News Google GDC 2019 Conference

[Luminaire]

This whole thing was a big box of No Thanks for me. The amusing part on other forums is how people are saying people will no longer have to buy expensive hardware, but failed to take into consideration the costs associated if they don't have a data cap and have acceptable internet already.

For speeds, fiber is not and will not be available in my area for years thanks to Comcast. I pay $80 for a 70Mbps connection. I can get access to 150Mbps for $110. I have a 1TB data cap and end up with about 100GB or so left each month. If I wanted that raised, it'd be another $50. Just upgrading to the 'acceptable' level would cost me $80 extra each month, or $960 a year. That's not counting what their subscription cost is.

I'll pass and skeptically observe from a distance.

 

[Ex-User (307)]

This whole thing was a big box of No Thanks for me. The amusing part on other forums is how people are saying people will no longer have to buy expensive hardware, but failed to take into consideration the costs associated if they don't have a data cap and have acceptable internet already.

For speeds, fiber is not and will not be available in my area for years thanks to Comcast. I pay $80 for a 70Mbps connection. I can get access to 150Mbps for $110. I have a 1TB data cap and end up with about 100GB or so left each month. If I wanted that raised, it'd be another $50. Just upgrading to the 'acceptable' level would cost me $80 extra each month, or $960 a year. That's not counting what their subscription cost is.

I'll pass and skeptically observe from a distance.

Complaints about "expensive hardware" are almost completely console focused anyways.

Yeah, it can be expensive to have a good rig. But at least someone's expensive rig can serve power user purposes for work and other hobbyist interests.

 

[Le Pertti]

I'm the prime candidate for the just streaming games part since I don't have anything more than a mac laptop to game on, but yeah I don't have the internet capable.

But I am still very interested what new things this opens up, for something like a mmorpg this can be incredible.

 

[curi0usBystander]

I have a pretty good internet (600Mbps) and even then I don't like this, I'll wait for them to explain anything but right now the idea doesn't sound really good to me.

The idea of game streaming is one that I have never liked compared to video/music streaming. At least, with video/music you're always streaming the same file so If one day they stop being available I'm sure that someone somewhere will have made a copy, with the game it's just gone forever.

And then there is the issue of modification, i've i can't have the option of modifying the game I have no interest. For example, I barely play First Person games, and that happened because I get motion sick so when games don't have FOV sliders and whatnot (now is less of a problem than a few years ago) If I can modify it in someway the game is a no go for me (then again this is also a problem in consoles, but i wanted to use it as an example).

But as I said I'll wait to see what they have to show, because so far they haven't really shown anything.

 

[Maxi]

Looks like pretty decent tech and Google have their plan. It obviously isn't going to be for most of us and especially the majority of streamers/PC market due to people chasing the best fidelity and framerate you can got so some encoded stream just isn't going to cut it for the top streamers.

But I do like the possibilities of instant demos from gametrailers and minor DLC previews but that will probably be at the cost of a lot of development time for most developers (supporting Vulkan etc) so that is something that would at least be a year or so away. I'd also wager alternative solutions will be available via Microsoft & Amazon via Twitch by the time this starts hitting the mainstream for most devs.

Fantastic for people with lower spec machines and the ability to play on mutliple devices as long as the connection holds up and you aren't a complete stickler for latency and visual fidelity.

But yeah for most people on this forum who have a console or mid-high end PC it isn't going to be that appealing in its current form and I think it will be a few years before we see developers fully lean into exclusive features for streaming platforms.

 

[Copons]

I don't really like this for all the classic "freedom and preservation" reasons, but I think it's a winner concept, and only Google has the means to realize it in practice.
Most people will love this as much as they love Netflix and Spotify, and for good reasons.

Though, I've got at least two big doubts here.

Will the devs be up to do some (possibly?) major reworks of their games to accommodate (and support long-time) this new fancy way of streaming?
I assume that, to be able to play in a few seconds, the tech behind is similar to, for example, how Battle.net handles updates, where you have a "playable" and "optimal" steps, and you can start playing while the game is still downloading.

And, of course, the current internet infrastructure is good enough, and I don't think it will be for many years.
Only recently Italy is starting to get >100Mb, and only in a few areas of some cities (like, not even in Rome, I think?). Most of the country, though, is stuck with dodgy ADSL connections at best.
When I moved to the UK, I expected to see major improvements, but not at all: roughly same speed, same stability, but much more expensive.
The US have their own fuck-ups with data caps and rural areas probably not even served by GSM...

 

[Alextended]

Devs seem to just have to make it work on Linux with the specs given. 16GB ram and the CPU and GPU specced and whatever else for now, who knows of future platform upgrades. Other than that I don't think this would be that different to any other console port on the game dev's end (especially if they use the engines and middleware with existing native support). You don't download the games, you stream video of the games being played on a remote platform like when you watch someone else play live, except you control it by sending your input to the server too (and of course it's not like they have an actual PC/box/whatever set up for every user but likely one far more powerful machine without even a monitor and everything else that is able to process multiple game instances with those equivalent specs and stream them to x amount of users at the same time, multiplied by however many they need to accommodate all users optimally, expanding the hardware as the userbase increases). Hence the talk of it being instant/taking a few seconds after you click play. I guess.

 

[itsamiracle]

People put too much emphasis on the "linux" part. Most developers will never interact with the kernel directly. It's up to google to provide a working environment to develop in like Sony did with freeBSD for their last 3 dedicated platfomrs (4 if PSP used freeBSD as well)