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.

Comments

Re:Not in most of the US

[HornWumpus]

Input lag is only half the problem. Round trip lag is the problem you are looking for.

All multiplayer games have 'round trips'. But a game state packet is always going to be much faster than frames of 1080 video. Good luck convincing the worlds admins that streaming video game frames deserve to be treated as ping critical.

Re:Misleading title

[PopeRatzo]

For starters, even a $150 GPU can play most current titles at 1080p on 'high' settings.

You better take a look at the system requirements for some of the current AAA titles.

Unless one is buying AAA releases every month, it's likely that just buying games outright will be cheaper than this service.

OK, you misunderstand what the service does. You don't pay to get the games, you have to already own the games. They're yours. You just run them on nVidia's or Amazon's hardware in the cloud. Your Steam account fires up in the cloud and you can just play any game you own. Same with UPlay. Origin isn't part of this (I'm guessing they're going to end up offering their own service).

he best I can figure is that it's good for kids who has a Chromebook, doesn't have a console, wants to play not-mobile games, and wants to play all of the AAA titles back to back, but also is willing to pay $30-$50 a month to do so.

Thing is, we have no idea what the price point is going to be yet. If it's $20/month, it would be cheaper than upgrading my PC every 2 years. We just have to wait and see.

Also, it's not just going to be Chromebook users. I can play current AAA games that have not been released for OSX on an old Macbook Pro. Don't have to download the game, just fire it up. You can run Steam without having it installed on your computer. And everything runs on ultra.

Now, maybe I'm blessed by being relatively close to one of the servers. I've been playing games a long time and I really can't detect much in the way of lag. On a game like Witcher 3 or Far Cry 5 or Wolfenstein, or Prey, I doubt even a pro gamer would notice.