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Microsoft is Working on its Own Game Streaming, Netflix-Like Service (theverge.com)
Phil Spencer, Microsoft's gaming chief, revealed the company is building a streaming game service for any device. Our cloud engineers are building a game streaming network to unlock console gaming on any device, he said, adding this service will offer "console quality gaming on any device." From a report: "Gaming is now at its most vibrant," he said. "In this significant moment we are constantly challenging ourselves about where we can take gaming next." He said that Microsoft is recommitting and harnessing the full breath of the company to deliver on the future of play. That includes experts in Microsoft research working on developing the future of gaming AI and the company's cloud engineers building a game streaming network. He added that the company is also in the midst of developing the architecture for the next Xbox consoles. Further reading: Microsoft Acquires Four Gaming Studios, Including Ninja Theory, As It Looks To Bolster First-Party Catalog.
Battletoads.
They have the license, if they chose to make it happen I would consider giving them money. Otherwise I'll just keep running it on my Wii in emulation (on a ROM that copied from a physical copy that I do own, of course). I don't give a damn about Halo 23, I just want all the Battletoads games that they have selfishly deprived us of for so many years.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"console quality gaming on any device."
I'm not sure that phrase "console quality" means what he thinks it means.
Console games typically look like ass compared to a state of the art gaming PC rig - or even a several year old one most of the time. Sometimes to avoid a glaring difference the studio kneecaps the PC version intentionally, limiting texture resolutions and polys etc to make them look "equal".
Using Wine, of course.
Microsoft is the original corporate #MeToo.
Cant wait for pixelated half second delayed pictures
BSOD
Microsoft's experience in entertainment delivery, Groove Music, probably shows the way. Maybe it'll last a year, if that.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
all that money that MS scammed, and this this the best idea they have, they should just stick to buying other's efforts, truly demonstrates just how incompetent these people have become
No. No. Hell no. I don't sign for this. Ever!
See the previous Slashdot headline. They purchased four? game studios (this is what the headline says, but I distinctly remember seeing five during the actual press conference)
This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with it:
Imagine if the old 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, a streamed game 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. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to be behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
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 streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
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 developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
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 Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they 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 streamed games would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed 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.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
no network neutrality and caps will kill it!
As a Microsoft Game Studio developer, I can tell you it sucks. Oh, and just wait for the API... A complete mess.
Can't wait to use my VBA skills and my regedit expertise to put my name at the top of the leaderboard, like I used to do with Microsoft Plus games.
lucm, indeed.
Asking for a friend.
Running on azure, streaming down to a set top box. They have all the components to deliver this today, it is just a matter of content.
Can't wait to dust off my Apple //e!
I know, they could call it "Streams For Sure", and create some sort of device to play it on ("Vune" maybe).
NO WAY would Micro$oft allow you to invest your money in a dead-end product.
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 Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them.
One potential way to partially solve the problem is what is currently being done by several IPTV, video streaming (Netflix does it) or messageing/voice-/video-chactting (WhatsApp is doing it) and even was done by some ISPs back in the Quake-over-modem era in order to reduce (outbound) bandwidth costs and (your local) latency:
put servers in the ISPs local point of presence server room.
Your lag will be mostly influenced by the latency over your home internet connection (optical fiber, cable or dsl), and the connection within the server room.
You won't be having horrendous ping time because you need to contact some streaming server at the opposite side of the continent.
As long as you have a good connection (fiber) and a decent local network, that might help making non-twitchy games bearable.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It just funny when you think about the higher level implication and the evolution of the prediction models.
Starting from old days like Quake 3 (where basically the syste1m predicts objects keeping the same linear motions) and then following the current progressive trend of machine learning, we'll eventually end up at a point where complex deep-neural-nets are used to predict the inputs.
You'll basically be training an IA to play you're self.
Each play will be in practice playing against a local AI avatar replicating in advance the intention of the remote player.
Basically, you as a player won't be a player anymore, but a coach for AI remote players, if you think about it.
You won't be realizing it, but in a very abstract way all FPS will become war-stategy game where you aren't controlling the main character, but instructing a remote AI how to move it (by controlling directly the main character on your screen).
It's fun to think about it at this level.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Technically, the idea is that for MMO you aren't paying for the game itself.
You're paying for the "online experience" of playing together "with thousands of other people".
(Kind of the difference between:
- paying for you drinks at a store and drinking them at home while enjoying the evening on your balcony,
- and paying an obscene mark-up for going out in club where the main selling point is supposed to be the ambiance and the opportunity to hook up with other human beings).
The fee you pay is supposed to cover for the technical cost (keeping servers up), and all the personnel (developers and artists making new missions and content, moderators or whatever the actors doing the LARP-equivalent of NPC are called, etc.)
So in theory the monthly fee would be making sense. The problem is that most corporation decided to turn it as much as possible into cash-cows.
Yes, there exist such things like RPGs whose code is even opensource and you would only pay for the experience on the server.
Yes, there are things like Minecraft, where microsoft would like you to pay them some subscription to play on their realms. But you could as well play on a private sever that you setup with a bunch of friends.
But then there's the other darker side of corporations that go out of they way to make sure that you won't be playing on anything but a server where you have to keep playing them.
See companies suing attempts to re-implement 3rd party servers.
See Blizzard suing players that want to set-up servers that imitate older version of the game.
That is the problem.
You should be able to run an online game on any server that you like. As long as that server didn't straight up lift non-public executable blobs from the official server (but instead runs a 3rd party re-implementation) (I really don't agree with Blizzard's complains that the small text descriptions of objects or quest stored in a SQL databse that is mandatory to make the game working could be considered copyright violations).
Just the same way that on older generations of games, mods became a thing and a couple of big players (including id software) managed to convince the lawyers that users shouldn't be sued for modding.
We need the companies to accept that playing against a different server that they don't own and don't get money from is basically just a different type of mod.
If they want us to believe that monthly fee are to cover the "playing on our servers" experience, we should be able to answer "no thanks I'm going to play on my own".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I already have more games on my hard drive than I can play in my lifetime- images of virtually all C64, Amiga, Spectrum, NES, SNES, Gamecube, N64, etc. games, and emulators to play them. I have torrents of thousands of old DOS PC games (and most of these are also available to play online, for free), I have hundreds of PC game CDs, and I occasionally buy PC game DVDs from charity shops for under £2 each. I have MAME. I have probably over 100,000 game images for the older systems listed in my first sentence (and others I've forgotten). I love playing Painkiller, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor on the PC. I have no great desire to buy any 'new' games - I'm not that interested, and my PC would need to be upgraded to be able to cope with them.
I 'own' ALL of these games, they are either on my hard drive (forever) or on CDs and DVDs that don't require internet access to run. I would never buy a game that stopped me from using it in the future (and I mean well into the future, twenty years or more) because it had to be registered online, or even worse, was running on a server somewhere else.
Microsoft as usual NOT the trendsetter. All has been done and late to the show...
MEEE TOOOOOOOOOOO!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is exactly why we need to have a new low bandwidth REST protocol for the teledildonics market or you will be at the mercy of Verizon to provide your remote stimulation services.
Gamefly is still a thing.
I think the underlying operational architecture is what is really valuable here.
That's marketing bullshit son, if that wasn't the case private wow servers wouldn't exist. see below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Well that was the whole point my long pos (past the 2 lines of introduction you cited)t:
- To make this "bullshit" (as you call it) explanation valid, efforts are needed to make 3rd party servers acceptable.
But currenlty that not the case everywhere.
- That *is* the case with Minecraft. (Pay a recurring subscription only if you want access to their servers. Pay the blob once and then play with your friends on your own personal server if you want isntead).
- That is *definitely not* the case with Blizzard given their trigger-happy lawyer ready to shut down any attempt to third party servers.
^- We even used the same example (WoW, Blizzard) actually in our respective posts.
So no the fact that you believe that corporate propaganda means you're stupid.
Personally, I don't even pay attention to "corporate propaganda" : I don't even play MMOs. (Or any subscription-based game)
I like to play point'n'click games which (since the fall of Sierra On-line and LucasArt) has completely exited the radar of corporation and is currently more an indie thing. (So mostly financed through crowd funding).
you can have an mmo you own as a complete single player game with multiplayer server integrated.
Please elaborated how you could "have an mmo " (given that these letter stand for respectively Massive, Multriplayer and Online) as a "complete single player game". It kind of contradicts the whole purpose of the genre.
I fully understand and support the "own {... a ...} multiplayer server integrated" part, that's why I was saying that not preventing the gamers to play on a 3rd party server is just as important as allowing mods was in the last 90s.
I should be able to have fun with my friends on just any MMO as I could on Minecraft, without fear of judicial action.
I just don't understand the MMO being single player part.
There's no difference other than people like you being stupid.
Yup, I'm sure that calling random people on the internet "stupid" is the best solution ever to make your point understood.
So much eloquence !
Such persuasion !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
(First thing first : Please try to get some professional help for your compulsive coprolalia or something. It really doesn't help to get your point accross when every other word in your sentences is calling everybody "idiots", "morons", etc. Structured argumentation is way much more efficient at that).
Also, maybe you should take note that we both agree that trying to *force locking gamers* into a subscription-based system is a bad idea.
(Basically, I'm on your side, just maybe not as extreme as you).
To me it seems that your opinion is that the word "MMO" should be banned altogether, and every company making any online game should be forced to provide the server executable(1) together on the same media in the game box.
My opinion is that providing the server has complicated logistics(1). But end-users should not be prevented from playing on 3rd party servers.
They should have NO legal obstacles at all to do what they do on Minecraft. A lawsuite like Blizzard's against re-implementing old versions of WoW *should have no merit and be dismissed*.
It's okay to pay for a box containing the game code and the assets (and a free initial "test" subscription to their paying server if marketing decides so).
But now that you've paid the game and it's yours you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want to, and that *should include setting up your own server with friends* (even if the company doesn't give up the original server code, and you have to run some 3rd party simulation).
Some people on some game should be able to decide that they actually want the paid servers because they thing the experience is stellar. (EVE Online is a prime example where most of the gamer *actively want* to be on these server. Because all the fun comes mostly from the political scheming between all the players present there. Networking effect at its top - see all social networks).
But other games should be able to go to the their friends' 3rd party server (be it Quake(2), Minecraft, Ragnarok Online(3), or WoW).
TL;DR: We both agree player should be able to play outside of the official companies paying subscription.
We only disagree how these alternative server should be setup.
You seem to want to make it mandatory for a company to ship their own official server code.
I just want that a company shouldn't be able to prevent users to setup 3rd party server. Not necessarily with the official company's server code, they should be able to re-create their own server if so they wish(3).
Also, Quake Live isn't "locked" in any way for the sheer reason of being open-source(2).
--
(1) - By the way, chances are that it isn't a Win32 .EXE file.
Given the tendencies of the server world (where nowadays nearly everything runs Linux), at best it's an ELF executable (Valve has been reported to produce Linux executable a long time before starting their current trend of gaming on linux, mostly to run servers), but more likely it's a collection of servlets running all on some modern stuff like python (e.g.: EVE Online devs often explain their architecture).
That makes it nearly impossible to run on your Windows gaming machine (though the introduction of WSL on Windows 10 has slightly reduced the level of impossibleness).
And actually doing QA and support on the Linux servers and make sure it runs on any 3rd party server end-users want to throw at it instead of the highly customized server in the company's data center is extremely hard and costly. (though some recent development such as containerization should have reduced the level of hardness a bit).
Some companies (like id, including Quake 3(2)) actually pulled the necessary effort to provide both local game AND server code, on both Windows AND Linux (and multiple other platforms). But that's rare.
But its hard to justify the costs (id has always done it out of ideology, id's distributors and parent companies has always pushed against it not seeing any financial interest).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]