Right. Microsoft is just about the only player left in cloud gaming because Sony, Amazon and Google all tried and gave up in different ways, in part because none of them really found a market nor an audience. I heard Sony is trying again but leasing some cloud servers from Microsoft Azure's white box version of xCloud, ironically.
That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.
As a gamer, few things would turn me away from a potential purchase more than the phrase "cloud gaming app". It sounds like DRM-infected bloatware ready to kick me from a server the moment my connection even hiccups. Only "cloud gaming app, now by Microsoft" could be worse.
On the contrary, I'm quite happy about "cloud gaming app" because all the DRM-infected software stays remote. I get a web browser or whatever, and they pipe video to me and pipe input back up. Really lightweight on my side, less room for insane anti-cheat whatevers. Now, the connection issues, the online-only requirements, the resolution, the lag, etc, these things are less good. But I really like the software part.
HN is the only place on the net where I've ever seen people defending the premise of cloud gaming and it's usually (not always) people saying something like "Well I don't game much myself but cloud gaming sounds compelling..."
I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.
I do game a good bit, and I like cloud gaming. I find myself away from my gaming desktop often, which makes cloud gaming pretty enticing. And overall it's currently incredibly cheap, a good value.
I get this use case, but I don't think it's very common. Most gamers are near their gaming hardware most of the time. Gamers who travel often usually have some mobile gaming hardware already. The number of people who would game but can't because they travel often and aren't satisfied with existing mobile gaming hardware is minimal. Not zero, but not a huge untapped market either.
Personally, I game almost exclusively on a laptop (even at home.) Suppose I was unsatisfied with gaming on a laptop because only the most powerful gaming PC with graphics turned all the way up will satisfy me... would cloud gaming really be an enticing answer to somebody with such high standards? Sure the 'cloud' server could max out the graphics settings, but latency and compression would probably ruin the experience for somebody with such high standards. Now maybe my issue with laptop gaming isn't the fidelity but instead the hassle of traveling with a laptop. The convenience margin between traveling with a laptop vs an ipad isn't zero, but it's pretty small. I think this is the niche cloud gaming fits into. So cloud gaming is for people who travel often and light, who don't care about fidelity/latency but do care about saving ~1kg of weight in their carry-on bag.
I sold my laptop that was capable of gaming and now I only use geforce now from my macbook. The fidelity is better. The latency isn't noticeable to me in single player games. And then price wise, for the amount I sold my old laptop I'd get 7 years of cloud gaming at current prices, maybe more as gaming is something I dip in and out of, although my kids are also using it at the moment so I can't dip out.
I've never used it while travelling. So I'm definitely a different demographic to the one you're describing.
It's not even that I'm traveling often (as in hotel stay or something equivalent), it's that I'm often out of the house for a bit. Gaps of time where it doesn't make sense to go all the way home to play a game, but enough time to get like a half hour or more of gaming in.
Kids want to go bounce around at the trampoline park? Cool, I'll hop on the wifi there and game. Had to go into the office and am taking a lunch break? Cool, I can hop on the game for an hour. Meeting up with people later but have an hour downtime? Cool, I can go to any cafe or bar and play for a bit instead of heading all the way home.
Just today I was far on the other side of town (over an hour away) as my wife was meeting up with her sister to do some stuff after some big family things. Cool, bring my cheap laptop with me or just use my phone with a controller, I can game for a couple of hours while she does her thing. But then now tonight that exact same game saves are synced to play on my desktop at the house, or on my cheap laptop while on the patio, or wherever. Maybe I'll even spend an hour in the hot tub tonight with the cheap laptop on a towel nearby. Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.
And then this even continues to something like the Steam Deck or the other streaming focused handhelds, which I'm now pretty interested in. It doesn't need to have high end gear on it if it's got a decent network connection. And as I've mentioned here, at least where I'm at I'm almost always with some kind of low latency network. It's so ubiquitous around me these days.
> Good luck getting that flexible of an experience with a full console or desktop.
You could stream your gameplay without resorting to Cloud. Steam has (had?) a great service where you could stream your game from one computer to another on the same network.
Admittedly, I'm not in the cloud gaming market nor would I ever be. First, data caps prevent me from doing this. Second, let's say I wanted to stream from some public place. I have to connect to their wifi? Non-starter. Not going to happen. Stream over mobile? Data caps again, this time they charge an arm and a leg and the connection quality is garbage. Third, if I am out of my house I'm probably driving. A Switch, Steam Deck, or Cloud Gaming can't do anything for that.
It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok. I will never sign up for a cloud gaming service until they can get over the infrastructural issues that prevent adults like me from engaging. For starters that would be public transit, and better Internet infrastructure and services.
I'm happy you found a use case for it. Most of the United States in particular, and I'd wager the world as a whole, does not and will not be in a place where that's viable.
I forgot to address the Steam Home Streaming with my earlier comment, and I did want to bring that up as well. I didn't even think about it, as the smoothness of cloud gaming just completely pushed this capability out of my mind.
Steam Home Streaming works pretty well on a LAN. Quality-wise, with my desktop at home its even higher quality than Xbox Cloud Gaming. I've got many hundreds of hours on my Steam Link. I just wished they'd make it work well outside of the LAN. I've had mixed experiences trying to run it on a few different VPN stacks. I ran into challenges of it not seeing the other computers, the stream being very unstable and crashing, and other issues. Plus, it means I need my computer's local console unlocked at home, but I prefer my computers to get locked automatically. And even then I've had games get in some stuck state launching or closing where I had to manually intervene on the local console to fix it.
Meanwhile, with cloud gaming I just click launch and the game is going. There's no waiting for updates. There's no managing a local console. I don't even need a gaming rig.
Also, you mention "Most of the United States in particular", I am in the United States. This has been my experience in one of the larger metro areas in the US (DFW). I don't get why it would be viable here but nowhere else in the US. 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage. I haven't been on many trips since getting it, but even a few years ago I could manage to sometimes make Steam Home Streaming work from a hotel WiFi on VPN at various places around the country, even with its challenges I mentioned above. I've got family who game a good bit with PlayStation cloud gaming service on a 5G home internet connection.
43% fiber and 60% 5G definitely isn't 100%, I agree. But it does mean there's a pretty big chunk of consumers who can use this, today. I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me. 43% of ~330 million people is >140M people with home fiber internet, nearly 200M people with 5G coverage, today. And that's just ignoring all the consumers with actually decent cable internet connectivity.
> 43% of US households have fiber-optic home internet. 60% of households live in areas with 5G coverage.
I'm doubting both of these numbers. Even if 5G coverage is there, like in my home, it's not a good enough connection to do anything beyond watch the 5G symbol play tag with the LTE symbol.
Even when we live in that world we still live under data caps.
> I'm not in some magical internet wonderland inhabited by just my family and me
And once again that's only FTTH. Loads of coax networks have enough throughput and low enough latency to make it work. Either way, I'm still just pointing out its out there. Fast enough internet is in a lot of places, as mentioned even the WiFi at a few coffee shops and bars around me have had fast enough speeds for a decent quality experience. Which makes sense, as the cable provider in the area offers 300Mbit as a minimum speed for only $65/mo on their business plans with WiFi6 APs. The fiber provider offers like 500Mbit symmetrical for the same on their business tier. Every little shop has at least a few hundred megabits of internet if they need to get their POS terminals online.
Mint Mobile offers "unlimited" (aka throttled after 40GB) for $30/mo without any promotional pricing. Visible offers unlimited for $25 for their basic plan and $35 for their plus plan which includes ultra-wideband and a "premium network experience" whatever that means. From my experiences Xbox Cloud Gaming uses ~1GB/hr. And yeah, within my home or my office building my cellular connectivity is pretty poor. But at the same time both places also have WiFi6/6E APs and gigabit+ fiber connections.
And I'm gonna go ahead and reply to the other comment here so we can re-unify this chain. Apologies for breaking it earlier.
> a child is what enables that behavior
Yeah, in that specific circumstance a child is what enabled that specific instance. And I had the infant at the park because we were all going to the park and had other things to do walking around after that, it didn't make sense for me to just stay at home the whole time. However, you're just ignoring the other instances I've shared. Here's another recent one. A family member was out of town for a while and wanted me to check in and socialize with their cat who gets anxiety without friendly humans around every now and then. So I went over, cleaned up after the cat, hopped on the couch with the cat in my lap, and played games for an hour on their WiFi. No kids involved in that story.
Mobile gaming is a growing market. Its a nearly $60B industry these days. People seem to really enjoy the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, phones with larger screens continue to get more and more popular. Cloud Gaming can enable these lower power devices to run much more computationally demanding games with similar experiences to game console or gaming PC performance while only consuming a few watts of power. A lot of people are finding time to play games on handheld devices, the real question IMO is if the economics of cloud gaming really work, because for a large chunk of the country all the technology is already there.
> It turns out I'm no longer a child. I cannot game while out of the house anymore and that's ok.
I'm not a child, haven't been one for a long time. I still find time to play games out of the house. You don't need to be a child to play videogames outside of the house.
Just this weekend we went to the park. I drew the straw to watch my infant nap in the stroller while my wife ran off with my older child. An hour of downtime. Turn on the 5G hotspot, whip out the laptop, and I'm on Starfield on my cheap laptop with several hours of battery life.
You're not a child but a child is what enables that behavior. I do not have a child nor am I a child. If I am out of the house I am driving, engaged in an activity, or there socially. When I was a kid I had my gameboy and I'd play it nonstop. Then I started driving and having adult responsibilities and all of a sudden I'm not able to do that.
Then again, I wouldn't have gone to the park to watch my infant while I played games. I could do that at my house.
Same, and I enjoy having maxed out graphics on a large screen while my MacBook stays at ambient temperature, instead of having a noisy space heater howling under my desk.
It all depends on what you're looking for in your gaming. I rarely replay old games. I'm often on the go, and don't really want to spend the money on a high end gaming rig nor a console at home. So from my non-gaming laptop I can hop on Xbox Cloud Gaming and play recent games in high quality pretty much anywhere. I've been able to play on cafe wifi, tethered to my phone, on wifi around the house, loads of places. And after finding the subscription on a sale its cheaper than buying even two new games a year.
If you're the kind of gamer who does love having a collection of old games you go back to, then yeah its pretty terrible.
Definitely depends on how you approach gaming. To me, gaming is something you have dedicated gear for, set aside dedicated time for, sit down somewhere comfortable, remove all distractions, turn down the lights, and so on, like watching a movie. The idea of playing a game "on the go" is as ridiculous to me as watching a movie "on the go" (or, really doing anything on the go--when I'm going somewhere, that's what I'm doing, I'm not doing something else).
To others, I guess picking up a casual game in a cafe might be interesting... Maybe they're a great target market for Cloud Gaming, I dunno. I sure am not!
xCloud (Microsoft's) and Geforce Now (nVidia's) both allegedly have large player bases.
The "neat" thing about xCloud is that you can try it for free under most Game Pass subscriptions. I think that is actually where "cloud gaming" currently excels, as a faster/better/glorified replacement for the old "Demo" games and modes. (Try a Game Pass game for a bit without downloading it, on a day where you expect few connection hiccups, to see if it is worth the hour or so wait while it downloads.) I think that is also part of why xCloud probably does have large MAU numbers.
I've tried to see if xCloud is also useful on my mobile devices for on-the-go gaming, but the connection issues have mostly tanked that for me. (I do know people using it to play games on the Steam Deck that the Steam Deck doesn't as well support; but they generally play at home on home connections even if they prefer the "mobile-like" form factor of the Deck.)
But yeah, the argument is that the audience for "cloud gaming" is incredibly limited (needs a strong internet connection, doesn't want to invest in up-to-date gaming hardware, or wants stranger form factors) and always will be, which is why it is fascinating that Microsoft got so much flak from the UK commissioners about controlling the current "cloud gaming" marketplace: Microsoft seems to be the most successful mostly just because it is an incredibly limited audience with few gamers interested. Most everyone else who has tried to enter the market, including Google, has failed to find players. (nVidia seems the next most successful and even they admit it is a niche side-project for them. They've been partly so successful by how much money they haven't spent and how cheap they've managed to run it so far, comparatively to the investments of their peers and bigger companies like Amazon and Google.)
I've used Xbox Cloud Gaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop all over my home on WiFi, several different cafe/bar WiFi networks, and several places tethered to my phone without any real playability concerns. I might not recommend it if you're playing some kind of twitch shooter kind of game, but I've played a lot of Forza, Starfield, Gotham Knights, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on it.
I'm surprised, I had pretty much the opposite experience. I used Xbox Cloud Gaming to play through Halo 5 (the only game in the series to not have a PC port) in four sessions over a few months, wrapping up last weekend.
I'm on a high spec desktop playing with an Xbox controller connected by USB. The desktop is on Ethernet, 200 Mbps down / 30 Mbps up.
In my experience, the game frequently failed to start. Most often I would watch the rocket ship loading screen for about a minute, then close it and retry. Probably about 1 in 10 times the game would start instantly, otherwise it would display the loading animation forever.
My understanding is that the game runs in 1080p on the original hardware (launch Xbox One) and runs in 4k on modern hardware (Series X). I'm not sure what the source resolution is for Cloud Streaming, but visually it looked like an old YouTube video. The game was designed with a large visual dynamic range. Video compression made it very hard to see in dark areas (think The Long Night episode of Game of Thrones). In colorful areas with more contrast I experienced lots of macroblocking.
Input lag made the game very frustrating to play. The Halo series is known for having generous aim assist, even so I found precision weapons useless and too hard to line up a shot. Occasional dropped button inputs got me killed too.
All-in-all I can't recommend Cloud Streaming to anyone. Looking at their catalog, maybe it would be more acceptable for games with limited motion like Phoenix Wright or Car Mechanic Simulator, but those run natively on cell phones or low-end hardware. Even then repeatedly failing to start a session is a turn off. Experiencing all of these problems every time I played makes me think it's not just a fluke.
> In my experience, the game frequently failed to start
I definitely got that a bunch right after Starfield launched, but it balanced out after several days. The period leading up before and after were and have been much better. Still happens sometimes though.
It's definitely not 4K, I'll grant you that. Playing Starfield locally installed on my desktop definitely gives a better framerate and higher quality, but ultimately I've put more hours in on cloud gaming simply because it's everywhere I have internet. I can play on my phone and an Xbox controller, anywhere.
I don't have much input lag, but I'm in a pretty well connected part of the country. On my phone right now ive got 20ms to microsoft.com, 19ms to google.com. At home on WiFi these values are in the low single digits. I dont know where Microsoft's servers are for the cloud gaming, that might be a part of it.
It's been about a year since I last used it. Back then Halo worked better through a browser and the app was very flaky. I wound up getting an xbox console and the experience with streaming on the console has been pretty good. All over wifi AC1600.
Cyberpunk at 1440p, 75Mbit/s and 120hz/fps feels pretty darn responsive, streaming in from GeForce Now. A local rig will beat it of course, can't cheat lights peed, but if you're close to a datacenter the added lag is negligible, especially if you can get the video stream at 120hz.
Even if it's 120 fps you can still have high latencies, because the time from button press to the next frame acting on that button press can be slow.
The game can stream at 120fps, but take extra like to register a jump for example.
Again, you might just not be sensitive to that.
There's also compression artifacts and bitrate that can make fine details already coarse and all that, even if it's 4k. That's what some won't find to be an issue and others will.
Oh definitely, everyone's experience will be different, not just due to their location in regards to the Nvidia datacenters, but also personal sensitivity to latency and such.
I am pretty sensitive to it. It never dropped into low framerates. Sometimes I'd get a quick blast of compression noise but not often.
It's not 4K 120FPS, but on a 1080p laptop the quality was fine. Maybe unacceptable when playing on a 70" TV, but a 14" laptop or a 1920x1200 27" screen it's fine. Not as nice as natively rendered, but way nicer than what that $300 laptop could have done on its own!
It never dropped into the 30s, I consider framerates like that unplayable.
Compression artifacts, spotty connections etc. all of those can be issues with remote gaming. What is never an issue is framerate or graphical fidelity (minus video compression artifacts), which makes sense, considering you tend to have a nice machine remotely that plays your game (e.g. a 4080 on GeForce Now).
that actually make a good reason to use cloud gaming honestly, trying game for 2-3 hours before downloading 100gb for it and not to make refund if you buy themselves is pretty neat
Honestly, there's a bunch of games where cloud gaming could really help the cheating problem. The issue with it is that if you're a ways away from the cloud servers it puts you at more of a disadvantage.
Then again, for a lot of these games you currently get some level of advantage for throwing a lot of money at your system so you can run with better settings at a faster framerate, so maybe it's not so much less fair as differently fair.
Having your competitive game reduced to pure input output doesn't solve cheating (especially in an age of image recognition and trained AI/ML), but it does even the playing field a lot.
And here I thought GeeForce Now was the de-facto leader in the cloud gaming market.
I use it regularly for single player games and it's quite nice! AFAIK they have the biggest supported library yet that is still my biggest issue with it: it doesn't support some of the games I'd like to play on it!
Sony's PS+ is really good, I was really impressed at how smooth the whole experience was. The ability to play titles all the way back to PS2 in an officially supported manner is really nice!
Apologies, I thought it had shut down already; I must have been confusing the shut down of game studios dedicated to it as the first step in a shutdown in the so-called "Stadia playbook" and thought they were further along it.
Do they? I genuinely don't know and a quick search only adds confusion. I see a lot of news from when they went Beta in 2019 and then a lot of radio silence and I don't see any links to the service that don't have a "Technical Preview" or "Beta" next to them. That probably doesn't bode well as a signal for an active player base even if it is technically running.
That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.