Okay but why? When you walk out of a movie theater you don't have anything. Was it still a good movie?
Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.
Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.
Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.
Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).
None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.
If you could have rented most of your games at a lower price, and then bought the ones you really liked on sale, would you have paid more money total?
Admittedly a very low percentage.
I will say that I definitely spend more than 90% of my time playing games on games that I've bought more than 10 years ago.
To me, games are a way to experience a different life in a different universe that is full with other friends and acquaintances. They are fun worlds that I can visit whenever I want.
That's why stadia (and games that require online connections) are things I can never see myself accepting.
I only pirated (it's the 21st century "Demo" for me) the rest. You may see why I wouldn't be interested in Stadia at all.
You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P
And pretend I asked what percent you continue to play more than a year after starting them.
It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?
MMOs are a case where the game itself inherently requires a serious server in order to work. I don't play MMOs myself, but if I did, I would not be bothered by their server-based nature as there's an obviously inescapable reason for it.
That is not representative of most games.
Handling a thousand people in the same spot can be done on any size of server, and most of the time you're looking at under a hundred.
This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have.
It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a trusted copy of the game state.
Further reading: Latency Compensating Methods in Client/Server In-game Protocol Design and Optimization by Yahn W. Bernier: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...
Edit: Okay I really need someone to explain why this particular comment got downvoted, I'm baffled.
To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory management. As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
Pretending all this to be no big deal might be right for some specific (kind of) games, but generalizing it that much is... unrealistic at best.
Btw, dev time is valuable as well, so an overly engineered solution probably isn't a realistic option for many online games either.
And I mentioned trust in my first post. It's a reason to use a server, but it's not a reason to use a 'serious' server.
None of these are reasons you couldn't use 40 tiny weak throwaway servers in place of 5 big serious servers.
> As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
That sounds more like a shooter than an MMO. And a shooter instance definitely fits into a tiny 2-4 core server.
> dev time is valuable as well
Which is why so much software is single-threaded. And single-threaded software only needs one core.
(And the dev time for what I was talking about would be tiny, and it would save money overall. There are good reasons not to do it, but I don't think dev time is one of those good reasons.)
Either you’re not making your point correctly or you’re just wrong.
I made two AAA games with online components, the game servers are “serious” (40cores, 256GiB ram, 10G network) because they have to be to emulate physics, to run AI and to do raycasting of bullets (to detect shooting through walls which the clients tell us they can do if you’re cheating) etc. And /even our/ game worlds offloaded too much in the first game leading to huge issues with cheaters.[0]
And our gameserver is written in C++ with a lot of optimisation work.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/26/hackers-c...
I just think that's pretty uncommon among games.
Maybe I'm wrong, but keep in mind that something like "an MMO" managed to work on the hardware that existed 15+ years ago and the underlying computational details have barely changed for many of them.
And something like Eve is single threaded.
But anyway, our future entertainment might be completely hallucinated by AI in an on demand fashion before we get the 'general storage game binary' thingy.
You can still play old video games in emulators, but you are usually using an approximation of the original input device. This isn't such a big deal with older, simpler games – playing a SNES game with an Xbox controller is a good enough approximation of the original experience. But newer innovations like the Wiimote, Kinect, VR headsets, etc will make it a lot harder to play games made for them in the future. In 50 years, you'll still be able to boot up Wii Sports in an emulator, sure, but will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?
I'm betting I could print it and hack something together from some hobby electronics kit if I really wanted to.
But you are absolutely correct. There is a category of games for which the complete experience is unseparably attached to the original substrate.
On the other hand, keyboard and mouse driven games are fairly maintainable accross platform generations.
Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.
> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price
It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.
I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.
You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.
Is this not possible with Stadia?
Also how does it compared price wise to a brand new but leased console?
It’s going to have to be pretty cheap to be competitive I think.
If you are just renting hardware then you need to run a local Steam cache (this exists), and allow players to use their existing game catalog. This is basically the "GeForce Now" model.
And yes, you may note that I am referencing other game streaming services. Google is late to this party, and they have nothing unique to offer, nor a particularly compelling business model, nor the trust of their userbase. Stadia is DOA.
If Google wants it to be not-DOA with their current business model, nothing short of a guarantee that if they fold within the next 10 years then they will issue a full and unconditional refund is going to do it. Nobody is going to pay full price for locked-in games on a platform with a track record like Google's.
At the same time, I never feel compelled to penny pinch by selling/buying used games. And I like to keep them, as I'm sure many other people do. Time, effort and inconvenience is involved with used buying and selling, and for many of us, that offsets the value of actual dollar savings.
If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.
Also the PC version of Stadia seems extra broken compared to the chromecast version right now, and there's a tweet in there saying it looks a lot better on chromecast.
While a 15 year old CPU is definitely hyperbole, if you bought the most expensive intel cpu 10 years ago, you could probably run VR on it.
> I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.
Where did you get those numbers? Also you'd be avoiding a lot of the microcode security-mitigation slowdowns that way.
Also, an RX 580 8GB is massive overkill for VR. An RX 480 8GB goes for about $80 on ebay and will have 90% of the performance of the 580
Games are more efficient than ever today. The worst era was definitely the really lazy Xbox 360 ports at the end of the 00s/early 10s. Those games would turn my GPU into a space heater.
> I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU.
If you've also upgraded your CPU to a relatively recent one, upgraded motherboard to suit, dropped some more RAM in it, maybe added an SSD, and your "4 year old $120 GPU" was actually a high end one that you got cheap, then sure. Your 15 year old PC case can play modern games because it's actually got a modern computer inside it.
If you tend towards single-player, story-based games, like Red Dead etc., then maybe playing through it once and moving on is enough for you. Then again, maybe you'll want to come back to it in 3, 4, 5 years, and hopefully you'll be able to with Stadia, but with a disc/download you definitely should be able to.
On the other hand, if you play multiplayer, "live-service" games, as many are pushing to be these days, then you're already at the mercy of the dev/publisher to keep supporting the game so you can play it in the future. In that case, it become a question of who will give up support first, Google or the developer?
In either case, I think the Xbox Pass-style "all-you-can-eat" model is a better solution. No big, upfront cost for any single game, and you can still go back to something older, as long as it remains supported.
When I was a youngling and had time and most critically - there weren't that many games - I liked to return to good games like Baldurs Gate 2 or Fallout from time to time.
Now - pushing 40, have family and career and and an acute sense of mortality (i.e. time has value) - I still like to play games from time to time, but I really have to struggle to complete any game even once.
I sample the latest AAA games and hottest indie things when they come out and are cheap on Steam but I don't really have time to complete them, except only rarely. The only game I've completed after Witcher 3 is In to the breach. I have a huge list of unplayed games in Steam from the last holiday sale waiting to be even installed.
Given this, I find a disposable cloud game library with reasonable pricing quite enticing. It would be exactly how I use steam - except sans having to download hundreds of gigabytes before I can even go to the main screen.
When those delivered a sufficiently good quality experience, I stopped going to a theatre.
Control is one part of that. "Let's pause..."
Replay is another. Maybe watch it a few times for whatever reason.
Sharing is another. I still like physical media for this reason.
Games are similar.
Renting a game should cost less than one that can be replayed, shared, etc...
Keeping history is another good reason. I have media and games from times past, and I have the ability to share that experience today. High value.
Gaming and movies today? Definitely moving away from the higher value things, yet pricing often seems the same, or not in line with the lower value proposition.