Facebook takes its first small steps into the world of cloud gaming:
Facebook is the latest tech giant to get into the world of cloud gaming — but the company's offering is quite a bit different than the competition. Unlike Amazon or Google, which both offer standalone cloud gaming services for a fee, Facebook is introducing cloud games to its existing app — several of which are playable right now.
"We're doing free-to-play games, we're doing games that are latency-tolerant, at least to start," says Jason Rubin, Facebook's vice president of play. "We're not promising 4K, 60fps, so you pay us $6.99 per month. We're not trying to get you to buy a piece of hardware, like a controller."
According to Rubin, the reason Facebook is exploring the cloud is because it opens up the types of games it can offer. The company started out in games more than a decade ago with Flash-based hits like FarmVille before moving to HTML5 for its Instant Games platform, but both of those technologies are relatively limited to smaller, simpler experiences.
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:15AM
Two of the things I DON'T want, together, makes it easier to avoid them. Pity they gobbled up Oculus though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jb on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:20AM (4 children)
Given that "cloud computing" just means using someone else's computer to do your computing...
...does "cloud gaming" mean using someone else to play your games for you?
And if so, why would anyone want it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:34AM
It's using someone else's computer to play games, mostly because the hardware being used (eg, a cheap tablet) is much slower.
The allure is having the ability to play a game on basically anything with a screen and a reasonably fast internet connection while retaining modern, high-end graphics.
The downsides are lack of control (both in terms of your ability to keep playing the game since it's a service instead of software, and in terms of your inputs being handled on-time) and dependence on a network connection.
Seriously though, I used OnLive back when it was a thing, mostly to play games on a shitty netbook I had. Mostly played the demos, but I did play Assassin's Creed with their "first game is $1" deal.
The latency is a massive deal breaker for most games. They offered FPS and fighting games on the service, which was crazy.
At least they have the sense to recognize that latency is a problem and expect to deliver games that don't demand particularly well-timed inputs.
Shame it's Facebook doing this, although again, using services instead of software is still not a good thing overall.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Thursday October 29 2020, @06:36AM
Let me dive a bit more into detail than the other response here. I'm not a gamer unless you consider my weekly boredom sessions of dosbox scorch, armada2525, and sometimes heroes3, which somehow still runs on windows10 natively.
So take that latest i9 and 3090 gpu or whatever people are using and play the latest halo or whatever the newage game is. it'll max out the latest hardware and render every hair and blade of grass in the scene to make it look real. But you want to play that on your $200 android phone. That phone can't run and render the game. But it can stream 1080p video of the game. So lets send your inputs to some compute on a big SAN in a datacenter, and just send the resulting video frame to your phone.
Since latency is high, and you need a few frames of video to compress the video, you're looking at half a second from the time you press left, to the time you see the video render the left turn. Maybe less if you're on wifi and close to the cloud exit point.
The beauty of this from a vendor point of view, is the textures are all the same, so it loads it all up in cache on the storage array, or RAM on the rendering server, and you have a single cached IO for all your users for the texture. So in theory if all those gaming servers are just virtualized (instead of having 50 xboxes in a DC for 50 users), you need a total of a lot less compute. You could probably also share cycles on a GPU farm to render for everyone. This means a lot less hardware total, vs everyone buying it.
The latency probably makes it a no-go for doom type of shooters, but I can see something like betrayal at krondor but with modern detailed graphics, where you're mostly just walking around a forest of a village, not being too annoying with a slight delay. like this, which hopefully gets made into the full game. https://youtu.be/5LRioTpg3yQ [youtu.be]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:51PM
You totally misunderstood Facebook and Cloud Gaming.
Facebook has already been using the Cloud so their algorithms could Game us all.
It's a big game to Facebook. The goal of the game is to make money from "engagement" by feeding everyone the most vile, abominable content that other users can create.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday October 30 2020, @01:21AM
And people wanted it like opium-laced ambrosia a decade ago - what has changed since then?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:23AM
So like their users.