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Sony Announces Game Streaming Service
You may remember Gaikai, a company built on the idea of cloud-based gaming. The idea was that a remote server would run the game and stream all graphics and sound to a player's device, which would allow underpowered or obsolete machines to run modern, graphically demanding games on high settings. In 2012, Sony purchased Gaikai. Now, they've announced at CES that their cloud gaming tech (dubbed 'PlayStation Now') is just about ready for the public. CES attendees will be able to try it out, and Sony will begin a closed beta test in the U.S. later this month. Full release is planned for summer. It will first support streaming to PS3s, PS4s, and certain Sony TV models. Later, it will expand more broadly to various non-Sony "internet-connected devices." Players will have the option to rent games or to subscribe for continued access. Forbes reports, "According to Sony, gamers who own disc- or digital-based games will not have access to those games via PS Now free of charge."
"Always play the most updated version of your game." Remove version control from my hands and I'm not sure I'll be happy with that. I've played a few games where the next version was, IMHO, inferior in some aspect I valued.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Don't you just love the constant creeping neofeudalism everywhere?
Tricky... I would have to first by a playstation before I could boycott the service.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Time for a boycott?
Lack of money will change there thinking very fast.
You fossil.
People with that mindset said, "nobody would ever pay $70 (or more) a month for mobile phone service" and then the telecoms and smart phone makers proved that completely wrong. There's, in my opinion, a huge market of players and potential players who don't care and will flock to this. The only thing you can hope for is they will still make physical copies available.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
who trusts them?
The kind of people who give their trust away very, very easily. I don't mean gullible, I mean people who put a low value on that trust.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Pay per shot".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Who would bother to ask Sony if they could play games they purchased free of charge? I would be surprised if Sony allowed that- the whole idea of this is a new revenue stream.
Tricky... I would have to first by a playstation before I could boycott the service.
Maybe you could just download a PS emulator, even a crappy one, and then go on with the boycott. I don't think they'd listen to you. Particularly if there's a bucket of people trying to push past nay-sayers and waiving their credit cards, willing to be among the first to sign up.
It's probably best to camp on the sidelines, watch the parade and then see if it actually ends in a parade of tears. If there's something you have to have and this becomes the only avenue to get it, your stuck.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I wonder if I can use Gaikai to play a game I've always wanted on my PS3 called "watch a fucking MKV file"
It was the first version with the "Nightmare" skill level, as well as not having yet removed the swastika room. Many, many little changes were made to Doom up until v1.9, which was the final one.
If I put in my pressed CD of Tomb Raider for Saturn today, it will run *exactly* like it did back then. Any bug fixes and changes that they made (and they did do it, a lot) later is not for me. Half-assed nostalgia sucks. I want the real deal, exactly like it was back then.
Streamed gaming is just wrong, just like "the cloud". It's somebody else's machine.
"first support streaming to PS3s, PS4s, and certain Sony TV models".
So, essentially streaming current gen Playstation quality games to your home, without requiring you to purchase any Playstation hardware!? Sony is going to 0wn current gaming console wars and truly bring high-end quality gaming to the masses if Playstation Now takes off!
I can imagine this being integrated in to all sorts of non-Sony devices (mobiles, tablets, low-end laptops etc) as you would only need to port the 'thin' Playstation Now client to get the games to work.
No.
Boycotts don't work, unless they are well publicized and have a huge following. Chances are you might never seen one that effective in your lifetime.
There are always petitions. Though companies are great at ignoring petitions, especially internet petitions, unless they get a massive number of signatures.
Something that has a higher probability of working. It's a letter writing campaign. Not email, actual snail mail get a stamp dead tree format communication protocol.
Yes, have people send them physical letters. It only costs each person one stamp, and each one is worth a thousand emails or petition signatures.
Will that get what you want? I have no idea, but it is a lot more likely to get a response than a minor unexplained dip in sales that probably isn't even noticed.
So Sony considers the PS3 and PS4 to be "underpowered" hardware, eh? :P :P :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
... let's just say that right now, this is all just marketing to cover up the fact that game ownership is being undermined and taken away and they are feeding the dumb half to the population PR to shove it down their throats.
Time for a boycott?
Why do you want to boycott it?
I have a hard time believing they can overcome the latency problems to my satisfaction. If you can play Frogger on this service than that's some pretty darn good latency.
It was the first version with the "Nightmare" skill level, as well as not having yet removed the swastika room. Many, many little changes were made to Doom up until v1.9, which was the final one.
Aha I just played through Doom 1 and I was damned sure when I lowered that particular patform that it formed a swastika and was confused by its slightly different shape. I wondered if I misremembered it. Thanks for clearing that up.
As for streamed games relative to versions that ship has sailed. Steam only sends you the latest version, and sure you can disable updates but what does that really get you exactly? You can't easily go backwards or install an old version later, and you usually need the new version to do any kind of multiplayer.
And the same stuff applies to disc based console games too. Sure you have the disk... 1.0 but if 1.2 was the best and 1.9 is the current... you have 1.0 or 1.9... good luck ever getting 1.2 on your xbo?? or ps??.
Even so I dislike intensely streamed games for many scenarios. But it might not be all bad for certain competitive genres if the lag is reduced enough -- as it can dramatically reduce cheating.
If video game publishers want pay per view, why don't they bring back arcades?
MKV has some amazingly useful and underutilized features. Everyone is (or should be) familiar with how it can do multiple audio/video/subtitle streams. It's chapter functionality is also really nice. The best and neatest thing is it's ability to pull in a separate file for a chapter. So instead of having 30 different TV show files each with the same opening and closing scene, you have those two scenes as separate files which are mixed in on the fly.
Data deduplication is a wonderful thing.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
Imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, this is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America (before you even consider data caps).
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who push this stuff seem very, very confused (at best).
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with this tech it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and no one has ever done anything to explain how they intend to solve them. Onlive did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that it would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streaming games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
I can't imagine that a deliberate boycott can be necessary. Game companies have a hard enough time keeping their servers up at launch, for vastly underestimating demand, and that's often for just authentication purposes, alone. The demands this kind of service has on its servers is ludicrous (just how many players can any individual machine in the cloud support, anyway?), let alone the problems that arise when you account for latency. I just don't know how they can reasonably accomplish their goals.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
As I recall OnLive was pretty decent for most instances, and is what Gaikai is modeled after. Only times people really seemed to complain was for really twitchy fighting games, when a fraction of a second really mattered.
What I am not too keen for is GaaS(Gaming as a Service), not a fan of paying a regular subscription fee for a non-MMO game.
Why do you dismiss YouTube
Because PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 systems can already view YouTube even without MKV support.
why does it matter if a corporation has backed MKV or not?
Sony owns a movie studio. A company that owns a movie studio would be more likely to back a format used by other movie studios.
which major legitimate video provider uses MKV?
People, millions of them. It's not just corporations that make videos you know.
Corporations make videos that I know. Individuals make videos that I don't know. Corporations have marketing departments strong enough to turn videos into videos I know.
Try 2: It's called economies of scale. I was under the impression that there was more demand for set-top devices for watching movies and television series distributed by major studios than for set-top devices for watching movies and television series self-published by individuals. Besides, services for self-publication of videos created by individuals tend to offer automatic transcoding from WebM to formats that PlayStation devices can play. For example, Google's YouTube service streams video to PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and other devices supporting MPEG-4 AVC video. So if an individual's video goes viral on YouTube and turns into a video that people know, people can still watch it on PlayStation devices.
I'd thrust them. Provided they're near a cliff.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you think that running everything about your game on some server and your computer only acting as some sort of display for it, ask anyone who got the original Final Fantasy XIV where Square Enix did exactly that and collect a few thoughts on how great an idea that is.
Hint: It was so great an idea that Square Enix pretty much trashed the game, redid it from scratch and just recently re-released it, about 2 (or was it 4?) years after its original release.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Better idea:
1) Encourage lots of people to get the service
2) Wait a few months for them to sink money into hardware and infrastructure due to high demand
3) Hit them with a boycott
4) Anti-profit!
"and sure you can disable updates but what does that really get you exactly?"
Mod compatibility.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Copyright infringers use mkv because it is arguably the best container format with the fewest restrictions. They have no reasons to use inferior products. The people who follow the rules are stuck with the shit that microsoft, sony, and apple feed them. They are designed to lock people into proprietary technology in order to secure revenue. These formats are designed to restrict rather than empower people.
What a radical idea! You need to expand on this "if you don't like it, don't buy it" idea. It could revolutionise modern day consumerism!
Even at a personal level; the number of times I've paid for stuff I didn't want and knew I wouldn't like. If I'd known I had the option of not buying it... well I'd be a rich man without a house full of junk!
The end of a show is the credits, where the episode number, director and even line producer change on each episode.
Some shows yes, some shows no. It's not unusual for Anime series to have canned credits on the way out which change in no particulars. And guess who actually uses MKV?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
will not be over rent vs buy. People have already demonstrated they will pay a monthly subscription if it gives them easy access to a broad range of interesting content; Netflix is a prime example of people's willingness to pay. The real battle will be over data use. Streaming services push bandwidth use up dramatically and as they become more popular ISPs will look for ways to make money off of the increased usage. ATT has already fired a first shot with their "content owner pays for data use" model they just announced. As more content becomes available via subscription look for ISPs, especially those that are cable providers, to look for ways to recoup money that is lost as people jump from cable to streaming content. I could even see the cable companies adding Sony's service as a package deal much like they have HBO and other premium channels, the only difference is what device uses the content.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Yes, it's "the ultimate game DRM" but, realistically, it's unlikely to displace conventional means of distribution. Two main reasons for this. Firstly, latency and bandwidth will inevitably be issues for many consumers, and publishers will lose money if they cannot also offer their games as disks or digital downloads. In other words, for a lot of people this will just be unplayable. I doubt it would ever work satisfactorily for FPS games. Secondly, for next gen and (particularly) PC titles, streamed graphics at high resolutions will suck compared locally run content. I doubt you'd get even 1080p at 60 FPS with no compression artefacts. Forget higher res PC titles. If publishers want to ship the latest and greatest to consumers then it's going to have run locally.
In summary, this service is likely to be used for more casual gaming, running titles from older consoles on newer ones, renting, and free trials. For the foreseeable future we will continue to have the distribution channels we currently have.
Finally, this streaming service isn't so terribly different to other DRM-laden systems such as Steam. Yes, it's a little "worse" but to all practical purposes not that much so. Frankly, I think Nintendo's system is far more shitty. There the downloaded games are forever tied to the console. So if you lose the device or it's stolen then you lose your games. If the device dies then you have to send it back to Nintendo to transfer the titles to a new one. I suspect the reason Nintendo do this is so that they can continue to sell the same Zelda/Mario game to the same consumer each time they upgrade their console.
soylentnews.org
Who trusts *any* major corporation these days?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It's not unusual for Anime series to have canned credits on the way out which change in no particulars. And guess who actually uses MKV?
The people who pirate anime who are also obsessed with subtitles.
Copyright infringers use mkv because it is arguably the best container format with the fewest restrictions.
I would call not being able to be played on consumer electronic hardware a serious restriction. I sometimes believe that the pirates use MKV just out of a sense of "leetness" rather than actual features. Not withstanding that a lot of pirates are Russian and well it's called "Mastroska" for a reason.
For the same reason that leading manufacturers of computing devices get their products into Best Buy and Walmart instead of selling only online. Showrooms have value.
You have a point. In that case, it's more likely that adding and testing MKV support would just cost Sony more than zero yen to add, and nobody happened to convince Sony of how many marginal sales MKV support would add as opposed to just using ffmpeg on the host PC to remux the video.
Meh, Sega Channel was pretty awesome back in the day.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
I would call not being able to be played on consumer electronic hardware a serious restriction.
Yes it is, but mkv still has fewer restrictions than other container formats
I sometimes believe that the pirates use MKV just out of a sense of "leetness" rather than actual features.
Being an open standard is definitely an important feature, aside from being leet. Mkv is not just *an* open video container, it is the most prominent and widely used open video container format.
Being an open video container means that it is easier to for 3rd parties to develop applications that support these files. This is good for healthy competition and consumers. This is not good if you are a big company trying to solidify your dominance in a market.
Android is good for consumers because it means that their apps can run on many different phones. It would be bad for consumers but good for Samsung if android only ran on Samsung devices. Microsoft would love it if everyone used wmv, because then they become the gatekeeper for new technology regarding video. Same with mp4 and apple. With mkv nobody is the gatekeeper. There is no gate to restrict people.
Look at what google is doing with VPX codecs. They don't want to be stuck paying licensing fees for h264, but rather than making their own proprietary compression scheme, they decided to purchase and open source a compression scheme that every (including google) can use royalty free. What's in it for google? They are boosting their support among developers who like the idea of using technology that doesn't come with any catches.
That only works if you happen to "freeze" at the right version.