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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Honestly one of the most "But why?" startup ideas I'd ever heard of. I figured pg's hype for it was based in thinking it could someday be targeted for profitable acquisition by Google. But perhaps the current tech industry downturn (plus Stadia's death) made that obviously untenable.

At $30/month, this sounded like something that could only be worthwhile for businesses (though I'm at a loss to imagine what size/industry of company would want this). Did Might have any corporate clients, and if so, how did they navigate the security/privacy compliance issues?

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I think pg likes slightly naughty ideas. Didn't he famously want to program a server using instructions send over email? And this Mighty idea was quite naughty. Stream like Netflix but it is your whole browser. And also pg really hypes YC companies which, bless his heart, is what we all expect and why YC is such a beast.

PG hypes a very infinitesimal subset of YC companies.

There's no indication that cloud gaming is declining.

Xbox Cloud, Playstation, Nvidia Geforce, Shadow (even has streaming VR), Amazon Luna, Paperspace, Boosteroid, etc etc. There's no shortage of options.

Google shutting down a business isn't a good indicator of a market's validity.

The "Buy why?" was simple: it made the internet very fast and improved battery life of laptops.

latency

I've played a 50hrs of Xbox cloud games in the last 2yrs and never had latency issues

The people saying this either haven't used it recently or need a modern ISP

I obviously don't have numbers at hand, but I'd bet most people have a internet connection with a latency of at least 100ms to closest game service servers, unless you already work in IT or adjacent sectors where latency matters more. Not even 50% of people online in the US are connected via fiber optic connections, so extrapolate that over the rest of the world, although many countries have better connections than available in the US.

There are a lot of sources of total latency in most games and systems that affect how long it takes between when you click a button and get a response. This means that there's often opportunities for optimizations that can remove entire frames of latency to make up for the additional network lag. It's not going to be enough for e-sports games but it can keep the experience from changing for many titles.

Just as an example of what I'm talking about, if you turn on the nVidia Reflex latency reduction feature along with the DLSS 3 AI Frame Generation, you get the same latency as with Reflex off but with much better smoothness. Of course if you're playing Overwatch you are chasing every millisecond of latency, but for most games it just needs to be low enough not to be noticeable.

Only 2% of the US population owns a Xbox Series S/X, 2.3% own a PS5.

The average internet speed in the US in 2022 is 120mbps.

Asking people to have a >250mbps connection to using cloud gaming vs being one of the most popular gaming consoles in the country isn't much to ask... in order to be a moderately successful game platform.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/999383/total-number-of-g...

Cloud gaming has a very bright future. If not being the future.

>I've played a 50hrs of Xbox cloud games in the last 2yrs and never had latency issues Gonna be honest , I'm not taking gaming advice off someone who has played only 2 hours per month.

Especially with regards to something like input lag.

I don't play competitive online high framerate FPS games where that level of input matters. If I did I would invest in a windows PC.

But for all of the single player games I played it was never a noticeable problem. If you're going to complain about anything with cloud gaming it should be switching or starting a new game. The loading screen preamble before the game start screen is the only annoying part. But that doesn't affect gameplay.

If input lag was such a real problem I highly doubt Xbox would have redesigned their new 2023 Xbox UI to be 100% centered around Gamepass (The current one already pushes it hard but the new one leaked on Youtube makes it the near default).

Game Pass runs natively, though...? (At least it does on my PC.)

pg's absolute faves don't seem to be the best. It's the tier below that where the good leads are

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