http://www.techspot.com/news/64821-ubisoft-ceo-believes-streaming-make-consoles-extinct.html

So they tried to revive OnLive? I tried that service a few years ago, even my 56K modem is faster in playing an online game.

I've tried to stream "steam" over my network and gotten nowhere... full GB speed with no interference and its like playing a lagged out drunk version of what you could be playing.

what game were you streaming?

Reason why Game streaming fails so much and has not taken off right is due to people wanting physical/digital steam like owning of games. And Not many people can afford internet that can stream such high detailed games over stable networks.

I have 500down and 25up with my provider and we tried streaming games using the ps4 stream thing with the trail and it did not turn out good due to latency issues and a lot of blurry moments. yeah it did work almost 80 percent of the time but man I fear for the future of games if these companies think this is the way to go... I see streaming of media fine but not games.


I can see them forcing streaming in 10 to 15 years for sure but not now, If anything it would be a side order right beside digital.

If we had internet speeds in the gigabytes a second or something and no latency, then yes I see streaming making consoles go away. However as the US has crappy internet compared to other countries, this isn't going to be the case. It's faster to generate the video feed and content locally than it is from half the world away.

I also don't like the idea of a subscription service to access my content. What if my internet has delays because of peak hours? What if I go to a friend's house that doesn't have unlimited internet and we want to play a game? What about wanting to play a specific version or a modded version of a game? (I love Zy-El, but wouldn't be given that option if I had to stream from Blizzard). What about Mods? (wouldn't exist as the servers would only stream a basic version)

No... This idea of streaming taking over is a dud.

Streaming services are theoretically interesting, as they would allow people to play pretty much any games on any platform, depending only on network speed.

In practice though it will still take a decade or so, that the internet reliability all over the world is good enough for bigger masses to really take notice.

Watch this video.

As to making consoles extinct, no. These are probably the same kind of people who believed ''cinematic'' games like The Order were the next step in gaming. Ie people who see something cool or something they're paid to push and market and say its ''the future'' without saying why.

People on both sides will have to have internet capable of uploading and downloading 1080p or 720p video at playable framerates and have the PCs be close enough in server region to minimize lag. A few minutes of playing will take up gigabytes of data and all this happens while the game we pay for is not in our possession and we can't even touch the files. So even if someone doesn't mind the waste of data for running games easier run on their PC, the DRM is strong. You don't even own anything. Its just you being able to log in and use the files stored on the company PCs for one authorized thing only. Not to mention it needs always online internet connection.

Take a look here. If they can play/stream The Witcher 3 from a different location, it's most likely a video encoding/decoding issue, not a network one.

Another streaming gaming discussion... I'm sure it will work for some people at least for some kinds of games, but as that linked Sony video suggested, they are still trying to figure out pricing. I presume there has to be some premium pricing because the store has to offer the computing power to run all the games.

Netflix and Spotify has been huge successes, so I am not saying streaming gaming couldn't be successful as well (not necessarily replacing "local gaming" though), even though it has extra hurdles compared to streaming movies and music.

Not for me though at least for now, my gaming habits don't really resonate well with a monthly subscription for many games as I tend to play games long (years) after their release in a rather slow pace, concentrating on few games at a time. Better service for people who constantly want to jump to new games and play them in a rapid pace (or abandon games easily).

latency kills all benefits of streaming. and there is no way to fix it, unless you are really close to the server, so maybe in-home streaming to another device will be popular

Like the NVidia Shield? That's suppose to let you stream wirelessly to a handheld device which runs on the main computer. This sounds like a good idea if you really wanted to play handheld, or had to go to the bathroom and couldn't wait to keep slaying monsters while doing your stuff... But beyond that I'm not sure the benefit of it.

Yes. not very useful now, especially when every platform (windows, android, consoles) has very little intentions to interact with others - for user's benefits

I think comments like this are typical of industry social isolates like Guillemot who seem to believe that their whims and wishes must automatically be adopted by their customers. Many a time I've heard from industry executives about how this and that is going to be the future. They want absolute control over their products, so "streaming is the future". They want to kill secondhand sales, so "digital is the future". What the customer wants and buys never factors into it for these idiots.

And almost every time, barring a few obvious developments, they're wrong. Supply does not get to dictate demand.

The industry has an interesting knack of developing in ways that, really, nobody predicted, simply because it rarely develops homogeneously. New developments tend to branch off into separate markets instead of supplanting existing ones, unless the old tech really offers no advantages (see DVD over VHS, for instance). Back in 2000, people were predicting that 2D games were dead because all games would be 3D. Back in 2005, people were predicting that physical media would be dead by 2010. And here we are, in 2016, and not only is 3D not necessarily king and physical not dying, but business models such as indie developers that were previously digital-only are increasingly adopting physical. 2D accounts for a very large share of the market. The fact is that both co-existing to scratch different itches. And yes, the industry genuinely thought that OnLive was the future. Yeah, we know where that went.

So will it be with streaming. You only have to look at the trends with Netflix and co. to see where this is going. Industry apologist articles constantly write about "the death of DVD and Bluray" blah, blah, blah, but in fact, streaming has only killed off the DVD rental market. Similarly, in the music industry, the singles market is pretty much dead thanks to digital downloads, but CD album sales are still pretty strong. It's all about the advantages that physical ownership offers in respect of collectability, trading rights and resale rights.

The problem with such generalised predictions is that they grossly undervalue collectiblity, trading and resale rights and massively overstate the perceived inconveniences of buying physical media or digital downloads, waiting for it to arrive and install it.

These vocal predictions are designed to keep clueless shareholders investing, nothing more.

I tried some Mortal Kombat, Fallout 3, Talos, PayDay, Tomb Raider... its crap, input lag and just slight enough graphical lag to make it unplayable... rig is an octo-core 4ghz with 32ram and a GTX970... host rig was similar in specs, also tried a gaming laptop host. This is not an encoding issue, This is leveraging the most advanced cloud platform available to mankind... EC2 is king of the castle, no Average Joe will have this ability. If you need dev drivers that are not available to the public then this service should not exist.

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In all iterations of streaming its never worked right in any way for me, on-live to new fancy PlayStation stuff. I've builtt a network in a lab to test ideas like this... best i ever got was thin client mixed with VM setup but this is also not feasible for scale or the Average Joe.