Paul Kamma used to lead an uncomplicated life. As a video games enthusiast, he'd while away his time playing first-person shooters and other high-octane games.
Then he got married and started a family.
"When you come home, you play with your kids… You don't have much time to play big games like GTA [Grand Theft Auto]," he says.
"But I still wanted to do this because I loved it."
As well as not being able to spend as long at his computer as he once did, Mr Kamma also didn't have free reign over the household TV like before.
So, he turned to cloud gaming, which allowed him to stream video games to a simple laptop computer. Anywhere he went, he could still have access to his favourite games.
Mr Kamma lives in Germany. The streaming service he chose, Shadow, allowed him to set up a remote PC on a server somewhere in The Netherlands.
He could install games on the server and connect to it via his computer, which displayed the game screen and allowed him to control his character.
"I can play it everywhere, I can play it at work if I have free time there," he says.
That's what cloud gaming is - your game runs on a powerful computer somewhere else and you just connect to it.
It means players can access big, processor-hungry games on simple devices - cheap tablet computers, even.
While such a set-up has been possible for some time, cloud gaming will soon be available from Google, and Microsoft as well.
This month Google will launch its Stadia service in the US, UK, Europe and Canada, and Microsoft has just begun previewing its Project xCloud.
[...Games industry analyst Piers] Harding-Rolls points out that cloud gaming of this type has already been attempted, 10 years ago, with a service called OnLive.
It was reasonably successful, perhaps even ahead of its time, but it went the way of the dodo. Partly because back then internet infrastructure was not as robust as it is today, and connection speeds were slower.
"It cost them too much to stream the content, and that left them with very little room to manoeuvre in terms of acquiring content," says Mr Harding-Rolls.
And that content, is make or break.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @10:59PM (1 child)
> As well as not being able to spend as long at his computer as he once did, Mr Kamma also didn't have free reign over the household TV like before.
Whites are cuck faggots.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday November 08 2019, @11:23PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @11:08PM (4 children)
GTA? With kids? What kind of monster are you? Hot coffee for a five year old?
Better just to go with the Snow solution, get a couple more wives, and games will be the least of your problems.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 08 2019, @11:15PM (3 children)
It's educational. Fantastic way to teach your kids not to be a hooker.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday November 09 2019, @12:28AM (2 children)
Also why you should always look both ways before crossing even if it's a crosswalk and the traffic light is green.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @03:36AM (1 child)
Maybe he should be playing a video game where you carry around a baby in a box, on your chest.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @06:42AM
No! Because then you would have to put your "baby in a box" into .the fuel intake in your motorcycle [google.com], as Ethanol_fueled did. And which explains why Eth has no progeny. Just a bare miracle that his military family could get him a job with a defence contractor, so he could spend his life spewing racist and anti-semitic shit. That is, of course, until HIS baby in his box realizes what an asshole he is, and aborts him. Bleeding out from a video game baby is really no way to go, but it gives these fucking incel gamers some idea of what it is like to be a real human being.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 08 2019, @11:14PM (3 children)
The only things that should be streamed are videos of cats and videos of people fucking. No matter where you move, you personally will never have a ping time good enough to play games that don't suck via streaming. It may look like you do when you test it, your ISP may swear you should five nines of the time, but every time you fire up a game their network will congest and you will get pwned and teabagged by a teenager.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Friday November 08 2019, @11:30PM
You can stream Civilization VII.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @11:52PM (1 child)
Not true, I have been streaming games for years and it works just fine.
It's true I get pwned and teabagged more often than not, but nethack hasn't been a teenager in over a decade.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 09 2019, @12:03AM
Comments like this make me wish I remembered what mad genius suggested the Touche mod.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday November 08 2019, @11:29PM
Nintendo Switch is designed for offline gaming, even as a wifi party...
I can do the same trick with a powerful computer in my kitchen. Streaming recipe is: put an ffmeg, openbroadcast and nginx into to pot, stir some configuration, use a grabber hardware to connect a real console or big windows heater to the contraption. Stitch with some ssh for tunneling input back.
https://www.freebsdnews.com/2019/06/13/how-to-freebsd-live-video-server/ [freebsdnews.com] but it should be close easy to that on Linux too.
And most importantly: keep every piece of hardware under your control. Always.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 09 2019, @12:08AM
About the time when WoW was blowing up big and people were having their evenings and weekends sucked away, I jumped off the online games train. I pick up old consoles for a song and rummage through the used games bins for big titles under $5. Paying one, discrete, low price makes a lot more sense for what is essentially a big waste of time than a recurring payment and DLC that stretches away into infinity.
Also, playing with other people online is not enjoyable when the games are mobbed with thirteen year olds with too much time on their hands and zero courtesy. I get what it is to live and die for games when you're that age, because I was one once, but it's not where I'm at as a gamer anymore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @04:03AM
Lots of games don't actually need to be very responsive. Pokémon, any JRPG, some Western RPGs, walking simulators like Detroit: Become Human (why aren't these called "mystlikes"), anything that's turn-based, slow paced builders and simulators like Sims or Minecraft.
Lots of games do need to be very responsive. FPSs, sports or driving games, fighting games, RTS and MOBAs, RPGs with lots of action content like Dark Souls.
The former will work fine, the latter will work poorly. But people have a way of rebelling against "sure, it's crap, but it's all you need, right?" PC Jr, Windows RT, whatever, nobody wants stuff that's just plain worse.
Game developers aren't going to like this either. Free to play developers won't care of course, and really competitive games won't work on streaming services anyway, but there are a bunch of games - mostly in the RPG category - where you pay full price, but once it's over, it's over. You could go play it again, but you usually don't. Developers can't license these for streaming because they would lose money, as most users would just play for a month or so. You'd basically have to pay nearly full price to unlock the game, because monthly residual payments wouldn't cover the development expenses.
There's also the hardware situation. Netflix has to pay a lot for content, but they don't really need a lot of server power per user. Streaming games will need a powerful server, and that has to be paid for. Unlike most web services, which might need a lot of server power for a moment while it figures out your directions or runs your web search but then can handle someone else's requests on the same server immediately afterward, games tie up the server completely, the whole time you're using it. This is going to be very expensive for the operator.
Some things just aren't suited to the cloud. Games are one of those things.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:27AM (2 children)
"Cloud" anything is getting increasingly absurd. I just picked up an older machine for the wife, who wanted her own desktop. We spent about $180 in total on it (including monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc). It runs GTA V great. And costs are only getting lower. "Cloud" services are [re]emerging just about the time that personal computing is becoming absurdly cheap. Probably why it's [re]emerging. At an economy of scale, you've probably bought that "powerful computer" you're connecting to after a few months of rent for access to it. Let alone the fact that at least tens of other people are going to be using it during those same months. Profit margins in "the cloud" are gonna be absurd and, again, only getting more absurd as hardware costs continue to plummet.
The one and only reason the cloud exists is so companies can collect a check without having to actually create a product. It's why all of these behemoths that are increasingly having difficulty creating new big products, such as Google and Microsoft, are pushing it without about the same dignity as your local crack dealer. Come on kid, try the cloud, all the cool kids are doing it, it's the wave of the future, it'll make everything better, you can do anything on the cloud, it'll make you feel good. Wife got you down? Work got you down? Just take a hit of cloud and make it all go away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:23AM (1 child)
I'm just going to main cloud
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @10:37AM
*mainline
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Sunday November 10 2019, @02:20AM
First we learnt to stream our food (grocer, Uber Eats)
And entertainment (circus, TV, Netflix, Google Stadia)
Then rent houses
And water (aqueducts, sewage, water pipes)
And power (oil, coal, electricity, gas)
Then stream transport (cabs, public transport, car lease, Uber)
And partners (prostitutes, divorce, pubs, porn, Tinder)
And fitness (caregivers, gym, supplements)
And communication (stamps, TCP/IP, webmail, social media)
And knowledge (consultants, libraries, eLibraries)
Finally, cordination and control (the cloud)
It began with streaming food and circus.