Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
I dunno, 2 feels pretty on point. Unless you're trying to match an Xbox Series S, I guess. The components in my aging midrange desktop are worth ~$600 more than than I paid for them in 2022.
On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?
Oh boy, that time is long gone. Today you wait an hour for the game to be installed from disk and then for the day 1 patch to be downloaded and installed.
> Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware
I do not believe any current-gen console is subsidised? Though old stock thereof is probably cheaper because they locked the component prices in before RAM prices started going crazy
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
Power-wise Steam Deck isn't on par with current gen consoles nor even last gen consoles. It can play plenty of games, but we've reached a point that it can't run most new AAA games at an acceptable level of performance regardless of settings. With a console you can buy pretty much any game and assume that it will run at a playable frame rate (though there are of course exceptions).
And it doesn't have to be on-par. Show me a gameplay enhancement that the current gen hardware has enabled - something that just wasn't possible on previous gen hardware.
Well, PS5 has an incredible audio processing chip that can actually use GPU geometry directly - and it does its own equivalent of audio raytracing to model accurate behaviour of audio inside whatever room you're in, based on geometry and material properties. It's extremely cool and works pretty well, but unless you're an audio geek you won't notice.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
The scale of things has somewhat improved, but the gameplay improvements in GTA V over IV are hardly there due to hardware capabilities. Gran Turismo still, afaict, does not have a visual damage model, but of course the simulation has improved somewhat. I do not believe Fortnite would have captured a bigger market had it leaned harder into cool graphics.
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
AMD TrueAudio was doing the audio raycasting thing many years before the PS5 released [1]
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
I am aware. But the question was what can the current generation do that the last one didn't - well, PS4 couldn't so that, PS5 can. And because it's built right into Wwise a lot of games support it(whether it's wired in correctly in them is a different question, but I know all games I've worked on had it)
Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.
I was specifically referring to PS4 and Xbox One. Power-wise Nintendo platforms since Wii are essentially (at least) one generation behind the other consoles, and generally speaking Nintendo platforms have their own games rather than relying on big multiplats, outside of indie games.
I own a Steam Deck and its one of my favorite devices but its specs are now not really at par with standard (given its age it makes sense). They need to release a newer version but I doubt they can keep the same price value as they did with the original given the market conditions
On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
Did we live in two different “2006s”? I remember 2000s laptops to be near-unusable for anything 3D, let alone a 400 dollar one. My mid-2000s gaming PC could do it at 60-ish FPS, but the graphics in that alone were like 300 dollars :D
You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)
$400 buys you a decent laptop from 10 years before.
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago (2006) a $400 laptop from 1996 had a pre-Pentium CPU barely able to run Windows 95. In fact I’m not even sure you could find laptops that cheap, used or new.
Dell was selling new Intel core laptops at the $450-$550 range in 2006. Budget brands were offering similar deals/rebate sales pushing just below these. (Acer) I had purchased one of these.
In general dubious binaries aren't really a problem, because releases tend to be done by people or groups with reputations. Lots of people are ideologically or technologically motivated to release stuff and have been doing so for many years.
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
Unlikely most of the Denuvo cracks actually remove the virtualized code from the executable. Not feasible without extensive binary rewriter tooling (that, while being sloppable, still takes a lot of time to slop).
Interesting yeah you're right. Looking it up it seems that only 2 of the Denuvo cracks have completely removed Denuvo - oddly enough Assassin's Creed games both times. Usually they just use various tricks to fool the authentication, but leave the performance degradation and other issues of Denuvo.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
I can't edit this post anymore but if you wanna read a bunch of stuff on the topic https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/ is a nice blog. All in Japanese, but it should be perfectly translatable.
Funny thing is they removed all their blogposts on Griffin (an obfuscator several anticheats, including EA's, Riot's and FaceIT's utilize) for whatever reason.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time.
I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
Even if I pretended what you said might be true, the ISP would still be noisy between you and Nvidia. So you would still have the latency between you, Nvidia and the game server.
It still doesn't make sense, however you try to create imaginary scenarios where it might make sense. A lot of people in tech seem to do this, where they will try to invent fantasy scenarios to prove people wrong. It is extremely tiresome.
This ignores all the obvious other problems with game streaming, e.g., what happens when their servers have an outage? What happens when they decide they aren't going to support a title anymore?
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
Myself I am very sensitive to latency, which is a bit more evidence that I have a somewhat unusual nervous system. People who are much better at other game genres are amazed that I can usually beat levels from any rhythm game the first time unseen but...
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Just run a private server and kick/ban them? That's how things worked in the 00's and there is no reason why it wouldn't work now. You can even whitelist your vetted friends.
consoles and thus games are hacked just as thoroughly and completely as PC, for quite a few years. i cannot think of a single console ive played MP and not seen the same blatant cheating since xb360 days
Even in an online FPS all your inputs need to be sent to a server running the game logic so what you're seeing is not an actual state of the game but rather the predicted one. I think it would make sense to have a competetive game run all it's logic and rendering on a single machine for all the players in a given match so that it works a bit like a split-screen - the only difference being that instead of showing it on a single combined screen it would send those screens to remote players. This way a lot of problems with latency and movement prediction would be gone. Also cheating would be impossible which is a good enough reason to do it on it's own.
For things you can't control, like other players, prediction works fine and can be almost entirely invisible when well done. But prediction doesn't work fine with things you control, like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
> like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
The problem is that things are dynamic. Pressing fire does rather different things if the gun is loaded or empty. You might argue then you could just start doing some small amount of local computation, but then this small amount rapidly grows to a not so small amount because you bump into these issues endlessly and you end up learning why so much is done locally on most games to the point that cheating becomes possible.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
What if you render a spherical view from player's standpoint on a server and then merge it with locally rendered hud + weapon? The biggest source of cheating is that your pc knows the position of other players, only rendering your local state locally would make this kind of cheats impossible while maintaining ms-level response to actions like shooting and looking around (moving has a lot of inertia anyway).
Imagine you're at the corner just before a hallway and you want to quickly peak around the corner where you think an enemy might be. If you didn't have local copies of player locations, then when you look around that corner you might not see anything even if there's a guy right there. At best he'd do this weird pop-in thing which would look awful.
Maybe but VR FPS isn’t such a huge category. The biggest problem there I suspect is almost certainly variable lag (particularly random spikes) as that’s harder to compensate.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...