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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's because I'm in a shitty location (Spain), but these gaming streaming services never felt good enough for me. I've tried a bunch of them (including GeForce Now and more recently, the PlayStation streaming thingy) and they all introduce too much latency + now the quality of the screen suffer from the same type of quality degradation as YouTube, which just looks fucking horrible. I'd rather play on lowest quality settings and lowest resolution than having to view that sort of compromise on image quality.

> And a lot easier than managing Proton and WINE too

I can understand wanting to avoid having to manage Wine, prefixes and all that jazz. But Steam + Proton is literally zero management. You install Steam, start it, install the game and hit "Play", the only Proton thing you notice is that it download and installs it before the actual game runs. Otherwise there is nothing you have to do as a user.

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Amazon has started pushing their version, which I think is called Luna. I haven't tried it, but if they run an instance out of EU-South-2 in Spain, you might get better results.

Looked through their entire collection (https://luna.amazon.es/subscription/luna-plus/B085TRCCT6) and there seems to be one game I'd be willing to play, although I already own it locally. For 10 EUR/month, getting access to ~100 games where most of them are cheap IP cash-grabs, seems like a very Amazon approach to video games.

Stadia worked really well for me (midwest US), but the other services haven't been as reliable. Back on hardware for me. SteamDeck is really nice at least.

Heh, I'd give it a try, but I didn't even have time to try it out before it disappeared :)

I think it was around for a couple of years and I bought a ton of games on it. When Google sunk it they refunded my purchases, which was nice.

What's funny is I think if Google had said upfront "if we kill this service we'll refund all your games/hardware purchases" they'd have got a lot more traction.

You should give Geforce Now a try. It's dramatically better than Stadia. (I used both.)

GFN has much more powerful graphics (because they're Nvidia), supports 4k, 10-bit color, HDR, ultrawide, etc. Nvidia Reflex helps with latency. You can use your own Steam or Epic or Microsoft library and play with those players. You don't have to rebuy the games like you did in Stadia.

And Nvidia actually cares about it and is constantly improving it. Google abandoned Stadia pretty much right after launch because they're Google.

Yeah, I had GeForce now when it first came out and the Steam library sharing was dope. It just seemed to lag and drop frames a lot where Stadia was seamless.

I'm sure GeForce Now has improved a lot since then. I should give it another shot. I miss gaming in bed from my iPad.

Yeah, it's unfortunately only viable if you're near one of their data centers – and even then, some of their international third-party partners have crappy graphics cards and networks. In the US, though, it is an amazing experience, more like streaming in 4K (which it can do) with minimal lag. Even first-person shooters are perfectly playable, as long as you're not trying to go pro. No compression artifacts or visible degradation at all for me.

> But Steam + Proton is literally zero management.

Absolutely. I had a Steam Deck for a few weeks* and that experience was amazing. Valve did a really really good job there. Unfortunately that's just not how it is in the Mac world :( We have Whisky and Crossover, which are much much harder to use.

(* The Steam Deck is a great piece of kit. I eventually sold it only because I already had a Logitech GCloud, https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-..., which does the same thing except streamed from GFN and with a bigger/better display than the Deck.)

> shitty location (Spain)

Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?

Otherwise, fiber is prolific in Spain (in major cities at least, to the best of my knowledge). I get 500Mbps down here in Valencia (for just €15 too!)

> Eh? As in, proximity to the streaming server?

Exactly! I've had symmetric fiber in countless of apartments in Barcelona, with latency to mainstream sites down to something like 2ms at the lowest. But the game companies who do streaming don't seem to cater to Spain (or Barcelona) at all since the latency always been horrible regardless.

Have you tried any of them and seen if the latency is shit or not?

I haven't tried any of them, sorry.

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