Netflix might get into cloud gaming, forms another new game studio

I think it works if you do it over a generation (of people). Never give a kid less than 50ms of latency and they won’t even realize they’re missing out.

The whole industry will attack the goal from multiple angles and make it happen. I think making GPU ownership expensive to improve the value proposition of streaming services is one of the goals.

On paper I think it should be a total failure. In reality, I tried the RTX 3080 tier of GeForce Now and I couldn’t notice the input latency playing Last Epoch. If triple buffering was accepted, 3 frames of latency for streaming will be too, won’t it?

I hope it fails because never owning anything sucks, but I think it’ll be extremely successful.

> Take an empty game (update nothing, draw nothing) and send black over the wire. You blow the budget.

You say that, but as a user I wouldn’t notice the difference in this game played on cloud versus locally.

You are sort of comparing apples to oranges. Like consider a beefy gaming computer, but the mouse is some junk with an input latency of 10ms. Can this computer do 144fps? It most certainly can. Despite the input latency, 144 frames are rendered every second, and 144 frames are displayed on the monitor every second. Movement and animations will be butter smooth. For the player the latency is frustrating but consider the friend looking over his shoulder. He can't tell. All he knows is that there are in fact 144 frames per second.

So you gotta ask yourself, well when does this make sense? Does it make sense in a twitch shooter? It doesn't. Does it make sense in a popular mmorpg that runs with a tickrate of 600ms? Yes. Does it make sense in a RTS? Probably, except at maybe the highest levels. Does it make sense in a train simulator? Yes.

Absolutely. There are certainly classes of games where several frames of input lag don't matter, but look at the big AAA titles, look at the popularity of challenging action games like Elden Ring, of multiplayer shooters and MOBAs.

It is, at best, a niche service.

Well, that may be true with having to send the entire payload over a distance of space-time. However, if AI-based rendering could sufficiently predict the next frame, then you can just simulate the next frame without lag. Given it can predict enough frames in the future in relation to compute requirements, then all renders are local-only with "online synchronization" - at least, this will probably be how we do long-distance "calling" when we are a multi-solar system species; unless we find a way to break the speed of light limit. In a way everyone you talk to really would be a simulation; and they'd "sync" up to new data every so often for alignment.

I'm not convinced that 16ms or 6ms is the right budget to talk about. Sure, if you want someone to see the picture, make a decision and reflect it back in the next picture, that would be the budget. But take a comparison to telephony, the ITU says the budget for unnoticeable latency is 150ms. So I can talk to you on the phone with 150ms latency and not even notice. Now, I think gaming is probably lower than 150 because the timing of speech is fairly slow compared to twitch shooters, but I don't think it's 6ms. You might be right it's still unachievable (and I agree, the only viable solution might be to boil the ocean by sticking data centres on the end of every street and create a new guaranteed low latency protocol that takes precedence over all other TCP traffic), but I'm not as certain.

Don't forget about the baseline input latency that even local games experience. The best case scenario is PC, which would add in the realm of 10-20ms of input latency to your network latency. TVs (which are the target for this stuff) have hilariously large input latency.

You're teetering on the budget before you even hit the network.

Meanwhile, on a cloud gaming service that has already taken off:

A native Xbox Series X test running at 60Hz gets an 85ms average - from a trigger pull to the first flash of gunfire. Xbox is far off a native PC result, which comes in at just 49ms. And the big surprise is that GeForce Now using the PC app beats a local Xbox Series X in latency, coming in at 81.7ms - while a Shield test is comparable to Xbox at 86ms.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-geforce-now-rt...

It will never cease to amaze me how consistently far behind HN’s user base is on this topic, the average 20 something service worker will watch a movie like Dune on an illegal streaming site through their cracked phone screen in 720p, but we’re actually entertaining the idea non-PC native latency is a requirement for playing video games without spending >$500-$3k.

The market for these services is slightly larger and more diverse than the folks currently running 4K@144hz setups.

Another turn off is the fact that like other streaming platforms you lose the sense of control over your media. You'll own nothing, be a renter, and forced to be happy and put up with it. You are essentially renting a game on someone else's platform therefore you will always play by their rules and policies, no matter how awful they may be.

I think it's much more likely that P2P-hosted gaming would succeed, and even that would probably fail. If I could rent out time on my gaming PC or console to my neighbors, they'd be able to play with low enough latency they would probably never notice it. (There's also probably no money in it.)

It's already unnoticeable by the average human, though. Not everyone plays CS:GO at Platinum. I went from using a PS4 to Stadia (I know....) and latency was not a big deal for me at all.

Yep. 100%.

Doesn't matter how good the graphics or pricing is, if there's a delay between inputs you've certainly ruled out almost every multiplayer game and most single player games.

It solves so many problems for them. No piracy, no second-hand sales, no public libraries, no cheating, and perfect player stats. They can take the game away whenever they want, and make you pay for it again in the future.

Technical issues didn't doom Stadia. Being part of Google doomed Stadia.

Stadia was only going to last as long as the Google promotion cycle.

GForceNow and XBox Cloud are doing ok, Stadia problems where managemnt related more than anything else, how they forced rewrites, how they don't know how to talk to game devs (ads KPIs instead of game tech), and their whole promotion cycle.

> I can't imagine trust for a new cloud gaming provider being super high

The target audience for Netflix shouldn't know they're playing a cloud game. Netflix is too big to cater to power users, casual gamers are a much much bigger group.

I think there's some hope. Netflix has good expertise in streaming infrastructure and if they play to cloud gaming's strength like turn-based games, they have a chance to last longer than Stadia (RIP).

I highly doubt that, the biggest hurdle to solve in cloud gaming is having a widespread network with edge points close to anybody who wants to play cloud games. Valve has nothing even close to that, compared to Google, Amazon or Netflix.

Their infrastructure may be too dependent on Google Cloud platform services for it to be worthwhile.