Google will release its own Netflix for games in March

The main problem with this type of service is a lack of any kind of "customization". It's a sort of console-style type of service.

I'm using a service called Shadow for some time now, its main advantage is you get a Full PC which you remotely control and can tweak to your liking.

 

Nvidia and AMD stocks will plummet if true.

Interesting times. Between the new EPIC games store, the shadow and likes start-ups, and now Google, the whole Game industry is changing fast.

 

Why should GPU stock's plummet? What do you think will render the games?
This will change the gaming industry, true, but not for every game.

 

It would be a good idea for Steam to stream then they have all options covered, I enjoy upgrading and tweaking as much as playing games so not for me
but my son would love to play games from my steam library on his laptop.

 

Honestly i think it will flop just like Google+ did.

 

This is not exactly a new idea. A bunch of independent companies have such services. NVIDIA has such a service. Microsoft is planning one. Google is only joining a list of companies that already do this.

 

@nevcairiel: True, but not with Google financial weight and visibility
@fantaskarsef : You would not need powerful graphic cards in each and every PC, but on Google nodes. Smaller market wouldn't you agree ?

 

this target mostly single player games i bet, since the added latency is not something you want to see in an online game.

I m more interested in how they handle multiple windows VMs to render those games and how video hardware is divided between them. Maybe they have special directx layer that just forward the rendering request to some giant hardware?

A console like experience on your console powered pc ( or less ) is what 95% of the people are looking for.

 

I don't like the idea of streaming gaming, it is the first step to a subscription and not been able to play/choose from all the games in the market. It will be like Netflix, a lot of content but full of things that I am not interested in.

My economy can not afford subscriptions to all the the different services from different companies with different content.


Greetings

 

Almost everything Google tries folds in a year or two. idc.

 

Did you mean fewer entry level cards sold to desktop DIY? But higher count of High-end/Server cards sold to google?
Does not look like problem to me. I am quite sure that google is not going to waste server room space with RTX-2060 when they can use RTX-2080(Ti) instead.

 

cheaper to buy game you want to play. I mean dota 2 is free, so...

 

Remains to be seen how bad the latency is.

I used to use the Steam Link hardware which streamed a game on PC to your living room TV. Even on my wired gigabit network the latency was terrible, even for games like Witcher 3. Was using the integrated Intel GPU on skylake to do the encoding, but low latency encoding looks awful as well.

It certainly could've been improved quite a bit, but low latency encoding is either ugly or high bandwidth.

 

This. If people don't game at home anymore, affordable GPUs die, and big ones for bigger margins and markets will succeed. While this is not a problem to those who want to run games via streaming, enough people do not want this, and that's where the issues start. And I don't even want to go down the route to say, whoever lands a deal with the biggest stream supplier once more controls the market, we all know the issues of quasi - monopoles in gaming hardware.

Also, you want 1080p? Okay it's in your plan. You want to stream game 4K? Pay more. You want multiplayer support for your games? Pay more. With games as a service, the ideas of people making money out of thin air, that the customer has to pay for in the end. You don't buy DLCs anymore, you buy another 10 hours of playing time with the game... ideas like this are already in the big publisher's heads, and they are practically exploding in their pants if streaming games becomes the norm.

For singleplayer games, I can imagine this being a proper concept. When it comes down to multiplayer games, I think we won't see this happening for many, many years. The idea behind it is good, but it gets corrupted by human greed anyway.

 

No thanks Google, you've got too much control already and you will never touch my games. Also I want to own all of my games, not just rent or stand in line waiting like in some red utopia.

 

Yea, OnLive demonstrated that game streaming really works, over fiber optic, if you are not over 50 km from the server. It was a huge success. Everyone just loooveeees huge latency.
nVidia Shield streaming works because you stream over ~5~10 meters. And it doesn't work without latency and compromise in IQ.

 

Yawn...wake me when companies are streaming 4k games with the same responsiveness of local hardware. Imagine trying to stream a high-res multiplayer game while playing it online as well...! Talk about lag...whew. See ya', wouldn't wanna' be ya'. Google's idea sounds like SUN did with its "network computer" notions many years ago--handing control of everything to SUN and being satisfied with a dumb terminal, while SUN sat back charged users on a "utility-bill" grid for use--the data equivalent of kWh...that went over like a lead balloon, fortunately! SUN took the network computer to its grave. The local hardware model easily won. With games it's exponentially more critical, since few application packages can stress local hardware like computer gaming does. All software companies salivate over unseating the user and taking his place in control of his hardware and software environment, it seems. Greed unbound. Fortunately, their greed makes them very nearsighted most of the time, imo.

 

If anything this is another layer of hurt for STEAM.