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[jakinov]

I dunno why people think Stadia is dead already. It just takes time to create games and they launched at a bad time. With almost 200 million current gen consoles out there and most PC games designed to work for consoles with hardware from 7+ years ago. There's not a whole lot of people who don't have access to games to leverage the benefit of not needing a console. Covid doesn't help either.

 

[Gamezone]

I believe Stadia is the only service who doesn't offer cloud gaming as a supplement, but is trying to replace local hardware, and it's failing hard. xCloud, GeForce Now and PS Now are all supplements to a much better service.

 

[yurinka]

It won't be a serious threat in at least 10 or 15 years. 4G still doesn't have a great worldwide coverage, so 5G or 6G will take for a while to get great coverage. Same goes with wired: fiber still has a small coverage worldwide, and many important countries have data cap.

Then we have wifi, like 2/3 of the people play using wifi, so wifi6 will be the standard very soon with PS5 and PCs but wifi 6 routers I think won't be very common until a few years more.

Then we have the worlwide coverage of each cloud gaming service: many of them cover only some countries, and still don't have a big enough number of servers/data centers almost everywhere with that technology.

I think feature wise most of the cloud services will be very similar, so pricing and catalog will be key. PS Now will continue being the one with a bigger amount of games and several generations of great PS exclusives. But Amazon will have a lower price point and may even include it inside Prime, which would skyrocket its userbase.

I think that in 5 years from now it will be a small market compared to console+PC downloaded or physical games, but will start to be something to consider. A secondary, complementary market. Like VR, that I also expect that will grow this gen with PSVR2 as the king but will continue being something smaller than the normal tv games.

 

[Barnabot]

wrong thread

 

[Krappadizzle]

- Blockbuster ceo

Good point. Kind of.

I've won't discount the very idea and possibility. I've yet to use a service that I would rather use than my local hardware whether that's PSNOW, xCloud, Stadia, even Steam Link(physical hardware i.e. local streaming) etc... I vast prefer to play on the console or absolutely at my PC. There's nothing around that's been able to give me the better gaming experience as sitting at my comfortable ass desk with headphones on playing Arkham Knight or Witcher 3 at 80-100fps 3440x1440 with my Xbone controller just in the zone, 25 streak combos as Batman just dominating 20 goons. Just so great.

I can imagine that streaming a game like X-Com would be an absolutely acceptable because of the nature of the game. But I'd never want to play an action game or racer streaming. At least not yet. I do think it'll be a big part of gaming future as an option that makes sense for a lot of people. I'm just glad it's an option, I wouldn't want it to be the only choice.

 

[GHG]

Of course it's here to stay, but it's never replacing local hardware.

In the next couple of years we will start to see games that can only be played via the cloud with no way to purchase them and play locally.

 

[MacReady13]

There's no huge market force for game streaming.. it's tech companies dreaming up something they think consumers want..

This here is exactly what I have been saying for a while- no one really wants this apart from these companies who are only looking at streaming as a massive revenue source. No one wants to play laggy games. NO ONE. Yet companies like Microsoft, Sony, Google and Amazon (and others) continue to try shove something like this down our throat.
Every fucking dawn of a new console generation they keep telling us "this will be the last traditional console generation" and yet here we are, weeks out from the launch of the Series S/X and PS5 and both consoles have sold out in record times for pre orders! Please stop trying to shove a narrative down our fucking throats. Console gaming will not ever die if us gamers have anything to do with it. EVER!

 

[Walter Matthau]

I dunno why people think Stadia is dead already. It just takes time to create games and they launched at a bad time. With almost 200 million current gen consoles out there and most PC games designed to work for consoles with hardware from 7+ years ago. There's not a whole lot of people who don't have access to games to leverage the benefit of not needing a console. Covid doesn't help either.

It's over for Stadia. They claimed people would be jumping into gaming sessions with their favorite Youtube personalities or experiencing new worlds with thousands of other players at once and most people thought they'd go the obvious route of doing exactly what Amazon is doing by having a Netflix style offering. What they rolled out was a service where you pay full price for dated games with some extra latency thrown in. If you want the game to not look like it's running on 2013 hardware you need to pay Google an extra $10 a month. Now competitors are emerging left and right and there's no time to rebrand themselves or erase people's memory of their terrible ad campaign and launch reviews.

 

[MarkMe2525]

The thing is, if there are still 100m people that will buy hardware, someone is going to make it. These platforms can and will coexist.

 

[Angel of BOOM!]

There's no huge market force for game streaming....

But for the masses, there's not really a drive to buy hardware for hardware sake. People just want to play games. If Uncle Billy can play the latest Madden without leaving his sofa he will.

 

[Krappadizzle]

In the next couple of years we will start to see games that can only be played via the cloud with no way to purchase them and play locally.

Now you've done it.

 

[Stilton Disco]

It's a service being pushed because analysts think there's the same money to be made with game streaming as there is video and music streaming.

The fact is though, that the reason streaming works for the other two mediums, is due to it being an entirely passive experience.

Gaming is interactive, and necessitates a perfect, constant connection witch ridiculously low latency, both back and forth, to be functional.

On top of this, the infrastructure required for gaming dwarfs music and video, especially now we're at the point that everyone expects 4K graphics and 60fps as a minimum. The cost of equipng a game streaming server farm, then cooling it and powering it, will be vastly more expensive too, as well as requiring far wider and faster bandwidth to stream.

It's a service not driven by demand, or catering to an untapped market, but being forced into existence by big businesses that have calculated that because apples sell, so too must oranges.

Basically all these companies can make as many competing services as they like, but that won't change the fact that when most pepple try it, it's a bit shit.

 

[cucuchu]

It will develop, but a large segment of gamers will want actual hardware powering their games vs relying on internet infrastructure that is in of itself reliant on external factors in both their availability and their performance. Nobody wants variable performance drops due to some disruption in a stable connection to some server.

Technology will keep pushing the amount of data a game requires to run more and more. The hardware powering those servers will always perform better next to your TV/Monitor without having to deal with latency and other issues.

Just look at how quickly the PS5, XBSX(S), and even $700/$1500 new Nvidia GPU's are selling out. The demand is there and maybe one day there will be a solid choice for cloud gaming but it will not directly replace console/PC gaming because the latter will always provide better performance.

 

[jakinov]

It's over for Stadia. They claimed people would be jumping into gaming sessions with their favorite Youtube personalities or experiencing new worlds with thousands of other players at once and most people thought they'd go the obvious route of doing exactly what Amazon is doing by having a Netflix style offering. What they rolled out was a service where you pay full price for dated games with some extra latency thrown in. If you want the game to not look like it's running on 2013 hardware you need to pay Google an extra $10 a month. Now competitors are emerging left and right and there's no time to rebrand themselves or erase people's memory of their terrible ad campaign and launch reviews.

Well no they revealed that it was possible for YouTuber personalities to do offer that if they wanted to. I don't think they explcitily offered anything about experiencing new worlds with thousands of other players. At most, that it was possible.

Again, because of the timing, when the console generation has matured. People already have access to 99% of the big budget games it's less attractive to buy the cloud version to play on your phone when your PC or the console you already have can play it. If a hypothetical GTA 6 comes out and next-gen consoles install base is still growing there more potential for people to hop on and adopt. The support also needs to expand and it has been.

They don't need to rebrand. They just need to improve, expand and be patient.

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

It will not for people with data caps and living on rural areas, thats for sure.

Well, data caps are pretty common in the U.S., so that would definitely be a problem.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Laptops are PCs dude.

Exactly. Not everything is gaming rig though they are growing popular these days.
Laptops are basically the mobile devices from PC area.

 

[SF Kosmo]

I think cloud gaming has a lot of potential but no one is really leaning into it's strengths, it's just a worse way to play the same games.

I think the potential to just let people hop into a game on youtube has a ton of potential for a Fortnite or Fall Guys kind of experience. I think they need to figure that out, figure out how to integrate it with all the social elements and make a game that can really only work with the cloud.