Gaikai sold to Sony because they saw the writing on the wall that they were going to fail. And Sony hasn’t exactly touted success for their game streaming.
I would say perhaps MS might be more keen on making that succeed, there’s been talk that they’re trying pretty hard to turn Xbox into a service instead of a platform. Rumor is that they were trying to get Xbox games on the Switch.
I played assassin’s Creed on project stream and input lag was not an issue whatsoever. It had other issues but that wasn’t it. I’d be more worried about the whole stream lagging behind. It was great most of the time but I can see how the occasional glitches could screw with pvp games… Then again, most gamers deal with that anyhow so I’m not sure it would be that much different. I’m curious how their servers will handle the load if it actually takes off.
$380 million is a lot for a “failed” company, the truth is they were a startup and Sony bought their tech and IP, like 1000s of startups. Sony hasn’t touted the success because the demand isn’t there for streaming, it’s an inferioir experience, something that Google will not magically solve.
Sony wanted their streaming tech and the infrastructure they had already built out. $380M seems reasonable to me, if Gaikai was doing well Sony would’ve likely shelled out more
I’ll admit that I only play Invisible Inc, ARMA 3 and Minecraft, so I might have a slightly skewed view of the situation. 
Yeah some games and developers are super friendly to modding, very thankful for that because i do think it helps the scene grow. It’s the main reason why Skyrim and Fallout has retained such a loyal and active fan base. However i do know that some devs and publishers view modding as theft of content and a threat to their IP, some people still go ahead and try to mod games not meant for such a thing but there’s always a big risk it’ll run afoul eventually.
I don’t see it as replacing my occasional pc hardware upgrades, but if the price is right, I can use this to play the games that would normally require a $500+ GPU update every year, and be content with purchasing something “not cutting-edge” at a bargain price for the titles that don’t require it.
I was in the Stadia beta, and it was fantastic. Better than it had any right to be. And Google hit it out of the park with tailoring it for Chromecast Ultra-level hardware.
Yeah, it’s not gonna replace running stuff locally, but for the people who stay far away from pc gaming because they’re not willing to enter the never-ending hardware race, this is a perfect way for Google (and their partners) to get their dollars.
Also, no one’s mentioned VR. I can stomach paying $400 or so for goggles. I can’t stomach paying more than twice that for the required GPU to run it well. Someone comes out with goggles that have integrated network capability and a decent enough cpu, there’s your killer app. Leave all the heavy lifting to Google’s datacenters.
So it wasn’t failing then.
I wonder how that works out for Google in terms of hardware upgrades, and power consumption? This seems like a pretty resource intensive, high cost venture for them to roll out. How much do they have to charge to break even on hardware, bandwidth and power costs? I’m used to Google doing unprofitable things, but I’m guessing this one really will sink or swim based on revenue.
Games are over saturated, but platforms are running in a near oligarchy. You have 3 consoles, two mobile platforms, and 1 clear market leader on PC.
The level of reaction on this topic makes me predict two things:
That’s a fun situation.
Now, I have to go solve real world problems, like why two 4672 column data frames which should be identical are not after some data wrangling. Happy gaming.
VR is an interesting one, that’s actually a really good way to do VR if the cloud console catches on.
They have multiple streams of revenue from this. Subscription fees, advertising on streams, the YouTube ad revenue on archived streams and a cut of content creator subscription revenue for the Stadia channels.
Also, exclusives are a big draw for game studios. That is a single tech stack. If all I have to support to fully distribute my game is have it work on a single line of predictable hardware that’s a huge savings on testing and support.
I had the impression that very low latency is vital for a good VR experience.
Sure, but the entry into VR is insane right now and this could be an imperfect solution for people with solid internet connections.
It would be just a server farm, right? So it’s a lot of investment but it’s not a high individual expense.
The issue with VR is that latency is extremely important, more so than on anything else because any change in framerate can potentially make the wearer sick and/or ruin the immersion. It may be possible to run VR games through streaming but i’m not optimistic on how viable it is currently.
Yes, but there are solutions with cloud computing to limit the latency by using a CPU in the headset and a remote CPU. I’m not saying it will be great, I said it’s an interesting consideration.
I was thinking a similar thing myself, MS has dabbled with partial remote computing/calculations for games so i know its possible.
I am waiting on the collapse of society to go back and get my frogger top score up to where it should be, so this isn’t going to work for me.
