Slashdot Mirror
Walmart Is Looking Into Launching Its Own Cloud Gaming Service, Report Says (theverge.com)
Google's Stadio cloud-gaming service may be intercepted by a similar service from Walmart. According to a report from US Gamer, the American retail giant is looking into launching its own cloud gaming service. From the report: Multiple sources familiar with Walmart's plans, who wish to remain anonymous, confirmed to USG that the retail giant is exploring its own platform to enter in the now-competitive video game streaming race. No other details were revealed other than it will be a streaming service for video games, and that Walmart has been speaking with developers and publishers since earlier this year and throughout this year's Game Developers Conference. Walmart's discussions with developers for its streaming service have been secretive, and it's unclear how far along the service is in-development. But our sources are confident that this is a space Walmart is trying to move into.
Though Walmart might sound like a strange company to be jumping into the streaming tech space, the move isn't wholly unexpected. In recent years due to competition from Amazon, Walmart has been increasingly looking into more tech-focused markets beyond its traditional physical retail chain. Over time, Walmart has integrated its physical stores with its large online presence, offering deliveries, app integrations, and in-store pick up services. Walmart also has a technology arm in Silicon Valley called Walmart Labs, which has 6,000 employees and develops tech for Walmart's digital presence. In addition it boasts tools like Cruxlux, which is a search engine designed to reveal the connection between any two people, places, or things. Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data. Data centers are a centerpiece of Google's Stadia streaming service and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple also own powerful data facilities, all of whom are also coincidentally working in streaming technology.
Though Walmart might sound like a strange company to be jumping into the streaming tech space, the move isn't wholly unexpected. In recent years due to competition from Amazon, Walmart has been increasingly looking into more tech-focused markets beyond its traditional physical retail chain. Over time, Walmart has integrated its physical stores with its large online presence, offering deliveries, app integrations, and in-store pick up services. Walmart also has a technology arm in Silicon Valley called Walmart Labs, which has 6,000 employees and develops tech for Walmart's digital presence. In addition it boasts tools like Cruxlux, which is a search engine designed to reveal the connection between any two people, places, or things. Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data. Data centers are a centerpiece of Google's Stadia streaming service and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple also own powerful data facilities, all of whom are also coincidentally working in streaming technology.
"Finally, Walmart has a data center unofficially called Area 71 in Caverna, Missouri which holds over 460 trillion bytes of data."
Who the hell measures their storage in bytes these days? I'm guessing they also boast the world's largest Commodore 64 cloud infrastructure to power this data center.
Haha! Poor Kenny. Has to get his games as walmart.
It's not even going yet and already reached peak bandwagon when walmart are trying to jump on.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
20 years ago, the worst DRM dystopia anyone could imagine was still better than one in which your entire game library literally vanishes as soon as (and I do mean the same second) the DRM server stops responding.
and wow it was like a gamy cloud back there
pee yoo
That’s a slashdot new service: stadio by google.
STADIO!!!
So what the Chinese needed a place to sell cheap Chinese games that break after a few month so you have to buy more.
They could try self driving cars, food delivery, AI, cloud services and electric vehicules as well.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
...All scrambling towards getting an cloud based gaming service up on running on their own flavor of the idea, has left out one big possible bottleneck they might not have thought of:
The Netflix problem! A huge problem Netflix faced when they had the problem with success, was bandwidth throttling. Netflix subscribers was a substantial load on every ISP's network, and while the idea of a cloud based subscription package - combined with the power of using server CPU's for the actual game processing is a good one, this is one that will come back to hunt and hit them big-time. History is going to repeat itself here.
The one company that get's the best deal with all ISP's and can provide them with enough funding to add the equipment needed to handle the massive increase in streaming loads, will be the ones to succeed with them. Wonder who get's that first?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Cloud gaming is the iTunes of this decade. It'll level out again, and I doubt Google or Wal-Mart will even still be players. There's no cure for stupid, folks.
I look forward to great Walmart brand games. Such as Super Wal Brothers. Walmart May Cry. Wal Souls. Call of Walmart: Rollback Ops. Though I realize, Walmart usually uses Equate or whatever..... Wal-brand is usually Walgreens.
So it'll be so cheaply made that it'll stop working the minute you leave the store.
No thanks.
Walmart will find a few companies that crank out cheap and sub-par games for them so they can offer a cheap and sub-par game service to their cheap and used to sub-par products customers.
In the end, I'd guess what we'll see is something along the lines of dressed up flash games with some cellphone game clones mixed in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Walmart has enough brick and mortar stores they could run the server equipment out of.
Makes sense, Walmarts main function is converting the world's production into U.S. dollars so the countries can buy oil. Most of them are so desperate for U.S. dollars for this purpose that they'll sell their citizen's data for a song.
OneOps anyone? Lmao.
Is this the new buzzword? Gamefly, PSNow, OnLive, GeForce Now, we already have these and nobody uses them, why do we need more? Choice is good but nobody's picking any of these. And after Walmart's digital music failure I'm sure as hell not trusting them to come up with anything that will change peoples minds.
No more game mods, no price matching with bargain bins or other sales, no rentals or used game market, and meanwhile you're subsidizing their cloud hardware which you'll never get to use for your own purposes or resell later when you want to move on.
You aren't even guaranteed they'll keep upgrading their hardware or your CPU/GPU slice, so who knows if games will run well or like crap in the future anyway. You're stuck with whatever they want to give you. Maybe they'll invent a new tier or added fee if you want to access better performance for your game.
Rubbish.
we can see cable tv like fee fights, forced bundleding come to online gaming as well as well ISP like Comcast trying to pull a new CSN Philly excursive like setup.
Do you want to say lose all EA games as your Streaming does not want pay the new rates?
Do you want to be forced to pay for mickey mouse adventures, Madden NFL, spongebob adventures as part of the basic package?
Have to pay for a mid tear or higher plan to be able to pay the add on fees to be able to play WOW?
Have to buy an mid tear or higher plan to be able to PPV / on off buy games from 3rd party's and that you can lose even after paying full price for the game if you stop paying for your basic plan?
In other news:
PetSmart has launched its own live streaming pet watching platform called FurView.
Bed Bath and Beyond has launched its own gaming service called Game on Thrones.
Sur La Table is launching a live streaming cooking platform...
Dollar Store is launching a new...
Pizza Hut is launching a new...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
what self-respecting gamer would use a wal-mart streaming service? are they going to use $500 acer laptops, too? wear wal-mart clothes on camera? what's next, IBM's z/Stream virtual gaming service on VM/CMS?
Very good points I had not thought of or heard from others yet
Much like their music library, I expect this to be censored, kid-friendly crap that no actual gamer would want to play. Then again, why do I care what gamers who accept this level of non-ownership have to deal with?
That good and better, I see the same article on http://www.sammypost.com/betra...
we went from owning your own media --> to media with drm --> to media with patches ---> to full downloads ---> to streaming the video. PROGRESS!
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,