Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them.
The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.
What companies want however is recurring income. Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of previous investments again. Movies are remade, leading to things like the Lion King CGI film selling more than the original cartoon (somehow). And everything is moving to subscriptions and other forms of recurring income.
Another one to remember is that software products like MS Windows and Office and Adobe's products HAD to basically add features or redesign themselves every year, because why else would people buy new versions of the software? I think those companies started to see that, people stopped buying newer versions of their software because the previous versions worked just fine. Microsoft saw that with e.g. Windows XP and Office 97, so many people didn't see the added value - or feared the changes - in the newer versions.
Adobe is a subscription model. Microsoft gave out their OS for free (effectively) or OEM only, in favor of pushing the office365 subscription model. I'm sure the break even point - where the O365 subscription income overtakes that of loose sales of licenses - is somewhere like 2-3 years, especially since there's no retailers in between that take their cut anymore.
And finally, why pay $600 for a new console + game + a subscription for the online services if you can also pay a $15 or whatever a month subscription fee? From a consumer's point of view, the break even point is years, and given there are newer versions of consoles every 5-10 years as well, it does start to make more sense, especially if you don't play games that often.
(disclaimer: I dislike subscriptions and prefer to own games + consoles, just saying I get where they're coming from).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_Village#Sales
Seems a bit disingenuous. The RE2 remake was fantastic and significantly different from the original in terms of gameplay. Remaking a game seems very different from remaking a movie. I've got high hopes for RE4's upcoming remake. I can't imagine being excited for a remade movie barring some reason to think it will differ. The lion king is the weirdest remake of them all, being mostly shot for shot but with weird CGI.
Originally released for the gamecube and then ported to:
PS2, PC, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Mobile, PC again, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, VR
After hearing it announced I just kinda rolled my eyes since it's not all that old (maybe because playing it feels like yesterday) and a remake of an existing title. But then, to your point, remembered the re2 remake and thought, "eh they'll probably make re4 worthwhile/even better".
You can't blame them for trying. Especially in Google's case, when they have more servers than they know what to do with. Why not offer customers something new? Freedom from expensive hardware purchases, and interesting capabilities like playing on a phone or in a browser.
That said, it's not a deal that interests me. Especially in Stadia's case when they were trying to make you pay full retail price for a game (are they still doing that?), creating an ever-present threat of losing everything when the service shuts down.
I'm not sure how to parse that. The people buying those used games _are_ paying for them; they're just not paying the original publisher. Just like they wouldn't for a used book, or cd, or whatever.
(Of course in practice platform owners are assholes and gamers are dumbasses so it's not even close to efficient.)
Relatedly reselling steam games or windows licenses have quite a few news stories to them.
Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.
AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows that startups don't want to get distracted by system administration and they're squeezing it like hell.
The way they've done this was almost comically silly at first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day, without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to how to control costs. At some point they decided this was too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though the cloud provider wasn't the problem.
Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I need a decent amount of compute for something ... it pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?) they've spent moving to "the cloud".
I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space.
For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically):
1). Gaming PC
2). Xbox Series
3). Playstation 5
With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH):
1). Google Stadia
2). Microsoft xCloud
3). PlayStation Now
4). Amazon Luna
5). GeForce Now
6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow)
7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic
8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future
I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.
But also we need to accept that this is also happening because software startups (SaaS or otherwise) are functioning more and more like predators than value providers these days.
At this point, it's not just the aggressive subscription/upselling models, but the various dark patterns in their design, the abusive immediate various newsletter subscriptions, the constant emailing, the popups, the little help widget thing at the bottom right corner of every startup that's there to supposedly help you, the hostile data collection, and many many other insulting and abusive patterns that's more or less a standard now.
And yes, FAANGs do this, but people are comfortable with the abuser they know and already are prey to than the one they don't.
There's nothing wrong with "the cloud", it's all the same tech behind the scenes whether you own it and run it or not, but it's the mercilessly hostile, incredibly ruthless and vicious attitude that these startups display that makes people not want to pay for them.
No, this is what happens when lazy developers prioritize their own convenience over what's best for everyone.
They want to write JS once and have it run everywhere, so we end up with abominations like wasm and node.
People are perfectly willing to pay for games, just look at Steam.
Multiple languages including rust already compile directly to wasm. This would be your own best pro-wasm argument if you're such a js hater.
If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech?
There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often gets ridiculed because of how new the model is.
The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam or any other games store. Very few people have all their games on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates. The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap.
In reality, all you really need to backup for single player games are your save games because if you get banned, you can just download a cracked copy of the games you like.
Only way to play state of the art graphics-focused games at the limit of what personal computers can do, sure. But not the only way to play games period.
Laptops and even phones these days are quite powerful and can achieve a lot. Due to diminisshing returns with even more powerful hardware, the gap in graphical fidelity between what a top end PC can run and what a cheap laptop can run will only get smaller.
There are titles that will run on pretty much anything with a moderately powerful GPU (league of legends, rocket league) but you'll have a hard time running Cyberpunk on integrated GPUs, no matter how much you crank the settings down. On my laptop I've tried running Skyrim (the latest rerelease) on my 10th gen Intel integrated GPU and the results were choppy and nearly unplayable.
It all depends on the games you want to play and how well they've been designed to operate in restricted performance environments. For sure a laptop made five years from now will run current high-end titles at decent frame rates if you set them up right, but that doesn't solve the problems of wanting to play a game now, or wanting more than the minimum graphical spectacle at playable frame rates.
A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could run Windows, and that's the performance level many people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that.
Both AMD and Nvidia are still finding ways to squeeze more performance out of their chips and even Intel is joining in with competent dedicated GPUs from what the leaked specs seem to indicate.
Yeah, a $500 chromebook won't, but a $500 gaming laptop will. Gaming laptops are far cheaper and more capable than people expect. They just aren't super thin, are heavier, and they tend to need a beefy power supply. My laptop is like 4 years old or so, has a 2080RTX, and cost I think $800 at the time. It's been able to run everything I've thrown at it at max settings, save VR.
Including RE Village
I can't find any new laptops with dedicated graphics for $500. You can find laptops with an AMD 5500U for that price, but I doubt you'll be playing RE Village on that.
$749 for an RTX3050. probably fine for pretty much everything but vr
The extra $250 spend on a laptop puts it at 1.5x the price of a decent 500 dollar Chromebook. That's over two years worth of Stadia subscription at the current price.
I have seen a laptop with a 3060 for $800, but it's rare. A laptop that can actually play AAA games at decent frame rates will run you $1k or more.
Mac users generally don't tend to game on Mac. This also means there are fewer experts on writing game engines for metal than there are for alternative platforms. I don't see why that would change any time soon, and that's why I don't think programming for Metal will be worth the extra effort and cost.
I definitely believe that this can be done. It all boils down to drawing triangles real quick and Metal is just a new way of specifying how to make those triangles appear. I just think it's economically unfeasible to invest much time into Mac gaming.
I think it's much easier and probably cheaper to just throw the game on Stadia/GeForce Now to reach Mac/ChromeOS/Android gamers. All they need is a browser and a decent internet connection.
I don't really see that changing in the very near future, which makes me think that the jump to cloud gaming won't be as quick as some companies want it to be. Whether this changes the calculus WRT making native macOS games I guess I can't say, but even without cloud gaming picking up the porting slack I don't expect to see much happening here unless Apple decides to throw a bunch of money around to make it so.
All relevant AAA tooling already do Metal for a while now.
As of Metal 3, Khronos APIs are now the only ones left without any kind of support for mesh shaders or optimized API for texture IO.
No worries, they will probably get a few more extensions to load per GPU vendor, making it no different than having a proper plugin infrastructure in place.
It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.
First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full of GPUs 10ms away from every person.
And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more noticeable.
You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing each year.
PC Gaming is a big initial investment for some people so making it more accesible will maybe also attract some of the mobile market who want to play AAA titles but dont want a console or a PC.
That being said I dont think we'll be saying goodbye to the desktop gaming PC anytime soon.
But anyway it's probably minimal the amount of PC gamers that migrated to mobile gaming. And cloud gaming will probably be similar. In fact I think it's doing pretty poorly already in terms of adoption.
Remember I'm not arguing that cloud gaming will never become popular. I'm arguing that we shouldn't worry about gaming becoming cloud only.
... With whales subsiding the industry due to gambling addiction?
I for one expected mobile gaming to revitalize story-driven, turn-based traditional RPGs like 2d Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, etc...
Boy was I wrong :|
So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder, and requires breaking more laws.
This is not what I intended to mean ( although clearly I left too much to interpretation ). What I thought I was saying was 'Even if there is a perfect digital lock, there is always the human component.'
edit: laws part; i misread the comment
while cracking is an option, legitimately purchased games on steam don't need to be cracked, offline mode is designed to work indefinitely - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/8649699535721...
In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at least) a single instance of the server-side game platform available open source, or freely available. Even if the game itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd align incentives for that, though.
I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering, cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in the future.
This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you see?
EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in London is particular roles because they were more likely to lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command arrive" issue.)
For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better than installing their kernel mode anticheat.
Stadia is just one service out of many, like Xbox, Playstation, GeForce, Luna, etc. Some of those operate off your existing libraries (Steam, Epic, etc.), others tie into publisher subscriptions (Uplay, EA).
Most games really aren't archival quality anyway. You play them for a few weeks/months and then forget about it, and maybe come back to it years later when it's either 10% of its original launch price or abandonware that can be easily pirated anyway. And for the games you really really want to keep forever, there's still GOG.com. But really, Steam does a much better job at keeping my games safe than I ever have.
When you think about it, the Web itself is similarly ephemeral. Most services are just subscriptions we use, dependent on the company that provides them. But they are still tremendously useful. Or Netflix, for that matter.
These online gaming services offer convenience and usability, which are way more important to most people than whether their purchases/rentals will still be there 20 years from now. It's just entertainment.
I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important in VR), but it would be perfect for me.
I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine) on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam existed.
Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games.
On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.
I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service, but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.
Am I scared? No.
And let's see if games are becoming only available through the cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc.
Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no bank around anymore ;)
Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.
IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store in my browser.
!
Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand asset pile.
I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it years down the road.
Just because you don't care about preserving our culture does not make those that do hoarders or fear mongerers.
There's the solution.
I haven't bought software or games in years.
Laws for consumer protection seem a better time tested way of aligning consumer and companies goals.
Young people are broke where I live, they either pirate or just outright not have game consoles (most do not have consoles).,
They're managing just fine, they play stuff on their phones or hang out and talk and eat some ice cream, or have parties/get togethers.
There are other challenges (maybe they work with companies that require them to use Office 365), but they could limit their contact with SaaS or DRM in their personal lives. They won't -- they frankly have no particularly good reason to from their perspective -- but they could.
> will often require compromises.
That is true for everything and hence an incredibly boring argument.