Giant Bombcast 624: Depth and Lightness

FIRS... oh wait

Giggity

Investigate 311 superfans

Regarding Geforce Now:

It's not so much "David vs Goliath" as it is prospectively a million Davids and a dozen Goliaths vs Goliath. Cloud-based VM services simply aren't going to be viable if each application, utility, and game that can be run remotely results in an added tax levied on the service cost.

With Moore's Law beginning to plateau it's very likely that some flavor of remote VM service is going to be the way devices (especially portable and mobile ones) continue to expand their capability. Publishers, developers and IP owners are just going to have to deal with this reality because there's no way that everyone from Rarlabs and Hinterland Studio to Adobe and Activision are going to be able to take a cut, no matter how small that fraction is.

In the case of Itunes/music and Kindle/books, Apple and Amazon had the manageable task of negotiating with a handful of publishing companies in order to secure most of the back catalog of those mediums, but the landscape of Windows applications is obviously nothing like this.

In the short term perhaps digital storefronts like Steam, EGS, GOG, etc will end up having to change their licensing terms with third party developers in order to give the storefronts the right to be utilized via GFN or similar services. That still won't address the broader issue of utilizing IP via new mediums that increasingly bend or break conventional notions of what it means to be a hardware device. There's an unbroken continuum between running an application locally and running it 100% remotely via a video stream or some terminal client, and I don't see where a clear line can be drawn.

Jan revealing the kitchen towel themed Playstation 5 is the most I've been impressed by that companies hardware in some time. What a piece of art.

dude, modernity

I believe there's a technical distinction between a truly airborne transmission and direct contact with liquid droplets.

Im waiting to see how badly they don't get the subtle parts of the characterization in FF7.

Death billiards is an ova for a show called death parade which has possibly the greatest anime opener of all time and is a fantastic show you should all watch.

I have been watching anime close to 20 years and have seen a crazy amount in that time and have only heard of 3 of those, one of which I am a huge fan of (GitS). Talk about some obscure picks. That or I am really out of touch.

the heat thing with covid-19 is baffling considering the virus is in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, places where its around 90F every day all year round.

311 never happened...

@anwar: it is factually not airborne

the vr sickness can and has been overcome by being careful taking a break when you start to feel sick then coming back later and playing longer. after a week or two you're good. Also it sounds like none of you tried Asgard's Wrath , Stormlands and The Walking Dead: Saints and sinners. All story driven high production value games. it's like as a group you have written off vr and are irritated it's not completely gone .

I live in MN and from what I can tell people are acting and shopping like normal humans. Maybe all the crazies have Costco memberships.

COME ORIGINAL on repeat since HS graduation in 2002.

@zoofame: Yeah I completely agree. Using Brads logic the publisher/dev would be able to ask intel/AMD for money If I decide to build a second PC for playing my steam games.

What Bombcast is Jeff talking about? Was it before or after goty? Because I can't seem to find any comments mentioning what he is talking about.

@anwar: Scientific terminology aside, a video game podcast really should't be anyone's first source of epidemiology news.

@zoofame: Absolutely right. It's also funny that they jump from "Developers should have a say in where their games are bought/played/etc" to talking about playing games on unofficial hardware (FPGA stuff/emulation) in a directly positive light.

Rorie leaked PS5

As someone that's sitting here in Beijing "under quarantine", it's not that bad. Our residential compound is full on staffed with guards that monitor people that are coming in and out (obviously need a special pass to get in). We're allowed out for groceries and what not too. Keep safe everyone.

@zinkn: that’s because they covered it up man!

Furthest I have gone for a show is this past summer my brothers and I flew from Buffalo to Huntington Beach, CA for the Back to the Beach festival. We flew out on a Friday and back that Monday.
And no it wasn't for Blink 182 none of us really even cared to see them to be honest

@zoofame: Nvidia is, as I said, a corporation worth nearly 170 billion dollars. Geforce Now is a service that itself stands to become worth hundreds of millions or billions if it takes off. The service is worthless without games, yet you think they should be able to build a business of that scale and value without making arrangements with the creators of the games they build it on, especially creators like Hinterland who are surely a tiny fraction of their size?

This isn't between you and the developers of the games you bought, it's between those developers and Nvidia. A company of that size can and should make appropriate agreements with the people whose work they're harnessing for their own purposes, without end users ever knowing the difference. I'll also note Nvidia's polite compliance with every company who's contested this issue should tell you how little leverage they have in this situation.

Huh, I actually have seen every real anime in that quiz except the last one. Most of then are really good, with Sgt. Frog being the first manga I ever bought and the first anime I ever found fansubs for.

Worth noting Death Billiards is a short, and got turned into a full series called Death Parade featuring much more than billiards. It's REALLY good and has a super tonally inappropriate opening that RULES.

The "Matt Rorie leaks PS5 date" Bombcast is episode #622 for those who are wondering...

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiR1t30QqAY

Those comments are golden.

I acctually just watched Death Parade (tv series based on Death Billiards) It's pretty good!

And shout out to Ontario!
Except Mr. Ford!

@brad: Yes, you should be able to play the games you own on whatever platform you choose, emulating older games for example. It doesn't matter who (even if they have a lot of money already) provides the service. You inevitably pay someone else than the developer for your platform, be it hardware or software or simply bandwidth. Should Microsoft have to pay the developers of every game you play on your Windows PC? If Nvidia were to pay *anything* for the developers, that would be them being polite. It will probably happen with big online games that would otherwise detect and ban remote usage, like Blizzard games. But in this situation again, that is Blizzard being anal about where the players are allowed to play their games. If I want to pay for a personal VM on a cloud server, Blizzard will ban that, and I will criticize them for it.

As an Android user many games will first launch on Apple devices, and I will ask and hope that the developers bring it over to Android. Other than acquiring exclusivity does Apple and Google have to pay the developers to get their game on the platform? No, it's the opposite. I guess I should also not use an Android emulator to play those games on a much powerful 'phone' than my own? Hinterland should be happy that they have a potentially bigger audience paying for their games. It's a benefit against piracy as well.

Steam offers in-home streaming, Should they also pay for every developer who is on their platform because someone streams their game from a more powerful computer they paid someone else money for? They also offer Remote Play Together, but have *politely* offered publishers the option of disabling that feature for their game, if they so desire. They would not have to.

And I assure you Nvidias polite compliance is just that, being polite, has nothing to do with their 'leverage' in this situation, this early in the growth of their platform.

EDIT/ADD: To clarify, the reason Blizzard pulled their online games was because they are lazy and mark any remote usage as a potential bot/goldseller/hacker. And simply do not want to waste customer support hours on false flags.

I'm extremely weirded out by Brad's stance on the NVIDIA thing. Should the game developers get a cut of the sale price of a PC you buy if you buy it partially to play that game?

If you answered no you sided with the Goliath of the situation. /s

@brad: As far as Nvidia's polite compliance goes, personally I think it's because they have ongoing business relationships with tonnes of developers. They work closely with them to develop or promote their own proprietary features, to ensure things run well, or even include them in marketing/promotions... getting sue-happy and diving into nebulous and expensive legal battles with each developer who doesn't want to be on their service is absolutely suicide, whether they win or lose.

From the developers POV - I think the business case of expanding your potential playerbase to anybody who can afford your game and $5/mo is fantastic. I understand the idea that Nvidia profiting off the games of others is alarming, but considering people still have to purchase the game from the developer, and competition will spring up over time, I think it's an acceptable trade. Nvidia isn't taking a cut off each game, they just want to facilitate consumer access to the game. It's not working now because everybody wants to strike up a Netflix-like deal with the next flavour of the month cloud computing service, if not develop their own service. Bleh, that's how you end up with 100 cloud computing services that all suck.

Sarcasm: Devs should also pull their games from the Apple Appstore. Wouldn't want to have to pay the goliath, Apple, to be able to play their games. If you have an Apple phone, you're siding with the goliath.

@maitom: This is a hilariously tortured analogy considering the devs of App Store games... directly enter into an agreement with Apple to sell their games on the App Store. What point do you think you're making?

@brad: I agree. The appstore analogy doesn't work. But I think game developers deserving a cut of graphic card sales works as an analogy.

@cyborgx7: But graphics cards aren't involved in any way in the transaction between game customer, game developer, and Geforce Now.

The best actual analogies I can come up with to this situation are, for example, Microsoft making Xbox 360 games playable on the Xbox One, which--surprise--requires Microsoft to go and do new business with the makers of those games. Or the Rainway people developing an app to let people stream PC games on their Switch right up until Nintendo comes in and goes "uh, not on our platform you aren't."

You already bought those 360 or PC games, and it's technically feasible to play them on those other platforms. Where's the outrage about those situations? How is this different?

Rather than saying the service is worthless without games, it would be more accurate to say the service would be worthless without the consumers library. Which makes this not only an issue between devs and Nvidia, but also the gamers making use of that service. For the devs and Nvidia it's about money, but for us the gamers it strikes at the subject of the erosion of ownership. Should devs also have to take a cut when Razer puts out the pc handheld they've been working on? After-all it's a worthless machine without the users games library.

@brad: I don't understand why Microsoft has to make a deal with Game developers to make xbox 360 discs playable on the Xbox One. I'm against that too.

But my point is this. Imagine these 3 scenarios:

1. You buy a PC. You buy games. You play games you bought on the PC you bought.

2. You rent a PC. You buy games. You play games you bought on the PC you rent.

3. You rent a PC that is somewhere else. You buy games. You play games you bought on the PC you rented by connecting to it remotely.

You seem to think that in situation 1 the game developer should not get a cut from the profit made off of providing the PC but in the situation 3 they should. Why? How do you feel about situation 2?

@maitom, mason_pat

I'm not a lawyer, obviously, but some developers licence agreement does mention what and how many devices the game can be played on. The agreements sometimes specify that you have to own the hardware, they're all different levels of vague so I have no idea where that leaves you if you rent an actual physical computer.

However, from a consumer standpoint, it is obvious why the developers shouldn't get paid. After I've paid the game developer for their offline, single player game through steam, or any other store, that transaction is over and they should have no say in on what hardware the game is played on. GFN is not Stadia, the developer hasn't done anything special to make the game run and Nvidia is not selling any games, so I don't understand why the game developer should continue to get paid while providing no additional value. Uber wouldn't have to pay some random small car manufacturer because some Uber drivers uses their car.

I also don't understand why @brad keeps mentioning how big of a company Nvidia is, as if that means that makes Nvidia owes the game developer money. The whole "punching down" thing doesn't make sense to me.

@brad The Division 2 expansion is set in a different part of New York than the first game. So I'd think it's all new.

@aktivity: There is definitely a good object lesson in the nature of "ownership" of digital games here, and I get why people are uncomfortable with the situation, but I'm going to keep banging the drum that their anger is misdirected, and that Nvidia has it well within their resources to make this particular case a non-issue.

I'm certainly not an IP lawyer, but I don't think the legal precedent has been fully hammered out on these sorts of murky ownership issues in the context of digital subscription services. But there does already seem to be plenty of legal distinction between a physical product that you buy and take possession of vs. an intangible "product" that only exists in an abstract digital state, which makes comparisons to embedded or handheld devices somewhat flimsy. That's still a physical computer you're buying to run the game on.

To offer another example, anybody remember Bleem? Remember what happened to that?

@brad: I'm honestly a lot more worried about a precedent being set that leads to Activision, EA and Bethesda each having their own streaming service you need to rent, in addition to buying the games, in order to play their games, than I am worried about a game developer not getting a cut off of someone who already payed for their game, playing that game.

I don't care about this particular case. I have no plans of ever becoming a customer of this NVIDIA streaming service. I just don't want every provider of a streaming service to also have to be a middle man for your games.

I also want to push back on your claim that graphics cards aren't involved in the transaction involving customer, developer and Geforce Now. I think a remote graphics card (real or virtual) is actually exactly what someone would be paying NVIDIA for. You seem to have a fundamentally different understanding what the service is they provide, and I would appreciate it if you could explain what that is, rather than falling back on the size argument, which (while I'm sympathetic to little guys getting screwed over by big companies) is entirely unpersuasive, to be honest.

Finally, no I do not remember Bleem. But from what I read about it, Bleem was in the right.

Yeah, on the Beastcast (I think - I checked Wikipedia just in case) it was said that Sony lost their court case against Bleem. Bleem was allowed to continue selling their commercial Playstation emulator, and were even allowed to use the copyrighted screenshots of PS games on their packaging. What killed them was the legal costs.

So yes Bleem is a good example of why this stuff should be allowed, and why greed kills good things (but I'm not a lawyer)

I can't wait to try believing in FFVII only to have it suck donkey ass like all the others.

Spoiler:

Final Fantasy is where the shitty Japanese game design stereotype originated

On the gF Now thing; Seems to me pubs have a problem with NV using their titles, as in the list of titles, to attract customers rather than just saying "play all the games you own on our thing!" That is, assuming there's no dev work required to makes the game function on Now. Why wouldn't a game work on Now regardless of it being on a list or having some deal with a pub? I feel like I'm missing something. No, I think the real problem is everyone wants to try their own streaming service and they don't want to be undercut, or seen as a partner when they aren't, or Whatever.

Bleem!'s case does seem similar, and they won that lawsuit vs Sony.

I can’t believe Ben never played a Final Fantasy game before. Especially FF7. He didn’t even know what a limit break was.

As the guy who wrote in about the beer, never have I been happier to learn I made a powerful enemy.

Valorant looks so generic. It's literally just a mix between CS:GO and Overwatch. I seriously don't get what you guys see as interesting in it. If this wasn't a Riot game you wouldn't even mention it.

@brad On the Nvidia Now topic: What Nvidia is doing is providing the server service. The user provides the games. I don't see why Nvidia should be paying the game developers who were already paid by the user. Imagine Microsoft applying a restriction on Microsoft Office files in Dropbox until Dropbox starts paying a cut to Microsoft. Sound ridiculous doesn't it?