Will gaming move 100% to the cloud? *spawn

I’m talking about the gamer market. Cloud is probably the only solution until we move to some other manufacturing material that scales better.

 

Half of my gaming these days is streamed from another PC in the house. If the cloud can provide a similar reliable experience I would gladly give up local hardware. It sits idle doing nothing most of the time anyway.

 

Its un-avoidable, local hardware will sometime (long future probably) be a thing of the past. It might sound boring initially to have no playstation console or PC at home, but it does make sense in many, many ways.

 

Will be as much of a thing of the past as Vinyl records. Most people won't use it, but enthusiasts forever will.

 

Well it depends how you define "local". I don't think there are forces I know of that are going to make streaming from 100s of km away cheaper (in terms of efficiency) than having something local to at least do some of the final rendering (even if it's just something like final raster with some heavy lifting done remotely). So if you're talking about "there might be a machine on your block or in your city that streams to you" that seems more plausible, but the counter-force to all of this is that at some point it will be cheaper for Microsoft to rent you an X-Box with your game pass sub if you are playing enough games in the cloud.

In terms of the trend towards the companies owning and managing the devices though, I imagine that will continue. But the "set top box" thing could still easily end up being more efficient for companies.

 

Why?

 

Most fibre has significant shared bandwidth and that sharing will have more not less impact going forward, expecting much more than 50Mb/s consistently is fanciful any time soon ... remote gaming has reached its zenith, it won't get much better.

 

There's an interesting discussion there on the necessary internet backbone. Gaming has pushed hardware forwards possibly more than any other activity as the most consistently demanding. Office PCs that would have been fine with far less power tended to get bolstered to play games better, and then software adapted to the new tech. 'Good enough' got stretched. Simply dial-up was good enough for the visuals of the time, but media rich websites require more Internet and faster PCs (kinda ridiculously!). However, the internet doesn't need super low latency nor visual quality for TV+movies beyond our existing compressed standards. Browsing the web and eCommerce are perfectly served with <200ms connections. Expansion of the internet seems to me largely driven by amount of users and traffic, not quality.

If internet backbone providers aren't making money from gaming, there's no obvious interest in them working on lower latency and faster data for pristine gaming visuals. Multiplayer already suffers from traffic issues - I wonder how it's affected when the routing is having to deal with video traffic as well as network traffic over the totality of users? The driver then seems to be the gaming companies setting up localised servers, a kind of interim sub-internet.

Will we hit a limit of cloud gaming based on the financial realities of the internet, or will we see the internet improve in every way despite no driving economic factors as a sort of unified human endeavour?

Edit: This discussion will benefit greatly from people's current experiences of cloud gaming, the different genres that do and don't work, and their internet quality in relation to their cloud service (ie. are they next to a MS cloud hub in their city, or 1,000 miles from the nearest populated centre?).

 

100%? Not anytime soon. Too many companies in the entire chain rely on selling hardware and/or components to create hardware for it to go away entirely. It will take a LONG time before the world makes that change fully.

In the foreseeable future, I'd say it simply continues to augment the market...allowing more people to enter into the market at a cheaper price point, basically lowering the barrier to entry. Also I think it will gain traction in augmenting games via advanced physics and AI.


I do think though in the future that the various console platforms will become more "generic" over time until they are basically prebuilt small form-factor PCs which the platform holders will simply brand such as "PS and Xbox", and at that point publishers/developers will only have to develop for a single platform to distribute everywhere across all devices. I think at some point it just becomes pointless for MS or Sony to continue to pour money into console R&D and then limit their install base to that single platform and grow it again and again over the next 7 years.

 

No it won't.

1. People like actual hardware
2. Not everyone has an internet connection fast enough and will never will (Like me)

 

I hope not, publishers cant even be trusted to keep a multiplayer server running

 

The idea of cloud gaming actually has a lot of similarities with streaming services.
I used to buy a lot of DVD (and later Blu-Rays) for “collecting.” But then I realized that most DVD or Blu-Rays I got was only played once or twice. Later I started to have my collections in the form of iTunes movies, but that’s also short lived. Now I (like most people) relies on streaming services such as Netflix for my video consumption.

is it ideal? Of course not, the recent fiasco of Star Trek: Discovery dropped out of Netflix internationally is just one example. But that’s probably still more efficient to me than having to buy and store all those discs for all video I’d like to watch.

Today, at least on PC, digital downloads are replacing physical copies of games pretty quickly. The pace is slower on the console front but I suspect it will follow soon. Will cloud gaming be the next step? I can’t say for sure, but IMHO it’s probably more likely than not.

 

It will never even be 30% cloud

 

It’s almost like you guys are new to technology. Lots of “nevers”. We already know how that ends.

 

If it ever does I am out.

Since I don't ever expect internet to be perfect nor do I think lag will ever be solved. On top of just not agreeing with lack of ownership as a concept

 

I'd build a pc the size of my closet if it meant the best frame rates and highest resolution. Who cares if I"m rolling 8-12 cards deep with 64 dimms of ram and 4 sockets with 128 core cpus in each. I'd even add a a vent system to expel hot air outside in the summer and vent the hot air into the hhouse in the winter.

 

Most people don’t have the means to do that even if they wanted to. Do you think there would be a large enough market for developers to target that?

 

The speed and latency of your own connection isn't the only factor either. Having servers close to your location is just as critical and a limiting factor of cloud gaming, especially for less developed countries.

 

Is it even possible? WRT physical limits, i.e. latency has to be less than 10 msec, I assume you can manage this if the server is in the same city, but if its hundreds of km away, can it make the round trip in under 10msec?
i.e.
1. I press the shoot button on joystick
2. gets sent 500km away to some server that runs the code, and then sends back the image of the gun being shot over the 500km
3. I see #2 less than 10msec after I done #1

I genuinely don't know is this possible

edit: OK seems its about 5.5msec for 1000 km to travel an optical cable