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Comment by geddy | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone even consider playing on the go anymore? I will be 200 years old by the time you can stream 60fps to a device sitting on a bus on my way to work.

Streaming may have a place in the future, but if it's the only option, then consider me a full-time retro gamer.

I already despise the fact that the masses voted to kill ownership of games, and now it's going straight to killing "rental licenses" as well, putting all of the power of entertainment and commerce in the hands of, essentially, two companies: Google and Amazon.

Ya'll voted for these massive monopolies, really looking forward to the dystopia.

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5G is on the way, and will enable this stuff anywhere. MWC had tons of demos of 4k, multiplayer, and VR games streaming via 5G. A lot depends on how/when/if it's all rolled out, but unless you're currently 194 years old, it's gonna be a lot sooner than you think.

If 5G is anything like LTE, it will work some of the time, cut out at other times, rapidly degrade into crap quality before coming back to full speed at random intervals. And bear in mind I live in Orange County, CA, hardly the backwoods.

We are a long, long, long way away from having constant, fast, reliable, high-bit rate connections for mobile devices.

(Note, I am on an IPhone XR in OC on ATT)

Still, always-online connections are still subject to typical tech issues. We're not living in the world of Ready Player One, and the country is extremely spread out. Add to the fact that a few mega corps own all the infrastructure in the country and for business reasons don't want to spend a dime, and I don't really see how any of this is possible, or even practical.

In other words, we have the technology (and it'll get better, I mean) to have handheld gaming devices. Even if they are digital only, it's extremely inefficient to generate video hundreds/thousands of miles away and beam it down to a device.

To me, this sounds like mailing a letter to your next door neighbor, going through the entire US Postal system, vs. just walking over and putting the envelope in their mailbox.

You can already stream to a mobile device over 4G now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykFQW6Jtc0A

The quality of this is only likely to improve with 5G coming in the next year or so.

This technology consolidating in the hands of only two companies implies there aren't going to be any competitors. Nvidia is already establishing a foothold in this space, and I imagine AMD will also do so eventually. If the technology is actually interesting to consumers, there will be a competitive ecosystem that springs up to serve them. The future isn't as dystopian as you're implying.

It's dystopian in the sense that nothing is actually owned anymore. I grew up collecting games and still collect them now, and for a ton of people (the average gamer is in their mid-30s, and that's a massive demographic) still likes to collect their games. They like a shelf of titles. Heck, even those who buy digital have little digital collections, and more power to 'em.

But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming time leased out to me by MegaCorp is not anything I'm interested in. I want to pick what I enjoy, buy it, and play it. I'm not crazy for thinking that way, collecting is part of the fun of gaming for me and many others.

Speaking of the 4G/5G, I cannot fathom a world where you can be on a subway underground and somehow have a perfect streaming connection. And subways are only in major cities - what about the rest of the entire country? The current infrastructure, heck, the infrastructure of 10 years from now isn't built to handle this kind of bandwidth for constant streaming. It's not even efficient - always-online services have been vilified by the gaming community, and now somehow we're celebrating being stuck on 1 TV, playing at home.

Sigh. I feel like this whole industry has left me behind, and nothing makes sense anymore.

I'd say the vast majority of PC gamers right now have maybe one or two special edition physical boxes and everything else is digital in their Steam/Origin/Epic accounts. As it is right now at any point those accounts can be closed down without oversight or warning, and you don't legally own the games in your steam account. I don't see game streaming fundamentally changing things at this point, the "own your games" ship sailed long ago. Also like many steam users I have a metric ton of games in my account that I will likely never play or use again in my lifetime. A monthly rental playing a catalog of old games and some new ones might honestly end up costing me less then having all those old useless games in my library that I played once for 2 hours and can't return that I'll never play again.

As for the subway thing, wifi networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous and advanced, I know my local subway has it's own inbuilt wifi, obviously it's not going to be amazing any time soon but between that and 5g and the hotswapping connections to keep uptime, idk it can work.

You appear to be somewhat biased by your surrounding infrastructure which does not reflect the state of the rest of the developed world. You see, a lot of subways have excellent LTE because the carries deployed their network antennas underground. Besides, for a lot of cities, public transit lives primarily above ground. On top of all that, LTE in the US is terrible compared to other countries which can easily average 50-100Mbps: http://research.rewheel.fi/

What about on a plane? I get quite a bit switch play in on flights.

Exactly. Or underground on a subway. Or in a bus next to a mountain. Or in a very congested area with tons of people on their phones dragging on the network. Or in a building that blocks service.

Every day of my life I am in all of those above situations, and I almost exclusively game on the go, either on my Vita or Switch.

5G doesn't make these problems just vanish, the US is a massive country and the middle of the mountains just won't have 60fps streaming capabilities in 5 years, it just won't. Why would any company want to spend the money on that infrastructure outside of a few major cities?

If spacex is successful with starlink [0], you probably would be able to play it on a plane.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

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