Streaming is fantastic. It means there is an indirect reference between the display of the game, and the running of the game. It means you can play max quality games on a $200 chromebook. The game can be running in the same rack as the server. Visual/input lag is a different type of lag than game client/server lag, I'm not sure which one will win the long haul.
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.
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.
> 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.
> It perpetuates the idea that you pay for a thing but don't own it.
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.
>Owning is wasteful unless you have close to 100% utilisation.
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'm on your side of the argument, but I take issue with the black and white "You pay for an x-box and own it". For any computer hardware that I pay for, I don't feel lime I truly own it unless I can run my own code on it.
Technically, I can rent an EC2and do that, but MSFT won't let me run a hello world on an X86 computer :/
Computers are complex enough that there is more than one dimension to ownership (in fact, if you consider how many computers are inside your computer, it'll quickly get fractal), but the argument still applies to whichever ownership dimensions you care about.
> "renting" only causes more surplus to be captured by the publisher, and not by the consumer
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).
Selective quoting to misconstrue what I'm arguing won't win you any favors. I'm suggesting that in this particular case (you carefully avoided quoting the "this" that I used) the surplus is being captured by the producer.
Anyways, not interested in discussing further with someone who quotes selectively to argue with a strawman. See ya.
It was not deliberate but my point stands with or without the "it". I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the surplus being captured by the producer in this case, but typically, for a voluntary transaction to occur in a free market, both the buyer and the seller must perceive some kind of surplus or benefit. If consumers willingly opt in for the streaming service, they must see the transaction as beneficial to themselves right?
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).
Because it's a smaller upfront cost, and a "pay per usage" cost ongoing. Many people don't want to (for example) dedicate the space to a large dvd collection for something they're only going to watch once, or to buy a media cupboard to hold two extra dvds. People don't want the hassle of reselling/searching the second hand market (where companies like eBay provide value, but friction and risk at the same time as anyone who has ever had an "item not received" case opened against them will tell you).
That's a common theory among people who hold a minority preference in a market, but it's almost invariably wrong. On aggregate, people tend to be rational. And there's plenty of valid and rational reasons for preferring to rent vs owning. Some reasons I can think of: lower cost, convenience (don't need to go to a store or wait for a shipment, doesn't take space in your apartment), not having to worry about hardware breaking, not having to worry about upgrading when a new model comes out, not having to worry about backups, portability, access to a huge catalog, personalized experience, ability to easily switch service providers, etc. It's not hard for me to understand why many people would prefer to rent.
If only that could be true. Economics would be more simple, and maybe actually a science.
Modern economics is nearly entirely how to deal with the fact that individual actors are indeed not rational according to the traditional definition of the term. Which is why advertising works so well.
It's a model that mostly reflects reality. I find the alternative much more unbelievable (e.g. that this trend is the result of general ignorance and dumbness). It's simply more likely that your personal preference simply isn't shared by the majority.
> If this were the case, it would beg the question as to why many consumers and businesses willingly opt for rental models.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nit picking goes both ways. Don't postulate unless you're going to give both sides equal treatment.
> 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.
> 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.
Why should the savvy renters care? They aren't generating the surplus captured by the publisher.
As someone who routinely plays and mods older hardware, I really hate renting culture. It’s short sighted and in 20 years time, when your kids are adults, they’ll be wishing there was a way to play games from their childhood.
We are already seeing this problem with specific games that force online verification. Let’s not break the gaming platform itself as well.
I might sound like communist, but i would like to figure out a way to a future (sustainable) where everyone owns everything and are happy. Not talking about equally to everyone, but at least not 99% owned by 1%.
Is there anything inherently wrong with 99% "owning" 1% nominally? Somehow 95/1 or 75/1 is systemically different or is it just extracting an emotional reaction to numbers folks have no accurate mental representation of in such context. If not, it does strike me as a slippery slope to communism.
Renting costs are not scalable or sustainable. The people who rent everything they can afford and own nothing will have to be in perfect health all the time, have no debts to pay, and basically work until death. Logan didn't run for no reason.
It’s been years since I’ve watched Logan’s Run, but wasn’t it the girl he fancied who went on the run and he just got caught up. Rather then him explicitly choosing to run?
societies willingly pool taxes so that the elderly when retired can maintain a decent standard of living.
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.
> Why pay for the full price of an X-Box that sits idle most of the time?
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...).
With traditional products there were three kind of parties involved: Producer, dealer, and consumer. Renting was a concept between the latter two. At an increased logistic effort between them (returning the product, more but smaller payments) the number of products bought from the producer is reduced.
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.
Agreed - including many who should really know better. https://hpbn.com is an excellent resource to refresh or learn practical networking fundamentals.
Back in the day, you could rent your own games to other people by handing them your cartridge and accepting some money for the loan. The goods were transferrable. Renting is good when it coexists with real ownership.
Having played both Cyberpunk 2077 and Destiny 2 exclusively as Stadia games, I respectfully disagree with your third point. And your second point is actually a flaw in the current videogame industry economics; the lack of any kind of subscription relation and perpetual-payment model for most games breeds most of the ills we see in the industry (buggy AAA launch titles, crunch time, studios releasing brilliant products, then going under because they just timed their release badly and were the second-best thing against something else that took all the attention that cycle).
But Stadia is definitely not a counter-argument to your first point. ;)
I agree it's awful, but anyone using an iPhone that is locked down doesn't care about ownership. The games can go right in their iTunes library with the other media and entertainment they don't own.
I've had good experiences streaming, but I also don't like competitive FPSs. So we'll have to agree to disagree. Maybe you live farther from data-centers than I do.
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.
Streaming is horrible. All of the game streaming services so far that offer a half-serviceable GPU cost $40+ per month, because that’s the minimum cost for offering a GPU to a user over the Internet. The remote end of a game stream is orders of magnitude more resource and power hungry than the remote end of a video stream. For it to be profitable, without tying in some kafka-esque monetization scheme into even single player games, it would have to cost at least $60 per month.
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.
I cannot stand latency. I can tell when my ping jumps from 20 to 70ms and it always throws me off. I don't think I'm particularly sensitive to it either. The thought of every game being subject to that sounds horrible.
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.