Microsoft gets green light in UK to buy Activision
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> CMA chief executive, Sarah Cardell, said: "Businesses and their advisors should be in no doubt that the tactics employed by Microsoft are no way to engage with the CMA. Microsoft had the chance to restructure during our initial investigation but instead continued to insist on a package of measures that we told them simply wouldn't work. Dragging out proceedings in this way only wastes time and money."
Sometimes I feel like people dismissing cloud gaming do not consider how the advent of cloud gaming has opened doors for those who previously couldn't afford traditional gaming setups. It's not about the technical specifications; it's about making gaming accessible to more people, regardless of their financial constraints.
Today there are a ton of cheap 2nd hand console available on different markets, and much thanks to hard-copies they still bring plenty of enjoyment for a cheap coin. The latter also allows access to games no longer published or available for sale.
Cloud gaming will ensure older games will be entirely at the mercy of the streaming provider to keep them up to date and compatible with their technology. Once not, they're gone forever.
You're missing the point of the parent comment. They aren't saying they had access to no games at all, but rather that they couldn't afford to play the latest games.
Nvidia's cloud gaming service costs $10/month, compared to $10 a month just for multiplayer access on an Xbox or PlayStation plus the $300-$500 upfront cost of buying the console itself.
So there's no doubt that even with the savings of a used last generation console, you would still save a lot of money with cloud gaming.
Just for clarity, I'm not necessarily saying I like cloud gaming. I think if you can afford the hardware to do local gaming, it's a better experience. But it's way more expensive to render everything locally for obvious reasons. Even just the electricity needed to power a gaming PC is expensive.
The average electrical energy rate is 10.3 cents per kwh. A gaming PC might consume 750 watts. So it cost an average of 7.7cents/hr to power a gaming PC. Hardly expensive.
Of course, both cloud and PC gaming requires things like router, monitor, etc that consume electricity. I think it's fair to assume those things are equal between the two setups.
Edit: Average cost is for US. 750 watts is a good power budget for a gaming PC, but of course machines can be made that consume much more power or gaming capable machines can be made that consume less.
but I hope cloud gaming can deliver that.
Heck Microsoft themselves point this out to their investors.
Google's monopoly on search and online advertising today could have been easily prevented 20 years ago by some regulations.
No it couldn't. Its fundamentally inferior to local hardware and no amount of wishful thinking will change the laws of physics.
Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology? Besides the fact that these services already exist and, provided you have decent infrastructure, which will only become more accessible as time goes on, do serve most people's gaming needs even in this early state.
Of course, there will always be some for whom local will be the preferred option, but they were talking about the future default. There are still people buying and consuming Blu-ray due to its higher quality, but the default (i.e. what the majority use) has become streaming, and I don't see anything preventing gaming going the same way. If you wanna stick with gaming, the majority tend to play on consoles and do view the advantages in convinience to outweigh the disadvantages in terms of possible fidelity, higher framerates and lower latency that a PC may offer (even in cases of similar pricing).
Concerning cloud gaming, network latency will go down, and the offered bandwidth will go up in most areas of the globe. With recent advancements in high quality upscaling, networking demands will also decrease. Physics is not a hindrance, unless I am overlooking something.
No, the majority never even noticed. The irreducible latency some are talking about is imperceptible, not a factor for the vast majority of the populus. Ease of use, lack of install times, flexibility, and ability to spread out cost, all will outweigh that.
Lots of people do discuss this and do care, not to mention to even get to the point of it only being “the lowest possible physics allows” you need great home networking equipment plus a fast/well connected isp and a cloud service provider that isn’t adding any processing delay. That excludes a ton of people.
Cloud gaming isn’t going to be “the default” anytime soon, and for many people it will never be an option.
Heck physical copies are still super popular with a large group of console gamers to this day despite digital delivery being so well tested and ubiquitous
Speed of a signal travelling through optical fiber or copper cable? Additional latency of cloud gaming rules out genres that require twitch reactions (e.g. competitive FPS, fighting games, platformers).
fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.
So yeah, if it's shittier and allows even harder rent seeking, it'll be the standard in a few decades. Don't count on quality being a factor, gamers are the kings of Stockholm Syndrome and there isn't any hoop you can't get them to buy and then jump through.
That's an extremely weird argument. Literally no one at Bethesda was being stopped from writing compelling dialogue choices for that game because controllers only have 4 buttons - it's a choice they made conciously, they wanted to simplify the dialogue trees and that's what they ended up with. To even suggest that it's because of consoles is........just odd man. Like, it's not a thing. I've worked in video games for long enough to tell you that the number of controller buttons would never even make it into a discussion about these things, unless it was coming directly from Todd Howard or something.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/393646/tested-how-nvidia-ref...
Like, I work in video games for a large publisher - we have done a lot of testing on this technology, both on GeForce Now and our own internal solutions. Without getting into details I probably shouldn't talk about - the lowest latency you can see when streaming is around 150-200ms, and that's in absolutely perfect conditions where you have a data centre super close to you. Unfortunately, 150ms is visible to your average player, and in our testing the enjoyment of the game is directly related to what kind of game it is - strategy games, action games, even driving games? Mostly fine, not really noticable. First person shooters? Extremely noticable, in our testing there is a noticable drop of player performance in online PvP when streaming. We have been experimenting with improving it(by giving the player just a touch of auto-aim assist when they are streaming), and we were able to bring the numbers back up to where they were for non-streaming players. But then you get into a debate about whether that is fair or not.
Either way, like OP said - you can't beat physics.
https://youtu.be/XXvKlpkJjFU?si=nSMT8m5onkuqggwo&t=247
Nvidia is advertising 25 ms on the 240Hz tier, even if it's best case it should scale linearly with ping:
Developers will adapt their games and how they play to suit the medium based on the mediums popularity.
Civilization, SimCity, zoo tycoon, Paradox Grand strategy games, etc... Would all be fine to play on a streaming platform
Who has that intent, exactly?
If a "someone" came along and offered you a benefit in exchange for saying "but won't someone think of the cloud streaming market" you too would give it a lot of thought.
You would give it a lot of thought while dropping your kids off at the new private school you kids just recieved a scholarship to, in the brand new car that arrived (you always wanted the Tesla but it was a Lexus that arrived), feeling much more relaxed after the family holiday (the med is nice over summer but Japan was calling).
Have you any proof that Microsoft paid off the CMA? If not, this is just shitposting.
I have a 2080 TI that can still run games very well, and if it lasts a few more years it looks like I'll never have to buy a GPU again.
Is it a flawless experience? Of course not, it will never match a native PC. But that is not the point at all. The image was a reasonable quality and the latency whilst ever so slightly noticeable, you get used to it after 5 minutes as you get lost in the game. Even played a bit of Destiny 2 and fast paced rhythm games without any issue.
It's not meant to "takeaway muh PC". It's an alternative to those who don't have the horsepower to run these games. Your expectations need to run with this.
A cynic would say that it's another way to extract whatever little money these people have. An optimist would say that this technology can bring video games and their joy to people who would never be able to experience them otherwise.
You pick the one that you like more.
e.g. Simulation games like Anno 1800 or Cities Skyline 2 require extremely good hardware if you want good frame rates late game
Besides most competitive players I know all play on lowest settings to minimize risk of lag spikes so they're unlikely to be the target audience anyways
Was able to do latency-sensitive gaming like VR gaming from a Shadow PC 200 miles away. Have happily streamed PC games to my phone whilst out and about on 4G networks. I suppose if you're comparing it to 4K ultra quality local gaming you might find it much worse, but for someone who only has a MacBook Pro I found it performed significantly better to stream the game from a PC elsewhere than to try to run Mac native versions of games – and also just let me open up high quality games very quickly from many devices without having to mess around with cables and device drivers and all that stuff.
My partner streams the Xbox games to her Surface laptop which is definitely not powerful enough to play them natively.
That said I know it's still fairly niche, but I think it has a shot of tapping into a much broader casual market than e.g. PC gaming and consoles which require people to already care enough to do a big upfront investment.
They know this well and the discussions going on at these companies are assuredly not about what gamers want, they are about "Can we convince EA to do titles on our streaming platform" and so on. You will own nothing and be happy.
So it's a long way away.
good article from Stratechery on the history of the field. tl;dr: they want to move games market from buying games to renting them (xbox pass)
Now that Microsoft gets even bigger, they'll have even more influence and power to distort the markets.
Way to go...