Cloud gaming isn’t real.
Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666. Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.)
When networks advance faster than computing, there’s glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up… at 28.8 kbps… in RealPlayer quality… while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.
Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it’s probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become “mini-consoles” that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You’re better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.
Remote computing makes sense from an environmental perspective. There would be a drastic reduction in e-waste if people were using zero clients instead of desktops.
Maybe in theory, but in practice, Chromebooks.
Unless you’re really chasing the big name games, you don’t need that high powered of a rig anymore. Stylized graphics are better than highly realistic, they hold up better and longer. The most intensive game I have bought is STALKER 2 and even then my rig is holding up fine.
The first ending has already been happening.
The second ending keeps failing to happen. We’ve got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart’s cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.
stadia people got lucky as they got full refunds on everything after it shut down. what a deal tbh
The other good ending: People learn to disassemble e-waste and reuse stuff instead of throwing them in the trash. Think of all the SSDs, HDDs, and RAM sticks that are thrown out in old laptops and gaming consoles. It would be great to bring more of a reuse, repair, Maguyver, culture back to electronics.
I mean, I’m happy to Maguyver my old laptop, I’m just not sure how much utility that last 8gb of ddr3 will deliver to my £5000 gaming rig
That’s fantastic for you that you have a £5000 gaming rig. Not all of us can afford that. A lot of us are still gaming or doing office work or running servers on DDR3 machines.
Unfortunately a lot of secondhand hardware is destroyed. Storage devices due to privacy, other components because corporations are unwilling to expend the man hours needed to sell off perfectly good hardware and instead choose an e-waste recycler they can write off as an expense.
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It’s lucky that my dad’s supplier is sensible about these things, my family has I think 5 refurb Fujitsu laptops at €50 and €70 for the last one. Perfectly fine machines for study, browsing 3D-print terminals, vehicle diagnostics and such daily usage.
The plateau of processing power and modern energy efficiency means far older machines are viable users for years and years.
Wish that happened more often. All these crypto mines or whatever that use massive CPU or GPU power should dump them on the market, but I’ve never seen dumps of low-cost hardware.
Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.
Good ending for the gamers, bad ending for the devs…
If a dev is good they can make games worth buying with current hardware
Second secret ending: the games you have won’t run on your pc.
-someoone who waited 5 years to play fallout 76 after buying it 2 weeks after launch.
I mean, fallout 76 doesn’t really fall in the category of games I’d even consider
Already did this last year and according to Steam data many others, too.
I have used an Xbox Gamepass trial a few times. Its a good deal honestly, especially if you play a variety of games.
Except its competing with essentially a 40+ year backlog of games I own that Inhave collected over my life. I have zero need for it.
And frankly, its biggest competition is something like HumbleBundle, where you can often get a pile of games per month to keep without the subscriotion.
ohh don’t worry, once they sort it out on PC, cloud console gaming 2.0 is on it’s way.
If those Devs could read low level they’d be very upset
Cloud gaming only happens if people break down and pay for it.
But seeing the usage rates of Gamepass, I’m not encouraged.
I think cloud gaming will be picked up because people are sheep already
We already normalized installing malware under the guise of anticheat. Anything goes past this point.
4th ending: The AI bubble bursts,AI companies goes bankrupt and RAM,SSD,Gpu and Consoles plummet to normal prices due to the companies selling their stuff.
5th ending: People move on to used/older PCS and Consoles.
6th Ending: People move on to older/simpler Open source/reverse engineered games that runs on Potato hardware.Older PCs and consoles are only cheap now because people buy newer stuff.
When the newer stuff becomes prohibitively expensive, old hardware and consoles will SKYROCKET as demand goes up, because nobody is MAKING more.
Hoard tech now. We’re not that far away from 2012 laptops going for $500.
Oh I see
Unfortunately, you cannot buy gaming gpus, not because AI data centers are buying them, but because Nvidia would rather produce server GPUs than gaming GPUs. Same for memory. Once the AI bubble bursts, there still won’t be gaming GPUs to buy unless Nvidia and everyone else switch production, and you cannot put a datacenter GPU in a regular computer.
you cannot put a datacenter GPU in a regular computer.
Bet?
Right? People have been doing crazy shit to make non-ideal hardware work for them pretty much since computing was invented lol
Well, apparently an adapter card costs 80€ on AliExpress. But I’m not sure it will just work, maybe you need to get special drivers from Nvidia or something, and after you have the adapter and the datacenter GPU, you need to fashion your own cooling system for the GPU.
Yeah, also even if you coukd, it will still have the crypto problem. Do you really want a second hand GPU thst has been running full tilt for the laat year nonstop?
thats sucks soo much,i hope its only Nvidia and Crucial right?
It doesn’t matter if it’s only them. They are the suppliers. So even if, say, Asus would like to sell gaming GPUs at a normal price (which they wouldn’t, but let’s pretend) they cannot do that because there is no supply, and the little supply of consumer chips left is sold to those that sell GPU at pumped prices and therefor can give more money to the suppliers
then we are soo cooked 🙏
4th ending doesn’t matter because after the AI bubble pops companies will do mass layoffs to reduce costs and nobody will have the income needed to buy components at normal price. By the time things start to stabilize there’ll be some new reason consumers are priced out of the hardware market.
Maybe your right
When the COVID recession started, dairy farmers were seen dumping surplus milk rather than sell it at a lower price. I foresee a version of this where companies start destroying silicon to keep the supply low rather than let the prices drop to sane levels.
When, not if, the AI bubble pops, they will have all these server farms built and will want to push people to cloud gaming to recoup some of their investments
Alternately, a glut of secondhand god-tier GPUs, which only smell a little toasty.
The GPUs they’re ordering are designed for AI and can’t really be used for gaming, from my understanding.
There are so many indie games and older PC titles, that it is not really an issue.
I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.
This won’t last forever.
I have an 8th gen i7 that’s still rocking it, also a 4070 which helps a lot too. Truth be told, I haven’t encountered a game I /want/ that requires sky high specs anymore.
I’ve been waiting for GPU prices to come back down to earth since 2019. I really hope you’re right in a few more years.
In between the crypto scams and the AI hype, there was a brief moment of maybe a few months were GPU prices were affordable. Not good, but affordable enough so that normal people could buy them.
Yeah I vaguely remember some xx60 card being somewhat comparable to the 1060 if you counted for inflation for a little while.
I think we’re at the point where PCs are an afterthought in the GPU market, and have been for a long time.
If they keep pushing their cloud renting models it will last forever.
3rd ending: Retro gaming makes a massive comeback.
If this happens, there’s a good chance companies like Nintendo and Sony will double down on trying to erase emulation as an option. Anyone developing emulators will be targeted (even moreso than they already are), and ROM sites will be taken down making it harder for the average person to find games. Now is a great time to build up an offline ROM collection ahead of this potentially happening in a few years, even if storage is currently expensive.
Sound advice!
Yeah, I would sooner game on a Pi or N150 mini PC than touch fucking cloud gaming. Decade old second hand laptop if necessary.
Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.
That and the US being such a large market while having some of the worst internet in the developed world. Last I read only ¼ of the network is fiber
Yeah but the ones that have shit internet don’t have money to pay for the games anyways
tbf: The US is huge as fuck. Most countries in the developed world could fit in Texas.
I live in France, has fantastic fibre, would still hate to play civilisation “in the cloud”.
There is just no incentive to do so IMO. Even a cheap mobile phone can render well enough, and I just hate any kind of even “possible” lag.
/Rant off 😋
I play games over 4G happily. Not likely to work very well with game streaming. Especially if everyone else is. I did it during covid and it was ok but input lag was noticeable. SSH dwarf fortress and got into cdda was a better experience.
It’s so stupid. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
As with anything these techbro oligarchs comes up with. Unfortunately they do have the power to bend reality to their twisted wills.
I’m happy that Google Stadia died.
“Sure, you could play good games, but good luck playing garbage.”
Shooters aren’t garbage to people who like them. Different people prefer different games.
I completed Nier Automata via GeForce Now just fine. Competitive shooters maybe not, but that’s just a subset of gaming anyway.
What if everyone is on the cloud in the shooter?
Everyone can suffer together, yay
Wanna bring about the next French Revolution, worldwide? Cause that seems like a good way to do it!
Would be cool to play civ5 on a long term server.
I’m thinking something that emails you when its your turn too. Like playing chess over mail.
Civ over mail. Physical mail. Like those old mail chess games in the times before online chess (use https://lichess.org/ btw <3 ).
Move a scout, wait 3-5 days for the answer.
Interesting. I mean it more in the sense that civ is just a long game regardless, so some async maybe help.
Isn’t that a thing in freeciv, that open source version of civilization?
There is a freeciv? How did i not know this
Yeah, there’s a web version of the game if you want to try it out, though it seems to be based on civilization 2 or 3 rather than 5 or 6.
Unciv is based on civ5 and has support for BNW from the mod list.
