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:Misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, there's a third type of game streaming service, where you never get to install the games locally, and instead the video and audio of the game is streamed to your computer. Your inputs are sent back to their servers.

Obviously this has latency issues, but it's apparently the new future of ultimate game DRM: you never even get a chance to buy the game, let alone pirate it, your only option is to rent games for a monthly fee.

This is what Amazon (and Sony, and Microsoft, and pretty much every major game developer) has been working on.

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.

The Tightest DRM Leash & Choke Chain

[Kunedog]

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?

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.