Intrinsic said:
a lot of people seem to think that gaming is going to ultimately become a stream only service. Some even think this may happen as early as next gen. I am going to try and explain why I think its not possible and why I believe game streaming will not replace a dedicated gaming box anytime soon.
First, let's look at what a game streaming business model will look like to be better or at least match dedicated consoles or PCs by 2020
- the stream should support at least 1080p/60fps
- the gamer will be paying for a $40-$60 game that they never download but just stream when they want to or
- A stream subscription service of like $10-$20/month with limited support.Games on the service will be at least 12-18 months old.
And now, the problems (point aligned with above)
- Make no mistake, playing games is the single most processing heavy computer related mainstream hobby on the planet. When people think game streaming, they just think Netflix and go if movies can do it then so can games. Just not that easy. Think about it, every time you stream a game, there is a CPU and GPU somewhere that basically runs that game for you. one user per virtual console/PC. And if said virtual PC happens in 2020, then you will be talking about hardware that at least supports 4k gaming. This means that that virtual PC is going to be at least $400 per unit. Who exactly is going to pay for that? especially if the service is meant to cater to 10s or 100s of millions of people.
To help pUt this in perspective, (just an example); one Netflix virtual PC could basically render a movie or show to about 10 users simultaneously. The base cost of that virtual box (if measured that way) will probably cost no more than $500 for every 20 people. If this were a gaming service streaming brand new games built on the latest PC hardware, we would basically be talking about one virtual box per user. ~$400 per person.
- You think the idea to some of not being able to buy physical games is scary, then imagine not even owning the digital game you buy. You never have to download anything, you just stream it, but yet you pay $40-60 for that. Nope, not gonna happen.
- There of course is the subscription model. But the two main issues here is that you won't be seeing brand new games on a subscription payment model. More so, a subscription payment model makes it even harder to cover the ridiculous costs associated with what would be ganmer based servers. If they have you paying $10/month but it cost them $400 for a rig that would run games just for you, it would take 3.5yrs for them to make back the cost they put in to cover one user. Obviously not everyone will be playing at the same time, but we are still talking about ridiculous costs here.
That basically sums up what I think about this cloud gaming future. There is a reason why game streaming services usually only have older games and even with nvidias latest push to actual new fully paid for games they can afford to do that cause they probably have a growing number of extremely powerful older GPUs lying around and probably also don't realistically expect people to jump on that service in mass.
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You forgot 2 other, major points:
4. Bandwith: Streaming a game in Full HD will take up a lot of Bandwith, you will need at least 30mbit download speed to achieve this consistently, which outside of Japan and South Corea very few people really have (and have access to). And for 4k you'll need even more than 100mbit downstream, which is still very rare and very expensive.
5. Ping: NVidias Shield achieved a delay of just 150ms input-to-output, which is pretty good. But in order to achieve this, they had a ping of just 15ms (one way, so 30ms for both transfers), a number such low virtually nobody will ever achieve. With a more realistic Ping of 50ms, you already get a delay of almost 250ms, at which point it gets very noticable.
