Most Games Will Be Streamed and Produced in the Cloud in the Next 5 to 10 Years, Ubisoft CEO Says

[Grimlakin]

It'll be nice and convenient for kids but yes I expect they will want to graduate to something better. Heck I have over the years of diy.

But... for the mass market. I think streaming with the option to locally cache games for those with crap connections will be the way forward. As long as they don't go to bandwidth monetized internet connections. Meaning data use beyond z amount is charged for.

 

[Zarathustra]

Hey, what a coincidence. I expect to decrease my gaming in the next 5 to 10 years as well.

Yeah, without the element of building a kickass machine to run it, gaming kind of loses its appeal to me.

I've always been a tech enthusiast first. Playing games was secondary.

That, and I will never pay a subscription fee for any software, games included.

Give me a one time license, or count me out.

 

[Zarathustra]

Pardon my french, but this francophone **** can go **** himself. I will never accept this.

 

[Brian_B]

• XBOX series X: $600, you own every game you buy and can play them forever in 4K
• XBOX series S: $300, you own every game you buy and can play them forever in HD
• XBOX streamer: $150, but with a $20 monthly fee attached. You don't own any of the games, and if you stop your payments it becomes a paper weight. And we can alter the deal at any time in the future. And if you cancel the subscription before the 24 month contract ends, there is a surcharge. Plus you need unlimited data high speed internet for it.

You forgot the "Pay $70 for every game you want to buy" for the first two options, whereas the streaming option is "All you can eat"

Depending on how much variety you want in your gaming selection, that could swing the financials considerably.

Not that it does a **** thing on the technical side though...

 

[Stoly]

I could swear I read the same quote 5 years ago...

 

[Uvilla]

Ill tell you what, I ain't trying to fight this at all. No I don't like it one bit. I hated the death of physical media, to the point I went with the switch for having cartridges, though that is no guarantee at all, nor are discs on ps4 and on. On pc physical media died quite fast, I hated it, I left pc gaming mostly because of it. I had so many games that didn't activate anymore, and this only by 2010ish, from games I purchased 1998ish and on. Yeah if you count 5in 4in floppies and cassettes and such physical media lasted a while, but the second the internet was more widespread they killed it via needing activation and such, making lots of my cds ( with serial numbers saved) worthless, I was not happy, and had no idea either, i though many of those serials would just go with the physical media, not for it to check against some server that did not exist. Well that is not physical media, I might have a disc, but it ain't media at all.
But no, I will not fight this, and this will come as sure as everyone loves Steam (which I now use, due to getting a Steam deck, so I I gues now I pc game) I will embrace stream gaming in time. I don't like it, but I won't work to hard to avoid it. This thing will happen in my view.

 

[MadMummy76]

You forgot the "Pay $70 for every game you want to buy" for the first two options, whereas the streaming option is "All you can eat"

Depending on how much variety you want in your gaming selection, that could swing the financials considerably.

Not that it does a **** thing on the technical side though...

Remember, on Stadia you still had to pay for the games. To be able to offer the all you can eat option you need to convince devs to put all their games on it first. No way that's happening. So I expect streaming to offer a limited selection as part of the subscription and pay for others. And if each publisher tries to make their own little crappy streaming service then it is doomed to fail anyway.

This is why I'm not so worried that streaming would be the future of gaming. Just as NFT games wasn't, just as play to earn wasn't.

And even if streaming can attract an emerging market that does not mean the end of PC and Console gaming. Just as the boom of mobile gaming did not make the PC and console market any smaller.

 

[theblackangus]

Look at the current video streaming market, and you can infer a few things that will most likely happen.
... paying for 2 or 3 20-30$ a month streaming services because a few games you like to play all the time will be on separate ones.
... games you want ot play becoming un-availble anywhere for periods of time.
... you cant play those games at someone elses house on your sub. (social gaming is a thing)
... commercials (Oh yes they will come).
... well 24fps is good enough at 1080p want more pay more.
This also creates a walled garden because devs now have to give even more money up to the "cloud provider" or build out their own with substantial up front costs, with substantial operational costs.

 

[DrezKill]

I left pc gaming mostly because of it

As much as I love physical media, I sure as f*ck wasn't gonna give up PC gaming just cuz of that. While I hated the move to digital-only, I got used to it because I used to grab a lot of "community demos" so I already had a digital library before things officially moved that way in the industry.

I also don't mind digital libraries when they are like GOG, completely DRM-free.

I appreciated how some companies like old Epic let us use the serial keys from our physical, offline, standalone versions of games like UT2004 and UT3 and put those keys into Steam, giving us a free digital copy. I still got my perfectly usable standalone discs, but for convenience I use the Steam version.

to the point I went with the switch for having cartridges

Too bad a good number of devs cheap out and don't use the largest Switch cartridge sizes, instead preferring to put only part of the game on the cartridge, forcing you to download the rest. Which means the cartridges are no good as stand-alone games, and 20 years from now when you try to play those cartridges are a fresh system, they'll be unusable cuz you won't be able to download the missing data. But if in 20 years you are still playing Switch, you should be using a modded Switch anyways.

Anyways streaming-based gaming will NEVER match up to or replace local gaming. An Internet connection will never be faster than the physical wired connection between my mouse/keyboard and PC, or between my graphics card and monitors, or between the internal components of my PC. I've tried some decent streaming-based gaming using the Xbox cloud shiznit at a friend's house, and it was decent for some games in terms of controls (the video quality wasn't), but my friend said it's not really an accurate representation either, because both a Verizon FiOS backbone and Microsoft Xbox servers were nearby. So people who don't live so close to such things will get an even worse experience than what I got (and it was already bad enough).

I will never pay a subscription fee for any software, games included.

Give me a one time license, or count me out.

Amen to that.

 

[MadMummy76]

As much as I love physical media, I sure as f*ck wasn't gonna give up PC gaming just cuz of that. While I hated the move to digital-only, I got used to it because I used to grab a lot of "community demos" so I already had a digital library before things officially moved that way in the industry.

I was never a big fan of physical media, the only part I miss are the goodies that came with physical games, but those stopped being a thing before the physical media era ended on PC. Insert disk to play game was always a hassle, or still is on console I guess. Not to mention the infamous starforce DRM that was capable of physically damaging CD-ROM drives and outright incompatible with others. But securom wasn't better either, with its online+offline authentication and limited activations, which left you no option but using a crack after the servers got shut down.

The only physical media I'm slightly nostalgic about are floppy disks. Back then in the early 90s games cost 2 weeks minimum wage in Hungary, so naturally all I had was community demos.

It was always a struggle to compact games to fit on the least possible number of disks. It could take an entire day to ARJ just a few games onto floppies. It was always exciting to see how many floppies a game could be compacted down to.

For some reason 10 was a psychological barrier for me, so I was always on the bleeding edge of compression among the first to adopt RAR. I also used 2M Format, which allowed more data to be squeezed on a single floppy.

But by the time games started to stretch beyond 10 floppies (roughly 20MB) the CD-R era was upon us. It was weird that all my games that I stored on dozens of floppies until then, had fit on one third of a CD.

I appreciated how some companies like old Epic let us use the serial keys from our physical, offline, standalone versions of games like UT2004 and UT3 and put those keys into Steam, giving us a free digital copy. I still got my perfectly usable standalone discs, but for convenience I use the Steam version.

EA did that too on Origin, unfortunately it rarely worked with localized physical media.

 

[Uvilla]

Streaming gaming libraries will come, may come and go whatever. Buying individual stream games will be a thing too, it doesn't really matter. Unless you have actual physical media as in pre ps4 and back (I am not even sure ps3 was 100% real media tbh) you own nothing, same as streaming.
You are already there, with your steam or whatever. Sure valve promises they have assuances in place blah blah. Suuure, still you own nothing but access rights, same as you would streaming, exactly zero differences.
If I was a valve steam but streaming competitor and said " we have assurances in place" we are in the exact same place, only depending on how the service is, I can access with little hardware.

 

[Brian_B]

Unless you have actual physical media as in pre ps4 and back (I am not even sure ps3 was 100% real media tbh) you own nothing, same as streaming.

That doesn't guarantee you anything, you still don't own anything with physical media. I can't count the number of physical boxes I have in the closet for games which are shut down and no longer able to play.

And even of those that weren't online - there's a good number where you have to jump through some pretty significant hoops because there's no longer any compatibility.

Here's a good example: While we were at my dad's last summer, my son found our old Nintendo (the 16-bit one). He wanted to play with that, but we didn't have a way to hook it up to the TV in the house without ordering an adapter for the old Coax/RCA video input (Dad's TV is some cheapy Walmart special and only had HDMI inputs) - so he got to look at it longingly and I showed him how to blow on the carts. But that was it, we didn't have time for the adapter to get in.

Is that surmountable? With some time and money, yeah. Same as an online service - that's surmountable too, if someone wants to run a public server and crack the login (City of Heroes Homecoming, for example). Just a matter of what you want to put into it.

 

[Stoly]

I think game streaming can have a place, but local gaming will still be king.

I've tried GeforceNow (arguably the best game streaming service, unfortunately that's not saying much.) almost since it was in early beta. While it has evolved tremendously, IMO its still not suited for competitive gaming. While lag may be fine for single player gaming and slower paced games, don't expect to do well in fortnite, Apex or CoD.