I love streaming music and movies... ...it's just too convenient and frugal to pass up.
Streaming software just seems kinda pointless. Like, even if it works, what is the benefit to the user? It just doesn't make sense to me why anyone would want to stream games or any other software. To me it just reeks of weird bullshit. There's no way anybody asked for this. It's one of those things where I have a hard time figuring out why it needs to exist. It's just so backwards...
Streaming music and stuff makes sense, because your goal is to be able to quickly access an otherwise impossibly wide range of media. I think most people stream to save money. You get to listen to a lot of music, the price per item is absurdly low, and you can do it anywhere, on any device. With current tech, streaming these things in high quality is doable and widely accessible.
You cannot, however, just take a PC (or even a console) game and run it on your phone (because it's a fucking phone, not a console or PC - not even remotely the same experience or capability,) so that doesn't really make sense. And besides, how many new games is a person gonna pick up at any given time? Usually you devote some real time to each one, as opposed to however few minutes a song runs for. To actually buy all of the movies and music people tend to stream would be cost prohibitive because you can easily go through a lot if you're into that, and games are expensive, but there's a significant limit to how many games a person can play and appreciate in a time span. You can only try so many. The cost of a subscription could easily add up to more than what you'd pay for the handful of games that you would've otherwise bought and sunk some serious time into. Is it really worth it just to be able to try more games?
And then on top of paying the sub, you're still going to be buying games... ...there will always be ones that aren't available. Getting everyone to play ball and create this massive database of current games is not going to be easy. We all know how it goes here just looking at what's happened to the music scene. Game developers aren't gonna wanna give up all the money they make on downloads!
Not to mention, there's probably no way to have this actually work on a large scale, with lots of current titles without it being rediculously expensive. You'd hate yourself.
And then if you're playing the game regularly, any small benefit of being able to just stream it goes out the window. Installing it on your PC just takes up some disk space, but at least then you don't usually need your internet to be working to play, and it's always going to work without randomly lagging out. Whether you stream it or not, you still have to download it lol. Might as well own it and just pay once. For playing the games you really want to play, it's not even worth it. You're adding an extra layer of crap to do the same thing. So many more things can come along and totally ruin your experience.
And lets face it here, there is always gonna be latency. It can be reduced but its still the nature of the beast. It is NEVER gonna be possible to avoid. For these fuckers to try and suggest that it can ever be made a non-issue is disingenuous. You can't just buffer a game as you play it, you know? It's not the same.
If they thought they could get away with it, they'd suggest that we'd all be playing super massive, AAA action games over the internet, which from my admittedly uninformed point of view just seems... ambitious. The practical implications for pulling that off are hard to fathom. How do you swap around pieces of a running game in real time, anyway? I'm assuming that's the idea, because otherwise you're just downloading the whole thing every time. So how does it figure out what pieces it's gonna need as you go along? And assuming it even can do that, how do they get there in time? Again, it's different from a song or a movie. It's not linear. Streaming as it exists now is probably not adaptive enough to handle crap like this. What about online gaming? How does that not become a terrible mess immediately? Streaming online games is next-level lol.
And we all know that even if they could, people aren't going to ever be playing the latest and greatest on smartphones. How can you possibly think that people are going to give up their consoles and PCs to switch to phones and smart TV's? lol People pay big money to play these games on the newest, best stuff possible. And the games are often designed with this in mind.
How do they not get that ideally, you sit and you play a game free from distractions because you're not just staring at a screen... ...you're reacting to and interacting with the game. Besides, PC's and consoles are always gonna be miles ahead in terms of performance, meaning things like gameplay and appearance will always be far, far less on a smartphone. Nobody's going to go from gaming on 1080p @ high fps to... ...whatever CAN actually be done on a smartphone. The level of immersion attainable is just so, so much lower. Just by nature of all of those things and the way we consume them. I know people like to say a smartphone is like a pocket-sized PC, but it's not ACTUALLY that way. They almost kind of work like one, but under the hood... ...yeah. <_<
I just... ...that's the big one for me. To even suggest that gaming is gonna go that way is really something. I don't think they quite understand how this all works.
I can see it working for little junkfood games. This is great for smartphone games and possibly the handheld market. Might actually save people money and get engagement up in that department. And on the technical end it should be doable. Fine. But for the majority? Big gaming? People who actually enjoy gaming and spend good money on it? I'm not talking hardcores here. Just your average gamer. I really sincerely doubt it. Games and movies are just too different for you to just go all netflix on them. The experience is different, the way people engage with them is very different, the demands are vastly different, and people's habits with them are different.
I find it telling how they say that people want this, but they don't say why people would want this. Why, if streaming games is gonna be such a big thing, can they not name one benefit? Like, what is gonna be so awesome and revolutionary about it? Nobody seems to know. "It won't lag anymore!" doesn't count. They act like that's the only reason people didn't want this before. Just how out of touch can someone possibly be?
Several times I had to go back and make sure I was reading things right... ...still not sure I'm understanding what this is.
