Game Streaming Platforms and Technology (xCloud, PSNow, Stadia, GeforceNow, Luna)

If they can use the existing infrastructure and hardware, sure. If needing proprietary hardware installed in those locales, it'll be dependent on hardware roll-out, which seems the case with every one of these streaming services. At which datacentres has MS installed its XB1S racks?

 

Seems to be circular question line?

Same answer as before for all of them:

 

Well yeah, in short we really don't know roll out. Except PSNow - we have the 19 country list for that.
Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.

 

Yup. Since we dont know their rollout plans, it's useful to point out today's upper bounds so everyone level set their expectations.

 

MS never rolls anything out wide.
Also worth remembering that this year is just trial for xcloud, where as it is launch of stadia.

So for MS only expecting it in very select core markets this year.

Would be nice if actual roll out was next year, but based on scarlet hardware.

 

You could call it launch for Stadia, but like every Google product before it, it's a beta too. Can't get mad if they discontinue a beta. LOL

As for MS, it makes sense to launch in core markets first. I only expect US & UK. Sorry America's Tuque Canada.

Tommy McClain

 

MS data centre strategy here and our broadband access is fairly good as a whole. We are within a year or so from 5G depending on how the Canadians want to play out the Huawei debacle. I would be surprised to be sidestepped to support the UK instead.

 

UK's definitely the second option for MS. Larger population, significantly denser population meaning greater reach with less investment, and more media significance. It's far better to get some Premiership Footy players tweeting about playing whatever on XCloud than getting some Ice-Hockey players doing the same.

 

Context behind large picture: "Stadia: Launching 2019 - US, Canada, UK, Europe".

Quite nondescript on what regions they mean by "Europe".

 

Can only be sure "Europe" doesn't include UK. I guess similar to PSNow's initial Europe roll-out.

 

It just reflects how Google is geographically organised and where their effort is deployed. Google has seven official campuses but focussing only on Europe, the United Kingdom has the most significant Google presence despite Dublin being Google's official European HQ. This is a common thing in the tech industry. Same with Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM etc.

 

That's only because of the tax loopholes, currently the Double Irish. They have until 2020 to close that out. However, there are other replacements such as Single Malt or Capital Allowances for Intangible Assets.

 

I'd think XCloud will probably have the same limited initial rollout as Stadia. It seems like they will limit it to specific developed western countries.

I'm in Canada and have currently have 150Mbps connection and could get up to 1.5GBps if I wanted(though I don't think you can fully take advantage of that unless you have some expensive network cards). So bandwidth isn't really the issue it's going to be the latency to the data centers.

You can test latency here:
Google http://www.gcping.com/
Microsoft https://azurespeedtest.azurewebsites.net/

 

That's a bit different. Lot's of companies are established in Ireland for sales, accountancy and tax purposes. You don't need to be headquartered there, sales are rarely channeled through corporate HQs. Google genuinely are.

 

Something that I haven't seen talk about a lot is how we will start to see games designed with lower latency in mind, especially for studios like Stadia Games, that will make games for cloud from the ground up. Checking the table from Digital Foundry (DF) below, I see that there is a lot of room to improve when it comes to reducing input lag on several games. Comparing Call of Duty Infinite with Killzone Shadowfall Single player, we see 70.7ms difference and even comparing both games running at 60fps, the difference is 50.5ms. Fighting games are usually considered games that need low input lag, but according to DF, Tekken 7 has 100ms+ of latency. Knowing that, you could easily imagine a version of Tekken 7 with the same input lag of Call of Duty Infinite. That version of the game would be able to absorb 60.7ms of added latency and still behave the same as the local game on console. That is without taking into consideration running the game at 120fps or more on the cloud, to reduce the latency even more.



https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-console-fps-input-lag-tested

 

Tekken 7 used to have that input lag and Harada promised he was going to resolve it via an update. But I am not sure if it was ever resolved.

 

Yes, Harada said that the input latency was reduced by 2 frames, but according to Display lag it stayed the same. Need to keep looking to see if I find any other test.



Edit:

It seems that the PC version input lag was lowered to 56.9ms and the PS4 version to 75.8.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/te...ow-below-any-tekken-in-the-last-decade.47214/

 

Thats still a lot for a fighting game I believe?
How much was it on past Tekken games I am curious

 

Found this.

- Tekken 5 DR (PS3): 63.0ms
- Tekken 6 (PS3): 65.8ms
- Tekken Tag 2 (PS3) : 94.0ms
- Tekken 7: 75ms (PS4), 56.9ms (PC)

https://www.resetera.com/threads/te...ow-below-any-tekken-in-the-last-decade.47214/