Epic Games Storefront - A Good Incentive for Piracy

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Folanlron

Trakanon Raider
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My brother has Gb internet were he lives, and had a chance too test PSNow when it was in beta stage guess what it was laggy as fuck still even on his line, and that is only a Video stream, basically that's all PSNow is.

Your talking about transmitting 4k on the fly rendered games, with a 2nd data-stream needed in order for Input too work correctly, and with your great "idea" of separating models from textures, more data streams would be required(and honestly it would make the whole idea of "Cloud" well a waste of time, as the receiver would have too compile the textures/models together..)
 

Ravishing

Uninspiring Title
<Bronze Donator>
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That's not how cloud games work. They take the video out and instead of sending it to a TV they compress the shit out of it for the stream. Anything besides that would require much more than a dumb client and would defeat the purpose.


Sounds about right. Netflix UltraHD is also 25 Mbps but they have the advantage of being able to use a far more efficient and CPU-intensive codec. Encoding in realtime is always going to be a lot more bloated.

I mean... Google was using Chrome browser for Assassin's Creed and there are browser capabilities they could utilize to build the models and avoid streaming flat images. But yea, idk what their tech is doing, seems wasteful to stream like TV though since it seems like input lag would be unavoidable - having to wait for every frame to render & reach you etc. They gotta be able to buffer it somehow.

Also, its not wasteful per se, assume a 100GB game, you install it but you never need to load all 100GB at any point during normal gameplay. Maybe you play 1-2 "levels" or whatever in a session and a level is 1-5GB of data or whatever. They could stream you the level(s) you need and dump it at the end of your session... or leave it and unload at some future date when you've passed that point in the game or whatever.

Your talking about transmitting 4k on the fly rendered games, with a 2nd data-stream needed in order for Input too work correctly, and with your great "idea" of separating models from textures, more data streams would be required(and honestly it would make the whole idea of "Cloud" well a waste of time, as the receiver would have too compile the textures/models together..)

Browsers already have these capabilities. And input is the same bandwidth no matter if its cloud based or not (assuming an online game). You still send & receive the same number of input/data, its just the imagery part that's the hangup, as well as the interface & client-only computations (physx), and crap. Stuff that isn't typically replicated.
 

gshurik

Tranny Chaser
<Gold Donor>
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cloud gaming being a big thing in 10 years is about as likely as VR being relevant in the next 10 years.

So it's not going to happen.
 
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Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
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@Valderen it's Monday - we are bored again.

I want one person to name a competing product coming into their market to disrupt said market, where the market had been mostly dominated by one force over the last 15 years and change, that had feature parity with said competitor in that same market, and didn't use these same tactics to get off the ground.

Across ANY market segment, across any industry.

Google Chrome.

Missing my point here. 7-10gb an hour for a 4k HDR stream. We will want our games at 60fps in 4k HDR. That's without input signal bandwidth relaying that information to the server and pining back.

You aren't going to see 4k 60fps from cloud gaming, for the near future this is going to be the low-end option. The downloads for games are already monstrously big, I did some math a while ago looking at Netflix other than their higher tiers people will probably come out ahead as games grow ever larger (before fucking 50gb patches). The exception would be games that people hundreds of hours into.

And just wait until Microsoft releases their Streaming Box. Azure Cloud based - half the price of the next gen console - it is going to be an unmitigated disaster.

I find it a bit funny that Sony and Microsoft are charging towards it. The actual streaming infrastructure is going to become an infrastructure commodity, at which point if you're a major publisher like EA, Activision, or Ubisoft, why the fuck do you need Xbox or Playstation. You cut out the middle man, lease time for AWS/Azure/Google and go direct to the customer.

My brother has Gb internet were he lives, and had a chance too test PSNow when it was in beta stage guess what it was laggy as fuck still even on his line, and that is only a Video stream, basically that's all PSNow is.

I think once you have a pipe with enough bandwidth the actual size of it has minimal impact, its more about the roundtrip time to the data center. I remember some reviews about the service Sony bought when it was PC-only, iirc people said if you were in-market (e.g. near a data center) it was OK for certain types of games.
 
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TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
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Cloud gaming is shit. Even streaming a game from my PC to my TV with Steamlink is considerably laggy.
 
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Ravishing

Uninspiring Title
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Is it just my imagination or is it you who insists on calling it product whereas others kept referring to it as a service? You're doubling down on disagreeing with yourself here.
In the context of my original post that kicked off this days old discussion, the person said Product.
I already said if they used the word Service I wouldn't have responded.
 

Kiki

Log Wizard
2,223
1,786
From an ISP perspective I can say bandwidth won't be the issue, that part is easy. I mean we are getting to crazy territory with what a fiber can do (40Tbps). Bandwidth is cheap these days (would you believe less than a dollar a gig?). Caps will raise at some point if you have them (poor bastards) especially when everything is 4k+. We can easily deliver 1gb up/down directly to your house today.

The problem will be latency and you might be able to solve this with gaming companies (like Riot) forming their own interconnects between ISPs and reducing hops. Band together (or just wait for Microsoft/AT&T/whatever to do it), create a decent service that everyone can use. We could even put it over the top on your bill for $5/month and prioritize traffic within our network if needed. It might be shitty to do it that way but it's gotta start somewhere. Interconnects aren't really any different than what ISPs do already, and you have boxes of google and netflix in the datacenter anyway, so what's another box if they even need that?

So I think it could be closer logistically than you might think. The most common problem I see is that ISPs only put fiber to the cabinet and you have 30+ year old copper lines running to or in your house. And some of these companies have no desire to spend money to upgrade their network (despite getting govt money to).
 

Tauntworth

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,219
6,281
Not sure if it's already been brought up in this thread, as Im now just getting caught up - Curious if anybody has or is considering liquidating their steam account?

It used to hold a certain amount of sentimental value, but as I age, I really don't care, and I rarely if ever go back and play games as adulting consumes most of my time. Was thinking maybe just dropping the entire account before Epic and other launchers slowly cause it to devalue as it ages. The community features steam has just dont matter to me these days - not saying they don't matter entirely, just not to me.
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Gold Donor>
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Cool. The question is their sales numbers. Did the hordes of 15 year olds on PC less invested in steam but very invested in Fortnite buy it?