Game Streaming's Latency Problems Will Be Over in a Few Years, CEO Says (arstechnica.com)

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference last week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says the rise of streaming gaming was an inevitability that was just waiting on the technology to power it at scale. While Zelnick acknowledged that the streaming game servers "have to be pretty close to where the consumer is" to address latency issues, he said there are a few large-scale companies "that have hyperscale data centers all around the world," and that infrastructure will be able to address that last remaining hurdle in a few years time. A report adds: Zelnick's comments come a few months after Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested that streaming games will completely replace consoles after one more generation. Guillemot suggested that changeover would cause a revolution in the gaming market, which will explode in size and accessibility thanks to cheap, streaming-capable boxes delivering big-budget hits. Zelnick agreed that streaming will increase the size of the high-end, big-budget gaming market -- because "you don't need to buy a box in order to play our games" -- but stopped short of expecting a massive revolution. Even if streaming boxes end up much cheaper than current consoles and PCs for the same experience, there may not be that many additional potential players who don't currently have high-end gaming hardware. "I can't sit here and argue it will be a sea change in the business," Zelnick said of future streaming game services.

Comments

They keep banking on infrastructure improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no financial incentive for ISPs to ever provide better service.

Why would it be over in a few years?

[Stormy Dragon]

Even if there's a technical solution to the problem, given the general lack of competition in the broadband internet market, what makes the author think that technology will be available to most consumers within a few years?

e.g. In my area Verizon won't upgrade beyond 2Mpbs DSL. What makes you think they care about latency?

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[Riceballsan]

easy the FCC has decided to make there be more competition by redefining things as competition. See by re-labeling 3g-4g service as competition... now ISPs have to worry about the competition in there area, and speeds will improve and costs will lower. They just need to go further in labeling old school dialup as a broadband competitor and then we'll be all set.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[Jason1729]

It's a form of myopia most multi-millionaire CEOs in Silicon Valley seem to have.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[nitehawk214]

I just saw the first Verizon 5G commercial the other day. Yeah fucking right. Not only will it be the same ok but not great service, but it will allow you to hit your data cap in 1 hour of use instead of 2.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[jellomizer]

It is more simpler then that. The more we have the more we will use.
The Average Website today is Megabytes large. Because most of us have network connections in the Megabits range.
25 years ago off a 2400 bps modem this would take hours to download.

Back in the 2400bps or more likely the 14.4k modem days we had games that were playable that worked "online" with such speeds. Doom over Modem? Or Starcraft over Battle.net.

However as speed increased the amount of data we can send to games increased as well, to be playable with what people would call "a slow connection".
If we all had gigabit connection, I would expect games would be streaming the video to our systems, So we are not having to deal with High End video cards, and prevent cheating or hacking the games.
   

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[Rockoon]

Thats a lot of writing you did about bandwidth... but the topic is latency.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[ausekilis]

Further than that, what about the push for higher and higher resolutions?
Neflix 1080p encoded video is at least 3Mbps (higher recommended). What about 4k? 8k? What about other parts of the stream (e.g. locally computed updates)?

To say "we've got it handled in a few years" is incredibly naive -- they're claiming they're going to hit a moving target. Every time we get a new technology, we find ways to push its limits, then we develop better technology, rinse, repeat.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[David_Hart]

Thats a lot of writing you did about bandwidth... but the topic is latency.

Exactly. Latency is based on media and distance. There are few technical methods to overcome latency as much of the internet already operates near the speed of light. There is room for route optimization and through caching. But I'm guessing that the "innovation" that is being referred to is prioritizing traffic (i.e. paying more for a gaming optimized service). This, of course, would end up creating a two-tiered internet. Those with money to pay for optimized gaming service and those who can't.

Re:Why would it be over in a few years?

[thegarbz]

what makes the author think that technology will be available to most consumers within a few years?

What are you talking about? That technology was available to consumers years ago: http://onlive.com/

They are expecting to make more money!

[HornWumpus]

High end gaming hardware? Consoles? Bullshit.

Double bullshit on 'next generation' gaming hardware being 'high end'. Phones will be powerful enough for everything but VR/AR. More or less, already are.

They are expecting to make money renting you mid priced CPU/GPUs, you will already have 'good enough' in your pocket.

If they think the PC gamers are going to use this, they ARE crazy.

Re:They are expecting to make more money!

[fbobraga]

but "the new stuff is better"! P

Re:They are expecting to make more money!

[Darinbob]

Big snag is that this will only be economically viable for big popular games. If you want to keep playing the game that isn't popular anymore then you'll be out of luck. Modern gaming, especially console gaming, seems to be oriented towards the fashion of the month, not Indie titles. It makes money, but it's targeting maybe 85% of the market only.

Re:They are expecting to make more money!

[HornWumpus]

3d shooters/sneakers are at the 'Commodore 64 sprite game saturation point'. They've just been beaten to death, nothing really new there for a decade now.

Nobody is at all excited about them as they are largely interchangeable. Hard to get a premium or charge rent for 'interchangeable'.

It's past time for something new.

It's not casual games on phones, those are just sprite games again, which are sort of new to kids.

Re:They are expecting to make more money!

[LesFerg]

PSVR gives a fresh new excitement to some types of game, but it really needs to be way smaller, weigh 10% of the current hardware, allow you to easily drink a beer (or anything) while playing, and allow you to see whats going on around you.... so lightweight AR is probably what will really take off in the near future.

I still go back to the PC for most of my gaming, the PSVR has not become a regular habit and certainly is not indispensable.

Bandwidth Demand Increases

[cirby]

By the time they can reliably stream HD game video at low latency, everyone will be wanting 8K-per-eye VR.

A reversal of fortunes

[rickb928]

Usually it's gaming or pr0n that drives innovation. But in this case, where latency is the problem for streaming, it's Wall Street that is driving the tech and the improvements.

HFT. Latency = $. It gets addressed. of course, for HFT, it's all distance, but all the other clever tricks will be deployed to stream games. And the end ISPs will be in the hot seat if they monetize specialized performance. Maybe.

Re:A reversal of fortunes

[sexconker]

Did you have a point or did you just want to throw out a Tropic Thunder reference?

You bring up high frequency trading. Then you point out that, of course, "it's all distance".

Then you go on to say "but all the other clever tricks will be deployed to stream games.". What "other clever tricks" are you referring to? You JUST said that it's, of course, all distance.

Making sure you have a minimal number of hops and the routers/switches along the path aren't slowing you down isn't a trick or clever.
There's no trick. There's no clever. As you first said, it's all distance.

Re: A reversal of fortunes

[rickb928]

Since you either have no technical background or imagination...

First, edge servers. Akamai does this for static content (caching) and that would work for streaming. Game servers could work with this.

And improved peer connections of course. Bypass the intermediate NAPs.

Certainly more direct physical paths.

I doubt better hardware would be a primary solution, but part of the mix.

Re: A reversal of fortunes

[rickb928]

BTW, the Tropic Thunder reference is to clever for me to catch on to. Sorry, not in my frame of reference.

Re: A reversal of fortunes

[sexconker]

How would caching work for LIVE GAMEPLAY? (It wouldn't.)
If there's some static content that doesn't need intensive rendering (maybe you want to cache the menus for some stupid reason), why wouldn't you just cache them on the end user's device?

As far as connections go, in what way is that a "clever trick"? I already mentioned taking the most direct route possible:

Making sure you have a minimal number of hops and the routers/switches along the path aren't slowing you down isn't a trick or clever.

Re: A reversal of fortunes

[rickb928]

A caching (content provider) on the akamai model would use better links from servers to edge 'caches' that would be delivering that content as a stream. Having game providers drive those high speed links out to ISP gateways might work, but piggybacking on the Akamai system.

It would look virtually identical, except the content would be changing... Just using the Akamai network model.

But game systems could make their own of course. Me, I want better than 30ms latency end to end, and that's gonna be hard to deliver, so all I really want is fair. If most of us are getting 30ms but some are getting 12ms, I'm being pimped by somebody. Probably my ISP, since I'm not getting anything much better than 45ms now.

well want to play games then buy comcast gameline

[Joe_Dragon]

well want to play games then buy Comcast game line to get the best pings (free with cable tv plus or higher)

Latency = Lag = Never Going Away

[Crashmarik]

Unless they manage to repeal special relativity.

So the question is will people that are willing to spend money to have a good to great gaming experience decide that trash for free is OK with them ?

Re:Latency = Lag = Never Going Away

[darkain]

That isn't the #1 latency issue however. Larger time slices in time-division multiplexing is. For example, on DOCSIS, it is usually in the area of 10-20ms. On GPON, it is closer in the neighborhood of 1ms. Right now with my GPON connection, I have ~3ms round-trip-time to several major datacenters, including Google. That is more than faster enough on the latency front to be able to stream games in real-time with input/response being a single frame of animation well north of 60 FPS.

Re:Latency = Lag = Never Going Away

[Aqualung812]

I have ~3ms round-trip-time to several major datacenters, including Google

Then you live near them.
Assuming you have your own private fiber from the datacenter to your home, you're less than 600 wire kilometers from the datacenter.
AT&T is currently showing real-world latency between Denver and Dallas as 19ms: https://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att...

That's about 1,000km in 19ms, so using that as a guide, you're about 158km from a datacenter.

If you're on the East Coast of the USA, or in Europe, then it may seem reasonable to be that close to one.

For those in rural areas, it will be a long, long time before they're ever that close to them.

Going to invent wormholes or so?

[guruevi]

The only problem with game streaming is latency due to the distances involved and the double rendering (once at the datacenter, once at home).

Even if you're talking about simply stringing a wire from your house directly to the output of a video card in a regional datacenter, you have ~1 mS of delay. Every transistor that has to switch in between there, does so with a maximum frequency.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[bluefoxlucid]

Streaming is an interesting technical problem, and not necessarily one worth solving for gaming. They're in the wrong market.

For gaming, streaming is trying to solve enormous problems with decoding highly-compressed video data: you have a description of where visual elements go, and you want to turn that into pixel data. In practice, this is cheap until you hit a point of diminishing returns: even an Intel Core i7 4750K with HD4500 does a pretty good job, and a more-specialized console will trade the expense of an integrated HD4500 for the expense of something slightly better and only slightly more-expensive.

The problem simplifies down to not knowing what video data you're providing ahead of time: you're able to generate positions and lighting elements, so you may only know the exact video data at the moment it's required. At 60fps, that's about 17mS ahead of time. Even at 24fps, you want the image to be newer than 40mS, so the frame rate isn't your actual target but rather your physical maximum latency.

They're trying to solve these by performing positional computations locally, sending those computations far away, performing rendering remotely, then encoding the raster image into a compressed video format, sending that back, decoding the compressed video, and finally displaying it. That's a linear process.

Instead, they could perform the rendering locally, while also providing the positional computations to the remote server. The local and remote engines could use any non-utilized GPU time to derive additional information and derive higher-quality rendering.

For example: you can pre-render lighting, and then calculate shadows and dynamic lighting on surfaces which move relative to the light source. Knowing the illumination and results, you can also compute how to alter these results by general relative position change, and then alter the overlay of lighting, shadow, and reflection, simply adding that to the surfaces or even the rendered output. When the information has changed so much that it's outside of an error bound, you discard it; and you can use extra cycles to start pre-calculating something closer whenever the GPU is idle, avoiding the total discard situation.

With that sort of approach, you can pre-render offsite; or you can drop your quality by a tiny value to free up extra cycles used to maintain artificially-high quality, which may paradoxically give you a better visual experience anyway. Same concept as mip mapping, but a lot more moving parts.

The offsite approach is simply rethinking video rendering: instead of prerendering the whole scene, you're prerendering information about the scene as the scene changes, allowing the local renderer to do less work.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[harl]

Latency has nothing to do with it. People have been gaming online for decades. Bandwidth is the real issue. Assuming I'm doing my math right one second of 1080p 32 bit color video at 24 frames a second is just under 190 megabytes of data to move every second. 4K video is 759 megabytes of data to move every second. 24 frames is generally considered a shit frame frame for PC gaming. Games are routinely called out on consoles when they are locked to 30 frames. Granted that assumes zero compression which is a no magic bullet since lack of buffer means compression directly translates to latency or reduced frame rate.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[Darinbob]

I generally play under 24fps just to keep costs of the space heater down. I don't really notice a big difference. I also don't have a full HD resolution monitor (it's 1650x1080 which still looks great). Are customers willing to give up the resolution, or frame rate, or both, just so that they can stream? Right now even 4K TV is a ridiculous waste of bandwidth given that most people can't detect the difference unless they move real close to the TV, 8K is just immensively stupid.

The idea of on-demand streaming itself is rather wasteful. Streaming to view offline later seems smarter to me. For games, streaming is just idiotic; at the very least client/server is a better choice so that the workload is distributed. I think there's a minority of customers who are lucky enough to have large bandwidth who assume that they're typical customers and everyone in the world should be able to do the same.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[MtHuurne]

Most big console titles run at 30 fps, so they don't have super low latency anyway. Having a data center within a couple of thousand kilometers might be good enough. Also latency hiding tricks like input prediction could be used.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[guruevi]

I don't think flappy birds has latency issues. But in most of the cases we're talking about high-impact FPS shooters going at 120fps. Even so, the current cost to the datacenter is ~50-100mS for most games and ~32mS in computers (triple buffering and all that). That issue doesn't go away because you put your system in a datacenter, most of the time it will double it because you're re-rendering the compressed streams on your computer + adding the latency between your computer and the game.

Once input latency goes over 100mS it starts being noticeable, you need very low latency connections and only single-buffer GPU processing on the remote end to allow for that.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[phantomfive]

Once input latency goes over 100mS it starts being noticeable

And that's extremely generous.

Re:Going to invent wormholes or so?

[MtHuurne]

You mean Angry Birds? Flappy Bird is a game that I think would suffer from high latency. The importance of latency differs a lot per game: I once played Final Fantasy using a TV capture card to turn my PC into a makeshift monitor and I didn't notice the higher latency. But as soon as I tried Frequency (a rhythm game), I was behind on all the beats, while usually I get at least half of them right.

In any case, I agree that there will be considerable extra latency, but you might underestimate how much latency people are willing to cope with, in certain games.

Note that when it comes to online games where multiple avatars walk around in the same world, input events already have to travel to the server and back. So moving the rendering will make some of the latency hiding techniques weaker, but the worst case latency (when prediction is wrong) is still the same.

Speed of light defeated says moron CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

"Our new technology moves data at a million times the speed of light, so latency is a thing of the past." said Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.

"Now where's my investment money?"

Won't the lack of Net Neutrality

[rsilvergun]

pretty much kill this? My ISP just started metering the connections around here. I'm not going to be streaming a 1080p game when it costs me $20/gigabyte to go over my cap. And no parent in their right mind would. They do sell unlimited, but that's pushing $160/mo here. And all that's before we start talking about large swaths of the world that don't have fast enough broadband to do this.

Oh well, I guess I'll stick to indie games on Gog.

Re:Won't the lack of Net Neutrality

[Eloking]

Won't the lack of Net Neutrality pretty much kill this?

Only if you live in the USA

Re:Won't the lack of Net Neutrality

[rsilvergun]

True, but the US is generally too big a market to ignore. Especially for AAA.

Do. Not. Want.

[UnknownSoldier]

And when these servers shut down in a few years because the masses have moved on to the next fad you won't be able to play. Sorry, do not want.

I've actually been playing Minecraft (Java) with my gaming buddies on our private server this past year and it is nice not to have to put up with the bullshit of loot boxes, DLC, or micro transactions. I can make texture packs, data packs, etc. without some company holding our entertainment hostage.

Regardless of how good an internet connection they can guarantee it will NEVER beat 0ms input lag from the box sitting right in front of me.

-- /r/Minecraft Redditard censorship:
It is against the rules to ask about the history of famous Minecraft servers such as 2B2T !

Latency will be solved with exsisting tricks

[Presence Eternal]

Just dumb the gameplay down. Then people using the wrong hardware can feel like badasses. That's what Halo did with aim assist, yes? To be fair, that's exactly how many PC fps's worked before mouse aiming was a thing. I recall it was a toggle as late as Shadow Warrior. As the desire to never "sell" another title grows, this mentality will creep across all aspects of gaming that require timing or reflex. They don't want to test your skill, they want to make you FEEL skilled.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to Realm Grinder.

YeahNO!

[Chas]

Not going to sign up for remote gaming services with shit latency and a false promise of said issues being eliminated "in a few years".

If you can just sell me the fucking game to install on my own PC whenever the fuck that I want? Screw you. I'll do without.

I'm completely adverse to being fucked in the ass without even the courtesy of a reach-around.

The gold standard

[AlanObject]

Anyone else here play agar.io? If you can win that game with the latency you have you can win pretty much anything.

Rent everything, own nothing!

[Rick Schumann]

Do you all see where they want things to go? They want people to own nothing and rent everything instead.

Put up barriers to owning a home: rent instead (and put up with someone else's rules, and never build equity)
Make it prohibitively expensive to own a car: lease instead (and still pay for maintenance)
Fool people into believing 'streaming' all forms of entertainment is somehow cheaper than buying your own copies of music and movies
'OS and applications as a service' instead of actually owning copies of them (and pay, pay, pay forever)
..and the list goes on and on

It's the new feudalism; before too long you'll be told you're lucky to be allowed to own the clothes on your back.

Re:Rent everything, own nothing!

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I will say that for many types of entertainment (experience once), streaming is usually cheaper. Because there is zero value to owning it (well, the ability to lend it to a friend). But that works far better for movies/TV than for games that are 20+ hour experiences.

Re:Not possible

[Presence Eternal]

Hey, I played Asheron's Call on dialup, and it was a blast.

OhmygodIclippedoffacliffnooooo.........

Latency solved by breaking physics, easy

[omfglearntoplay]

Just stop obeying the laws of physics, then latency will be perfect. Right? Wrong. Just like monitors and big TVs with latency, good enough isn't good enough when it comes to competitive gaming.

And pigs will fly....

[Kwirl]

maybe in the rest of the world, but there are still Americans who don't have access to broadband despite billions of dollars having been provided for deployments

Re:They keep banking on infrastructure improvement

[Joce640k]

My ISP just dropped the price by $10/month (to $22) and raised the speed to 400MBits up/down.

bufferbloat in games

[mtaht]

I like to think all the work we've done in fixing bufferbloat all over the edge will make interactive gaming more popular and pleasant. It would be nice if some gaming CEO acknowledged the benefits of sqm and rfc8290! Less bufferbloat will also make streaming games more feasible - IMHO, the biggest reason onlive failed was due to the widely variable latencies they encountered while trying to shove that much data down the pipe. I agree strongly however with those that think good interactive gaming requires very low ms latencies, but there's room for something between farmville and call of duty here.

Really?

[Chris Mattern]

Amazing that they've kept finding an FTL communication method this quiet.

Re:Really?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You don't need FTL, you need to break LOS limitations

Re:They keep banking on infrastructure improvement

[pslytely psycho]

Care to share some details? If for no other reason than for the rest of us who are getting screwed to be able to take this example to publicly shame our own ISP's who keep fucking us?

Please, please, please....

Are they gonna makes games cheaper too?

[iampiti]

They say cheaper streaming boxes will explode the number of customers. But if the reason those people don't play is that they can't afford the hardware how are they gonna be able to afford the games then? Especially since the cost of a console is 5x to 8x the price of an AAA game.
Maybe they will lower the prices expecting to make it up with the increased number of players but I doubt that.

Re:They keep banking on infrastructure improvement

[youngone]

I would imagine Joce640k does not live in the US. Some of us enjoy the benefits of a competitive ISP market.

Re:Do. Not. Want.

[MtHuurne]

This is Take Two, who make hundreds of millions a year with GTA Online. If you want games without microtransaction bullshit, you're not the kind of customer they're looking for.

Re:They keep banking on infrastructure improvement

[Joce640k]

Care to share some details? If for no other reason than for the rest of us who are getting screwed to be able to take this example to publicly shame our own ISP's who keep fucking us?

Please, please, please....

Simple: I live in Europe.

And it will be maaaagically free for everyone!

[locater16]

It still runs on hardware. It runs on the same exact hardware you always need it to run on. And many of the "benefits" of it not always needing to be run by the same person can easily be snapped up by needing to run a ton of damned networking hardware.

Every games exec that brings up streaming seems to think hardware will come from the magical hardware fairy who gifts it to the wonderous cloud for free!

Re:So It's Negotiable?

[Chas]

... ...

I'd need some time to think about it.

And lube! LOTS OF LUBE!

Re:Here's My Problem

[Lonewolf666]

So yeah latency is a problem, but we already have the solution in hand: Cheap, powerful local computing! Why exactly would we walk away from silicon everywhere when it is so useful, and we know it works, and it's a surefire cure for the latency issue?

The "cheap local hardware" is something the industry would have to compete with. So far, that part is paid for by the player. With the streaming approach, publishers need would set up servers at a overall comparable cost. There would be some cost advantage due to not all people playing at the same time, but on the other hand server class hardware tends to be more expensive.

Overall, I have my doubts this will work out financially even if the tech problems are solved.

Awesome!

[JThundley]

This is great! I've had way too much control for years at this point!

What is below the console peasants?

[Agripa]

Finally there will be a group that the console peasants can look down upon.

PC Master Race
Console Peasants
???

Also, I laugh at the though of latency getting better. Higher bandwidth connections typically have *higher* latency because interleaving is used or extended for better noise rejection. And on top of this they are going to add compression and decompression latency? Hah! And wait for the ISPs to get involved "managing" their network.