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As predicted PS4 will be ushering in streaming gaming for Consoles
GrayGhost79
Member UncommonPosts: 4,775
in Hardware
As some may know me and a few others debated in great detail about the future of streaming games, specifically Sonys acquisition of Gaiki (A company similar to Onlive).
In any case it turns out Sony did purchase Gaiki for streaming games. It looks like it will not only be a big part of the PS4 but they are also looking to add the service to PS3 and Vita.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/20/playstation-cloud-revealed
Microsft has also been looking into streaming games but have yet to leak or state anything concrete so we will see but again I see them also embracing streaming games.
Comments
It serves two purposes, both of which make sense in ways that using streaming as your primary solution for gaming does not.
One is backward compatibility. The CPU in the PS4 is very different from that of the PS3. Going with Cell in the PS3 was a blunder for Sony, so they had to move away from it eventually--and the sooner, the better. But that means that the CPU in the PS4, while vastly superior for gaming to the one in the PS3, can't just run code written for the PS3 off-the-shelf, and likely wouldn't be able to run it with just minor modifications, either.
Some PS3 games will run natively on a PS4 if the game developer takes the time to port the game to PS4. But if the game developer doesn't, then running a PS3 game natively on a PS4 won't work. Playing a PS3 game on a PS4 by streaming it won't be nearly as good as playing it natively on a PS3. But if you really want to play the game, it's a lot better than not being able to play it at all. That's why Sony decided to offer stremaing PS3 games.
The other purpose is a quick trial of a game. If you just want to try a quick demo of a game to get some idea of what it's about, needing to either go buy a physical Blu-Ray disk or download 20 GB is a big barrier to that. Streaming means that you can just jump in and play the game immediately. It will give you a far worse experience than if you were rendering it locally, so while it's not a long-term solution, it's fine if you just want a quick 15 minute trial before you decide whether or not to buy the game.
Sony is not using streaming as their primary method for rendering PS4 games. The PS4 has pretty capable hardware in it, and streaming is only used for those two special cases.
As for the PlayStation Vita, the idea is that you render a game on your PS4 and then stream it to your Vita. That's streaming over a LAN, which is a totally different critter from streaming over the Internet at large. That gives you vastly higher bandwidth at vastly lower latencies. And yes, that does make a lot of sense, if both ends have adequate video encode and decode hardware to prevent latency from becoming a big problem.
Pretty much, the more that comes out the more it looks like their main focus in going to be on the cloud gaming service. They've said its going to be the glue of the PS4 among other things that help paint this picture.
Spectating, streaming, downloading games straight to the PS4, and free trials online doesn't bode to well for Gamestop.
Nice to see so much focus being put on cloud gaming though. Between Steam, Microsoft, and Sony the era of cloud gaming should be rolling in fairly quickly.
a detailed editorial from last summer
What has Sony bought for its $380 million, and what does it mean for its competitors?
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2 ... ver-lining
EQ2 fan sites
If the main focus were going to be on cloud gaming, then why would the PS4 have an 8 core CPU, an 18 GCN CU GPU, and 8 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus? As far as I'm aware, the PS4 will be the first device of any type to use GDDR5 as main system memory. None of that is cheap--and none of it is useful to streaming. If streaming were the focus, the Sony could make a streaming-only version of the PS4, sell it for $200, and make a handsome profit on each unit sold. As it stands, they're probably going to lose money on every unit sold while selling them for over $400.
Streaming will fill a few niches where traditional hardware would fare poorly (backward compatibility and demo or trial versions of games with very large downloads), but the PS4's focus will be squarely on local rendering the way it has always been done.
I assumed the streaming thing was just for demos or other such stuff like that o.o
But then again they did say they will autodownload demos for you...which is weird...
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**This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**
Nah, it's a bit naive to think a service that can offer streaming gameplay won't be used to offer more than just demos and such. With things like the Steambox on the horizon thats looking to focus on cloud gaming reducing the hardware cost of a "Gaming Rig" as well as Nvidia following suit Sony and Microsoft are going to be forced to offer similar if not the same.
Not to mention, cloud gaming will extened the lifespan of a console a great deal more than hardware could which is a win/win.
In any case it's not like the PS4 is sporting high end hardware. It's about the equivilant of a low end gaming rig. For $250 to $300 you can build a PC equivilant of a PS4 lol. By the time it launches I can only see it being cheaper.
In the end DRM is forcing many games to be online only, MMO's are already online only, multiplayer games have moved away from couch and lan parties to multiplayer/co-op being online only. Cloud gaming is pretty much the inevitable end result in all of this so it makes little sense to not utilize it with the next generation of consoles because it puts them at a disadvantage.
Cloud gaming can further assist in combating...
1) Piracy
2) Loss of revenue through used game sales
3) Cheating
Its one of those inevitable things, it's going to happen. Whether companies like Sony and Microsoft fully embrace it or not is going to decide whether they survive or not. When the dust settles it's likely that neither Sony or Microsoft will ever fully embrace cloud gaming and will fall by the wayside while new companies like Steam take their place.
So once the PS4 hits, no one will still use their PS3's and buy used games? I don't get it. Why will these old games not work anymore? I have a 360 that is not hooked up to the internet, the PS3 doesn't work the same way? I am wondering...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
What you're missing is that just because something technically can be done, doesn't automatically mean that customers will be willing to pay for it to be done. If so inclined, Microsoft could easily set Windows to automatically shut down an hour after you boot the computer. The reason they don't is that virtually no one would want it to do that.
You dismiss PS4 hardware as the low end, then go on to extol the virtues of cloud gaming. That's insane. Cloud gaming is the low end. Compared to cloud gaming, $500 laptops look positively high end. Give it several years and we'll probably have $500 tablets that look high end as compared to cloud gaming.
While Sony will surely offer streaming demos for PS4, it's far from clear how many games will want it. You can do the same on PC today. TERA already did. How many other games have rushed to follow suit?
Streaming demos does have the huge advantage of skipping the download time. But it comes with huge drawbacks, too: greatly degraded image quality and sloppy controls. Game developers know that if someone first tries your game via a streaming demo, they're playing a greatly degrated version of your game. People who would have liked the real game without the defects intrinsic to streaming could easily dislike the game when they try it streamed and decide against buying the game. A streaming demo that gets more people to try your game could easily lead to fewer sales. It's not inevitable that it will work out that way; customers might be savvy enough to separate the problems intrinsic to streaming from problems with the game itself. Or they might not, and if not, then streaming demos will never catch on.
There will always be gamers who care about image quality and/or control responsiveness. Indeed, one could argue that that's most of the "serious" gaming market (as opposed to, say, Solitaire or Facebook games). For those people, streaming is a complete non-starter unless there's no alternative. If you can render the game locally, you do. A $500 laptop will blow streaming out of the water. And a PlayStation 4 has far more powerful hardware than a $500 laptop.
Sony has promised that the PlayStation 4 will still allow the sale of used games. If the next Xbox doesn't, then you can expect Sony to make a big deal about this in trying to convince people to buy a PS4 and not an Xbox.
PS3 games will still work just fine on a PS3. But they won't work just fine on a PS4 unless the game developer ports the game. Streaming will make it possible to play PS3 games on a PS4, albeit with greatly degraded image quality and control responsiveness. Having that option is surely better than not having it, though it's not clear how much better it is. Why buy PS3 games if you don't have a PS3?
New consoles are cool, for about two years. Then they just get uglier and uglier for another six years or so.
No thanks. I'll stick to PC gaming.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Where did Sony say this about used games on the PS4? I haven't seen this.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/playstation-4-will-play-used-games-6404263
EQ2 fan sites
Well if the always on rumor and the madatory Kinect rumor about the next x-box, and the fact that about 8 months ago Microsoft added into its EULA the wording about charging extra viewers of movies, leads me to not want MS spying on me in my living room.
Clearly they intend to charge people who watch movies over x-box live and they will charge by the head. This should be throwing up huge flags to consumers.
PS4 looks like the next gen console for me, my Wii-U is a brick the games on it are really bleh, and all my kids do when they do play it, is argue over the tablet controller.
Microsoft is making me feel uneasy, sad because i am a huge consumer of consoles, but i do not forsee purchasing a new X-box, i do see getting a new PS4.
Lolipops !
I actually like the streaming features and I have tried streaming on my PC but it is chronic. Like large parts of the UK my internet connection is not up to streaming.
I think I have about average connection quality, I get 16mb down and 0.8mb UP, that up speed is chronic. If I stream from my PC at anything above 480p the network slows to a crawl.
I tried OnLive last year too and while some games were playable, they were blurry and the delay from button presses was fairly obvious.
If you live somewhere like Sweden then all these new streaming tools will be awesome but for those of us with only one connection option and a terrible infrastructure in general these new things will be brutal and won't work correctly, people that have no understanding of how it's supposed to work will just blame the consoles and I think that is dangerous for Sony.
Quizzical is making alot of sence and this is the 2nd time you're ignoring his posts while you're replying to those posts where people just type a few words with their guesses...
cloud gaming can not be done to satisfy the actual quality which gamers expect... Even tho internet is available in most countries, the speeds are still not good enough to stream good quality videos and you'd squize a game streaming into that picture with HD quality and low latency gaming over cloud?
It'll be used in ways quizzical said and maybe few other tricks they've got in their sleeves, but to expect it'll be used for cloud streaming with satisfying quality to provide a good gaming expirience... Now THAT is naive..
"Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life."
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I swear I never really would pay for a game like that, one thing is you pay for a game so you can play online other is you pay for a game, one things most people miss is simple they don't have loss of revenue, its just greed they hope to force people to buy from then hoping they game are that good, but come on most people who piracy a game or buy a used one is not willing to buy that game, it just there now because its cheap.
also saying and hoping piracy will go away with cloud computing is wishfull thinking to be polite, you have private server for MMOs, you can create a server on your machine so you can play SC2 without the battle net, and cheating please, all cheating happens online and don't matter what they do its always easy to by pass, most of time the diference is the admins of the game work hard to ban and stop then before it become too hard to stop then.
@castille you are right on most of you said, but i'm one of the old guys who don't want to have anything with cloud gamming computing and such, because i'm not willing to share my resources with others, and I will not mention the other problems who the cloud fashion now will bring.
but most guys ehre should remember one thing companys never do things to help you only then, if they are pushing and trying to force you do anything you better start to notice it will not be good for you in the long run
The first two of those can be handled by simple always-online DRM. Indeed, those give you all of the anti-piracy and anti-reselling benefits of full cloud gaming. And they do it at multiple orders of magnitude less in cost to the company that made the game. If you have to spend $2 million on cloud gaming to reduce piracy by $1 million, you're doing it wrong--and remember that the PS4 will already have robust anti-piracy controls, quite apart from streaming.
Furthermore, always-online DRM is far less intrusive to players than full cloud gaming. Always-online DRM doesn't degrade image quality at all. It doesn't affect latency at all. While it does say, "You can't play a single-player game because your Internet connection is completely down today," that sure beats, "You can't play a single-player game because your Internet connection isn't quite optimal today."
Now, just because you can doesn't automatically mean that you should or will. Always-online DRM has problems of its own, and can significantly inconvenience the paying customers that every company values highly. But the inconvenience from full cloud gaming is orders of magnitude worse than simple always-online DRM, and for many, pushes into "product works so poorly that it might as well not work at all" territory.
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Cheating is only a problem with online gaming. If people cheat at a single-player game, does anyone care? I've even gone in and edited saved game files in Europa Universalis II. Did that bother anyone else who played the game? Would anyone have ever known about it if I didn't tell you?
If a game is online, anyway, then you can verify everything that matters server-side. That's the "right" way to prevent cheating, and full cloud gaming doesn't offer much stronger anti-cheating controls than that. Preventing cheating by verifying things server-side isn't trivial to do, but neither is cloud gaming a magic bullet that fixes it.
Furthermore, verifying everything server-side is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than rendering the game server-side and streaming it, as you'd have to do for cloud gaming. Games that have rampant problems with cheating tend to do so because they don't verify everything server-side--and this is often due to the cost of doing so. It's cheaper to have a "server" hosted on a random player's computer, and have the official servers just be a matchmaking service. Companies that aren't willing to pay the costs of hosting games on their own servers because it's too expensive aren't going to suddenly be willing to pay orders of magnitude more than that to stream games from their own servers.
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The upshot is that, while cloud gaming does offer the benefits you cite, there are dramatically cheaper ways to get those benefits, and at far less inconvenience to customers. Any company that requires cloud gaming with any of those three reasons as one of the main justifications (as opposed to minor side effects) will probably go out of business for being terminally stupid--and certainly deserve to.
and funny part, piracy is still here and they already break any ps3 anti piracy, and any DRM to this day they also already break it, pretty much the "war" agaisnt piracy is company spend millions to prevent, pirate spend 2 days to break it for free, or simple for challenge.
I think cloud gaming has a future.
Cloud computing is already here. We've been using it for years, and it just gets more and more ubiquitous and prevalent over time. More and more "services" will move to the cloud, the limiting factor being bandwidth availability more than anything. The more bandwidth we have available and accessable to the general public, the more services and functionality we will see out of cloud computing.
Email moved to the cloud early on - AOL mail, Hotmail, Gmail - the clients live in the cloud, the mail stays in the cloud, we just didn't call it the cloud until recently. More and more "stuff" is moving there - word processors are already there, operating systems are moving there (Onlive Desktop, Windows Remote Desktop, VNC, Google Chromebooks).
Gaming does fall into that generalization; however, it requires a lot more bandwidth than we currently have - maybe in Japan/Korea/Eastern Europe, where they are sporting 50+Mb/sec on average to the typical house, they may just be on the cusp of where it's a practical possibility. In the US and most of the rest of the world, we're still struggling to provide the typical household with enough bandwidth to do video streaming (and before you go out saying "Well I have 100MB/Sec FIOS and I can stream 18 HD videos at the same time, so can everyone else" - most of the world does not have access to FIOS, most of the geography and more than 1/4 the population of the US doesn't have access to what the FCC defines as broadband, which is only around 760kb/sec).
The question is: is it more economical for a service provider (and here I mean SAAS, not ISP) to provide the hardware (via a datacenter and hosting "in the cloud"), or require their clients to provide their own hardware and bundle their service as an application. More and more - companies are deciding that eliminating the hurdle of hardware requirements broadens their audience, and simplifies their application design: They know exactly what hardware it will run on, it's in their datacenter. They just need to keep the front end lightweight and generic. They know when and how you will get your software updated: it's in their datacenter, they don't have to worry about distributing patches. They can monitor security flaws in real time, the software lives in their datacenter, they can see breaches and react immediately, with changes being pushed to all users immediately.
There are a lot of benefits to SAAS, and I think gaming will get there - our clients will be thin devices that don't require a lot of hardware power (think of what that will do for battery life) - they just need to be rendering engines with interface mechanics (buttons, touchscreens, motion sensors, cameras, microphones, whatever), and everything else is handled on the cloud and transmitted to you. Something as small as Google Glass could be running something as hardware-punishing as Crysis on Ultra without an issue, because all the rendering and computations are done on a more powerful computer someplace else. Wii U controller does this on a local basis - all the video for the controller screen is rendered on the Console, and transmitted to the controller via dedicated WiFi N connection (and even that gets stressed for bandwidth, even at that low 854x480 resolution). nVidia Shield is working this way too. It's starting on a local network, there still needs to be a lot of backbone work before we see it on a global scale though.
But that all requires bandwidth. Once the bandwidth gets there, you can bet cloud gaming will already be there. Today's bottleneck isn't CPU speed, or GPU power, it's bandwidth, and it's been bandwidth for the last decade, and will continue to be bandwidth until we have something that is completely transparent, wireless, and much higher capacity than anything we can currently imagine.
read more about cloud computing before thinking on anything else, one thing is having files saved in a server another is having everything over the net, please google cloud computing, and everything liked to it then see if what you say really is rightSorry, I mean no offense by ignoring Quizzical. He's one of those that's just not open to change and has been wrong on every front in this discussion in the past few years so far.
I told him consoles were going to need to look into streaming. He argued that they would not. Then of course Microsoft and Sony both looked into it. Sony purchased a company and Microsoft has looked into a few.
I stated they would be used to stream games. He argued that it wouldn't, that they actually wanted these companies for other purposes. Yet here is Sony and Steam both looking to stream games. Sony so far has stated that they are looking to stream older titles and PS3 titles as well as free trials and etc. (This is what Sony has said) but I don't see it stopping there, I mean if you can stream PS3 titles why is it far fetched to consider the possibility to stream PS4 titles in the not so distant future?
I have no problem discussing things, but not with someone closed minded and proven wrong numerous times on this specific subject.
+1. I'm done with consoles. Pay $600 (assuming, since that's what the PS3 went for) for something that just plays games and blu-ray, or pay $600 for something that does that and a million other things...not a hard choice really lol.Edit: Not to mention, by the time they launch, consoles are already outdated...
Thanks. It is right.
Id like to point out that steambox never said anything about cloud streaming. All they said was streaming from within your own home.
Edit :
Its not even streaming the word that they used in the press releases iirc. I just remember saying the distinction that they do not want to offer something like on live. Gabe just pointed out the usefulness of streaming a la shield (local streaming) and most definitely not streaming through the internet
''/\/\'' Posted using Iphone bunni
( o.o)
(")(")
**This bunny was cloned from bunnies belonging to Gobla and is part of the Quizzical Fanclub and the The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club**