller companies who outsource their server space to other companies, being some of them as an example cloud platforms such as MS, Google, Amazon, or game servers for mutiplayer, or big apps and websites like FB, local companies to store there their servers for their own games or apps, and many other examples. Only a portion of PSN, Azure, AWS and so on are stored in datacenters owned by the companies who own these cloud platforms.

 

[Ezekiel]

Assuming you have a great internet connection (fiber with good speed) and play wired (RJ45), a big part of the latency comes from the distance between the server and the user.

The image quality often gets limited by the maximum streaming resolution (most don't go above 1080p) and also their compression (pretty similar to youtube) and also the internet traffic or internet connection quality.

Yep, I remember testing Stadia, and the image quality was like playing a very compressed YouTube video. Wasn't a great experience.

I'm sure there's a use case for streaming, like games with very basic graphics, or to quickly test out a game.

 

[Gamernyc78]

Yep, I remember testing Stadia, and the image quality was like playing a very compressed YouTube video. Wasn't a great experience.

I'm sure there's a use case for streaming, like games with very basic graphics, or to quickly test out a game.

Nope my experience has been great graphics, not much compression. So your experience abd mine aren't everyone else's. When you are close to a data center and good internet it's a very viable and good gaming choice.