Amazon announces cloud gaming service

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/24/21451371/amazon-luna-cloud-gaming-service-twitch-alexa-controller

I have complete confidence that this will be a triumphant success and nothing at all like Stadia. 

22 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I have complete confidence that this will be a triumphant success and nothing at all like Stadia. 

If anyone can pull it off successfully, it might be Amazon

Strong doubts anyway :)

I don't think this is a great idea. Not a bad one, just not great. I don't think that it will have that much to offer to gaming, and it will be seen as just another cloud gaming service with crappy ads. I think it would be smarter if they made a console, even though they aren't as popular as they once were. It would be cool if they made a text adventure game with alexa, where you can say, "Go North," then it describes the scene to you. that would be cool. This just seems silly to me. 

Amazon, like Google before it, wants to make a product with no demand. Consumerism-as-culture is really bad in the United States, and even that's not enough to power services like this that are for absolutely no one.

I can only speculate that this comes from an attempt to capture Apple's success with the iPhone and the iPad, creating a product the consumer didn't even know they wanted. I think it's safe to say that was lightning-in-a-bottle, to say nothing of the enormous failures of everyone who came before.

2 hours ago, M_W said:

wants to make a product with no demand.

It has to have some demand somewhere. When you're putting together a business plan, you always need to figure out the peoples likes and dislikes. So, although you and I don't find it fascinating, someone out there does. 

2 hours ago, M_W said:

creating a product the consumer didn't even know they wanted.

That's the same with most other products. People didn't know they wanted video games, or television. They are now the two biggest forms of media in the world. This service could be huge, or be completely ignored and forgotten. 

I never cared for the whole cloud thing.

I imagine if-unlike Google's Stadia-Amazon's swanky knock-off of the idea actually has games on it (and more than a measly handful) that people actually want to play, then it might have a chance. Still, ask anyone who's really invested in games and they'll tell you they're not exactly sold on the idea of said games only existing in the ether once you purchase them. Not to mention one of Stadia's greatest pitfalls was its inability to guarantee that you'll always have access to the games after you've purchased them. Also it seems Google didn't exactly... well, care about the bloody thing enough and just let keel over. Perhaps it was just an idea that was floating around the office and the higher-ups were in a charitable mood and said, "Yeah fuck it. Give it a go and lemme know how it works out. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the cocaine-tasting party" and later found a way to turn it into a tax-write off, if they even bothered at all. I imagine they blow their noses on more money than it took for them to make the sodding thing in the first place.

So provided Amazon actually puts in the work and gives a shit, maybe it might succeed where Stadia failed. I kind of doubt it though.

29 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

I never cared for the whole cloud thing.

Me either, but when Skynet takes over we're all going to have to get used to it. 

Cloud gaming is completely unfeasible for most of the planet and will be so for the foreseeable future. These companies pushing it are living in a fantasy world. 

15 hours ago, LiT_gam3r said:

It has to have some demand somewhere. When you're putting together a business plan, you always need to figure out the peoples likes and dislikes. So, although you and I don't find it fascinating, someone out there does. 

That's the same with most other products. People didn't know they wanted video games, or television. They are now the two biggest forms of media in the world. This service could be huge, or be completely ignored and forgotten. 

Its been ignored and forgotten no fewer than four times now.

If there is anyone that is able to afford the ridiculous upcharges for going over their data caps, or expensive enough internet to not have data caps, chances are they already own a console, and if they are distinguished enough to want the best possible visual quality that only a high end PC can provide, they probably don't want to put up with input latency or the loss of image quality from data compression. The people who want lots of games on a subscription service? Xbox already offers this, and Playstation soon to follow. This appeals to absolutely no one except people with money to burn on the latest tech for no other reason than because they can.

"You know what would be really, really great for gaming? It'd be if gamers did not have access anymore to the game data. It'd give total control over game content to the publisher, and zero control to the player. Modding? Ripping? Reverse-engineering? Fan-made patches? All these things, annihilated forever. This is the future we want. This is why we are announcing a new Cloud Gaming platform. For the meager sum of $100 per months, plus 5G internet access, you get to enjoy playing all the games from a selection we made, and with extreme input lag!

What do you mean you're not interested?"

This is the typical fallacy of the American internet industry. For some unknown reason they and their journalist lackeys seem to believe that it is desirable for the average user to discard their home computer and move all their activities into the cloud. Of course I do not know anybody using a computer who concurs with that lunatic sentiment. Even the less technologically savvy people using a computer know perfectly well that some things cannot be offloaded into the cloud.

The most baffling thing here is, as mentioned before, the input lag - hell, we cannot even play Doom network games without some serious countermeasures to overcome the lag - and still need to compress the data to the maximum extent possible to get good throughput. And now they expect that their high bandwidth solutions work better? Well, think again!

I don't see why anyone should want to introduce a small amount lag and significant amount of video compression artifacts into to their game experience. All I see are downsides and as far as I can tell, no upside.

This video shows what I consider to be an unacceptable amount of input lag. As much as the guy on the video is talking about how great it is, he can't even keep his vehicle on the road.

No can do, just like others who tried before, this one will fail too considering how weak and slow the internet still is in some regions, it may be 2020 but this still hasn't changed, as seen by the number of complains when a few gigabytes update rolls out.

Besides, some things can never be shared. It seems the user owning what they paid for is a concept growing increasingly obsolete, everyone wants to push cloud services these days.

Ha ha, hook up those shitty systems with their input delays to (ironically) stupid "Smart" TV's with their display delays and you got a real unplayable disaster.

And totally screw the cloud bullshit!   Before companies worked on ways to make people pay more and more for what they used to get for free or more reasonably.   Now they're working to be able to monitor and take away what you paid for!

It might not be feasible for anyone but a small handful of people, but it clearly shows the direction of travel that those perpetually-irritating tech bro types want to drag us all towards. Fuck that! I think it would do the future of PC gaming a whole world of good if cloud gaming was brutally murdered in its crib, before it has the chance to grow.

It's all part of latter-day corporate favouring of "services" that one continually pays for, instead of a one-time sale to you of a product that you can use again and again. It's something that's being imposed from those at the top, rather than something that customers have explicitly demanded. 

If the bastards could privatise the atmosphere and then sell you a subscription for oxygen, they'd do it without a twinge of conscience. It's fucking shit.

It's definitely one of the more blatantly anti-consumer ideas that would see people unable to have any control over the things they purchase. Screw that noise with a side of chips, fam.

49 minutes ago, NoXion said:

It's all part of latter-day corporate favouring of "services" that one continually pays for, instead of a one-time sale to you of a product that you can use again and again. It's something that's being imposed from those at the top, rather than something that customers have explicitly demanded. 

 

It always depends on what the "service" is. For example, most viewers only watch movies or TV series once, it makes perfect sense for those to subscribe to a streaming service and would be cheaper than buying these things on DVD or BluRay.

The same is also true for many gamers, they'd be more than happy if they could just pay a monthly fee and play some games.

The issue here is that unlike these services where only the data gets streamed, playing games online requires quite intricate interaction with the server and that's where the whole thing will fail.

Of course, trying to sell games hosted on such platforms is nothing short of fraud. Either I own something, then I have control of it or I don't, but that's not a sale but a rental - and I won't pay full price for it, that's why I no longer buy new PC games. This online gaming thing is the end goal of what started with online-DRM, it was inevitable that we get here. It's just good that they'll never be able to remove the lag altogether - they may reduce it but that's really it.

I expect this to fail, period. It will keep failing for an eternity.

8 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

I expect this to fail, period. It will keep failing for an eternity.

No, at some point down the road cloud gaming services have a strong chance of becoming extremely successful. 

9 minutes ago, Ajora said:

 

No, at some point down the road cloud gaming services have a strong chance of becoming extremely successful. 

Maybe when we got tech for that (even though the second sentence was meant as an intentional exaggeration).

5 minutes ago, Ajora said:

 

No, at some point down the road cloud gaming services have a strong chance of becoming extremely successful. 

It's theoretically possible but in order to get the market penetration the big companies want, the internet of many significant markets needs to improve. In some cases dramatically. I have a pretty good connection by new Zealand standards but still get the occasional hitch just streaming 1080p video. All the algorithms in the world will never compensate for input lag because of the way the internet works at a fundamental level. All the while companies are pouring money into developing the platform, deploying servers, maintaining them. That will not be cheap. From my perspective, the economics simply don't add up.

I would say conservative estimate of large scale update of cloud gaming outside of major cities with good internet infrastructure is at least a decade away. In spite of what a browse of some social media platforms may suggest, most people are not morons. If they play a cloud service and it sucks, they will drop it and will be unlikely to go back. This has already happened with stadia.

12 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

It's theoretically possible but in order to get the market penetration the big companies want, the internet of many significant markets needs to improve. In some cases dramatically. I have a pretty good connection by new Zealand standards but still get the occasional hitch just streaming 1080p video. All the algorithms in the world will never compensate for input lag because of the way the internet works at a fundamental level. All the while companies are pouring money into developing the platform, deploying servers, maintaining them. That will not be cheap. From my perspective, the economics simply don't add up.

 

I would say conservative estimate of large scale update of cloud gaming outside of major cities with good internet infrastructure is at least a decade away. In spite of what a browse of some social media platforms may suggest, most people are not morons. If they play a cloud service and it sucks, they will drop it and will be unlikely to go back. This has already happened with stadia.

I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here.

https://www.thegamer.com/cloud-gaming-is-the-future/

im surprised the quantity of things that amazon does 

38 minutes ago, Ajora said:

https://www.thegamer.com/cloud-gaming-is-the-future/

Typical hogwash. Like nearly everybody invested in this they ignore the fundamental technical issues.

The only really interesting thing in that article was the statement about Apple who again abuse their power to block competitors, the rest was all the same type of pipe dream that seems to run rampant among these internet types who have no clue about the inherent limitations.

The input lag problem is not easy to overcome - even with dedicated multiplayer clients of today you need movement prediction and other kludges to reduce its impact, i.e. you need a local client that know the game it plays.

But with these services the client is merely a dumb terminal only receiving a video stream. As a result the lag will hit with full force and with long distance connections being a necessity here it should be obvious how this will play out.

And these people may repeat endlessly that this can be overcome - it can't! This is bound by the speed at which information travels through the internet, which is finite (from what I read, roughly 200'000 km/s, 2/3 of the speed of light.) So imagine your server is 2000 km away. That will result in 1/50 s of lag (have to factor in both ways of travel!) that's impossible to remove - for gaming that presumably measly time can already become a problem because the game won't feel snappy anymore.

Of course that time is merely the travelling time of your information. The data will get routed through multiple intermediate nodes that all add their own delays to this time so you'll never even match that 1/50th of a second. Not even the fastest internet connection in the world will be able to overcome a hard physical limit!

So, you have to essentially keep your gaming server very close to your customers to make this work. Does it now become clear why this is a fool's proposal?

EA projects 1 billion cloud customers? No, EA wants 1 billion. 1 million customers on stadia in six months is frankly a pathetic uptake and nowhere near enough to turn a profit. Many of them are possibly curious experimenters who won't stay long term. Also the more services diluting the potential customer base the worse each service will be financially. Few customers will pay for multiple services. One, maybe two would be the norm. Nothing in that article suggests that the author has truly considered the whole feasibility of this, not just technically but financially. Even big companies can only support this stuff for so long if it's not turning significant profit.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying my interpretation of this situation is correct. This is just one idiot's take. I have been in the tech game a long time and projections of the growth of emerging new tech from "experts" are wrong as often as they are right. Coupled with what I know about the expense of deployment and internet weaknesses even in ideal circumstances I just don't see this stuff working on a large, worldwide scale anytime soon if ever.

12 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Typical hogwash. 

I don't disagree. Just wanted to provide the other side of the argument. And thanks for shedding some light on this discussion. You've made some very good points, and I've learned some things.

They'd never let cloud gamers face off against PC or console gamers. The cloudy lot would be getting their arses kicked consistently.

4 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I don't disagree. Just wanted to provide the other side of the argument. And thanks for shedding some light on this discussion. You made some very good points.

Heh, yes, and it was inevitable that it totally sidestepped the one problem they'll never be able to overcome. Can't beat the hard limits of universal physics.

What they totally forget is that unlike movies, gaming is a two-way affair - data goes in and out. With movies it doesn't matter if the data travels for a second or two, what is important is that you get an uninterrupted stream. But with games it is of the utmost importance that no time at all is lost for data transmission which is a physical impossibility.

1 minute ago, NoXion said:

They'd never let cloud gamers face off against PC or console gamers. The cloudy lot would be getting their arses kicked consistently.

Yup, most definitely.