@INTERPUNCT @gpowerf
It has Dreamcast vibes - a great concept hampered by the technology just not quite being there to realised the dream!
There just isn’t enough internet connectivity that’s both good enough _and_ affordable in the wider world for it to really fly.
@wiredfire @INTERPUNCT I tweeted this saying they both died too soon. I got a bunch of aggressive responses. 🤷♂️ that's Twitter for you.
barring the sudden invention of FTL data transfer.
@icedquinn @wiredfire @INTERPUNCT
There are multiple things to consider here:
1) For a huge chunk of games and for a huge chunk of people with decent connections and local area networks the latency is just fine as it is. I've played through many games on the cloud (including driving games) where latency is important and at no point did I feel like my experience was spoilt by running the game remotely. Some services are better than others too; Stadia and GFN for me have low latency, Xbox Cloud has much higher latency.
Like you said FTL would be great! But there are ways to avoid this by having lots of smaller instances around a country. Easy to achieve where I live sure, I live in a tiny country. If you live in a place like the US, Canada, or China this is admittedly much harder.
2) I think we need more of a hybrid model for games that merit a faster response time. As an example look at what Microsoft has done with Flight Simulator, the game runs both locally and on the cloud and it utilises cloud computing to deal with the massive scale of the game.
Cloud computing is one of the tools that's necessary to give us the next step up in gaming. Experiences that would not be possible just running on a local PC or console.
3) There are machine learning techniques that can be used to minimize latency. Google was looking at this for Stadia. They called the technology "negative latency" as they were looking at predicting button presses and pre-processing inputs before they happened. And sure, this is untested and I will admit that it might be kind of pie in the sky, but my core point is that technology is improving and it doesn't all rely on having a super fast connection.
@INTERPUNCT it is probably a case of "too soon" as well as the usual lack of commitment from Google. For me it was one of the most impressive platforms of the last few years, going back to gaming on a console and dealing with downloads and managing local storage does indeed feel like travelling back in time to a darker era.
There are alternatives like GFN. And whilst GFN does indeed work well it lacks the level of polish that Stadia did, as well as the usable free tier.
@gpowerf played a decent amount - not my speed, but holy hell, wish it became a platform in its own right. it might have been doomed from the start - not the right time, but the service itself was executed pretty well by Google and I wish it caught on and survived.