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Amazon is Working on Game Streaming Service, Report Says (geekwire.com)
Amazon is looking to get into game streaming, joining its tech titan contemporaries Microsoft and Google, according to a report from The Information. From a report: Amazon is reportedly developing its own game streaming service, and it is talking to publishers about distributing games on its platform. Citing "two people briefed on the plans," The Information reports that the service likely won't launch until next year at the earliest.
I am worried that Amazon seems to be accelerating efforts to sell its own services.
Game streaming - I couldn't for the life of me figure out why they would want to do this as they already own Twitch.
Oh wait you mean a Steam competitor. So electronic game distributor.
Not a problem I have, but don't most Americas only have slow, capped broadband connection
Cause you need the opposite for this.
Also, nothing mention on a way to lower input lag. Without a lower one, you wont be able to play a lot of games.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
This is how I always explain streamed 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 100mb/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 startups like 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 a streamed game service 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?
Amazon already offers Amazon AppStream so this is a natural development. It uses NICE DVE protocol.
They also have had a similar service for displaying Adobe Flash content on Fire tablets which looks and feels remarkably like AppStream.
Similar technology is used in the Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop service but that one uses the Teradici PCoIP protocol. I've used to display both Adobe Flash and YouTube content with virtually no latency.
The GPU-equipped instances render graphics on the server and send the framebuffer directly to your device. It's surprisingly good.
Kriston
https://bgr.com/2019/01/10/ring-camera-customer-feeds-accessed-creepy-privacy-violation/ -- enjoy, your children's video game feeds will be stored to use against them at college admissions time, no doubt. You deserve the convenience!
Remember OnLive? The beloved cloud gaming service that took the video game industry by storm? Oh.. they went bankrupt... because their service sucked and cloud gaming is dumb.
The argument that video games are important to neckbeard fagchildren like yourself? No, we get that. You can cry about the speed of light in a vacuum, just realize it has nothing real to do with this. Sorry snowflake.
You aren't competitive in anything real, lol. You're a putz. We've witnessed you fail to grow up here over the years, we know you. Lol. You just don't know who you're dealing with because they're anonymous.
But then, you have a pretty long history of not knowing who or what you're talking about, for all to see. ;*
Whatever education was wasted evidently either way.
as long as it won't turn into the same exclusivity story as we see happening now with video streaming.
games from publisher x only available on game streaming service y and games from a only available on b.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Bitches can try, I suppose. Doubt it'll make any impact. Steam is already the God-Emperor of Gamerkind as far as anyone who isn't a console gamer is concerned. I doubt Amazon will get many exclusive titles because it would be stupid for any game developer to not release their game on Steam. The only developers and publishers that can get away with not releasing on Steam are gargantuan studios like EA, Blizzard and Epic, and those guys already have their own distribution platforms and thus wouldn't need Amazon's help.
This is a stupid idea, and my guess is that Amazon just thinks they can pull it off because they're Amazon. If they even hope to make a tiny dent in Steam's bottom line, they're going to need to offer something Steam can't provide, and that will be very difficult. Steam is available on every major platform except for phones (not counting the mobile authenticator,) it has nearly every game you can think of and it has a very big community that could almost be considered its own social network at this point. They even let you share your library with your family or roommates, even if they have separate Steam accounts, so that your saves and achievements don't conflict with each other. Developers have a good rapport with Valve, especially when it comes to getting help with making their games work on Linux. SteamWorks DRM is available if it helps you sleep at night, but it is completely optional and lots of games on Steam don't use it. You can use Steam's EULA (the SSA) and you can optionally tack on your own EULA if you wish to do so.
Can Amazon come up with something that not only compares to all of that, but surpasses it?
Sure, I can think of some things Steam could be doing better, but admittedly not much. Personally, I think some sort of disclosure on the store page as to whether or not a game uses DRM would be helpful. Also, a zoom feature in the standard client plus tabbed browsing support would help bring it up to date with other applications made this century. Perhaps a bit more flexibility with regards to refunds, such as if a developer pulls support for your OS after you've bought the game on that OS, but still continues to support other platforms. Uh... there's a few spelling errors in Big Picture Mode that bother me. That's about it, really.