Very interesting indeed. Doom Eternal from Id Software is next game it would seem. 4K, 1080p, 60 fps on Grandma's computer desktop? Very intriguing.
The most important piece I got from this was the pronunciation for “id” is not I.D.
I always assumed it was referring to the psychological id, but I never checked it out. It's interesting how different people perceive and process the same input.
according to wikipedia "id" stands for "in demand".
I always thought it was just a play on words for I.D.
Whether people like it or not, this is the future of gaming period. Once it gets perfected and the quality is there, then it will take over whether its Google or another company very similar to what Netflix did to blockbuster.
I'm going to assume that the people who are excited about this have never used a thin client in their lives. Something that intermittently chokes on displaying the desktop is not going to magically be reliable for games.
I could believe that you could make an impressive looking demo out of it by making simplifying assumptions atypical of real games. Making something that actually works well and reliably in the real world is an entirely different matter.
The basic problem for any service that proposes to stream games over the public Internet is that flops are cheap, but bandwidth is expensive. If you don't believe me, then how much do you spend on computer hardware, and how much do you spend on your ISP? Even if you buy a brand new $2000 PC every three years and throw the old one in the garbage, that's probably still going to be a whole lot less than you spend on bandwidth. Proposing to massively inflate bandwidth requirements (and costs) in order to save a little bit on hardware costs is not going to be a win.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be a market for it. But for the most part, it will be the gaming equivalent of rent-to-own furniture or payday loans. Maybe it lets you get what you want in the short term, but it's not the market you'd like to participate in if you have a choice.
The main exception that I see is that letting you skip the download really is a benefit to the people who like to download a game, play it for three minutes, decide that they hate it, and uninstall it after only those three minutes. This will allow them to spend most of their "gaming" time ranting on forums rather than waiting for games to download.
Color me extremely skeptical that this will make arbitrary games work well with arbitrary controllers. The next PC game with controller support that completely works right outside of the box will be the first one I've seen. Ever. There are a lot of PC games that claim that they have controller support, and sometimes they almost work except for some odd glitch. But there's always at least some odd glitch that makes it best to disable the built-in controller support and use external tools. Often, the built-in controller support is so shoddy as to make me skeptical that the developers ever tried using it to play their game. Adding extra complications to how the game has to run isn't going to fix that.
Isn't this the same as what GeForce is working on? if it is they will have competitor and honestly when it comes to games I'd pick GF's side over Google's.
There are a lot of companies working on this or something much like it. But there's no hope of making it actually work reliably unless you can get ISPs on board with pushing it. Just yesterday, Nvidia announced some GPUs intended for cloud gaming that would live in the ISP's infrastructure, which is how you pretty much have to do it if you want it to work.
Outside of the handful of cities that have Google Fiber, Google doesn't have anywhere remotely near the infrastructure to have any hope of making this work well. ISPs do have the infrastructure to at least have a chance, as by definition, they have to have infrastructure near you. ISPs also have the easy ability to kill external efforts at doing this, which they will do unless paid very well not to, because they'll need to stop game streamers from hogging all of their bandwidth.
Wonder how much a month this will cost? Highly unlikely it will be $15 or even $25 a month but much higher. Could be wrong but linking together all the platform essentially, everyone will still want to get theirs.
The big price tag will come from your ISP, not from Google, at least unless Google is your ISP. If you think ISP throttling is bad when they only have to throttle a tiny handful of people using a ton of bandwidth, just wait until you see what they have to do when everyone and his neighbor's dog wants to use a ton of bandwidth.
VR has been tried for over a decade that doesn’t make the current hardware any less revolutionary.
Making VR work well is massively easier to do than making game streaming over the public Internet work well. VR has been at the "can make an impressive demo" for many years now, but it sure doesn't feel close to the "common part of daily life for many people" stage yet.
I live out in the country in a small town, like most of the population my province, so I wont hold my breath in the hopes this will be viable in any form for me.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
All comes down to how lossy the compression on the stream is for me. It's alright saying 4K and 1080p gaming.. but if the image is compressed it won't look like either resolution anyway. We all spend a lot of money making our games look and run better.. it's not a minor concern and is clearly important to us. They're going to need some Silicon Valley Pied Piper magic to get it as good as it needs to be.
It's all about picking your poison. You can go with heavily compressed data to avoid runaway bandwidth requirements, but then the game will be a laggy mess that looks terrible. Lighter compression to allow it to look good will mean that you need a ton of bandwidth. There's also the question of whether you compress across time, which gives you the choice of making a game look better but feel really laggy or reducing the lag at the expense of making the game look terrible.
There are a lot of different things that you can do that will work well in various sets of circumstances, but there's nothing that you can do that will always work well. Arbitrary data just isn't arbitrarily compressible. But that will make it easy to make a wide variety of impressive looking demos that can do a wide variety of things, none of which are typical of actual games that you might want to play.
The big corporations have invested in massive facilities to house all of this Hardware as a Service solution. I'm not saying that Google will be the ones to roll it out correctly, but this shit is happening.
Everything is about to change. Tech wise it will be a cool advancement. Business wise prepare for the worst. Remember how in Terms of service, these bastards tell consumers the hardware they just paid for doesn't REALLY belong to them? Welp now it REALLY won't. It will be subscriptions or die.
In addition, as horse power + brains of consumer hardware starts living with the manufacturer as a service, I don't suspect they will be cutting prices much. Gold sickness always wins.
The PC "master race" will try to buck the system but...
"As far as the forum code of conduct, I would think it's a bit outdated and in need of a refre *CLOSED*"
The reason these companies are pushing this is because it moves all the work to the cloud, where they make money from it. If they succeed in making it work well, someone has to pay for the cpu/gpu costs in the cloud for high end games. That cost is going to go straight through to the player, it has to. Which means if you own a good PC you will be forced to pay to use the cloud hardware instead.
The thin client dream has been around for decades. Cloud providers love it. It has worked in some areas but the things that have to come together to make it work well for PC games is I think a couple more decades away.
The basic problem for any service that proposes to stream games over the public Internet is that flops are cheap, but bandwidth is expensive. If you don't believe me, then how much do you spend on computer hardware, and how much do you spend on your ISP? Even if you buy a brand new $2000 PC every three years and throw the old one in the garbage, that's probably still going to be a whole lot less than you spend on bandwidth. Proposing to massively inflate bandwidth requirements (and costs) in order to save a little bit on hardware costs is not going to be a win.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be a market for it. But for the most part, it will be the gaming equivalent of rent-to-own furniture or payday loans. Maybe it lets you get what you want in the short term, but it's not the market you'd like to participate in if you have a choice.
The main exception that I see is that letting you skip the download really is a benefit to the people who like to download a game, play it for three minutes, decide that they hate it, and uninstall it after only those three minutes. This will allow them to spend most of their "gaming" time ranting on forums rather than waiting for games to download.
Population density is the key I suggest.
In the US - as you say - I paid more for my ISP than my hardware; and imo it was crap even though I had the best most expensive service available. In the EU costs are a fraction of hardware costs for unlimited, unmanaged / unthrottled and (very) fast internet. And to be clear TV over internet is now very common.
And the upgrades to the network everywhere continue.
I strongly suspect the same applies in Korea, Japan etc.
Edit: To be clear I am speaking in "broad terms". I am aware that there are parts of the US with very good internet and some rural areas of Europe with less good internet. Service follows demand and higher population density drives means more demand.
It is a not a real news, it has been existing for years. Seems like it has to be a GAFA so that you guys in US start to think about...Wake up and meet the present and futur...check here : https://shadow.tech/usen/
Been using that for years and it is working perfectly...even on a apple TV now....Google has not invented anything, there are just following a trend...
People can claim whatever they want but this is going to be huge. I remember many streaming music products existing, but never really breaking trough, because the quality was not there. Then products like pandora slowly took it to the next step, and while the world was still dazzled by Itunes, suddenly out of nowhere came Spotify and obliberated it's competition.
For movies it was the same. Streaming video was crap, basically. No one believed in it. DVD's where the thing of people that liked video. Blue Ray was the next big thing. And HBO. The quality of streaming was just too poor. Until it wasn't, and Netflix blew away the entire video and TV industry. No one buys Blue Ray's anymore and no one is talking about a succesor to Blue Ray
The same thing will happen to gaming. Once you can play high quality streaming without having to pay 1400 euro on a videocard or 600 for a new console, no one is going to do that. Of course the quality isn't there. Yet. But when it is, it will blow everything away.
Neither music streaming nor video streaming for watching movies is sensitive to latency. That allows far better compression, which is essential to making the streaming services work well. They can download it ahead of time, buffer it up, have time to fix anything that gets delayed or dropped, and just read from the buffer for a moment if your connection has a hiccup.
If people were happy with streaming games by having a delay of a few seconds between what is rendered and what appears on your screen, then they could make this work pretty well. That's fine for watching someone else play a game on Twitch. That's not fine for playing a game yourself.
Streaming audio in real time without adding meaningful latency still isn't entirely a solved problem, at least apart from having a dedicated line, which basically no one does anymore because it's so expensive. You can usually understand the person you're talking to on the phone, but the quality is imperfect. Video for playing a game requires many thousands of times as much bandwidth as audio. And video is also massively more latency sensitive than audio. Adding 100 ms of latency to a phone call is acceptable, but an extra 100 ms of latency for video in a game you're playing would be pushing into "game doesn't work" territory for an awful lot of games.
Todays announcement is not really a surprise for anyone in the industry. The particulars of what is being offered, and when (i.e. the specifics that they have now decided on) are news, but the addition of a streaming platform for games is not. What is also being missed by the media is that this is just one piece of a larger picture.
For those not seeing it, just remember that Android Q has a desktop mode, which at this time is mostly for developers... which includes game/hardware developers. If Google can show that gaming is viable on a thin device (for now limited to limited key demographics) it opens a much larger market for device makers (who can use this to push hardware sales that have been stagnating) and game developers who can sell to a new (device agnostic) marketplace.
There are several technical challenges (most specifically end user bandwidth), and some marketplace challenges (development/adoption will take a few years) to doing all of this. However, there is also some competitive opportunities that may work out (MS has been pushing to launch their own version of this, and it is rumored that they may do so with the next console) to build this space faster.
People can claim whatever they want but this is going to be huge. I remember many streaming music products existing, but never really breaking trough, because the quality was not there. Then products like pandora slowly took it to the next step, and while the world was still dazzled by Itunes, suddenly out of nowhere came Spotify and obliberated it's competition.
For movies it was the same. Streaming video was crap, basically. No one believed in it. DVD's where the thing of people that liked video. Blue Ray was the next big thing. And HBO. The quality of streaming was just too poor. Until it wasn't, and Netflix blew away the entire video and TV industry. No one buys Blue Ray's anymore and no one is talking about a succesor to Blue Ray
The same thing will happen to gaming. Once you can play high quality streaming without having to pay 1400 euro on a videocard or 600 for a new console, no one is going to do that. Of course the quality isn't there. Yet. But when it is, it will blow everything away.
Neither music streaming nor video streaming for watching movies is sensitive to latency. That allows far better compression, which is essential to making the streaming services work well. They can download it ahead of time, buffer it up, have time to fix anything that gets delayed or dropped, and just read from the buffer for a moment if your connection has a hiccup.
If people were happy with streaming games by having a delay of a few seconds between what is rendered and what appears on your screen, then they could make this work pretty well. That's fine for watching someone else play a game on Twitch. That's not fine for playing a game yourself.
Streaming audio in real time without adding meaningful latency still isn't entirely a solved problem, at least apart from having a dedicated line, which basically no one does anymore because it's so expensive. You can usually understand the person you're talking to on the phone, but the quality is imperfect. Video for playing a game requires many thousands of times as much bandwidth as audio. And video is also massively more latency sensitive than audio. Adding 100 ms of latency to a phone call is acceptable, but an extra 100 ms of latency for video in a game you're playing would be pushing into "game doesn't work" territory for an awful lot of games.
Latency is the same when you are playing on a streaming plateform like : https://shadow.tech/usen/ even less than playing on your own hardware..You are so wrong and I work as a IT engineer so I am very familiar with RTT and I have been playing online since late 90s and meridian 59...Just test solution like shadow streaming and try some game like APEX or any FPS that is realying on latency and you will notice that you are not suffering from any penalty playing on a streaming plateform on the contrary.
Isn't this the same as what GeForce is working on? if it is they will have competitor and honestly when it comes to games I'd pick GF's side over Google's.
Didn't nvidia all but abandon the shield?
I'm not talking about the shield, but cloud gaming. They've been beta testing for like an year now maybe more?
VR has been tried for over a decade that doesn’t make the current hardware any less revolutionary.
Making VR work well is massively easier to do than making game streaming over the public Internet work well. VR has been at the "can make an impressive demo" for many years now, but it sure doesn't feel close to the "common part of daily life for many people" stage yet.
I'm glad you're not the one in charge of innovations, we'd just scrap it before trying it
The point is, and you can argue it all you want it wont make a difference to me, someday, someone is going to make this work and so far Google is in the best position to do so. They wouldn't spend the millions they have if they didn't think it would net either some kind of return or value in the technology they're creating.
Once you can play high quality streaming without having to pay 1400 euro on a videocard or 600 for a new console, no one is going to do that.
I agree with that as stated, but not in the sense that you meant it.
It's not clear whether being able to get high quality game streaming over the public Internet will ever happen. But if it ever does, it will come sometime after you can get high quality rendering of the game locally on that era's equivalent of a cheap Wal-Mart computer. And if you can do that, then why do you need game streaming? You're never going to be able to stream games to a device that doesn't have a monitor to display them on.
That has already happened on sound cards, which is why nearly everyone uses integrated sound on their motherboard today. It's not clear whether CPUs and GPUs will ever be good enough that hardly anyone feels the need to have anything beyond a cheap, integrated part. But we're a lot closer to the latter happening than we are to game streaming over the Internet not being outlandishly expensive or poor quality.
I live out in the country in a small town, like most of the population my province, so I wont hold my breath in the hopes this will be viable in any form for me.
I live in rural Oregon and have gigabit fiber to the house. It's possible, but it takes work and cooperation and time. In our case different government, non-profit, and for profit entities have cooperated to bring high speed internet to a lot of Oregon. It didn't happen overnight and there is still a lot of area that needs coverage, but progress is being made. Try and support or instigate public/private utilities to do that in your area. Don't wait for cable and telcos to offer overpriced minimum viable service.
I live in the province of Quebec in Canada we are way way behind all the time and the QC gov. doesn't do things like that. About the only good thing we have that the CRTC forced is that big telco like cogeco HAVE to let small start up ISP use their lines and we have no "contracts" so we can quit and switch to a small tpia provider with a phone call.
If we had some groups like that I would surely be down with doing my part but like I said...ass backwards...lots of places still only accept cash only, and wont take debit cards...lol
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Whether people like it or not, this is the future of gaming period. Once it gets perfected and the quality is there, then it will take over whether its Google or another company very similar to what Netflix did to blockbuster.
That revolution has already happened in games. It's called Steam, or their various competitors. Netflix lets you download stuff ahead of time, then render it (video decode) as you need it. It doesn't let you do anything remotely similar to what Google is trying to do here.
I live out in the country in a small town, like most of the population my province, so I wont hold my breath in the hopes this will be viable in any form for me.
I live in rural Oregon and have gigabit fiber to the house. It's possible, but it takes work and cooperation and time. In our case different government, non-profit, and for profit entities have cooperated to bring high speed internet to a lot of Oregon. It didn't happen overnight and there is still a lot of area that needs coverage, but progress is being made. Try and support or instigate public/private utilities to do that in your area. Don't wait for cable and telcos to offer overpriced minimum viable service.
Rural Oregon as well! Still waiting for gigabit connection
Comments
I always thought it was just a play on words for I.D.
You got the wrong wikipedia for this case. This is the correct one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego
I could believe that you could make an impressive looking demo out of it by making simplifying assumptions atypical of real games. Making something that actually works well and reliably in the real world is an entirely different matter.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be a market for it. But for the most part, it will be the gaming equivalent of rent-to-own furniture or payday loans. Maybe it lets you get what you want in the short term, but it's not the market you'd like to participate in if you have a choice.
The main exception that I see is that letting you skip the download really is a benefit to the people who like to download a game, play it for three minutes, decide that they hate it, and uninstall it after only those three minutes. This will allow them to spend most of their "gaming" time ranting on forums rather than waiting for games to download.
Because it's actually a series of tubes. Ted Stevens was right.
Outside of the handful of cities that have Google Fiber, Google doesn't have anywhere remotely near the infrastructure to have any hope of making this work well. ISPs do have the infrastructure to at least have a chance, as by definition, they have to have infrastructure near you. ISPs also have the easy ability to kill external efforts at doing this, which they will do unless paid very well not to, because they'll need to stop game streamers from hogging all of their bandwidth.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
There are a lot of different things that you can do that will work well in various sets of circumstances, but there's nothing that you can do that will always work well. Arbitrary data just isn't arbitrarily compressible. But that will make it easy to make a wide variety of impressive looking demos that can do a wide variety of things, none of which are typical of actual games that you might want to play.
Everything is about to change. Tech wise it will be a cool advancement. Business wise prepare for the worst. Remember how in Terms of service, these bastards tell consumers the hardware they just paid for doesn't REALLY belong to them? Welp now it REALLY won't. It will be subscriptions or die.
In addition, as horse power + brains of consumer hardware starts living with the manufacturer as a service, I don't suspect they will be cutting prices much. Gold sickness always wins.
The PC "master race" will try to buck the system but...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The thin client dream has been around for decades. Cloud providers love it. It has worked in some areas but the things that have to come together to make it work well for PC games is I think a couple more decades away.
Population density is the key I suggest.
In the US - as you say - I paid more for my ISP than my hardware; and imo it was crap even though I had the best most expensive service available. In the EU costs are a fraction of hardware costs for unlimited, unmanaged / unthrottled and (very) fast internet. And to be clear TV over internet is now very common.
And the upgrades to the network everywhere continue. I strongly suspect the same applies in Korea, Japan etc. Edit: To be clear I am speaking in "broad terms". I am aware that there are parts of the US with very good internet and some rural areas of Europe with less good internet. Service follows demand and higher population density drives means more demand.
Been using that for years and it is working perfectly...even on a apple TV now....Google has not invented anything, there are just following a trend...
If people were happy with streaming games by having a delay of a few seconds between what is rendered and what appears on your screen, then they could make this work pretty well. That's fine for watching someone else play a game on Twitch. That's not fine for playing a game yourself.
Streaming audio in real time without adding meaningful latency still isn't entirely a solved problem, at least apart from having a dedicated line, which basically no one does anymore because it's so expensive. You can usually understand the person you're talking to on the phone, but the quality is imperfect. Video for playing a game requires many thousands of times as much bandwidth as audio. And video is also massively more latency sensitive than audio. Adding 100 ms of latency to a phone call is acceptable, but an extra 100 ms of latency for video in a game you're playing would be pushing into "game doesn't work" territory for an awful lot of games.
For those not seeing it, just remember that Android Q has a desktop mode, which at this time is mostly for developers... which includes game/hardware developers. If Google can show that gaming is viable on a thin device (for now limited to limited key demographics) it opens a much larger market for device makers (who can use this to push hardware sales that have been stagnating) and game developers who can sell to a new (device agnostic) marketplace.
There are several technical challenges (most specifically end user bandwidth), and some marketplace challenges (development/adoption will take a few years) to doing all of this. However, there is also some competitive opportunities that may work out (MS has been pushing to launch their own version of this, and it is rumored that they may do so with the next console) to build this space faster.
Latency is the same when you are playing on a streaming plateform like : https://shadow.tech/usen/ even less than playing on your own hardware..You are so wrong and I work as a IT engineer so I am very familiar with RTT and I have been playing online since late 90s and meridian 59...Just test solution like shadow streaming and try some game like APEX or any FPS that is realying on latency and you will notice that you are not suffering from any penalty playing on a streaming plateform on the contrary.
I'm not talking about the shield, but cloud gaming. They've been beta testing for like an year now maybe more?
The point is, and you can argue it all you want it wont make a difference to me, someday, someone is going to make this work and so far Google is in the best position to do so. They wouldn't spend the millions they have if they didn't think it would net either some kind of return or value in the technology they're creating.
It's not clear whether being able to get high quality game streaming over the public Internet will ever happen. But if it ever does, it will come sometime after you can get high quality rendering of the game locally on that era's equivalent of a cheap Wal-Mart computer. And if you can do that, then why do you need game streaming? You're never going to be able to stream games to a device that doesn't have a monitor to display them on.
That has already happened on sound cards, which is why nearly everyone uses integrated sound on their motherboard today. It's not clear whether CPUs and GPUs will ever be good enough that hardly anyone feels the need to have anything beyond a cheap, integrated part. But we're a lot closer to the latter happening than we are to game streaming over the Internet not being outlandishly expensive or poor quality.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.