It’s probably still too little too late, but apples latest metal conversion tool and iPhone event have me hopeful about gaming on apple devices.
As fiber is being installed into more residences, streaming becomes an even better prospect. I would much rather be vendor locked into steam than into the xbox, play station, or ios stores. Steam still has execs that think about more than next quarters profits, they aren't trying to bleed their cash cow dry like most other companies seem to be doing. From a monetary point of view $10 a month with no contract is more appealing than $500 or even $3000 every several years. It definitely seems like there are many economies of scale wins to be had via centralization.
Apple also failed to create a marketplace culture. IOS gaming is synonymous with "pay to win". Good games just aren't put on those devices with the exception, maybe, of riot's games and pc ports. I would be worried about Apple's "lets make money off kids gambling" culture, that is absolutely pervasive in mobile gaming, becoming more pervasive due to cross pollination. Apple is generally a benevolent dictator, but when it comes to mobile games they are a slum lord.
Streaming is awful.
It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it. It creates more incentives for ongoing monetization (to support the streaming infra) like in-game ads and loot boxes with paid keys. It introduces horrendous input lag that fluctuates based on network conditions and it means there's yet another probably buggy layer of abstraction between the game and the player. (edit: and you can't play on LAN!)
Unless you're playing Yahtzee, streaming delivers a suboptimal gaming experience.
Renting is an old concept and it's not going away any time soon. Maybe the technology is not there yet but I don't see what's inherently wrong with the concept itself. Owning is wasteful unless you have close to 100% utilisation. Why pay for the full price of an X-Box that sits idle most of the time? If every idle X-Box could be utilized by anyone in need, we would either see a significant rise in the number of people able to enjoy gaming, or a decrease in the number of consoles required to be produced.
If you're going to veer into Economics 101 then you'd better reconcile with the fact that this "renting" only causes more surplus to be captured by the publisher, and not by the consumer.
A. You pay for an x-box and you own it. You can mod it, develop games on it, play games on it, sell it, whatever. Economists tell you this is "inefficient" because the xbox is not 100% utilized, and so in theory you have incurred an opportunity cost.
B. You pay $amount for the privilege of "renting" a game that is streamed to your television over the internet. You own nothing. Your access to the game and/or the game console and/or the service as a whole can be terminated at any time, for any reason, at the whims of a gigantic faceless transnational corporation. You have no means to contact an actual human at customer support because there aren't any humans working in customer support. The corporation gives less thought to you than you do to a mosquito that splats on your bumper as you drive home in your Elonmobile (which, incidentally, suffers many of the same problems)
I'll take option A, thanks.
This assertion is demonstrably false. If this were the case, it would beg the question as to why many consumers and businesses willingly opt for rental models. Cloud hosting and music streaming are prime examples of the popularity of such models.
You have a personal preference for ownership, but if we look at consumer trends in the past decade, I doubt your preference will be shared by a majority of consumers. My bet is the majority of consumers are likely to prefer the flexible, less costly options, rather than ownership (assuming the technology is competitive).
Anyways, not interested in discussing further with someone who quotes selectively to argue with a strawman. See ya.
What I am saying is that, looking at past trends and assuming the technology becomes competitive, I believe a majority of consumers will opt for option B (streaming) rather than stick with option A (owning).
Lack of understanding on consumer side and malicious intent on business side?
Consumers: because "as-a-Service" can have cheaper sticker price (often free), people have hard time seeing long-term costs, and social immune system hasn't caught up with this particular type of abusive business practices.
Businesses: because they're much more focused and high-cadence economic units than are individuals living a life, and most importantly, they're abstract. Their don't have lives that are valued. They're an entirely different kind of economic agents, and it makes much more sense for them to be "cash flow minded" instead of ownership-minded.
Then there's also the angle that, in B2B, typically both sides of the relationship are much closer in terms of relative power than in B2C, which is why there's less blatant abuse happening there.
That seems a bit elitist to me. "Ah, if only the consumers knew what you know?" Maybe you're right but I find it more likely that they simply like the deal being offered.
Why should the savvy renters care? They aren't generating the surplus captured by the publisher.
then who is?
> You own nothing. Your access to the game and/or the game console and/or the service as a whole can be terminated at any time, for any reason, at the whims of a gigantic faceless transnational corporation.
Your access to an Xbox is, and has been, gated behind a Microsoft account for a decade (same with PlayStation). That "facless transnational corporation" can ban you from using your _purchases_ Xbox and physical games just as easily as they can revoke your streaming access.
> You have no means to contact an actual human at customer support because there aren't any humans working in customer support.
You're speaking about Google here, but Microsoft, apple, Sony (can't speak for Nintendo) and valve all have open,semi-reasonable support channels.
> The corporation gives less thought to you than you do to a mosquito that splats on your bumper as you drive home in your Elonmobile (which, incidentally, suffers many of the same problems), sell it, whatever
I hope you had fun writing this drivel. It reeks of immaturity, pomposity and navel gazing without any real substance, and your post would be better without it.
Klaus Schwab "You will own nothing and be happy" dystopia. No thanks.
often the decision is to move somewhere warm and sunny or to travel but it can be to have all the streaming services and a nice little cottage in the country.
evidently someone downvoted me for the suggestion that such societies exist - gee, I wonder what their problem is.
We are already seeing this problem with specific games that force online verification. Let’s not break the gaming platform itself as well.
With dealers included, exhaustion occured between producer and dealer. With dealers removed and products rented exhaustion no longer occurs at all.
That's a significant change, much more so than removing dealers or a switch to renting alone.
Producers retain full control, and individual consumers lack the negotiation power dealers had, which is an issue if there is no eqivalent alternative product from a different producer.
Because it's available at a moment's notice. You don't have to actively schedule around its availability, or otherwise worry about it. It gives you consistent play experience, freedom to use it in nonstandard ways, and if anything goes wrong, it's likely you can do something about it now.
In general, ownership removes worry and gives you more options. Those have utility that more than offsets reduced utilization.
As for example of what I mean by worry, let's take video streaming. Between Netflix's failure rate and unexpected catalog removal, my ISP's failure rate, OS (both Linux and Windows) and browser (both Firefox and Chrome) being what they are, and anything else that happens between my machine and the CDN hosting the video I want to watch, there's a non-trivial chance it may be not available at the time I want to watch it, or it will be non-watchable (e.g. because it's pausing every few seconds to buffer, because of some failure somewhere). I experience some sort of a failure like this roughly once every week or so. That doesn't seem like much, but it generates some anxiety - a worry that at the exact moment I wanted to stream, it won't work, e.g. ruining an at-home movie date with my wife, or my personal "sit down with my favorite supper and put on a show" unwinding ritual.
Contrast that with the same video, acquired on the high seas in form of a local file. This. Just. Works. If the same or similar video file worked last month, it will work today, 100% of the time. Even if the Internet goes down, even if Netflix goes belly up, even if my ISP gets hit by a fire, even if a war starts somewhere and there's a billion people rapidly F5-ing news videos - my video file Will. Just. Work. I can set dinner and sit down and double-click and, not for a second, worry about the hidden weather of markets and networks ruining my evening.
That's just one small part of what makes ownership good despite seeming economical drawbacks (well, drawbacks to whom? it really seems to depend on one's accounting methods...).
But Stadia is definitely not a counter-argument to your first point. ;)
> It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it.
That is probably true in the case of the streaming that you're discussing, but I want to bring up something that I think is pretty cool, Steam Remote Play: https://store.steampowered.com/streaming/
I actually had a case where I wanted to play a game on my netbook, but it just wouldn't run on the device (Transport Fever 2, which was demanding both with its OpenGL and Vulkan renderers). So instead, I setup the game on my PC and just streamed it to my netbook, over wireless in the house.
I'm mentioning this because it was actually playable and honestly it was cool to see the tech getting better for this (not a bunch of input bugs, or performance as bad as what VNC/RDP would historically give you) and being able to do something like that without a hassle.
Of course, that's a bit different from not owning the game and just renting someone else's hardware/service to play it on.
Rather than buying a new computer to play cyberpunk, I streamed it and it and was quite happy. It cost me $10 for one month and my relationship with the company ended afterwards. I've used streaming a bit more and I've tried several different services and generally been happy with all of them. nVidia now is great, I just finished BG3 on it and it ran well.
> It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it.
I think that's myopic. A new computer every 8 years for $2000 or $10 a month for 8 years? From a purely monetary and economic point of view, there are clear advantages to subscriptions. From economies of scale perspectives there are clearly advantages to subscriptions/centralization. There are disadvantages, too. So it's most correct to talk about trade-offs.
Where I think you are right is that it gives vendors power to alter the rules and leave you praying they alter them no further. We are seeing the down side of now, with the enshittification/shrinkflation/brand looting of nearly everything in the American economy. So I agree that in a might makes right world, a world in which there are no consequences for our aristocracy, centralization/streaming/etc puts you in a weaker negotiating position and could very likely be good in the short term, but bad in the long term.
> It creates more incentives for ongoing monetization (to support the streaming infra)
I think that depends on if these streaming companies are subsidizing the streaming or not in the same way Uber subsidized rides: at a loss. Allocation for peak capacity is the direct cost to the company, and any unused capacity could potentially be re-tasked for other purposes. Any user that doesn't contribute to peak capacity+growth projection is free from the perspective of hardware acquisition. Hardware is an economies of scale world, there may even be positive tax implications.
I'm not sold that there is any special incentive to monetize streaming unless the companies are streaming at a loss. Letting kids gamble is the culture of mobile gaming, and I think it's culture that perpetuates it more than structure. I think the PC market salivates at the idea of loot boxes (just look at EA), but the culture is quite against them. PC gamers have provided consequences to predatory publishers while Apple and mobile gamers have not.
> It introduces horrendous input lag and it means there's yet another probably buggy layer of abstraction between the game and the player.
I haven't personally experienced this. I have had almost entirely good streaming experiences on broadband. I think from a purely theoretical point of view, input+vision doubles the potential latency and therefore it should be worse.
I think from a practical point of view it's probably easier for one company to "solve" input/graphics lag for all games while games run in ideal conditions, than it is for every game's netcode to be fantastic.
While we're comparing and contrasting:
Have you read the EULA's of the anti-cheat software on some of these games? Literal root kits, some from Chinese companies, some that allow direct raw memory dumping from the computer if not direct RCE/remote access for investigation.
From an environmental point of view computing from a datacenter as well as time sharing devices is probably a win.
So while you come in strong against it. I think you should be somewhat respectful of other people's positive experiences.
"Streaming is awful" is poor criticism. "Streaming quality is greatly dependent on where you live and your internet quality" is probably an accurate criticism. Streaming from SJC in San Francisco is probably going to be a pretty good experience.
I’ve paid for and used multiple remote GPU gaming services and all of them suffered from horrible jitter in input lag. If even once every 20 minutes you suffer in a (even single player) game randomly due to network latency, you’re going to hate the service. This was on residential fiber as well. I think this is why Google exited the market. It’s just a bad gaming experience.
When you think about the type of player that would need to champion this service for it to reach critical mass among hardcore gamers, think of a speedrunner or top-level competitive MoBA or FPS player. In the offline case, they are honing thier skills at a time resolution of 16ms or less (in the case of an FPS player 8ms or less). This type of gameplay just isn’t possible over the Internet in general. Live more than 400 miles from a datacenter? Whoops, you can’t get good at games.
Game streaming, not to mention the “own nothing” aspect of it, is just horrible from the perspective of anyone who cares about the game they play and getting good at the game they play.
Likely nothing. Forget about Raytracing, the tech. But RayTracing as in better Graphics. iPhone has been able to output very decent graphics for games for quite some time. Arguably since Unreal Engine Game running on iPhone, and if I remember correctly that was Infinity Blade. And yet the market for hard core games on Smartphone is just not there. To the point where there are very little overlap between Smartphone Gaming and PC / Console.
And if anything the small market of Console Games wanted on Smartphone may be much better served by Cloud Streaming.
Edit: Also worth mentioning the constant iOS changes means developers have very little incentive to keep updating their game over a long period of time.
Or who wants their saves and profiles different on their phone.
if connectivity is a concern, it is also a justification.
save profiles can go back up to the cloud, where the download came from. now those that want to use a different device can do so.
who thinks this much about what have become minor details?
IPhones start with 128GB of space and charges a hefty premium for storage.
I would deffo not want a game to consume 40G of space
if you buy the smallest configuration storage, you will have to care more. that’s the choice.
how many people actually use their space? really use it. not just use a quarter of it and keep the rest in reserve.
my phone has 256gb right now. 150gb are free. (cloud storage doing its part.) that’s two large games and 40gb+ to spare. so as much as a larger capacity would allow for more, this is still… fine.
A lot of the technology has a lot of potential but I don't know how you get past that hurdle to broaden iPhone gaming.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-a-game-contro...
RealityKit looks promising at first glance, but it’s definitely AR first, and has some odd limitations like no tvOS.
Like your reply hints, their strategy seems to have shifted to making it easier to port games from other platforms rather than build them on Apple’s.