Will the Switch ever get a Direct competitor?

[Bofferbrauer2]

fatslob-:O said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

1. You are only counting rich countries there. In those countries, you're right, that shouldn't be a problem, except maybe some rare cases. However, countries outside of the top 20-30 richest countries do have less developed infrastructure, and thus much worse conditions for game streaming, both due to data limitations, but also ping.

2. Yeah, yeah, I could see that myself with Playstation Now - not. Under 8Mbps the visual quality was more at PSP level. Thankfully, I had 30Mbit which made PS3 games at least look like PS3 games, but with the 8Mbps at my dad's place it took a very serious visual hit, and that just wasn't worth it for me. Also, keep in mind that the 5mbps (which in Sony's own terms need to be rock-solid and rather suggest up to 12mbps to make sure) and 3GB/h Sony publicized for Playstation Now is just enough for 720p30. 1080p is twice as big as 720p,which means 1080p60 would at least need 4 times as much bandwith and data so 20mbps and 12GB/h for 1080p60

3. Prices will get cheaper, but certainly not as fast as you seem to think. It took forever to get high data cap plans with LTE and these are unpayable as you can see yourself.

I also checked what the prices would be in Germany (Telekom), Luxembourg (Tango), France (Orange) and found that they are wildly different. Telekom has an unlimited Data subscription plan... but that's needed since the next-lower one only gives 10GB. Tango doesn't have any unlimited data plan and even their biggest one is capped at 44GB (free wifi is relatively commonplace in the city of Luxembourg, but if you live in outside the city, you're pretty much out of luck here). Orange is pretty good and cheap, but not unlimited. Just to show you that plans like the ones you posted are not universal in the industrial world.

1. Depends on what you mean by 'rich'. Latency isn't much of an issue and I don't think it'll ever be an issue unless you're streaming across different continents. Ping would only become a profound issue in real time competitive modes ... 

2. The Switch's native display is 720p and for the most part 5 Mbps just works according to when DF tested PS Now using PS3 games but comparing image quality to PSP games is very harsh when they are identifiably lacking with tons of low resolution textures and less complex meshes. Sure PS Now isn't going to win any image quality awards but even I can tell the difference between compression and being a generation behind in graphics technology. Even Nvidia, recommends no more than 7 Mbps for their GameStream app ... 

3. Well soon it's going to become a reality because the advent of decommissioning 2G and 3G networks is upon us so there's absolutely nowhere else to go when much more spectrum is going to be freed up for 5G/LTE networks ... 

Orange is fine with a 150GB plan which is a shit ton of data more than what most people could use remotely even for streaming ... 

1. With rich I meant G20 plus some extras. @bolded: Yes, but there's an easier word for that: multiplayer. As in, every multiplayer is either coop or competitive, and with coop everybody gets dragged down to the slowest in the bunch, so these will get affected by lags too.

2. I have a comparison made by the German magazine C'T (stands for Computer&Technology, and they're very profound and thorough in these, so much that you see them in every single IT department in German-speaking countries) which had the same scene at 5Mbps and and 50mbps, and the difference is really night and day. Wish I could upload images to the forums directly so I could show it to you.

3. Why are you so locked up on 2 and 3G? I haven't been connected to anything less than 4 G in the last 2.5 years in Luxembourg, yet as you can see you don't get much data in the subscriptions there. Guess why? Because the deactivation of 2 and 3G doesn't do squat. 5G will probably bring  more data, but it will take years until we'll have full coverage with 5G

Yes, orange is quite good in that regard, but with streaming that can still get eaten up very fast