Slashdot Mirror
How Game Streaming Went From Shaky Webcams To the PS4
An anonymous reader writes "A slightly different take on Sony's PS4 semi-launch this week. This article traces the history and growing trend of capturing/recording and streaming your gameplay on the internet, from the early days of Let's Play articles with screenshots to today, where pro-gamers make money by playing live on Twitch.tv, and the technology is built into the PlayStation 4: 'Multiplayer video games have been around since the beginning — just look at Pong. Sony's real breakthrough with the PS4 might not be the specs, but its ability to turn every game you play into a multiplayer one.'"
Heads up gamers, nobody wants to watch videos of you playing games, especially not your family or coworkers who are not 60-hour-a-week gamers, so please stop sending us Youtube links, okay? I'm never going to play in the NFL and you are never going to make a living playing games in your mom's basement, deal with it.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
If you live in OPPOSITE LAND! Who but an absolute MORON would want this? I'll bet the people that implemented this also voted for Romney.
Huehuehue, all those Romney voters are such a bunch of r-tards. Lulz.
Hack the planet. 420, become Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street erryday.
What if my ADSL goes down again like it did last night due to heavy rain? Will that turn my PS4 into a brick? Are console developers even caring at all about proper single player support?
I . . . don't think you understand this article.
Many of which are experienced video game reviewers, whom are also skilled gamers. A good video game review is harder to do than it looks. I think the OP is right, in that the average person does not want to see a video of the average gamer gaming. I don't.
Lets hope Publishers and developers don't decide that now every game must have a multiplayer component, no matter how little it makes sense. I'm looking at you Dead Space.
I cant wait to stream used games...
Oh.
I laugh every time I watch it.
Don't talk to it. It is a bot.
Sony's real breakthrough with the PS4 might not be the specs, but its ability to turn every game you play into a multiplayer one.
This is not a breakthrough. They already did this with the PS3. Every time I turned the thing on I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game. When I wanted to stream Netflix videos, I'd spend 30-60 minutes in a tug of war between Sony, Netflix, Content Owners and Content Pirates... The Content Pirates would get an edge on Netflix, which would update its software to keep the Content Owners happy, but Sony would make the customers update over their network and lock up the machine for an hour once a week. That game got old so I stopped playing. When I wanted to use OtherOS, I found myself stuck in a multiplayer game between the hobbyists, Sony's marketing department, Sony's software developers, and Sony's legal team. Ultimately, that game got old too, so I stopped playing.
One would think Sony would learn from this, but even if one head of the Sony hydra learned, it couldn't focus on the concept for very long because the other heads are too busy snapping at it.
You're a bot :(
The REAL hardware is a low latency encoder block in ATI's GPU, that is used to create an H264 video stream that ANY modern device downstream, including tablets, can decode. This is the same tech used for the 'tablet' controller provided with Nintendo's WiiU. Essentially, open standards (for wireless and decoding) and a special on-the-fly encode block provide the ability to have low latency wireless monitors, the very thing Intel and others FAILED to provide with a wireless HDMI solution.
For gaming, a wireless back-stream provides the inputs received by the viewing device. This is also how Nvidia's 'project SHIELD' works. There is an irony in that AMD/ATI has currently refused to enable the video encode function in the drivers used for its current 7000 series GPU parts.
I don't really want to watch someone else playing games either... yet I do watch other people working, eating and even having sex. Hell, the watching other people have sex industry is gigantic. And the BBC has a watching other people eat show every 30 minutes (and to humorless moderators, that is a joke, not a statement to be taken as literal claim to the BBC programming, that would be every 15 minutes).
And even the NFL comment is wrong... people pay to watch people remove toilets from buildings in Dirty Jobs. Watch mental retards fail to find gold in the ground but find it in broadcasting deals in stead. Hell Big Brother was nothing more then people sitting in their living room watching other people sitting in theirs. And it was a massive hit.
Lets analyse OC choppers. They aren't doing anything fancy or hightech. By watching it, you are not finding out how other people live their lives. It are just a bunch of overly fat rich white guys who suck at planning (did they EVER just start building a bike on time so it was finished in plenty of time) building gay bikes. How many seasons did it run?
Compared to that, watching someone else game... well it could hardly be anymore boring could it? And really the entire sports industry has proven for decades that people are willing to pay top dollar to watch someone else be marginally better at something that doesn't matter. Why cares who put a little ball the most times in the net? Most of the planet it seems.
I agree, it is time for Humanity 2.0 lets call this run a proof of concept and get god/evolution to do a radical redesign and come up with something less couch potato who doesn't fold at the knees at the sign of a crown, oscar or MVP award.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So it's already multiplayer when one guy plays a game and others watch?
In that case it's not that new. Even PacMan was multiplayer by that definition. Granted, mostly because we were waiting for that idiot to finally spend his last quarter so we can get a turn, but...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't get it, how do you turn Zelda twilight princess into a multiplayer game?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
multiplayer - a mode of play involving more than one player at one time in a computer or video game
Someone needs to learn English.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
...is considered multiplayer can watching porn then be considered group sex?
People watch curling (if I spelled that right) which is basically floor sweeping on ice. What can happen. Someone falls and hurts their bottom a bit. Yet, it is a sport that people watch. Darts? Rakes in millions of viewers. Although it suffered a setback after that Alas Smith and Jones sketch (or was it not the nine o'clock news).
Right now Nascar is in the news. Which is to racing what an empty room is to a maze. Turn left because if you turn right, you get a crash. Well MAYBE people watch for the crashes but really the people in the stands saw less of it, one video shows a guy totally unaware of a tire hurling towards him, he payed the ticket price for that?
I am NOT saying I can see the appeal it is just that I figure that if people can watch paint dry, then watching grass grow might also appeal to similar people.
Part of the appeal might be watching someone else do something better then you, or different then you. In Holland soccer is claimed to have 16 million national coaches (implying that the majority who don't give a hoot about soccer still want to be coach of something they don't care about). I can see people watching another gamer just to shout abuse at the tv screen "how could you not have seen that sniper" "they pay him for that?". There is money in this, the tabloids basically sell people they 5 minutes of righteous indignation about todays headline during their breakfast.
Remember that if you wrote down the concept of Columbo a "who-dunnit in which you know who-dunnit" before Columbo existed, people would have, and did say "this is never going to work". But it did.
There are pro-gamers and they are making a living out of showing how they play. It might make you no longer want to live on this planet but that is the reality.
Now will it be big? Who knows, a lot of people make their living catering to very small markets, let it be. There are things you are not meant to understand. Printerest for instance. In the days that Twitter is allowed to exists, the concept that someone might watch someone else watching paint dry has to be readily accepted because that is exactly what millions are doing right now.
The BBC has/had at the weekend in the morning a cooking show. Not 1 half hour show. Not 2 half hour shows back to back. Not two 1 hour special back to back. An entire morning of cooking... IN ENGLAND the country with the worst food in the world bar the USA. I would WELCOME watching someone playing pacman...
For that matter, in the Arcade days, isn't that what we all did? Watch the kid who could do it really well hoping that by standing behind him we would be as cool and attract the girls (flaw in this reasoning was that there never were any girls)?
You are basically a guy who is still arguing that reality TV is never going to take off. A noble thought but I can't help thinking of windmills and charging them for some reason. Pro gaming is here, it is sad but it is here to stay. Hopefully at the same dizzying heights as professional curling.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Having been fan of a not internet connected PS3, I'm going to skip the PS4 and just buy myself a nice linux gaming rig.
I hope this catches on because Youtube will get stuffed with these useless video's. I wonder if google really has unlimited storage
Webcam recording is alive and well.
My dad had been Cinecaming since 1968 and now I'm taking the tradition in to the Ultra High Defenition 3D future (7680x4320-3D@240FPS!). I won't be streaming games, but I will be doing trainspotting as usual, delicious trainspotting. Get ready for Train Simulator 2025 on PS5 n00bs.
Ever since I figured out how to connect the Nintendo 64 to the VCR and record my best lap times in Diddy Kong Racing I have been doing this shit. Now sony can fuck off into its rootkit hell.
Does it please you to believe I am a bot?
Your internet went down? Where are you living, Zimbabwe? My internet goes down about as often as the power - i.e. essentially never.
You really should stop posting self portraits on the Internet.
Pong may have been multiplayer, but today's consoles can't handle the graphical demands of local multiplayer action.
Perhaps we can have a reissued pong which is online only? Double the game purchases, double the fun!
That guys accent is really engaging.
I love hearing him talk about his engines being on fire as "unpleasant".
He is the best.
I never wanted to play multiplayer and never will.
When I think about it, there is indeed some kind of psychological satisfaction.
I remember watching streaming Starsiege: Tribes games with Winamp. I remember watching streaming Starcraft matches. This isn't even vaguely new, but the article doesn't even go into history; it's "history" lesson starts in 2011 and ends in 2013. This is thinly veiled PS4 advertising, not much more.