[DanielHB]

It is because regulators don't want a monopoly to be formed around an emerging technology. Sure cloud streaming is not big at the moment but it could literally be the default way to play games in 20 years.

Heck Microsoft themselves point this out to their investors.

Google's monopoly on search and online advertising today could have been easily prevented 20 years ago by some regulations.

[junaru]

> it could literally be the default way to play games in 20 years.

No it couldn't. Its fundamentally inferior to local hardware and no amount of wishful thinking will change the laws of physics.

[Topfi]

> laws of physics

Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology? Besides the fact that these services already exist and, provided you have decent infrastructure, which will only become more accessible as time goes on, do serve most people's gaming needs even in this early state.

Of course, there will always be some for whom local will be the preferred option, but they were talking about the future default. There are still people buying and consuming Blu-ray due to its higher quality, but the default (i.e. what the majority use) has become streaming, and I don't see anything preventing gaming going the same way. If you wanna stick with gaming, the majority tend to play on consoles and do view the advantages in convinience to outweigh the disadvantages in terms of possible fidelity, higher framerates and lower latency that a PC may offer (even in cases of similar pricing).

Concerning cloud gaming, network latency will go down, and the offered bandwidth will go up in most areas of the globe. With recent advancements in high quality upscaling, networking demands will also decrease. Physics is not a hindrance, unless I am overlooking something.

[katbyte]

Latency can only go down so much because as parent comment said: laws of physics dictate the minimum response time between two points given the distance. And it will be higher with each hop /media change

[Topfi]

Ok, but we were talking about the default, the average for the majority of consumers. Did any of them care about the far more significant latency that their TVs processing imposes (or did impose, as now many TVs switch to "game mode" by themselves) on their console gaming experience?

No, the majority never even noticed. The irreducible latency some are talking about is imperceptible, not a factor for the vast majority of the populus. Ease of use, lack of install times, flexibility, and ability to spread out cost, all will outweigh that.

[katbyte]

A lot of people discuss it when purchasing tvs, tvs often have game mode as you say, the entire 30/60 fps debate and how many gamers refuse to accept 30fps as acceptable, ping times in games and how variable they can get. Personally I can notice the difference pretty easily.

Lots of people do discuss this and do care, not to mention to even get to the point of it only being “the lowest possible physics allows” you need great home networking equipment plus a fast/well connected isp and a cloud service provider that isn’t adding any processing delay. That excludes a ton of people.

Cloud gaming isn’t going to be “the default” anytime soon, and for many people it will never be an option.

Heck physical copies are still super popular with a large group of console gamers to this day despite digital delivery being so well tested and ubiquitous

[akaij]

How "average" do we want to go? Because another slice of this average population will be mostly fine playing Candy Crush on their mobile.

[scrlk]

> Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology?

Speed of a signal travelling through optical fiber or copper cable? Additional latency of cloud gaming rules out genres that require twitch reactions (e.g. competitive FPS, fighting games, platformers).

[trgdr]

If you look at the market, this is a pretty small fraction of gaming revenue. Sure these things will continue to exist in competitive format, but a significant majority of gaming is not highly latency-sensitive in this way.

fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.

[WithinReason]

Let's check the laws of physics then: Typical latency in games is about 25-80 ms [1]. What's your ping to the closest GeForce Now server? For me it's 10 ms.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/393646/tested-how-nvidia-ref...

[gambiting]

The GeforceNow client has its own delay in processing your input, just like the game does. So you have to wait for your input to be captured by the client, processed, sent to their servers, where it has to be processed again, then given to the game process and then used there. And then the visual output has to be sent back, where again it has to be processed and displayed, with all the latency of the local client and display device.

Like, I work in video games for a large publisher - we have done a lot of testing on this technology, both on GeForce Now and our own internal solutions. Without getting into details I probably shouldn't talk about - the lowest latency you can see when streaming is around 150-200ms, and that's in absolutely perfect conditions where you have a data centre super close to you. Unfortunately, 150ms is visible to your average player, and in our testing the enjoyment of the game is directly related to what kind of game it is - strategy games, action games, even driving games? Mostly fine, not really noticable. First person shooters? Extremely noticable, in our testing there is a noticable drop of player performance in online PvP when streaming. We have been experimenting with improving it(by giving the player just a touch of auto-aim assist when they are streaming), and we were able to bring the numbers back up to where they were for non-streaming players. But then you get into a debate about whether that is fair or not.

Either way, like OP said - you can't beat physics.

[WithinReason]

All the reasons you listed were software reasons, not physics. If physics is only contributing 10 ms then you can beat low latency. This guy can get down to about 50ms with 15-20 ping:

https://youtu.be/XXvKlpkJjFU?si=nSMT8m5onkuqggwo&t=247

Nvidia is advertising 25 ms on the 240Hz tier, even if it's best case it should scale linearly with ping:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoRszjZb2-8

[dageshi]

Smart phones are fundamentally inferior for playing games on than consoles or PC, that hasn't stopped gaming on mobile from being huge, they're mostly just different games than you get on PC/console.

Developers will adapt their games and how they play to suit the medium based on the mediums popularity.

[polski-g]

Cloud streaming would work for the vast majority of games. It just wouldn't work for realtime ones.

Civilization, SimCity, zoo tycoon, Paradox Grand strategy games, etc... Would all be fine to play on a streaming platform

[johnnyworker]

Remember when consoles were touted as having none of the disadvantages of PC (no patches, no loading times, "it just works"), but what we actually got was consoles that are suckier than PC in every way, but instead PC gaming being gimped by consoles existing? (e.g. Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design" and everything to do with a controller having 4 buttons)

So yeah, if it's shittier and allows even harder rent seeking, it'll be the standard in a few decades. Don't count on quality being a factor, gamers are the kings of Stockholm Syndrome and there isn't any hoop you can't get them to buy and then jump through.

[gambiting]

>>e.g. Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design" and everything to do with a controller having 4 buttons)

That's an extremely weird argument. Literally no one at Bethesda was being stopped from writing compelling dialogue choices for that game because controllers only have 4 buttons - it's a choice they made conciously, they wanted to simplify the dialogue trees and that's what they ended up with. To even suggest that it's because of consoles is........just odd man. Like, it's not a thing. I've worked in video games for long enough to tell you that the number of controller buttons would never even make it into a discussion about these things, unless it was coming directly from Todd Howard or something.

[johnnyworker]

It was one of many examples, if you want to pretend PC game interfaces (speaking of fallout again, the same key for gun bash and grenades, plus a trillion other things in basically all AAA games) aren't gimped by consoles that's great, but you finding it "weird" and "odd" isn't even an argument.

[gambiting]

Nice move of goalposts - interfaces absolutely got nerfed because of consoles, I never argued otherwise. You argued that the reason why Fallout 4 got crappy dialogue options was because controllers have 4 buttons(to quote you "Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design""), which is complete nonsense, but I don't know how to prove it to you other than by saying I have worked in the industry long enough to tell you with absolute certainty that it doesn't happen. If bethesda wanted to have 20 dialogue options they would have done it regardless. The fact that the conversation options suck in that game and that they basically all mean the same thing has nothing to do with how many buttons are on a controller(!!!!). If you walked into any conversation about NPC conversation systems and said with a straight face "I think we should only have 4 dialogue options because controllers have 4 buttons" you'd be laughed out of the room.