[nsfmc]

i tried this and found it to be pretty satisfying. i played entirely on a macbook while traveling during my winter vacation. It worked surprisingly well even with mixed wifi, i would compare it to the experience you get from using PS4 Remote Play or Steam Link over ethernet.

The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're circle strafing around a target and the entire screen is constantly redrawing). I thought it was great for playing a game casually: i.e. story mode. Lots of people use that phrase as a put-down, but the system is well suited for a game like ACO where you are mostly being tactical, planning, exploring, and moving the story forward.

I think of a game like 2016 hitman: i hesitated to install 30G of it to my ps4, but if you told me i could drop into the demo/prelude in less than a minute, even at 720, it's a very appealing concept for somebody like me that plays video games the way other people watch netflix while they're eating dinner: basically whenever i have some downtime and want to dip into a story or mechanic i like for ~30 mins.

[beefsack]

> Steam Link over ethernet

Note that even Steam Link over Ethernet is too laggy to play KB/M FPS at any serious level - the input lag makes FPS almost unplayable.

I can see the growth of services like these, especially with more gamers being unable to access dedicated hardware, but there will always be a niche for dedicated hardware. The only way I think they could solve that problem with streaming is using some sort of hybrid streaming approach where some of the UI is remote and some is local and they could do client side simulation somehow for input.

[nsfmc]

i perhaps have diminished standards, but i found steam link over ethernet to be totally serviceable for playing through most of hyper light drifter on a controller. the input lag was fairly minimal and the computer was already quite long in the tooth, but to your point, i wasn't getting 60fps, that's for sure (probably realistically it was a firm 30fps).

i don't doubt that consoles will remain useful, but i think that services like this will satisfy a pretty legit niche for a vast swath of games that aren't really dependent on low latency input (i.e. puzzle/turn based/rpg/simulators/board game conversions) and that are often 'discovered' by people finding letsplays on youtube.

for some variety of mmorpgs, i can imagine devs being excited about the reduced surface area for cheating/exploits. for somebody like me that uses a mac, i'm looking forward to playing a version of Civ that doesn't cause my laptop to sound like it's about ready to take flight. i don't think the idea is meant to replace consoles, though more, it seems like a way to grease the wheels of commerce and get people playing (and buying) games that they've been traditionally priced out of because of the not-insignificant startup cost of building and maintaining a gaming pc/console.

[bobthepanda]

I guess my question is; how would something like this scale? With Netflix and Spotify, the media is the same every time you play it, and even stuff like the Black Mirror CYOA have a limited number of combinations, so it's very easy to cache.

Every game has an extremely high number of potential combinations and outcomes, so it's effectively uncacheable. Fan that out to Steam level popularity and diversity of games and it sounds a bit nuts.

[pier25]

The only way is adding more servers closer to the users, which means Stadia will only offer really low latencies to users living close to the data centers. So probably only people in large cities.

[reanimated]

I don't really have a need to stream a full game, but your idea about the demos actually sounds great. I would like to play the demo instantly, evaluate if the gameplay/controls are good and if it does and I'm interested, I would purchase and download full game to my system.