Friday, April 3rd 2020
Amazon planning its own Cloud Gaming Service dubbed "Project Tempo"
In a report by the New York Times, plans by Amazon to launch a new cloud gaming product in the already crowded field were detailed. Dubbed "Project Tempo" the project has reportedly been in development for several months and at the cost of several hundred million dollars. Amazon hopes to develop new AAA games to accompany the launch of the service which will integrate with its popular game streaming platform Twitch.
The project is one of Amazon's largest investments in original entertainment since its founding, and places them in a prime position to compete with Google's Stadia, Microsoft's Project xCloud, NVIDIA's GeForce NOW and the countless other game streaming platforms. One advantage Amazon possesses is its vast network of data centers as part of Amazon Web Services which will play a significant role in ensuring the service achieves the minimal latency required for an optimal experience. Amazon's vice president for game services and studios has stated: "The big picture is about trying to take the best of Amazon and bringing it to games" in regards to the game making process. The first of Amazon's major game releases will be New World a fantasy MMO in May which will be followed by more games throughout the year, primarily targeting hardcore gamers.
Source:
New York Times
The project is one of Amazon's largest investments in original entertainment since its founding, and places them in a prime position to compete with Google's Stadia, Microsoft's Project xCloud, NVIDIA's GeForce NOW and the countless other game streaming platforms. One advantage Amazon possesses is its vast network of data centers as part of Amazon Web Services which will play a significant role in ensuring the service achieves the minimal latency required for an optimal experience. Amazon's vice president for game services and studios has stated: "The big picture is about trying to take the best of Amazon and bringing it to games" in regards to the game making process. The first of Amazon's major game releases will be New World a fantasy MMO in May which will be followed by more games throughout the year, primarily targeting hardcore gamers.
54 Comments on Amazon planning its own Cloud Gaming Service dubbed "Project Tempo"
Not likely to sway me to it but it is good to know what's occuring either way.
Streaming games doesn't work well enough and it will likely never do.
New World MMO... 2003 says hi, is what comes to mind.
And then there is that other title in development called Star Citizen... might go the way of the dodo just like this.
But yes, anywhere else it will never work well.
“When you talk about Nintendo and Sony, we have a ton of respect for them, but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward,” Spencer told Protocol
Therefore they fail.
But without some killer (or at least useful) feature, how many services like these are we going to see? I mean, "pay for your game, then pay us some more to run it on our server" only makes sense if you're a frequent traveler or fi you buy games but are too cheap to build/buy a gaming rig. What's the projected TAM for these services?
Lastly, there's still A LOT of America that has terrible internet, mostly the rural areas, which includes myself.... And I'm about to tell you a story about internet speeds so bad you'll lose sleep....
In July of last year I moved from a small city in New Jersey to a tiny town (population of around 600) in New Hampshire. I went from having symmetrical Gigabit internet (985Mbps down/975Mbps up) for $65/month to DSL thats only 1.5 Mbps.... that's not a typo, it's 1.5 Mbps... Approximately a 1000x reduction in my internet speed. It cannot even be considered broadband to the FCC as its not at least 20Mbps. It's so bad that I cannot watch YouTube videos above 240p, 360p on a good day. I got a free copy of borderlands 3 with my 5700xt and at 68GB, I've attempted it on 4 occasions, but since the epic games Launcher on all occasions has mysteriously disappeared my download progress, once at 52GB which took days, I gave up.
I've actually formed a town committee, got a vote through and now the town is issuing bonds to pay for our own fiberoptic network that we're going to lease to an ISP in exchange for discounted service (I convinced everyone that we need Gigabit speeds), but it's not happening overnight.
I consider myself lucky though considering that there's literally people in Idaho and Montana living in Areas with zero internet service.... But anyway sorry for the rant, but our internet sucks in this country
These cloud gaming services are not just for PC gamers and especially not for those with powerful PCs.
You have to think outside the box a bit. Seriously. Check what games are available for your smartphone. That'll make this idea easier to digest.
And as pointed out above, no matter how low the latency of the network is there are still things like encoding/decoding which are network agnostic but still add to the latency experienced by the user.
Tangential but relative point.
So another streaming service to add to the many we have, the internet is already strained such that YouTube et Al, and others are limiting bandwidth.
Doesn't sound like a great plan to me, with great bandwidth requirements comes great responsibility it's annoying enough lagging out on multiplayer, how many times would it take for lag outs to put people off a service completely.
For me that number is about three I would guess.
It sucks big time, because even if all is full fiber, severs are ultra-fast, etc. you can't beat the laws of physics. I live in southern Portugal and most of the datacenters are in central and northern Europe. So the distance is at least 2000 km (to Paris - best case scenario). Travelling at the speed of light gives you 6 ms of delay (even if i had direct cable from my house to server farm). Multiply by 2 for round-trip and you have 12 ms of unavoidable latency. Add network adapter latency + 5-6 routers latency + load balancing at the server farm + processing time. Let's be optimistic and say the total latency added is around 50 ms (on top of what you would have playing locally). Oh wait, there's the streaming video latency that can't be less than 10-20 ms (and I'm being very optimistic here). So more or less 80 ms.
80 ms of added latency will get you killed in any marginally competitive type of game, be it shooter, MOBA or MMO.
I'm glad I will be too old or dead when cloud becomes the platform of choice of gamers around the world.