| Intrinsic said:
Now you are talking about a completely new can of worms. Streaming. For the most part I agree with you. But understanding what goes into making that work will give you an idea of how far off it is. You are basically talking about gaming as a service. I use my surface a my primary PC too, even though I have a much more power dedicated PC. So I understand where you are coming from. But lets break this down. Game streaming doesn't just automagically happen. If you want a streamed game to have PS4 level graphic fidelity, then you basically should have PS4 level hardware somewhere that runs that game. Now if you want to provide a stream for lets say, 30M people simultaneously, taking into account that they could all be playing 50 different games, you literally have to have 30M dedicated PS4 level hardware hubs to run the games for those 30M people. If your audience is 100M large, then thats 100M PS4s. Difference being that these PS4s aren't in your home, you aren't paying for it. They are in a massive server room somewhere. This brings us to the next part, they will still sell you dedicated hardware. Much simpler on their part compared to what they have to do now from the end consumer perspective. What they will seel you is a small box that allows you connect your controllers or what not. Most importantly though, this box will have extremely cutting egde video processing hardware to process and playback in realtime what may heavily compressed 1080p/4k streams. At 60fps. But thats not really a problem, such a box probably wouldn't cost more than $100. This hardware however wouldn't be something that could just be in every tablet/tv or PC cause its dedicated hardware built to handle codec that nothing else needs to deal with on its level. You can't just use traditional streaming methods. Long story.... But now the real problem, how would such a model work as a business. Lets say MS sells you and XBO for $400. And it cost them $400 to make and ship it to you, they have broken even the second you buy the console. If they make say 100M consoles. Thats $40B right there. But its ok cause they sell all those consoles and start making money from the games. But who pays for the $40B worth of hardware that is in the server room to stream games to a 100M people? And that is not including the additional $100 box they still have to make and sell to you so you can recieve and process the stream. It emans right off the bat, there is a $400 loss they are taking everytime someone buys that $100 box. An easy fix, or actually the only fix... would be something that most would not like. Start charging a subscription fee. And I am not talking about $50/yr. Doing that would take them 8yrs to make back that $400 per user investment. No, they will have to charge around $40/month. Now after paying 440/month do you think gamers will still want to spend $60/game? That they never own and can only stream? No. So that would mean that the games available become part of the service too, which will mean that you won't even be paying $40/month but more like $80/month. Then now imagine how they will feel when in say 8yrs they have to spend god knows how much more to upgrade their entire server. Streaming games sound really good on paper. But the business of it is just a disaster all round because of how hardware dependent games are. Think of it this way, in 10 yrs MS tells you to buy a small $50 box or better yet, download an app to your phone or tablet that will let you connect it to your TV so you can play games from XBL, but you will have to pay $80 every month to do so and you don't own any of these games. Sony, tells you that you can buy hardware for $400 that will have IQ that is much higher than what XBL servers can give you and you don't pay $80/month... you just buy your games. Which do you think you would do? |
Well, you are actually describing the very idea that MS seem to have had when starting the next gen with X1. They are the company that actually has the capacity to have servers near almost everyone on this planet. They created 300000 servers, virtual or not, that aim to support a huge online community. They also aimed to make X1 online/only, in my view laying the groundwork for an always/online service. It backfired somewhat but MS are the ones to have the capacity to make this a reality.
