So what do you think about it? The idea of streaming high quality games seems ambitious when the infrastructure just isn’t consistent enough in many parts of the world.
I struggle to stream a game decently from my PC to my laptop in the same room, so I find it hard to believe that the visual quality will be reliable and that they can defeat the inevitable input lag.
I can see why linking it to YouTube would be a popular move though.
Good idea, just not sure it will work.
I’m not sure how Google will do their streaming, however streaming games is already something you can do. Linus Tech Tips did a video on Shadowbox (ignore click-baity title):
Shadowbox isn’t limited to a console, and can literally play pc games on iphones and androids. I think the only advantage of google’s console, from what I understand, is linking it with youtube/‘google’s data center’. Maybe they’re going to push for games as a service, I don’t know.
So I think that Shadowbox beat them to the punch in terms of the streamable games, the linus tech tips video came out 3 months before this announcement.
Yeah I’ve seen a few people promoting Shadow and it seems to work well as long as you have a stable high speed connection. The idea of playing a GPU intensive modern game on a tiny netbook is crazy.
No doubt Google and Microsoft are going to either push out or buy out the competition.
Even in my home network streaming from PC to a steam link results in noticeable input lag. I doubt YouTube has magical data centers to not have lag that is noticeable.
It’s just a shit idea to turn gaming into a subscription service. No thanks Google.
It might work. They have the big advantage of having data centers almost everywhere, so you are not connecting over huge distances.
You can test your connection to Google servers here: http://www.gcping.com/
At work I have a median latency of 32ms according to this test.
Also:
I also don’t like the idea behind it, Google just has too much control over everything.
I have no problem in paying reasonable monthly subscription for a good game.
But i do have a problem paying company that didn’t even made said game in the first place.
Both sides are being kinda screwed over. And unnecessary 3rd party is parasiting on the whole thing.
Its like protection racket in very fancy clothes.
Agreed, I just don’t see how this is beneficial to players over buying a console/PC and a discrete, downloaded game. We have no input lag, no streaming quality issues…
A good 90% of my games have had their online components shut down at some point or other. I see no way having an entire game library be cloud based could possibly go wrong.
It’s not the first time someone did something with streaming games over the net. There’ve been a couple of entrants to the fray, the only one which I remember still being online being Sony’s PSNow Service. Streaming games is… a thing… but I wouldn’t count on it being a replacement for getting physical copies of a game / download them and having a local machine (may it be console or pc) running them locally. There is probably a market for non-time-critical-input-games. Like the civs and co.