alt Hacker NewsSteam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...
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On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
They’re not a hardware company*. Sony and Nintendo are. MS is kinda questionable.
* Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.
Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.
You’d be surprised with how much lag is actually tolerable when you have good prediction.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.