Anyone else feel slightly depressed about the idea of a streaming games future?

Maybe it's just me being dramatic but something makes me sad. Even though I went 99 percent digital this console generation I every once in awhile catch myself missing the days of heading out to a store at midnight to get the new hotness and now I feel like we won't even get that with consoles.

I think Jeff touched upon a major drawback during today's podcast. There will be places in the world that will have bad Internet, perhaps for the foreseeable future, but the major gaming companies will still push ahead because streaming is so financially lucrative compared to selling physical or even digital copies.

The future of gaming is coming whether we want it to or not: http://fortune.com/2019/02/19/google-game-streaming-service-gdc-2019/

I think for me it's more just that I'm really sensitive to lag in input. I tried the Nvidia streaming service for Prey and even at a 30ms ping or so I can't imagine playing an entire FPS over a streaming connection; the delay's just too noticeable.

Nah. I’m streaming music over listening to old vinyl recordings on an analog system due to the bananas improvements in convenience and compression.

Yeah, I’d rather listen on a classic rig, but the compression and digital sources aren’t bad and I can listen to almost anything at any time.

I trust that games will only go streaming when the tech is there...if they don’t, fuck ‘em. There are plenty of other things to do!

i feel like they'll keep selling digital licences for at least another generation. But just like Jeff said, buying a game for 60$ doesn't feel great when you can get the same version + access to a huge library of other games for a lower price. And that's where they would want you to end up eventually. But i don't think they straight up stop giving you the possibility to make that 60$ digital purchase. Different ways to service different customers is better than leaving money on the table. Running a digital shop is something they already do & can coexist next to a subscription service i feel.

Back in the day,I remember that there was an agreement between my parents & myself that MMO's were pretty much a no-go between the internet costs & the subscription fee. I agreed with them . Mostly because paying for a subscription as a kid, you feel the need to squeeze every last penny out of your 'access'. So what happens is that every moment not spent on this subscription, feels like you are wasting money. You can't go outside to play football with your friends if you are trying to finish this game up before the month ends. If you straight up buy a game, you can play whenever you want and that pressure is not there. I think parents in general are also way more willing to buy a game for a kid than having to dedicate themselves to this monthly subscription that never ends. And as the kid gets more & more used to having this access to a library of games, the bigger the fallout will be once the parents decide to cancel the subscription. At some point it's just way more covenient to be able to buy games one at a time for certain customers. Why scare those customers away by eliminating offers?

It's simple if you care about frames and latency you would buy a PC else you could stream it on a StreamingBox. Think about it as audiophiles playing LP's on there Expensive gear and lackeys like me using Spotify.

As for "next gen" consoles i think both Sony and Microsoft will have the option to buy a streamingbox instead of a classic piece of hardware maybe not at launch but somewhere in the middle. Amazon and Google could be major disrupters in the industry, as there both major cloud providers. So i would be stupid of Sony and Microsoft not to offer this service as they got a lot of "exclusive" developers working for them.

It won't happen unless there is profit in it; the world has to be ready for it. The big players aren't just going to jump ship into it without a reasonable potential of player-base. Of course, that threshold will be crossed while some others are left behind initially, but I also have a hard time believing traditional methods won't be offered.

i'm not convinced the industry is going to go the way pundits think it's going to go.

match 3 mobile players are not fortnite players are not madden players are not steam users. sure there's overlap, but i feel like these are all different audiences that will or will not tolerate different business models.

i'm just an armchair analyst over here, but i feel like games as we now know them would sooner stop being made than your call of dutys, gears of wars, or uncharteds all successfully becoming streaming-first titles.

i'm just not convinced that the people buying game-dedicated hardware in 2019 want to stream their games like netflix.

It's not for me, i tweak game settings and configs all the time to provide myself the best input response, and input lag is always going to be an issue with streaming.
My UK internet connection isn't great either, however it is unlimited download which is nice, there are a lot of people burdened by download limits and this type of service would not be an option for them.

I straight up CANNOT IMAGINE a day when a new GTA becomes available and millions of people stream it, MMO's introduce queues for less numbers than that.

I see both markets existing. I hate streaming games. Absolutely hate doing it. I need all the pixels in my face right now.

I don't even have a great internet connection in a highly developed area in Massachusetts without going business tier. I can't see myself ever, ever signing up for a streaming games service. I would rather play my existing games than the new shit in a compressed video.

I can't see any reason why anyone wouldn't as long as the service was perfect, but that's a very big catch. The way I see it I'm in @symbyosys boat, it's not gonna be one or the other but both, and whoever delivers the best streaming service is just gonna grab a slice of the console market. There's no way anyone is gonna be able to deliver a streaming platform that straight up kills the console market. If Sony or MS decided to go full streaming for their next generation it would tank so hard people would forget about PS3 and XboX One launches. I'd imagine it will go more like the recent VR bout, it's not like it replaced normal screen gaming. But then next time around it's gonna make bigger waves, and next time after that even bigger waves, and then maybe eventually it will fully replace screens.

I'll probably get used to it but the only time I tried streaming was with ps now and I was just looking for lag the whole time and couldn't enjoy the game. That's probably because there was noticeable lag and I don't think much of that service from what I've tried, but what Jeff said on the bombcast did worry me. I love twitchy precision platformers and fighting games, if we start getting less games like this in favour of ones that try and compensate for lag with less precise controls, it will be really dissapointing.

I'm averse to the idea of a Netflix style game smorgasbord. I enjoy staying with games until they're thoroughly wrung out. I worry having a wide variety of games at my fingertips will tempt me away from finishing games and my experience will change from playing very few games very thoroughly to playing many games and putting them down early.

The industry will move to whatever medium can reach the largest market, and game genres that don't play as well under that larger umbrella will either adapt or gradually be sidelined with less publisher investment. We saw this with many of the PC franchises of the 90s and early 2000s as they pivoted to become multi-platform console games resulting in gameplay mechanics being streamlined, slowed down and loosened up to accommodate gamepads and living room TVs. If mobile and cheap streaming boxes represent the chance to grow the potential market by a factor of 10x, (which seems reasonable), then I'd imagine any franchises and genres that can be engineered to accommodate slower and sloppier input will see that happen.

The other factor here that I've not heard addressed by the GB staff are the industry ramifications from the gradual death of Moore's Law. The days of getting new iterations of console (or PC) hardware that can dramatically outstrip the previous iteration while maintaining the same price point are effectively over. Even reasonably modest jumps in performance are going to come at a growing price, so something has to give there -- the baseline price of a new console can't be too high or else your market shrinks, but the performance upgrade over existing hardware has to still be enough that people think it's worth buying. Streaming services coupled with a high-volume dirt cheap SKU seems more reasonable than expecting the entire market to be willing to buy a new $500 box just to get slightly more stable framerates in the same types of games.

It'll be fine. Within the next 5 years 1) a large percentage of the market will be streaming 2) another significant percentage will be downloading onto PC/console and 3) and ever-shrinking percentage of physical copies will be sold. I think the streaming/download split will actually mirror the music industry's streaming/vinyl split - compact discs have more or less disappeared because they're less convenient and more expensive than streaming, but lower quality than vinyl. Physical games are less convenient and the same "quality" as downloadable games - and still have to patched, authenticated, etc. so what's the point?

real question for someone who knows more than i do- with American ISP infrastructure such as it is, and taking a hypothetical family with the following presumptions:

-they have a average tier mbit connection (not business class or a pilot program)

-2 adults and 2 kids in the same household

-they mostly utilize wifi for networking

if it's 7pm and simultaneously mom and pop are streaming a 4k netflix show, little tommy is streaming a dope 1080p pewdie vid while downloading some sickk mobile games to his ipad, meanwhile janey is streaming 1080p gameplay from apex legends remake 3 while voice chatting with her quake revival clan...

are US ISPs able to handle that load for the average family on an average plan, CURRENTLY? and if so, i wonder if game streaming remains a pleasant experience under real world conditions...

With data caps and my love for driving games, and general taste for responsiveness in games, I get super depressed whenever this comes up.

Living in England - The Internet in the UK has improved a bit in the last few years but it's still definitely not going to be the quality for streaming games. Even where I am in the south east and relatively close to London.

Regarding data caps: I'd imagine for a lot casual gamers it might actually utilize less data to stream a few games for a few hours a week than to have to download multiple 100-200GB installations (especially factoring in patches, updates, and expansions), and it also removes the need for having very large HDDs.

Another thing to consider: There's nothing necessarily forcing the concept of streaming to be an all-or-nothing affair. Depending on the gameplay and environment, I can imagine cases where you could render and stream layers of skyboxes (or even light-fields) and then be transformed and composited with client-side foreground elements. Doing it that way would avoid having to render unique POVs for every connected client, as the most distant layers could be shared across multiple clients in a given area, and those distant layers wouldn't need to be updated at the full refresh rate either.

Yes. I live in Australia and the prospect of a streaming future sounds like the drizzling shits.

All I know is that I was part of that Google ProjectStream thing with AC Odyssey and it was awesome. Was way better than how I expected it would perform. If I can pay $20 a month to play the latest games without having to spend 500 dollars for a console/ or a graphics card, and if it performs as well as the ProjectStream thing did for me, that's very tempting.

as long as the internet works and theres no delay so even fighting games play smooth im all for it. anything to make it easier. data caps is nothing to worry about. Streaming the game non stop will use less data than downloading the game once.

@mellotronrules: I live in a decent sized city in the US. I get 100GB down and 30 GB up. costs $100 a month. I have 6 people in my household. 4 kids 2 adults.

At any given time I will be playing rainbow six seige online, 1 kid will be watching netflix. one kid will be watching youtube. One kid will be listening to music. One kid will be playing destiny. And my wife will be watching hulu. And there is no issue at all. Thats my experience at least.

@mellotronrules: I'm no expert, but as far as I understand the problem you'll face is response time not capacity. Even if you're not utilizing all the capacity everyones signals gets lined up in the same queue, taking away precious milliseconds. This might be wrong, but imagine you have a 10gbps connection, that means it takes a full second to process 10 gb of data. So if you're consistently using 5 gb that means as the signals comes in it will take half a second before they're at the front of the queue and ready to get processed.

Absolutely. The sort of latency that you can't really avoid in a streaming scenario would be pretty ruinous to so many of my favourite games. If the industry really pushes in that direction, what does it mean for my favourite genres?

@fivegreenaliens: I havent bought a physical game in years, i do find the idea of a streaming future to be depressing if we move forward before technology reduces latency, otherwise we're going to be getting sold games designed around input lag.

I’m of two minds about it. On one hand, I love Spotify. I rarely feel like I need to buy music anymore, I have most of what I need there. Movies feel like it’s in some middle ground, you have exclusives and whatever your given streaming service decided to put money into adding to their library. But that library rotates out. In contrast to Spotify and music, movies seems to be at a less ideal place. There’s no one catch all place nor does it seem like the library is consistently big. So you end up being forced to rent/buy that one movie you feel like watching anyway.

If game streaming worked well in an ideal way and operated much like Spotify, I would be curious about trying it. But if it is more like movies and new games are either not added directly to the service (a period of buy/rent) or they get removed and rotated out of the library, I am much less interested in it conceptually. Not saying things don’t disappear from Spotify once in a while due to deals falling out, but it’s never a case of built in limitations.

@tunaburn: thanks for the info. i'm glad to hear it sounds like something of that tier can easily handle it.

i did some mild googling and found this-

https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/2018/fixed/

according to ookla the average in the US (as of dec. 2018) is 96Mbps-ish down and 33Mbps-ish up. i wonder how a connection like that fares when you have a family at peak usage hours (not being rhetorical- genuinely curious).

@mellotronrules: I have 46 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up living in the Cleveland suburbs for approx. $80 per month. The Apex Legends lag gets pretty rough if my wife is watching Netflix, Amazon, etc. They do offer higher speeds so I guess I’d upgrade once game streaming arrives.

There will be multiple skews of box and service. Ones that can run games natively and ones that can not, there will be an app giving on other devices thatll complement your system and not replace it. The source for these games will still exist and i imagine there will always be a box thatll run the source for years to come.

lets just hope IPS will not limit everyone with data caps then, because I don't see all these streaming services working well when literally everything we do is streaming using the internet.

I for one welcome the possibility of a streaming future.
I'd still like for physical or downloadable copies to be an alternative however.

Aside from technical limitation im worried about the quality of games when theyre just thrown up to a streaming service. As unfinished as games have been lately..Could you even imagine ?

For publishers and platform holders streaming is a very enticing prospect hardware is the biggest barrier to entry and bypassing it could increase you could vastly increase your potential audience, but I have a hard time seeing streaming taking over in anyway.

The majority of console owners only by 1-2 games a year using a monthly sub for a couple of games seems pointless, and on the opposite side the core folks already have more content than time. Both seem unlikley to take to streaming in a big way leaving streaming for families or a new audience entirely. Families often buy into the generation much later not being big spenders I can easily see streaming working but its only a small group atm.

Also not sure how many non-gamers are will to spend $60 on a AAA game and would those folks care enough in the different between Fortnite mobile and Fortnite PC/console, Nintendo struggled getting people to spend $10 on Mario Run getting these people to commit to a monthly sub seems far fetched.

The strength of Netflix is its the biggest player around with the largest warchest/content creating a vicious circle. I don't see it happening for gaming which could very easily go down the PC launcher rabbit hole where you have so many competing services with none having all the content you want, if streaming removes the hardware why wouldn't EA, Ubisoft and Activision all have their own service.

I hope they continue to give a download option like Microsoft plans to because the input lag and quality of streaming would be a deal breaker for me. Everyone kept saying how good AC:O looked on Project Stream but I thought it looked like hot garbage on a 400meg connection. Unfortunately because most people can’t seem to see a difference this is where our future is headed.

My internet is shit and I'm really sensitive to input lag, so no fuck this streaming idea.

When it becomes mainstream, I imagine more traditional gaming will be relegated to the same corner as those that prefer vinyl records. It'll be niche. It'll really suck for those of us that are already in a gaming niche. I avoid DRM (including Steam and Epic) and game on Linux. I'm not just going to be a DRM-free Linux gaming weirdo, I'm going to be a DRM-free Linux local-system (or whatever term ends up getting coined) gaming weirdo.

Yep, the prospect of publishers flicking a switch and preventing my access to a product I've paid for or not being able to play my games 10+ years later when they decide to close/reassign the servers really upsets me and I won't be buying games / subscribing to services under these circumstances.

I buy 95% digitally and I know eventually I won't be able to download these titles if needed but storage is cheap enough that I tend to download something once and never delete it, so aside from HDD failure it shouldn't be an issue. Fuck streaming and fuck anything always online.

Tying stuff to a service is the reason I'm reluctant to get the Switch Online stuff for the NES games. I'll have them until they decide to bring a new box out. Just open up a rom site and be cool, please.

The feelings of breaking the seal and the smell of a new game is something that i miss now on PC.

And, Will probably miss on consoles on the near future.

Truth. With GPUs from NVIDIA raising prices (because they can, not because they need to) most likely local high fidelity PC gaming could take a big nose dive like in the 360/PS3 era because most people are not that into tech or the details of games and are fine playing some garbage microtransaction/always-online/graphically downgraded trash like Ubisoft PC port. we could experience a dark ages. A game where input lag matters like Devil May Cry will get put in a corner by greedy publishers who want to make wide audience soggy toast games.

It really doesn't look good for steam's future when they have to consider taking down horrible games like "Rape Day" and the one about school shootings.

And then on the ISP side, my friend plays Xbox One and regularly goes over a data cap just for online gaming so expect them to make you pay $200 a month for adequate internet.

Once again Capitalism ruins good art so I guess us weirdos will have to be Linux gaming, DRM-free, local host AA games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice or Divinity Original Sin 2