Tuesday, August 15th 2023
Netflix Cloud Gaming Beta Launches on TVs, Coming to PCs Soon
We've been focused on creating a great gaming experience for our members since 2021 when we added mobile games to Netflix. Our goal has always been to have a game for everyone, and we are working hard to meet members where they are with an accessible, smooth, and ubiquitous service. Today, we're taking the first step in making games playable on every device where our members enjoy Netflix - TVs, computers, and mobile.
We are rolling out a limited beta test to a small number of members in Canada and the UK on select TVs starting today, and on PCs and Macs through Netflix.com on supported browsers in the next few weeks. Two games will be part of this initial test: Oxenfree from Night School Studio, a Netflix Game Studio, and Molehew's Mining Adventure, a gem-mining arcade game. To play our games on TV, we're introducing a controller that we already have in our hands most of the day - our phones. Members on PCs and Macs can play on Netflix.com with a keyboard and mouse.
This limited beta is meant to test our game streaming technology and controller, and to improve the member experience over time. Games on TV will operate on select devices from our initial partners including: Amazon Fire TV Streaming Media Players, Chromecast with Google TV, LG TVs, NVIDIA Shield TV, Roku devices and TVs, Samsung Smart TVs, and Walmart ONN. Additional devices will be added on an ongoing basis.
By making games available on more devices, we hope to make games even easier to play for our members around the world. While we're still very early in our games journey, we're excited to bring joy to members with games. We look forward to hearing feedback from our beta testers and sharing more as we continue on the road ahead.
Source:
Netflix
We are rolling out a limited beta test to a small number of members in Canada and the UK on select TVs starting today, and on PCs and Macs through Netflix.com on supported browsers in the next few weeks. Two games will be part of this initial test: Oxenfree from Night School Studio, a Netflix Game Studio, and Molehew's Mining Adventure, a gem-mining arcade game. To play our games on TV, we're introducing a controller that we already have in our hands most of the day - our phones. Members on PCs and Macs can play on Netflix.com with a keyboard and mouse.
By making games available on more devices, we hope to make games even easier to play for our members around the world. While we're still very early in our games journey, we're excited to bring joy to members with games. We look forward to hearing feedback from our beta testers and sharing more as we continue on the road ahead.
31 Comments on Netflix Cloud Gaming Beta Launches on TVs, Coming to PCs Soon
Takes 30 seconds or so to just connect to the wifi.
- Want to watch Netflix? Just wait around for 60+ seconds for it to load up the Netflix app. And if you have closed captions on, half the time the show you start freezes and you need to restart the show multiple times while trying to disable closed captions before it'll play.
- Want to watch something on Discovery+? Loads up much faster, but if everyone is sleeping and you can't have the volume too loud and you need to turn on the closed captions - there's 30 seconds just do that and if you're really (I mean, really) lucky the TV won't lock up and need to be power cycled just because you're asking the Atom (I don't know what processor is actually in it, but it really sucks) CPU to do 2 things and it freezes up trying.
- Want to watch something on Prime? Loads up faster than Netflix, but sometimes none of the images populate so you're left staring at a bunch of gray boxes. The only way to resolve this is to do a system restart through the TV's options.
- Want to watch Apple TV on it? Sorry, can't. The TV itself doesn't support the Apple TV (not that it matters to me, I don't have a sub for Apple TV, but my brother wanted to show me a couple of shows on it last time he was up to visit, but we couldn't do it on the TV itself)
If I have these kinds of issues on a Roku TCL TV, I sure as hell wouldn't want to try playing any kind of game on it.To bypass these issues, I just use a Roku stick that I plug into one of the HDMI ports on the TV. The little Roku sticks work great! Netflix loads up in about 10 seconds. No issues with shows freezing. Apple TV works on the sticks. No problems running closed caption on shows. A little 4 inch long Roku stick that is as old as the TV, runs circles around the TV.
But in the end, I still don't want to sit at a TV trying to play games offered by Netflix. I'll game at my computer or if I'm feeling nostalgic and want some good NES gaming, I'll fire up the Nintendo mini and play a bit on Final Fantasy or Zelda.
What Netflix is proposing, is to have mobile phone games, being played on a Smart TV using your phone. Netflix will run the ecosystem and dictate what games you have access too, how much it costs (or what tier of Netflix you have to pay a subscription for in order to get these games) and how long the games are available for in rotation.
What everyone eligible for this already has is a Smart TV and a phone. What's to stop you streaming your phone games to your Smart TV?
Like, what am I missing here? You need a Smart TV and a phone for Netflix Cloud Gaming, and it currently offers (and hopes to offer in the future) solely the games you can already stream to any Smart TV from your phone.
I guess it's no surprise that Netflix is failing as a company if this is their idea of winning where much bigger, more influential and cash-rich companies have utterly, totally failed with huge losses.
That's why they want to control the content through cloud. Get your facts straight ;)
And that's also why cloud won't go places, unless you are a beaten-into-submission n00b.
Note that cloud services have started struggling and raising prices recently and almost none of them turns a steady profit even with 100 million subscribers AND market dominance (Spotify). The age of free money is over, let's see how many clouds are still floating in the sky five years from now.
The harsh reality is that the entertainment industry now has middle men not in small retail businesses, but in multinational corporations with much larger userbases (and running costs!) that effectively control them more than vice versa, while extracting a large piece of the pie for 'distribution'. Remember Steam and Epic's spat over the 'cost of distribution', as well. 30% is common and its insanely high considering the effectiveness of digital solutions versus physical stores. Now consider a cloud service that is not distributing all that data ONCE for a download, but every single time a user selects the item. Its horrendously wasteful and the expenses are on the cloud provider's side.
Piracy is still here too, so did the entertainment biz win a whole lot? Perhaps, but there are lot of bills left at the cloud streaming services, to be paid. Ironically the only digital distribution providers swimming in cash are Valve and MS, both of whom are NOT doing game cloud streams but really still just distribute games, even if Gamepass slightly nudged away from it.
There is another bullet coming for cloud providers, and that's the cost of data centers. They want lots of power and water, and space, none of which is low on demand especially with climate change. Those expenses are going to go up too.
but basically the only one needed is gamepass, which, luckily, isn't cloud streaming :laugh:
cloud streaming is a bit like early console, OG Xbox Morrowind come to mind (needless to say, it was that who motivated me to build another PC and get Morrowind GOTY a second time :laugh: ) ... later well, we got modding (not good enough tho) on console for some games ... but it was still better to have more control
for online games? nothing beat client/server implementation, some game have high ping and they would only get worse if all the data had to be streamed
cloud save are one thing i find useful... saved me some lost hours more than once.
if cloud streaming came to be the only mean possible to game and we lost mod friendly games all together, i'd drop gaming in a second (well not really, i still have my 90s till late 2000 humongous library anyway) :laugh:
The "cloud" is a market ripe for implosion not because it doesn't work but because everyone wants to squeeze their slice
The reality is that cloud providers all compete with each other = the entire world. Massive potential market, but compared to local retail, its a different game entirely - as a customer, you really just want that single service that has everything you want, anything else is a hassle. We've seen that sentiment before, wrt gaming and its many launchers. People still dislike it, but deal with it - however games are things you tend to stick with for a bit of time longer than say a music album or episodes of a series. The implosion is ongoing as cloud providers enter the market to compete more, and the market is sick when there is only one or two of them left. In other words, its a catch 22.
Mind you I got a massive catalog of games and still carry old consoles, I'm fine.
I dropped all streaming services as well. Too expensive and now they all limit to their own services making it more expensive than cable now. Most of the content is trash like TV anyway. The same will happen to gaming.
And all of this is to say nothing of the absolutely wretched idea of handing over ownership of your stuff to a for-profit, multi-billion (and sometimes trillion) dollar company. They decide there's a political or social message they don't like in the game? A character is the wrong color? Says the wrong thing? You say the wrong thing? Oops, removed from the service, can't have wrongthink :^)
In the same way, video did *NOT* kill the radio star. I still read books, listen to music on CDs, et cetera ad nauseam. And yes, I still listen to the radio.
But a lot of people can't see the forest for the trees and only think that cloud gaming will wipe out gaming on local hardware. That's not really the intent. Some content is far more suited for use of high performance, low latency hardware.
Some titles would probably be far better as a cloud offering.
I'm thinking of MS Flight Simulator which is something like a 150 GB title that doesn't require lightning-quick response. But there are other titles flirting with the 200 GB storage threshold. Baldur's Gate 3 is a 122 GB download. There are plenty of titles with 20 GB+ updates. No time downloading a game or patching it. No storage space concerns. Every new season of Apex, Overwatch, Fortnite, whatever, there's a big download.
Not to mention that there is ZERO system administration load for a cloud gaming device. On GeForce NOW, I don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, the latest GeForce game-ready drivers, Microsoft.net, Visual C++ redistributables, blah blah blah.
Of course, the modding community will always favor games stored on local PC hardware. Microsoft themselves have admitted that cloud gaming is probably the future of where console gaming is headed. Cloud gaming won't replace a small handheld device that can be used offline (smartphones, Switch like devices, Steam Deck, etc.).
For sure, more and more people are gaming on the go today versus 10-20 years ago. Also, gaming habits vary substantially. Gaming in a group and on the go is far more common in Japan versus the USA where the stereotype of someone glued in front of a PC monitor in their mom's basement or their bedroom is more common. In some countries, PC gaming is probably extremely rare and most gaming is likely done on mobile.
There is room for all of this. You can own a powerful gaming PC, a PlayStation, and a Nintendo Switch. You can also play Pokemon GO on your smartphone too. Hard to do that with your RTX 4090 and 7900X3D. There is no gaming police that will take you away in handcuffs in you decide to play Tears of the Kingdom on your Switch rather than Escape from Tarkov or Valorant.
But I know some people here only see black and white. Guess what? You need to open your eyes. Relax, read a book, listen to a CD. It's okay. There's no cloud/streaming police that will cite you for a violation.
Every time there's an article about cloud gaming, some people flip out and say "I will die on this hill as the last defender of PC gaming and they will have to pry my RTX 9090 from my cold dead hands." It's almost like an SNL parody of gamers reading gaming industry news.
Very amusing.
:lovetpu:
Disclaimer: I realize this bizarre tunnelvision isn't exclusive to TPU, it's prevalent anywhere gamers can post messages.
'But the service also depends on me' Oh does it now? You're not every consumer, surely? And why do you assume the company cares about the service's long term prospects? Not a single on-demand provider has proven to be a long term prospect to begin with...Wait you still listen to music on CD? Okay. You can safely trust there are generations that simply won't, ever. CD is not vinyl ;)
I don't think cloud will wipe out local hardware. What I do think is that it lures people into shitty places as consumers, and on top of that, lures devs into a clusterfck they prefer not to be in. After all, they also depend on services now to get their stuff in plain sight, or at least partially. And in the end the corporate think act and do will end up in the games as well, its a simple you rub my back and I rub yours scenario we're going to be looking at. Already we see lots of games that have degenerated towards this, in one way or another, whether its about 'the woke impact' or just plain bad / 13 in a dozen writing and mechanics. None of this consolidation and full value chain control (MS's agenda with Activision) is going to benefit either creativity or consumers or the quality of end products.
Also, there is this utopian idea behind on-demand services and the economy/business behind it that somehow this will make life cheaper, but it obviously won't. Even if you game less, you still pay too much when you add subscriptions to your monthly bill. This is the case with virtually every service in history ever. Of course MS 'admits' this is the better path forward. For them. Ownership has always been cheaper, especially if you take good care of your stuff. Owners can extract value. Subscribers get the value that is allotted to them, hopefully, but they really don't even get that, because they gave away their choice to play and buy what they really wanted. Subscribers will be limited by the subscriptions, not by the content itself, after all. Already have three services going? Will you add a fourth just to play game Y? Whereas if you just bought your games, you simply would buy precisely what suited you and when, for example when the price is right.
Even if all you spend on games is 10 bucks a month, that $120,- a year represents an absolute truckload of games on sale plus one new blockbuster you could buy at launch, or 2-3 if you use a keysite and wait for a month or two. And then you own them, they don't vanish after the licensing deal with provider X or Y ends or when you cancel your sub.
And really... not waiting on an update... #firstworldproblems comes to mind. If you have a solid connection you barely wait for updates anyway, and if you don't, you don't even want to go near a cloud service to begin with!
It remains to be seen who's really in tunnel vision mode after all :)
Today's younger generation (especially here in the USA) is clearly very comfortable renting out their content, whether it be movies, music, TV shows, games, whatever. The USA is a consumer economy, when you are done with something, you throw it away and move on.
And not just media. You should see the post Independence Day photos of Lake Tahoe. It looks like an H-bomb went off, the deserted beaches were piled sky high with abandoned items (not just trash). They brought acres of stuff and left with hangovers and some social media posts.I listen to my CDs because they're already sitting on my shelf. (Most have been ripped to my Mac's music library though).
For years I bought used CDs that were cheaper than digital downloads of the exact same album (which were only 256kbps AACs at the time). Great way at the time to populate a music library with classical music, opera, jazz, some other genres.
When I travel abroad, sometimes I pick up a music CD, more as a memento. Seeing it on a bookshelf will remind me of the trip and put a smile on my face. Sometimes they are conversation starters, just like deadtrees tourist guidebooks. Physical media can have some other value beyond ones and zeros, or inked characters. The concept of liner notes are sadly gone with streaming audio.
I realize that there is little appreciation for stuff like that. But some people do care. Even Taylor Swift puts a *lot* of thought and care into her album liner notes even if her target audience listens to streams.
The age of free money is at an end. Even in the US, that will sink in one day. It remains to be seen what the viewpoint will be then... A similar sword is hanging above our heads with regards to climate and consumerism. Can you even afford to keep throwing stuff away and waste energy like cloud does? We already know more services do not lower our carbon or energy footprint. More economic activity simply leads to more waste. We just killed crypto only to replace it with more streaming, can we get a short pause to admire the irony here.
Concerning gaming, a lot of titles have some sort of online service aspect. I have old games that wouldn't work today if someone hadn't hacked a replacement for Punkbuster or some other crap.
Remember the failed DIVX video rental format? Another technology that reached out online to activate content.
No one really knows where the cutoff line is between sensible and irresponsible consumerism. For sure, humans aren't going to head to the mountains and live in monasteries practicing quiet contemplation of the cosmos. At least in a free market economy, it's up to the individual to decide whether to download that game, order that meal delivery, climb onto an airplane, buy a bundle of herbs at the grocery store instead of a seedling of the same plant at the nursery, etc.
But like I wrote earlier, it is highly unlikely in our lifetimes that all gaming will be hosted from the cloud. You can still play poker with a deck of cards in a cabin in the woods, just like a hundred years ago.
And most importantly, digital and physical content can co-exist peacefully. It does already. I don't buy *ALL* of my music on physical media. Same with movies, TV shows, whatever. I have both physical and digital music. Same with films, same with TV shows, same with books. Some people here don't get that. And yet they probably have a mix of different content but they don't see what's right in their faces.
I know it's very fashionable to many people these days to only see the world in black or white and ignore all of the various shades of grey.
Remember that rentable content is not a new concept by any means. You basically do the same thing when you borrow media from the library (funded by taxpayer dollars). Same when you go to a movie theatre: you are renting a chair and one playback of the movie. Same with most live performances. I attended a particular rock concert that ended up being released on DVD a year later. Many here rented movies from a bricks-and-mortar store (like Blockbuster) or used to receive rental DVDs by mail (Netflix started this way). Some even rented videogames (cartridges and discs) from bricks-and-mortar stores. Radio? Television? Mostly funded by advertisements.
How many of you would prefer physical discs of Daniel Tiger and Sesame Street to pop into your DVD/Blu-ray players for your kid to watch? Yeah, I thought so.
The big problem with touchscreen phones is that you have to basically look at them to see where the controls are because most phones don't have physical controls beyond volume, a power button, and maybe one or two other buttons that aren't standardized. This is fine when the smartphone screen is the display device as well but that's not the case here with the big screen TVs.
Anyhow, this is only a very limited beta trial, there will be many more changes to this service before it launches.