Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

> Fortnite wasn’t designed to be a Second Life-style experience, or even a digital “third place“; it became one organically.

I don't even know what to do with this comment. All multiplayers games are designed to be a third place, that's why they have groups that stay together between rounds, integrated voice chat, and friend systems. Multiplayer games have been designed to act as third places for ... a long, long time now.

> Epic has also built up another great and particularly hard to establish advantage: some 200MM+ registered user accounts.

I don't think that Fornite players as a group think that setting up a new user account is a big deal. Having an account is not a particularly big point of friction any more.

> Third is the threat posed by the shift to cloud-based gaming

do players actually want this? I've only heard that players want this from "thought leader", technology speculator types. Never in my thousands of hours of online gaming have I ever heard another player talk about this.

> they will be able to support Unity and other engines as well (interoperability will obviously be critical to any Metaverse and has long been a passion point of Sweeney’s).

this seems pretty divorced from technical and political reality.

I don't have access to any non-mac laptop - nor any computer with the hardware required to play a AAA title. When an interesting title like shadow of the tomb raider came out I was always put off by the sticker shock of buying a ~$1000 machine + desk + monitors that will take up a large portion of my apartment, and be obsolete in 2 years. For what amounts to ~80 hours of entertainment if I only play 2 AAA titles per year.

Trying out ParSec gaming was game changing for me and I've played 3 AAA titles with max settings in the last 3 months on the same PaperSpace cloud I use to do my personal ML projects. for a total cost of $30 in cloud credits, from my MacBook air sitting silently on my lap.

Another reasonable middle ground is buying a $300 console...

Don't let the PC Master Race hear you.

For some reason the convenience and peace of mind from having a console+game is sinful.

Recently, this has become a reasonable option.

However, if one plays a lot of games then the difference of prices between console and PC adds up.

No they don’t. Assuming you ‘shop smart’. A PS4 slim 1TB on Amazon sale set me back ~€200. PS+ goes for ~€40-50 a year, and gives you a few free games a month. If you’re willing to buy secondhand physical and/or be patient, most console AAA games can be had for €20-40 after a month or two. Hell, I bought God of War 2018 on a PS store sale for €35 three months after release, and that’s a premiere Playstion exclusive. Let’s say you put together a gaming PC for €650 and buy AAA games for €10 a pop. We get the following situation after 3 years of ownership:

PS4 * €200 for the system * €135 for 3 x €45 for PS+ * €360 for 12 secondhand AAA games €0 for ~7 good PS+ games (36 months x 4 PS+ games x 5% average chance its a decent game) * €695 total cost to experience 19 games

PC * €650 for the system * €180 for 18 AAA games via Steam / Kinguin / whatever * €0 for 1 AAA game free with your GPU * €830 total cost to experience 19 games

Now at this point avid PC gamers will huff and puff that their games will pretty much be eternally compatible, console gamers will gleefully point out how you need to constantly fidget with your PC for optimal graphic / driver settings on the PC, etc etc; Those are for yourself to decide. But purely on price, a PC can’t compete with a console.

But, everyone already has a primary computing device in a PC / Notebook (if it has TB3)

The extra cost is only associated with getting the new GPU.

One can buy an $700 machine every 5 years and play 3 games per year acquired at steam sales for $10 - $20 each. They can be aaa titles from 2-3 years back or less demanding items.

That is an average of $185 a year for 80 hours of fun or little more than $2 per hour.

One can also get or build a a micro atx machine that does not use much room and hook it up to a kvm switch and a keyboard.

At the touch of a button it goes from an extra monitor for your laptop to connected to your micro desktop.

If you like old games even better a $500 machine could provide hundreds of hours for years.

Say 100 per year and a few hundred hours per year = 50c an hour.

There are a ridiculous amount of classic games.

Parsec (or similar) will be my go-to gaming rig once my current rig isn't good enough anymore.

How is the experience with online gaming? Is it possible or is the increase in latency to much for e.g. FPS?

I'm a perpetual solo player and haven't gone into FPS titles yet, but the experience was more or less perfect for third-person titles like tomb raider. FPS performance may depend on the title and how close you are to the cloud. I'm 7-10 ms (one-way) from PaperSpace's NY2 facility, and 10-15 ms from ec2's us-east facility on ICMP.

Wow. Now _that_ really puts the cost of non-enterprise cloud computing into perspective. That doesn’t sound bad.

cool that this worked out for you but I think you're an outlier here.

edit: wait don't you still have to actually buy the game if you use parsec?

You clearly haven't invested in PC gaming because your vision of how it would play out is quite misguided.

I play exclusively on the PC, and only update the majority of hardware (CPU, RAM, motherboard) every 7ish years. GPU about every 4 to 5 years. When a system is first built, enjoy the new AAA games on "ultra" settings, and lower settings on new games do that at 5 years you're picking "medium" or "low" for quality settings.

80 hours for 2 games? Most gamers log hundreds of hours into a game over a year, not 40. Games like fortnight, pubg, destiny 2, far cry, sky rim, Witcher 3, etc, can easily rack up several hundred hours of play thanks to exploration of deep content or multiplayer modes.

If I do the math, it's a few cents per hour of entrainment. Much cheaper than any other venue. Even hiking at the local forest preserves charge more money for bringing in a car and parking.

> do players actually want this?

What makes companies the most money?

One shot games? Or never ending games with repeat buys?

I see more of the later and not really the former...

That tells me that whether or not what gamers 'want'... what they spend on is cloud based.

> Or never ending games with repeat buys? (snip) That tells me that whether or not what gamers 'want'... what they spend on is cloud based.

That's not what cloud based means here. "Cloud based", in this context, refers to video streaming of a game rendered within a data centre, remote-desktop-ed to your computer like a YouTube video. (The article calls it a 'cloud-based streaming solution'). Lots of companies offer this (GeForce Now, PlayStation Now, etc). But almost no players actually play that way today.

Lots of players are spending money in online "never-ending" / "repeat-buy" games. (Fortnite, Apex, Blackout, Destiny, Warframe, Path of Exile, WoW, etc). But approximately 0% of players are spending any money on "cloud-based" ones (using the articles definition of cloud-based).

> That's not what cloud based means here.

Ahh, I misunderstood then... I hear cloud and I think server based.

I would think cloud-hosted "gaming" - as in RDP type gaming?... the latency alone would kill it for me.

I stand corrected :)

Cloud gaming was tried before, with a company called OnLive. Interest peaked shortly after they announced in 2012, and then they crashed and went bankrupt because nobody cared enough to pay for it.

I miss it. It amazed my friends seeing me play LA Noir on my phone.

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