Ubisoft CEO: Streaming Will Replace Consoles
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GOG.com, which has grown by huge amounts, allows you to really own the games. You download the installer, zero DRM, no login or online activation required. I make them my first stop for games.WeepingAngels said:
Not everyone has/wants Netflix. Not that there's anything wrong with Netflix overall, but there's a number of technical issues (compatibilities, servers, the operational status of your computer, etc.) that can add up to issues. My main thing is that while this is a great system and all, what Netflix giveth, Netflix can taketh away...but if you have it, you have it. I'm an early blu-ray adopter too. It plays all DVDs, regardless of quality, as long as they're readable and all it needs is what I've got. So, in case of crash, virus, bad video card, speaker problem, Verizon cables, net service screw-up, downed telephone pole, or any number of other computer or internet-based problems short of power outage, I can watch what I've got at my leisure. My computer can play movies, and hell it can do alot of things, but it isn't my go-to device for it.Something Amyss said:
So what? Does that make the trend any less real? Will your personal preferences for viewing somehow undo this? Of what consequence is it that not everyone wants or has Netflix if that's the way the world is trending? There are people who still love Betamax and Laserdisc. Meanwhile, you have shows forgoing physical releases.FalloutJack said:
Well, in short answer, yes. I'm not just me. The phrase "You're never the only one" comes to mind. I'm sure there's a bunch of people who have your opinion too. Not all, though. That's the reality. The 'trend' is that people will pursue whatever they like, and businesses will try to make money off of it. There is money in streaming, so they pursue it. There is money in not streaming, so that is also pursued. The problem is that you are thinking in an extreme, much like the Ubisoft guy, in that something will just absolutely consume all other media. And yet, there is still significant money in books, television, retro-gaming, consoles in general, etc. Streaming has found a lovely nest-egg of profit and will continue to do so for some time, no more and no less.Something Amyss said:
No. The tick rate was too low on launch which casued complains. When tick rate was raised complains stopped.Bad Jim said:
And the developers are just going to set up those datacenters in every town for free?
The thing is, what we see in the video should be normal gameplay. as in actual destruction. yes, the weapons are overpowered, but it still takes to calculate all the impacts even with lower power weapons. This video, if anything, shows that it cannot be done on a cost effective manner.
If everyone would not play their games for an hour please, i want to play mine. Yes, thats the only situation where you dont need hardware-per-player in the servers.
No you didnt. you provided an example of a workaround current multiplayer uses to hide the latency when all calculations are done locally and only confirmed with the server later. This work around will not work, as i have repeatedly explained, with streaming, because there is no local calculation to do it. If we have local calculation big enough to do it then there is no point to stream the game to begin with since you are already rendering everything locally anyway. There is no magical "Does local calculation but needs no power to do it" middle ground. you either do local calculation or you dont. and if you dont its going to be horrible gameplay. There is no "minimal calculations". This is literally logically impossible.Joccaren said:
No, the main reason is game balance. when there are that many players games often turn into chaos and results in no tactics used. few exeptions like Planetside 2 exists of course.
There is no n^2 problem if server is done correctly. server only has to serve every player and recieve data from it. it does not have to deal with information between players and in fact such information isnt even needed if server does its job correctly. Also nobody sends bullet trajectories in multiplayer. Heck, most games dont even have bullet trajectories and uses a scan method for aiming.
Most gamers, id expect. Given its popularity so far, i seem to be right. Oh and are we back to "i think most people are blind idiots" argument? Because being a blind idiot is never an excuse.
Oh and btw these are not graphic cards that does this, those are monitors. (though yes graphic cards have to support them)
intentionally designing bad game mechanics to compensate for bad game delivery systems is hardly something worth pushing for.
Server checks whats possible because it has that information hardcoded. For example you are driving a car in multiplayer. The max speed of a car is 230 km/h. Server recieves the position from the client and can calculate speed (dont trust client speed reported, this can be faked easily). If the car is going bellow 230 km/h its fine, above - the player is cheating. Certain allowance should be made for unstable user connections of course, but you get my point.
No prediction needed for reality checks.
Absolutely ridiculous. Snowdrops graphical results are way beyond what Crysis could offer. and Avalanche open spaces are nothing we ever saw in gaming until this point. I suggest you replay Crysis because you seem to have forgotten what it looks like, even though it was revolutionary when it came out. There are huge leaps, they just arent in polygon numbers that seems to be your sole focus for some reason.
Also you only need to look at peoples reaction to battlefront to disprove the "people wont notice" argument.
Thats funny i remmeber playing games with AO in 2006 on a Athlon XP and 7300GT. So much for card crippling. I turn it off because it makes it look worse for me. This is one of those kinks i have where i turn off most of the post-processing crap because i hate how blurry it makes everything. I turn it off because i DO notice the difference.
at higher resolution the AA becomes less important because the pixels themselves are smaller (unless you increase screen size appropriately, but thats doubtful and rarely happens). I often played without AA because i tend to have mid-range cards rather than top of the line (currently have a 760) and AA likes to eat GPU power. I also turn off the FXAA and all its variants because they actually make things look worse. Now i do notice the difference AA makes, its just sometimes a compromise for the framerate i find more important.
You know if netflix/youtube/twitch streamied in BR quality id be ok with it. Its compressed, but there are no big artefacts and compression is rater unagressive. But then something better would probably come around and id want that, its just that we never had better for movies.
I think the big difference here is that you think only twitch games require responsive controls. In reality almost every game does.
The technology at the time and general consensus defines what is acceptable. Clearly the consensus thinks that 30 fps is not acceptable and we do have the technology to play at higher framerates.
As far as resolution goes, 1080p has been a standard in the 90s for most, many expect things to improve, not downgrade.
No, 60 is not "high framerate". Its acceptable framerate. And 1080p is not high resolution, its standard resolution nowadays. I never talked about graphical settings other than to refute your point about consoles having equivalent of high settings so not sure why you put them here. clearly being weaker hardware they will have lower settings.
The difference is that even if nothing changes, current trends will make ray tracing feasible in 20 years whereas streaming being feasible requires invention of FTL communication.
No, please, no. I already don't have access to 100% of a game's content because the internet where I live is too slow for online play. I live in upstate NY and internet speeds are terrible here, download speeds at all 3 houses I have lived at in the past 2 years have regularly been Kb, and there are no options for providers. Not to mention the input lag of streaming combined with current gen TV's (its getting worse, not better) is already terrible for games where reaction times matter.
Sorry, my first google missed that. But it was originally 10Hz which is very low (actually the tick rate was 30 but the server only sent you 10 packets/sec, but it still added up to 100ms to your latency). I never claimed that an otherwise good game couldn't be ruined by latency, just that a cloud gaming service could keep latency low enough for the game to be playable.Strazdas said:
When Onlive started, you got your first game super cheap, so I got Just Cause 2 for ?2. And it was playable. I conquered half of Panau.
With Onlive, you just paid for the game and you could play it as much as you wanted for no additional cost. The average cost of running the servers was obviously included in the price. But while you may spend more on each game, you don't have to buy a console or PC.Strazdas said:
Onlive also offered a Netflix style arrangement where you paid something like $10 a month and could play whatever you wanted from a catalogue of games.
It would be nice, but he is using more computational power than a console can handle, probably more than any affordable PC could handle. The only way of doing this at all is via the cloud.Strazdas said:
If you have, for example, a limited supply of rockets, you might need about 5 seconds of physics calculations before everything settles down, then spend a minute or more running around, shooting and not doing anything that needs serious physics. Occasional mass destruction is better than no mass destruction.Strazdas said:
Perhaps you were lucky to be close enough.Bad Jim said:
Yes, and OnLive went bancrupt. Though its probably because it had very poor game selection more than anything else.
Thing is, PC costs does not dissapear with streaming, since most people use computer for more than just games. And you still have to make sure the average person pays for a console (raise the game costs appropriately) because they still need to produce the hardware on MS/Sony end.
OnLinve netflix style arrangement was very expensive from what i remmeber, but yes, they did offer it. Worth noting though that this did not gave you access to the entire catalogue, but only games where developers agreed with this. so its like imagine if you buy netflix subscription and get access only to half of the movies there and have to buy others seperately anyway. Though of course this was not OnLive fault but the publishers that refused to try this.
Thing is, hes not doing anything special though. The destructible enviroment he shown in that video, we had a very similar setup in RF:Guerilla in 2009, running on Xbox 360. So that makes me think the Crackdown devs were simply shit at optimization instead of it actually requiring massive amounts of power. Heck we got plenty of physics based games nowadays that do offer various kinds of destruction and none require the cloud. Two years ago Nvidia has shown that a 680, now a 3 generations behind card, could calculate physical bending of objects (for example grass) for millions of objects real time and wouldnt even break a sweat. we have the hardware to do it. we just need the developers to implement it.
If you look close at the video, there is a UI element that shows how many cloud resources they are using in real-time. Notice how when they are running around these resources do not fall all that much? the servers are still engaged with the player.
What you are describing is also very hard to implement in real gaming, because you are basically asking the client to establish new connections with server and alocate server resources every few seconds on-demand and thats simply not how server infrastructures work. If a server allocates say 8GB of ram to the user only that user can use it and noone else regardless of if he actually utilizes. what you are asking is that these resources be dropped from the player and then given back every few seconds? We havent perfected a way to do it on a local machine for multiple applications yet, let alone cloud computing.
You are, however, part of a shrinking demographic that is reaching an increasing level of irrelevance to the concumer market to the point where physical media releases are no longer a guarantee. The thing I just said, only in fewer words.FalloutJack said:
Again, so what? Now instead of you, there is a small market that doesn't justify the cost of mass production of physical media (that I already kind of addressed anyway, so...). That still doesn't address or change my point. It's kind of like that thing you said earlier:
The bottom line is, indeed, the bottom line. And the bottom's been falling out on physical media for a while. BD never reached saturation like DVD did, and even the companies that staked their wellbeing on them are not predicting clear skies. I mean, this is exactly what you were saying about consoles, except you're not on the side of the desired product. Digital video services happen to be what the movie companies want as well, but would be untenable if not so greatly desired by the consumer public. Meanwhile, they'd still be serving up Laserdiscs if that's what the public demanded.FalloutJack said:
Oh, and no. Streaming has not found a nest egg. It's still the rapidly growing form of video consumption.
Once again, you're speaking in terms of extremes. You're doing exactly what my post there said you can't do, trying to convince me that the bottom line is anything else than what it is, trying to redefine it according to those who want the money say, not those who have the money. History says you're wrong. You talk of laserdiscs and betamax, apples to oranges. Console VS streaming is as different as books and television. They're not in direct conflict with each other's existence. It's not the same as directly-competing products like Blu-Ray VS HD DVD. They require different setups, different resources, and not just in little ways like format. Essentially, you're trying to replace the hammer with a screwdriver, as opposed to the hammer with a better hammer with a claw for pulling nails out. That is the problem defined and that is what Mr. Ubisoft doesn't understand.Something Amyss said: