/v/ - Video Games

>>16839404

Most likely a long time into the future where we have 100% Perfect Satellite Internet

I do believe streaming is possible, but, for some fucking reason, it seems like companies keep screwing it up somehow and creating an intolerable amount of lag that shouldn't even be possible.

However, with that being said, I'm not going to support any of the streaming services, regardless of how many games are made for them. I won't be able to take ownership of my games, and there's nothing stopping the company from ripping them out of my hands. That's on top of the fact that physical games aren't going anywhere.

>>16839404

>I ask this because I genuinely don't think we really have a choice in this matter.

Even if we, the players, didn't. The hardware industry does. They like to actually sell shit, and not give up their market.

Good for them, since I actually like to customize and own shit too.

It'll be a thing. Had Google started with turn based games like Civilization or something like KotOR 2 and such, they'd have been fine. Instead they chose fucking fighting and rhythm games. How fucking stupid do you have to be to deliberately undermine your mixed bag tech?

Anyway, someone will nut out the specifics and it will happen. It's a marketing problem now.

>>16839404

It'll only work for certain genres. Lag is inevitable, fighting games and rythym games will never work for example. However, walking simulators and turn based games will do just fine by comparison. The only problem is that most of the casual audience has only a taste for cinematic garbage which won't work.

>>16839407

Far from it. I highly doubt we will be more than 10-20 years away from consoles (and PC-gaming for that matter) going completely extinct.

>>16839421

All that can be hoped for is that a certain amount of bad taste will be left in player's mouths after the Stadia fiasco.

>>16839427

Please, a console gen ago everyone was all about COD and brown shooters. Then we went to cover-based third-person crap, which evolved into the """cinematic exprience""" games we get today.

Sooner or later everyone will land on something that actually works on a streaming machine then it's straight off to the Cloud Gaming hell for all of us.

>>16839415

I think you're underestimating the cunning of the marked. The only hardware makers that will suffer are those who make GPUs, and honestly Nvidia would just transfer into going full Bitcoin-slut.

>>16839404

>Movies, TV shows and music have all made the transition to being primarily streaming based

All of these are much easier to stream, to the point that they were "streamed" well before the internet even existed. The way in which they're streamed has changed, but that's it. Games are a significantly bigger challenge because you have to deal with input lag. The technical issues are very difficult to overcome even in principle. Turn-based games can be streamed without much difficulty, but as long as some games have to be run locally it's going to be hard to convince people not to run their other games locally.

>while most new tech is coming out as services provided not consumer-owned products

In many of these cases this is done with fairly conventional DRM, not by running it on their own hardware and streaming it to the consumer over the internet. Photoshop is a subscription service now, but the software still has to run locally.

>>16839441

It's going to be a hell of a fight.

Streaming is just downright un-American though. A man deserves to have his own computer.

>>16839458

I agree that OP is a faggot, but there's legitimate discussion to be had here. In my opinion I think cloud gaming won't replace Digital Downloads but rather will act as a supplement or a novelty to the existing norm. It's the reason people are porting games to the Nintendo Switch rather than the Google Play Store since they know most people aren't willing to strap on a clip to their 1,000 dollar phone.

>>16839467

The Stadia model won't work. It'll either have to be based on something like Gamepass or something like Geforce Now.

Another thing, I'm heavy into modding. At least when it can be done.

That will be another thing lost if this shit becomes the norm.

>>16839473

Why do you fags keep coming here?

The gayming industry is going to force this down everyone's throats, and it's going to be the whole ordeal of "if you dont like it buy a 360", but companies won't sell 360s or any consoles with physical medium. DWE're start of a false dichotomy, like oh you dont have to stream, you still have full games, but you have to download half the game, or pay more money to make it work. Next you won't even be able to buy the disk at all

Local and personal game streaming sure, as an actual market? Fuck no. Literally never has it ever been successful, and the rare cases where it does sell is because it's an amending of another service.

>>16839494

Pretty much, no one's gonna wanna pay separately for a cloud version of the same game. Even Phil "hentai games" Spencer knows that.

>>16839404

The problem is that from a technological standpoint its already possible. The main issue however is economic. You see sending a video signal over the network to a screen while receiving inputs from a controller is not a problem.

First you need to have enough people out there who can even consider getting a fast enough connection. Many places lack the infrastructure to even allow for fast enough internet connection for could gaming(unless you intend to play at 480p, 23.9fps). However for everything else that infrastructure is more than enough so internet and telecommunication companies would be burning untold billions worldwide to make this one thing even available. Even with Google cash that is a tall order.

But then there is the problem of still needing the hardware to generate said video signal(a.k.a console/computer). Whats more you basically need individual hardware for each user to maintain sensible performance(without wild drops and jumps in fps). That means you need the equivalent of millions of PCs stashed away somewhere that would need to be exclusively dedicated to playing games. You cant just occasionally lend out half of them for some other cloud processing shit because you never know when player will want to login and play "their" games. And since its a subscription service you never know how much hardware do you exactly need at any given time.

So for the service to work you need a have and maintain a lot of hardware which naturally means you get to have very high expenses and that means the price of subscription will also have to be very high. This is why Stadia requires you to "buy" your games on top of paying for a subscription(and they are still probably losing money on it anyway). This coupled with the high price of high(like really high) speed internet makes the whole thing pretty much worthless for most users. Most people generally play only a couple of games and when just keeping access to those games quickly becomes more expensive than just buying a regular copy with a console they lose interest. Not to mention that a console with games has intrinsic value and can be sold later to purchase the new generation, no such cost reduction with Stadia or any equivalent.

So in summation its simply too expensive. Maybe once we develop a new kind of a metal that can be easily laid down and can transmits data at 1000tb/s speeds without melting than we talk about it being a viable model. As it stands its only a novelty that can have some limited success but not much more.

It's inevitable and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know how economics work. We are literally the last generation of people who do not want this.

>>16839407

meanwhile hdtv's are now at 32K and 2 games can run well on it

>>16839592

Tech paradigms are unpredictable. Even this, a product of the Data Center-centric model, might just become a thing of the past, and you could suddenly see the current Giants like Google struggling to keep relevant in a new paradigm. Not to say the old model of individual processing power would replace it again, but perhaps something like it in the form of blockchains. Or who knows..

>>16839610

Go back to OneAngryGoy kid.

>>16839592

Nigger there have been game streaming services since the 2000s it don't work. Streaming just doesn't work for an active application that requires repeated low latency connection.

Fuck man, it doesn't take a neurologist to hit on the splitting factor of ONLINE MULTI-PLAYER GAMES, SINCE FUCKIN DIALUP WAS A THING yet streaming services STILL can't sell themselves without amputating features EX: Sony trying to sell psnow by crippling backwards compatibility for NO USEFUL REASON besides gluing it to their even bigger ripoff than psnow.

>>16839622

Forgetting all the theorizing I did about tech paradigms and possible death of Data Center, just this alone is probably a good enough reason. The people designing this shit are just delusional scrubs and don't think or have any of the demands of actual gamers. To them, it's "good enough" to just have pixels floating on a screen. Low standards, and it'll just attract equally low standard customers.

That said, they're all fucking Marxists (at least in the abstract) and envision the world under grand, Centralized schemes.. and may just attempt to ram this all down people's throats anyhow. Standards be damned. For this alone, they all must be premptively destroyed and hung in the streets. If people knew what was good for them at least.

>>16839633

Don't worry, anon. This is another Marxist trick - convincing you that you've reached the End of History. The end of production and wealth creation (and therefore, it just needs to be "managed" at this point). Although Marx himself thought the Industrial Revolution was the End in his own day. That's about the only difference. Google and the like have just redefined the same delusion in their own image, for our day.

Fuck them. Have hope. You don't know what will happen.

Oh, blackpill fag is here.

>>16839648

>you dont know what will happen

Yes we do. History will always repeat itself

>I genuinely don't think we really have a choice in this matter

You have the choice to not play streaming games which is a pretty easy choice.

If streaming games became a thing gamers would have to be so generationally retarded that they'd just do that shit older brothers did to their kid siblings, give them a controller attached to nothing, show them a video of gameplay and let them think they're playing it.

>>16839661

It's only the End of History when they are given power to enforce it as such. In places where individuals have power, new developments inevitably come about and changed the course of history.

This can even be illustrated with something as innocuous as toothbrushes. Once the Soviets decided on a particular design of toothbrush - down to the number of bristles and length and limited colors it came in - they just churned them out in the same way, for years. Free, simple boring toothbrushes for the masses. Yat! But underneath the facade, this was soul destroying. Humanity longs for new and exciting toothbrushes. And across the world, they set out making that. Americans weren't so restricted and came up with dozens upon dozens of new designs of toothbrushes. One for every day of the week, of every year in the Cold War. And average Joe American woke up with a spring in his step and a smile on his face and couldn't wait to brush his teeth, then enter work kick ass - and create products and services of his own that enriched others. This, in turn, made America all the more wealthy and creative and less stagnant of a society. Everyone was happy with their choices and freedom. And they won the Cold War - with a fucking toothbrush. The End of History was postponed.

Don't spit on all they've done, now that game streaming is here.

>>16839679

>everyone ITT knows it deep down.

I really don't. Admittedly, I'm kind of being a spaz in the other direction.

>>16839404

>"Game streaming will be a thing, whether you want it or not."

I dont have faith in it. I doubt its possible eliminating lag from a streaming, and while its possible to play some games, fast pace games like DMC would be fucking hell.

>"You don't have to please an existing customer when you can easily find a new one to take his place."

the most retarded concept that they come with. game was always niche in the past so just because it got a bit more popular to think its possible to throw your fanbase under bus and create a new bigger one with just ONE game is stupid. and we already got many examples that proves this.

>>16839681

Hey friend, you're replying to blackpill fag. It's honestly not worth the time to reply.

>>16839404

>>"Game streaming will be a thing, whether you want it or not."

Absolutely true, and sooner than you think.

The fact that it is slower and less smooth than hardwire is not something they care about. The fact is that the model they are currently using is too expensive to sustain, and they will be switching as soon as they possibly can force it to be done.

This is in tandem with the push for app-based smaller games with multiple updates rather than large epic one-time stand alones.

And no. We don't have a choice except to not buy into any of it. But the other undeniable thing about it is that console and PC gamers are no longer the target demographic. The money is in the kids who are just starting out gaming, and those kids are doing it on kid tablets. Game consoles are not going to be a thing in ten years, tops.

>>16839640

>never underestimate the lack of standards of the normalfags.

You shouldn't underestimate just how shitty the internet is here in America. Till they've fixed that it'll never catch on, that market's a must have now that China is kill.

>>16839696

This is pretty much it. Actual improvements of service to draw new business have stopped and the industry has moved on to seeing how much they can whittle away and how high they can raise prices before they pull the equivalent of the EAFront 2 lootbox fiasco and have the government kick their shit in. Murrica will never have the speed and bandwidth to make this work.

>>16839691

You're absolutely right. Console and PC gaming will be completely dead in 10 years in favor of mobile and cloud gaming. The kandscape is about to change, and in a very bad way.

>>16839696

They already have that market.

>>16839691

>But the other undeniable thing about it is that console and PC gamers are no longer the target demographic. The money is in the kids who are just starting out gaming, and those kids are doing it on kid tablets. Game consoles are not going to be a thing in ten years, tops.

Mobile games are a fundamentally different market from PC and console games. Consoles might get absorbed into PC, but they're not going to get absorbed into mobile because there are whole genres that just don't work on mobile. Fighting games are still going to be around in ten years, and they're not going to be played on fucking tablets.

>>16839756

*landscape

>>16839404

>Does /v/ believe the following statement is true or false:

>>"Game streaming will be a thing, whether you want it or not."

It's objectively false, with plenty of history to back it up and it only requires a little bit of common sense to understand why.

First of all, "game streaming" requires infrastructure that is NOT as available as most would think. There's plenty of countries where this would simply not work without massive lag and even most countries where it is possible, it'd be restricted to urban centers in metropolis.

The actual market space for this idea does not exist yet to begin with, it's almost the same issue with making VR games and expecting a lot of sales from a mostly niche market.

Second of all, we are already past the point where this actually matters anyway and we made it. Digital-only games are sold with almost no issues and the market still works, but the only reason it is so is because this is actually to the advantage of the consumer in some ways like not having to deal with degrading physical storage, cloud saves, easily download and installing a game from your digital library, etc.

Cloud gaming does not offer the same level of advantages to this. It potentially reduces the specs you need to play a game but that's it and anyone rich enough to buy the internet connection you need for this to be worth it is more than capable of having a beast rig anyway.

To put it more simply, digital sales are fast food. Easy and convenient but not really that good for you. Opening a shack right next to it where you can pay to drink your food from a straw is not a leap in service quality so high that it justifies slurping away a burger you can't even see.

Finally: "whether you want it or not" I'm sure this statement will be overlooked but it's actually quite comical.

Steam only became the hegemony it currently is because the consumers wanted, not because it was destined to it or anything.

GOG still exists with it's business model because there's consumers that care about not having DRM in their digital copies, not because CDPR feels like hosting that service.

Key re-seller sites exist because consumers would rather buy cheap keys than the original price most of the time.

The consumer ALWAYS decides how the market works and anyone that thinks otherwise pays dearly for their folly.

Ask Bioware if "Dragon Age \ Mass Effect will be LGBT friendly, where you want it or not" and see how well that went.

Ask EA if "Simcity will always be online, whether you want it or not" and see how popular Cities Skylines became.

Ask Microsoft "You will play our version of Minecraft, wether you want it or not" and see how the modding community stuck to 1.12 instead.

Cloud gaming is a corporate wet dream but something absolutely so fragile that they are bound to fuck it up just by even thinking about it and even normalfags will wonder "what's the point of this shit?"

>>16839756

>They already have that market.

No they don't. Streaming games requires a hell of a lot better internet than is available in burgerland.

The average gamer laughs at the idea of input lag in singleplayer games. The current demographic that these big companies are marketting to? Children hopped up on sugar and Adderall.

You expect a group with a shorter attention span than rodents to accept huge input lag on games like Fortnite?

Considering the amount of popular games that are autoaim, farmville tier or walking sims, I doubt it much matters if the infrastructure catches up. There will always be plenty good shit that it just won't work for and continue to be superior on proper hardware.

>>16839790

>Steam only became the hegemony it currently is because the consumers wanted, not because it was destined to it or anything.

To be fair, Physical PC games always kind of sucked compared to console/handheld storage..

>>16839918

Physical PC games blew console garbage out of the water until the mid-00's or so, particularly in the 90's.

>>16839925

heh, good laugh

>>16839918

>Physical PC games always kind of sucked compared to console/handheld storage

What does this even mean? Physical storage media? Because after cartridges, it's pretty much CDs for everyone up until now, not much different between PC and consoles there.

Unless you mean that proprietary cartridges that you can't replace are a better option, if you happen to be retarded.

Or that being capable of creating backups of your CDs on PC unlike PSX or similar that require the original is not an advantage, if you happen to be an idiot.

Heck, even if we go low-tech a floppy disk was a better storage method than a cartridge simply because you could copy what was inside of it.

>>16839758

> Consoles might get absorbed into PC, but they're not going to get absorbed into mobile

They are not going to be absorbed at all. Both Console and PC will be almost entirely abandoned.

>Fighting games are still going to be around in ten years, and they're not going to be played on fucking tablets.

Of course fighting games will be around. But they will all be APK. That is where the ROI is best, and that dictates EVERYTHING. Simple math.

Don't get me wrong, anon. I don't like it any better than you do! But that is the reality of the situation, and you can see every single aspect of gaming heading in that direction already.

>>16839925

Game play was smoother on consoles, but on PC you had way more control and adaptability, especially when it came to modding. Think back to original Mortal Kombat. It pretty much MADE consoles. But the minute they came out with the PC version, players on PC were kicking console players asses because you could program macros. One button and a multi-keystroke move, or series of moves, were executed while Freddy Fatfinger was pressing O, X, down, down…..

I am not trashing consoles, I played them all the damn time! But I am saying that it is really comparing apples and oranges because they are two completely different tools designed for two completely different experiences. One is ultimately not better than the other, they are just different.

>>16840058

>Of course fighting games will be around. But they will all be APK. That is where the ROI is best, and that dictates EVERYTHING. Simple math.

ROI on a game that requires an external controller is worse on mobile than on PC or console. It's why almost everything that isn't touchscreen focused on mobile is a port. Fighting games do not work in that market.

>>16840236

Because OP is a gargantuan cockwaffle with blackpills for blood, and to grant him any legitimacy is exactly what him and (((the people paying him))) want. I know you're probably the same fucker on a different ID but here we motherfucking go. The people that he says are gonna replace us don't give a shit about creating 'new' vidya that'll be pushed down these pipes, or maintaining any sort of infrastructure that won't directly benefit them. If you get what you want then something will break sooner rather than later and nobody will know how to fix it or care enough to do so, and the golem will turn on its master who will flee to yet another country wondering why this keeps happening.

I don't really see much reason for that to be the case. Streaming is a hell of a lot more convenient than waddling off to blockbusters and renting a dvd, and still more convenient than downloading. It's also legal, which is a big point for the niggercattle, see Nostalrius vs WoW Classic.

Gaming is already digital. The only difference is you bypass the initial install, which isn't that big a deal when you'll probably launch any one game a couple dozen times. And you still need the processing power. Either it's locally, or on a big server farm. The server's going to be marginally cheaper, since they can order bulk, and rent out computer time to avoid downtime. But only marginally. Then there are the technical problems, like lag etc(input lag is fucking horrendous, not at all comparable to your ping in an online game), network costs, etc.

For once, it's tradeoff. And one with barely any actual benefit, and some very real costs. The only real difference in favor, is you can scam some suckers with a subscription model. Which I'm not going to deny is the case, but I don't think that alone is grounds for a technical revolution.

>>16840266

>Streaming is a hell of a lot more convenient than waddling off to blockbusters and renting a dvd, and still more convenient than downloading. It's also legal, which is a big point for the niggercattle, see Nostalrius vs WoW Classic.

games are an interactive medium. media streaming works because you usually have a whole catalog and not buying your shit for the same price as a dvd.

game streaming will never work out for the majority of people because the technical foundation simply isn't there and there almost no way to make that shit profitable to make companies do it.

as much as retarded normalfags want to "press button, get game", streaming isn't the solution.

>>16840313

yeah, that's what I'm saying

movies are one and done, one sitting affairs. avoiding the initial download is a pretty sizeable boon there.

Games, 99/100, you're launching something you've already installed. The benefit is minuscule. And the costs much bigger.

And that's not what normalfag means.

>>16840316

>And that's not what normalfag means.

normalfags value convenience above everything, that's one of the big reasons they pay for all the stupid shit. on paper just having to press a button to have a game and not even have to bother with consoles or all that complicated technical stuff is the very definition of normalfag

>>16840262

Eat your cricket burger, Lil Zoomie.

>>16840323

just fucking google it, you touchy little bitch, I already told you it does not mean what you think it means

>>16840334

>n-no you're wrong, I won't explain my retarded definition what normalfag means, just google it!

>>16840331

Zoomers are the ones standing up for owning hardware now (mostly PC gamers)? This is like saying it's younger generations who prefer tinkering with old American muscle cars.

Which could be true, but that would surprise me.

a new era of gamer serfdom

where's our rights?

>>16840396

yes, no matter how much you repeat yourself, it's not interchangeable with "normie". Which, when you're blubbering about the niggercattle, is what you mean. The gogo gaga /r9k/ term.

>>16840412

I wish you'd just fuck off.

>>16840427

do I look like a genie?

>>16839404

>Movies, TV shows and music have all made the transition to being primarily streaming based

All of those things are conceptually easy to stream, and video streaming didn't become popular until enough users had enough bandwidth to get decent quality out of it.

Vidya is almost impossible to stream in the same sense: you can't send data in advance and buffer it locally because the data is generated as you play.

On the other hand, certain vidya is already being "streamed" in some way: anything relying on servers you can't run yourself is in fact running parts of the game remotely and sending them to the players as needed, and just like movie streaming that means you don't actually own the game and you might lose the ability to play it without warning.

>>16840400

They do, but that's mostly because new cars are expensive garbage.

>>16840940

Yeah, this. Movies, TV shows, and music are completely noninteractive except for control functions. Video games are not only interactive but they're interactive in real time. If Netflix fucks up and your TV show stops to buffer for eight seconds, it's annoying but you can get back to that spot. If a streamed game fucks up for even one second, your session could be completely ruined unless the streaming service has some kind of built-in state retention system AND the game is single player. If the service does have something like that, though, then it's changing the nature of the game because only the user can determine when it would need to be used and it effectively becomes a free rewind.