Amazon planning its own Cloud Gaming Service dubbed "Project Tempo"

[Uskompuf]

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.



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[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Is there any games developed on lumberyard yet , just asking because I would expect a few to be on the way and a killer App might be a possibility.
Not likely to sway me to it but it is good to know what's occuring either way.

 

[Uskompuf]

Is there any games developed on lumberyard yet

There are 2 games developed using lumberyard that have been released, one being The Grand Tour game by Amazon Game Studios and Coffence by Sweet Bandits Studios. Along with New World there are 5 more in development games using the engine.

 

[Vya Domus]

It's time to stop.

Streaming games doesn't work well enough and it will likely never do.

 

[Vayra86]

Just staaahhp

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.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Just staaahhp

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.

Surely you jest, I sold my house , car and have just a little bit more saving before I can buy a second hand javelin, damnit

 

[neatfeatguy]

April Fools Day was 2 days ago.

 

[Space Lynx]

It's time to stop.

Streaming games doesn't work well enough and it will likely never do.

It would work well in Japan since the country is entirely fiber to fiber at every endpoint.

But yes, anywhere else it will never work well.

 

[Basard]

It would work well in Japan since the country is entirely fiber to fiber at every endpoint.

But yes, anywhere else it will never work well.

Hey, in about fifty years when the US catches up, you'll be sorry you didn't sign up and get one of them sweet founders' skins for your warlock!

 

[dirtyferret]

Microsoft stated Amazon was working on a gaming service months ago. Apple has kicked around the idea as 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

 

[Vya Domus]

It would work well in Japan since the country is entirely fiber to fiber at every endpoint.

You can have a 1000 GB/s connection and the latency would still not improve.

 

[dirtyferret]

It's time to stop.

Streaming games doesn't work well enough and it will likely never do.

It won't be a replacement for desktop PC gaming but when the players are Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Sony, and Apple...they will make it work.

 

[Flanker]

There will probably be some sort of market as long as they avoid what happened to Nvidia (almost every publisher pulling out their games)

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

There will probably be some sort of market as long as they avoid what happened to Nvidia (almost every publisher pulling out their games)

I doubt any streaming company can avoid some of that, with a lot of companies pushing streaming they are going to want exclusive games, epic proved their worth, so no streaming service can expect 100% of games, it's not a possibility IMHO.
Therefore they fail.

 

[Space Lynx]

You can have a 1000 GB/s connection and the latency would still not improve.

Latency is good there though cause distance is so short for most people to servers, I have seen speedtests at 5ms there

 

[Nioktefe]

Latency is good there though cause distance is so short for most people to servers, I have seen speedtests at 5ms there

You will still have twice that lag for user inputs, and you also need to encode the video, all in all it's at least 10-20ms added for the best case scenario :/

 

[Kohl Baas]

You will still have twice that lag for user inputs, and you also need to encode the video, all in all it's at least 10-20ms added for the best case scenario :/

Well, in Europe to ping a server about 3-4 countries away, you'll be around 20-30, which is good. Not the best, but still good considering the routing. Twice that is 40-60, which is starting to be mediocre. Adding up the processing with 10-20 you end up with 50-70. Well, 70ms is definitely not good, but still not terrible either. I think "up to" 75ms it would beacceptable. But... There are a lot of people playing at 80-90ms or above a 100. For them, this would mean 200+ms. That yould be sluggish. Which would still be usable for like turn-based strategy or other genres which are not time-constraint. Competitive is an absolutely no-go. Not in the near future. If youcan have like 10ms with this, a true competitive player would still choose to have 2ms with dedicated PC.

 

[bug]

I'm not sure the "streaming will never work" is accurate. Most games the days are online titles that lag anyway, that's not a show stopper.
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?

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

I think one thing these companies trying to push streaming fail to see is the fact that most, if not all, PC Gamers are also hardcore PC hardware enthusiasts to the extent that EVEN if they had the latency issue perfect, I do not think it'd still be enough to attract people. I'm just a casual gamer and would honestly say I'm more into the hardware (but also some content creation and messing around with 3d design software) than the gaming and I'm sure I'm not the only one who enjoys their PC for something other than 100% pure gaming, and that's another reason why a lot of people wouldn't sign up for game streaming.

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

 

[notb]

I think one thing these companies trying to push streaming fail to see is the fact that most, if not all, PC Gamers are also hardcore PC hardware enthusiasts

Not every PC gamer is a hardware geek. At this point surely less than half uses a DIY desktop.

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.

 

[Space Lynx]

You will still have twice that lag for user inputs, and you also need to encode the video, all in all it's at least 10-20ms added for the best case scenario :/

Isn't this the lag we get on consoles and 4k TV's now? Even a Samsung 4k 55" tv I read gets about 19ms. Doesn't seem to bother console gamers. Don't have a 4k tv myself, so I wouldn't know.

 

[R-T-B]

You can have a 1000 GB/s connection and the latency would still not improve.

Fiber is like 1ms for a short in country hop like Japan...

 

[Vya Domus]

Fiber is like 1ms for a short in country hop like Japan...

I really, really, really doubt that is that case. I can get up to 10ms connecting to servers within my city with a fiber connection. Unless of course Japan has some magical infrastructure that one else has and were doing pretty damn good in my country.

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.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Seams to be true in that many are reporting this.

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.

 

[holyprof]

Cloud gaming is, sadly, the future.

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.