Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Publishers, You Can't Stop Me From Cloud Streaming Your Games
System
Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Publishers, You Can't Stop Me From Cloud Streaming Your Games
Steven breaks down his thoughts on Cloud Gaming, specifically looking at publisher behavior regarding pulling their games from these services.
Comments
It works just so damn good, input lag is so small that i can play shooters and race games with not much trouble.
But it might be cause they have a server in my country.
However, soon as IPV6 is a forced requirement then they can have complete control and monitor and make sure all your inputs are from you. Until then with IPV4 they can't.
Shadow is not in Canada, GeForce is.
The other obvious as i believe the article touched on is these developers are going to make money by signing deals with various competitors so they don't like the idea of someone profiting from their games without paying them.
This is really nothing new,geesj idk was like 7/8 years ago a small group of people wanted to utilize a simple app for Wow players to login,no money ,no strings attached but Blizzard quashed the ieea.
If you haven't realized it by now,Blizzard wants FULL 100% control of games you buy,they are real scummy nickel and dimer.
If these studios spent as much money and effort on their games as they do on lawyers and TSO/EULA's we would have a million AAA games to play.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
According to lawyers there are two reasons.
1 as long as the streams or videos are sort of promoting the product in a positive way they look at it as free advertising.
2 There is no real steadfast law versus the subject,so a develoepr would be going in with no definitive law to cite and would have to rely on convincign the court that it is simply a copyright infringement.
The definitive area is when you actually upload copyright material for others to use that is NOT your own material.A cloud service is a streaming service that would have to upload the files for others to use,this is definitely a copyright infringement,unless of course the service pays ..ahem Blizzard,Square Enix etc etc,which is what they obviously want.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Geesh i was watching that Chess channel "Gotham Chess"the other day and people were gettign banned for tanking their ratings.I am sure many that follow Poker know of thje Mike Postle cheating ordeal that even had the employee of the casino in on it.
$$$$ has been the bane of mankind since it's inception.Mankind has ALWAYS been about power,control and money feeds that perfectly.Do not expect cheating to EVER go away.
Furthermore,simply catching a cheat doesn't solve the problem because the damage is already done.Example banning botters/rmt from games after they already instilled billions of gold into the game did not do a single thing.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Maybe next year.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
the quality of Geforce now is ok , PS NOW however is way better for me more stable , HD w/o issues , no pixelations (maybe once in a blue moon) , wth Geforce now is a bit blurry
Im founder on geforce now but Nvidia needs to move before its too late. Put money now or lose it forever , im sure google STADIA is going all out
Even for consumer uses, the convenience of being able to check your e-mail from any device and having it just be there often outweighs the ability to get access to your old e-mails a few hundred milliseconds faster. Music or videos can often be streamed from the cloud and buffered to cover up latency so that a slight delay at the very start is the most noticeable drawback to not having many terabytes of stuff all stored locally.
The cloud isn't the solution to everything, and it can be a problem when it requires a ton of bandwidth to do things that are cheap to do locally, or when adding an extra hundred milliseconds of latency is a major problem. But it is the solution to quite a few things, likely including hosting the web site that you're reading right now.
The longer explanation is that the game won't be running on your local device, but will instead be running on a remote server. When you press a key to move or attack or whatever, it sends that input to the remote server, which uses it to determine what you're doing and render the game. It then sends the rendered images back to you to display on your local device.
As to whether you'll be able to run Crysis 3 at max settings on your phone, the answer is sort of but not really. Displaying the images on your screen can be done in a manner similar to streaming video, so that's not a barrier. Your phone not being able to keep up with rendering the game also isn't a problem, as that's done on a remote server.
There are several problems, though:
1) Your phone probably doesn't have the controls that you'd want in order to run Crysis 3 at all. It surely doesn't have a full-sized keyboard and mouse. It likely has only a touchscreen for input. One reason why mobile games tend to be so much simpler than PC games is that phones just don't have the input options to be able to run PC games from 20 years ago, even if they do have more than enough processing power.
2) Having to send data to a remote server and then get the rendered images streamed back to you adds a lot of latency. They try to optimize it to a considerable degree, but there's only so much that they can do. It can be like playing a game where every time you press a button, it takes an extra 100 ms to take effect. That will make it impossible to be competitive at a twitchy game, but is only a relatively minor nuisance for a turn-based game.
3) Having to stream completed images back to you takes a ton of bandwidth. They use very lossy compression to try to squish it down as much as they possibly can, but streaming a game can easily still use more than 10 GB per hour. Most cellular networks won't like it if you try to do that very much, and it's a problem even for a lot of wired connections.
4) The game as displayed on your screen won't truly be max settings, and likely won't be even originally as rendered. They'll typically restrict frame rates and resolutions to try to help keep bandwidth down. Depending on how heavy the game is, they might otherwise restrict the settings you can use. Just because it's on a remote server doesn't make the hardware free, and they commonly want one server to handle rendering for a lot of customers simultaneously. But the lossy compression is what really makes it not look like max settings at all. Depending on how it is compressed, it will likely look fine when not much is moving, but it's inevitably going to look terrible whenever you rotate the camera.
Firstly, Can it run Crysis on all max settings to your phone? Yes and no. The way you explain how lossy compression renders the game isn't exactly accurate based on what players see. For most services the compression is based on your bandwidth, so the more bandwidth you have, the less it needs to compress the stream, but yes you won't get rid of the compression entirely.
Generally, a connection that can sustain 20Mbps will be suitable for most players in most games. It doesn't mean that at times you won't notice some compression issues, but it's not nearly as bad as people suspect. In fact, you would be able to experience max settings, even in motion, without a fuzzy or pixelated experience. That being said, services such as Shadow have up to 70Mbps options which is very little compression, but the sustained bandwidth required means you'd have to have a very solid connection. It would rarely be suitable for a phones 4G connection. It would probably work on WiFi pretty well, but I wouldn't trust a public WiFi spot for any sustained throughput.
In terms of usage per hour, you're looking at about 7GBs an hour. So yes, it could eat up your data if you have data caps. Though some services, such as Shadow, have a low bandwidth mode, but utilizing it kind of defeats the purpose of services like this, that are meant to give you the best gaming performance and visuals you could reliably achieve. Low bandwidth mode is much more compressed and pixelated during motion.
Secondly, Mobile devices specifically have very different resolutions than PC's. So yes, while it's possible to play something like Crysis streaming from a cloud service like Shadow, unless the resolutions match, you won't get a "full screen" on your phone, at least, not one that works properly. In most cases, like how it's show in the picture of fallout 76 in the article, you would get black bars on the sides of your game, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how if you're using the virtual controller, your hands would be in that area and you couldn't see anything anyways.
As for peripherals, again, that's more of a non issue. You can use a controller on your phone to play most games, or even bluetooth peripherals like a keyboard or mouse. You could even go so far as to slide your phone into a VR headset if you wanted so it stays close to your face and you don't have issues seeing it. But it really wouldn't be too comfortable to do that.
Rather, what most people would likely do is utilize these systems to get in some games for simple play sessions. Like retrieving items from an auction house, or setting up new automated tasks.
It's also important to note that most of these services have Timeouts in place. So for example, if you think, "man I wish I could just stay logged into the game all day so I can pop in when I want" like in GW2 or whatever, it doesn't work like that. Sure you could rig it to keep the game alive through a macro of some sort, but for the most part, these services check on intervals for activity and cut the stream if they see you aren't using it. Some do it as quickly as 10 minutes of inactivity.
So.. to the question, "Can I play Crysis 3 on max settings on my phone?" Long answer is, yes, you can, but you probably wouldn't want to. Now, if you were to ask, can I play Crysis 3 on my iPad or Android Tablet when I'm in bed because I don't want to sit at my PC... the answer to that is yes, and you'd probably have a pretty good experience too.
The first would be:
How fast and stable is your internet?
Do you have any data caps?
How old is your computer?
Will the cost of upgrading be less than 400 dollars?
Do you play mostly online games or single player?
Do you have multiple devices at your home that you want to play on?
For me, because I play on several devices, some of which have limited space to house games, plus my network is good and I don't have a data cap, and because many of my games are online RPGs, I don't mind cloud gaming and it's beneficial and cost effective for me.
Mileage may vary
In reality, what thin clients commonly do is delta compression. That is, for a new frame, transmit the parts that changed, but not the parts that didn't. So long as not very much of the picture changes each frame, that more or less works. Think of Centipede, for example, with a handful of sprites moving on an otherwise fixed background. Or think of reading an e-mail, which is the sort of task that thin clients are really built for.
The problem with this is that if a game can guarantee that it will never have very much of the screen changing at once, then the rendering load is almost certainly trivial on a cell phone. If the question is, can I run game X on a phone by streaming it, and game X can easily be run locally on the phone, then it doesn't matter if you can stream it. That's a dumb thing to do.
It is common for more demanding games to have not very much of the screen changing most of the time, but then a lot changes at once now and then. Rotating the camera will change most of the screen at once in a lot of games, for example.
I'm of the view that a computer that works 99% of the time is a computer that doesn't work. If game streaming works fine 99% of the time, but chokes on the other 1%, then that basically doesn't work. But it's actually worse than that. When things are changing fast is exactly when you need to see what is going on. A computer that works exactly right except for when it matters is a computer that doesn't work.
On peripherals, when someone asks if they can run a game on their phone, they usually don't mean "if I happen to have a full-size keyboard, a real mouse, and a good surface on which to place the mouse available". So an answer of "only of you have those things" would usually be an answer of "no".
As for simple things like checking an auction house, if that's a major use case, then the real fix is for developers to offer a browser-based way to check the auction house. That would get you the functionality without all of the drawbacks that come with game streaming. Neverwinter had some stuff that you could do in a browser for a while, for example. That it is uncommon for demanding PC games to offer a browser-based interface to the portions of the game where that would be possible tells me that they don't think there is much demand for it.
To start, simply by saying that if a computer works 99% of the time than it doesn't work is ridiculous, no computer works 100% of the time, ever. There's no possible way it could. But the rate of failure between a cloud platform and localized PC is far and away the 100% to your 99%. If a game runs on a cloud platform, then you don't have to worry about drivers, you don't have to worry about the right video card. Cloud systems are way less prone to failure than your actual PC is. That's predominantly why the majority of businesses utilize cloud systems these days.
As for the compression and visual quality between your monitor and something that you're streaming, that doesn't even make any sense why you're attempting to push data quality based on visual throughput of your monitor cable. It's not even close to apples to apples, because the monitor is what displays what the PC renders, that doesn't account for what the PC is actually displaying, nor what is actually depicted on the server streaming a game.
For example, lets say you're watching a 4K video and you're streaming it on one channel and watching it on a blu ray on another. At best on BluRay you're looking at what, 100 - 120 Mbps? Streaming on something like Netflix, roughly would throttle that same throughput to 25Mbps.
Visually a streaming service that runs at 70Mbps is already close to the maximum of what an UltraHD BluRay disc displays at. It's higher than what a 1080p display would show, which would be at virtually no compression at that resolution.
But that isn't even the only benefits of cloud streaming.
Yes, I could stream some games on a phone, games that can only be played on a PC. Even if you were to say you don't want to do that, I could also do the same thing on a tablet, or more importantly, I could do this on a Linux or Mac. No need to dual boot at all anymore, no need to compromise what operating system you want to run, you can download an app or open a browser and just play.
In addition to that, with a streaming service, you never have to upgrade, install drivers or increase storage. If a game releases and it is 200GB's you don't have to clear off space or old games, you just launch the game and it works. Think of it from a cost perspective. Take something like GeForce Now, it's 5 dollars a month. An entire year of streaming is 60 dollars. How much would a 2080 cost, by itself, forget the rest of the PC, just the video card. 400 dollars at best? How many years of playtime would you get on a service like GeForce Now for the cost of a single video card?
For some people, by the time they paid off the video card, it would be time to upgrade again anyways.
As someone who has a great PC, I opt to use my streaming service more times than not. I get to play all the games I like on all the devices I want, wherever I want in my house. If I want to play but my wife wants me to sit with her, I don't need an expensive laptop.