well, assuming there's actually a cloud gaming market. A fact that's still up for debate I think.
That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.
I think they rebranded Origin or whatever it was called, didn't even realize.
As a gamer, few things would turn me away from a potential purchase more than the phrase "cloud gaming app". It sounds like DRM-infected bloatware ready to kick me from a server the moment my connection even hiccups. Only "cloud gaming app, now by Microsoft" could be worse.
The "neat" thing about xCloud is that you can try it for free under most Game Pass subscriptions. I think that is actually where "cloud gaming" currently excels, as a faster/better/glorified replacement for the old "Demo" games and modes. (Try a Game Pass game for a bit without downloading it, on a day where you expect few connection hiccups, to see if it is worth the hour or so wait while it downloads.) I think that is also part of why xCloud probably does have large MAU numbers.
I've tried to see if xCloud is also useful on my mobile devices for on-the-go gaming, but the connection issues have mostly tanked that for me. (I do know people using it to play games on the Steam Deck that the Steam Deck doesn't as well support; but they generally play at home on home connections even if they prefer the "mobile-like" form factor of the Deck.)
But yeah, the argument is that the audience for "cloud gaming" is incredibly limited (needs a strong internet connection, doesn't want to invest in up-to-date gaming hardware, or wants stranger form factors) and always will be, which is why it is fascinating that Microsoft got so much flak from the UK commissioners about controlling the current "cloud gaming" marketplace: Microsoft seems to be the most successful mostly just because it is an incredibly limited audience with few gamers interested. Most everyone else who has tried to enter the market, including Google, has failed to find players. (nVidia seems the next most successful and even they admit it is a niche side-project for them. They've been partly so successful by how much money they haven't spent and how cheap they've managed to run it so far, comparatively to the investments of their peers and bigger companies like Amazon and Google.)
I've used Xbox Cloud Gaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop all over my home on WiFi, several different cafe/bar WiFi networks, and several places tethered to my phone without any real playability concerns. I might not recommend it if you're playing some kind of twitch shooter kind of game, but I've played a lot of Forza, Starfield, Gotham Knights, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on it.
For me, it's just simply not up to the quality I can enjoy the game at.
It's not 4K 120FPS, but on a 1080p laptop the quality was fine. Maybe unacceptable when playing on a 70" TV, but a 14" laptop or a 1920x1200 27" screen it's fine. Not as nice as natively rendered, but way nicer than what that $300 laptop could have done on its own!
It never dropped into the 30s, I consider framerates like that unplayable.
The game can stream at 120fps, but take extra like to register a jump for example.
Again, you might just not be sensitive to that.
There's also compression artifacts and bitrate that can make fine details already coarse and all that, even if it's 4k. That's what some won't find to be an issue and others will.
I'm on a high spec desktop playing with an Xbox controller connected by USB. The desktop is on Ethernet, 200 Mbps down / 30 Mbps up.
In my experience, the game frequently failed to start. Most often I would watch the rocket ship loading screen for about a minute, then close it and retry. Probably about 1 in 10 times the game would start instantly, otherwise it would display the loading animation forever.
My understanding is that the game runs in 1080p on the original hardware (launch Xbox One) and runs in 4k on modern hardware (Series X). I'm not sure what the source resolution is for Cloud Streaming, but visually it looked like an old YouTube video. The game was designed with a large visual dynamic range. Video compression made it very hard to see in dark areas (think The Long Night episode of Game of Thrones). In colorful areas with more contrast I experienced lots of macroblocking.
Input lag made the game very frustrating to play. The Halo series is known for having generous aim assist, even so I found precision weapons useless and too hard to line up a shot. Occasional dropped button inputs got me killed too.
All-in-all I can't recommend Cloud Streaming to anyone. Looking at their catalog, maybe it would be more acceptable for games with limited motion like Phoenix Wright or Car Mechanic Simulator, but those run natively on cell phones or low-end hardware. Even then repeatedly failing to start a session is a turn off. Experiencing all of these problems every time I played makes me think it's not just a fluke.
I definitely got that a bunch right after Starfield launched, but it balanced out after several days. The period leading up before and after were and have been much better. Still happens sometimes though.
It's definitely not 4K, I'll grant you that. Playing Starfield locally installed on my desktop definitely gives a better framerate and higher quality, but ultimately I've put more hours in on cloud gaming simply because it's everywhere I have internet. I can play on my phone and an Xbox controller, anywhere.
I don't have much input lag, but I'm in a pretty well connected part of the country. On my phone right now ive got 20ms to microsoft.com, 19ms to google.com. At home on WiFi these values are in the low single digits. I dont know where Microsoft's servers are for the cloud gaming, that might be a part of it.
There have been large differences between app vs browser vs xbox streaming, too.
If you're the kind of gamer who does love having a collection of old games you go back to, then yeah its pretty terrible.
To others, I guess picking up a casual game in a cafe might be interesting... Maybe they're a great target market for Cloud Gaming, I dunno. I sure am not!
Then again, for a lot of these games you currently get some level of advantage for throwing a lot of money at your system so you can run with better settings at a faster framerate, so maybe it's not so much less fair as differently fair.
Having your competitive game reduced to pure input output doesn't solve cheating (especially in an age of image recognition and trained AI/ML), but it does even the playing field a lot.
I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.
Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.
Kids want to go bounce around at the trampoline park? Cool, I'll hop on the wifi there and game. Had to go into the office and am taking a lunch break? Cool, I can hop on the game for an hour. Meeting up with people later but have an hour downtime? Cool, I can go to any cafe or bar and play for a bit instead of heading all the way home.
Just today I was far on the other side of town (over an hour away) as my wife was meeting up with her sister to do some stuff after some big family things. Cool, bring my cheap laptop with me or just use my phone with a controller, I can game for a couple of hours while she does her thing. But then now tonight that exact same game saves are synced to play on my desktop at the house, or on my cheap laptop while on the patio, or wherever. Maybe I'll even spend an hour in the hot tub tonight with the cheap laptop on a towel nearby. Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.
And then this even continues to something like the Steam Deck or the other streaming focused handhelds, which I'm now pretty interested in. It doesn't need to have high end gear on it if it's got a decent network connection. And as I've mentioned here, at least where I'm at I'm almost always with some kind of low latency network. It's so ubiquitous around me these days.
You could stream your gameplay without resorting to Cloud. Steam has (had?) a great service where you could stream your game from one computer to another on the same network.
Admittedly, I'm not in the cloud gaming market nor would I ever be. First, data caps prevent me from doing this. Second, let's say I wanted to stream from some public place. I have to connect to their wifi? Non-starter. Not going to happen. Stream over mobile? Data caps again, this time they charge an arm and a leg and the connection quality is garbage. Third, if I am out of my house I'm probably driving. A Switch, Steam Deck, or Cloud Gaming can't do anything for that.
It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok. I will never sign up for a cloud gaming service until they can get over the infrastructural issues that prevent adults like me from engaging. For starters that would be public transit, and better Internet infrastructure and services.
I'm happy you found a use case for it. Most of the United States in particular, and I'd wager the world as a whole, does not and will not be in a place where that's viable.
I'm not a child, haven't been one for a long time. I still find time to play games out of the house. You don't need to be a child to play videogames outside of the house.
Just this weekend we went to the park. I drew the straw to watch my infant nap in the stroller while my wife ran off with my older child. An hour of downtime. Turn on the 5G hotspot, whip out the laptop, and I'm on Starfield on my cheap laptop with several hours of battery life.
Then again, I wouldn't have gone to the park to watch my infant while I played games. I could do that at my house.
Steam Home Streaming works pretty well on a LAN. Quality-wise, with my desktop at home its even higher quality than Xbox Cloud Gaming. I've got many hundreds of hours on my Steam Link. I just wished they'd make it work well outside of the LAN. I've had mixed experiences trying to run it on a few different VPN stacks. I ran into challenges of it not seeing the other computers, the stream being very unstable and crashing, and other issues. Plus, it means I need my computer's local console unlocked at home, but I prefer my computers to get locked automatically. And even then I've had games get in some stuck state launching or closing where I had to manually intervene on the local console to fix it.
Meanwhile, with cloud gaming I just click launch and the game is going. There's no waiting for updates. There's no managing a local console. I don't even need a gaming rig.
Also, you mention "Most of the United States in particular", I am in the United States. This has been my experience in one of the larger metro areas in the US (DFW). I don't get why it would be viable here but nowhere else in the US. 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage. I haven't been on many trips since getting it, but even a few years ago I could manage to sometimes make Steam Home Streaming work from a hotel WiFi on VPN at various places around the country, even with its challenges I mentioned above. I've got family who game a good bit with PlayStation cloud gaming service on a 5G home internet connection.
43% fiber and 60% 5G definitely isn't 100%, I agree. But it does mean there's a pretty big chunk of consumers who can use this, today. I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me. 43% of ~330 million people is >140M people with home fiber internet, nearly 200M people with 5G coverage, today. And that's just ignoring all the consumers with actually decent cable internet connectivity.
I'm doubting both of these numbers. Even if 5G coverage is there, like in my home, it's not a good enough connection to do anything beyond watch the 5G symbol play tag with the LTE symbol.
Even when we live in that world we still live under data caps.
> I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me
You are to an extent.
https://fiberbroadband.org/2022/01/05/fiber-broadband-enters...
And once again that's only FTTH. Loads of coax networks have enough throughput and low enough latency to make it work. Either way, I'm still just pointing out its out there. Fast enough internet is in a lot of places, as mentioned even the WiFi at a few coffee shops and bars around me have had fast enough speeds for a decent quality experience. Which makes sense, as the cable provider in the area offers 300Mbit as a minimum speed for only $65/mo on their business plans with WiFi6 APs. The fiber provider offers like 500Mbit symmetrical for the same on their business tier. Every little shop has at least a few hundred megabits of internet if they need to get their POS terminals online.
Mint Mobile offers "unlimited" (aka throttled after 40GB) for $30/mo without any promotional pricing. Visible offers unlimited for $25 for their basic plan and $35 for their plus plan which includes ultra-wideband and a "premium network experience" whatever that means. From my experiences Xbox Cloud Gaming uses ~1GB/hr. And yeah, within my home or my office building my cellular connectivity is pretty poor. But at the same time both places also have WiFi6/6E APs and gigabit+ fiber connections.
And I'm gonna go ahead and reply to the other comment here so we can re-unify this chain. Apologies for breaking it earlier.
> a child is what enables that behavior
Yeah, in that specific circumstance a child is what enabled that specific instance. And I had the infant at the park because we were all going to the park and had other things to do walking around after that, it didn't make sense for me to just stay at home the whole time. However, you're just ignoring the other instances I've shared. Here's another recent one. A family member was out of town for a while and wanted me to check in and socialize with their cat who gets anxiety without friendly humans around every now and then. So I went over, cleaned up after the cat, hopped on the couch with the cat in my lap, and played games for an hour on their WiFi. No kids involved in that story.
Mobile gaming is a growing market. Its a nearly $60B industry these days. People seem to really enjoy the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, phones with larger screens continue to get more and more popular. Cloud Gaming can enable these lower power devices to run much more computationally demanding games with similar experiences to game console or gaming PC performance while only consuming a few watts of power. A lot of people are finding time to play games on handheld devices, the real question IMO is if the economics of cloud gaming really work, because for a large chunk of the country all the technology is already there.
I've never used it while travelling. So I'm definitely a different demographic to the one you're describing.
I use it regularly for single player games and it's quite nice! AFAIK they have the biggest supported library yet that is still my biggest issue with it: it doesn't support some of the games I'd like to play on it!
I had the best experience, quality wise, with Stadia though.
I consider myself pretty attuned to (and annoyed by) compression artifacts in streaming video.
I did end up buying an Xbox instead of using Stadia though - I couldn’t get over paying full price for games I didn’t actually own.
Provided you have a good internet connection, if you could just run a AAA game off of your crummy computer or tv, why would you buy an expensive graphics card? It is definitely where things are going.
Latency concerns, connection reliability, and bandwidth are all potential factors.
I haven't seen any papers where cloud gaming servers implement rollback logic on your inputs in behalf of the game developer.
Even assuming games that do support native rollback, most rollback netcode implicitly considers you're local to your game client, not in some relay box 7 frames or more in the past.
For example looking at September's games by MAUs[1], #6, #10 and #17 seem like good fits for cloud gaming, but the rest seem like a bad fit for cloud with fairly benign recommended hardware and latency sensitivity. Developers seem to be aware and willing to target fairly modest hardware specs for these titles as well. For example the new CoD's recommended GPU requirements is a 1070 and previous game was a 1060, which matches up with Steam hardware surveys.[2]
[1]https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-survey-results-june-...
there's no need to rent a PC 50ms-100ms away for esports when a bottom of the range PC will happily run it at 144fps
if I ping my router on wifi it ranges from 2-10ms
40-100ms on celluar
(whereas ethernet is consistently about 100us)
It’s the opposite of what I want!
With cloud gaming it's possible to playing field far more, because competitions can now force the same latency by introducing artificial latency.
Cloud gaming also eliminates cheats like wall hacks (or fog of war removal), which is currently possible because the game client and rendering engine all run on a local machine.
Playing a game with latency is horrible, be it artificial or not. If you want the pinnacle of any esport, it will be played on LANs and never streamed.
It's a subpar experience that almost exclusively casual gamers deem acceptable.
Most e-sports events don't fly players into an arena - that's only for really high budget events.
It’s only a given because circumstances force and/or allow this.
Also, how do leagues and competitions account for a 30 ms vs 70 ms latency difference?
I ask this as someone middle-aged who immediately notices this difference, when playing ladder PvP games.
Nvidia seems to be leading the way here.
But imagine in the cloud, they only needed to render games at 320p, and then they'd stream it compressed at low bitrate using H266 (assuming it's out in a few years). Then your "console", only needs to AI regenerate and upscale the feed, and it ends up looking photo-real or close to it.
You could even explore methods of compression on the video that the AI is best as reconstructing from.
That makes absolutely no sense. There is no possibility for a AI algorithm to be more efficient than a simple compression and decompression.