i really dont like the look of how the gaming landscape is changing. well to be honest, we are already there. it is already concerning how everything is going digital only and the retail physical media is disappearing. sure digital purchases and downloads are very convenient but in a lot of cases, if that service/platform/company goes under then your game library is gone. you do get places like gog.com where you buy stand alone digital games where there is no such risk but with the majority are places like steam, playstation, xbox, battle.net etc you need your account to play and offline play is limited or even not possible. effectively, you dont own any digital media "purchased". you simply pay to get access to playing a particular game, listen to music and watch some tv shows.
there are other issues with digital only. big download sizes really hurts a lot of internet users. i know that most first world countries have uncapped high speed internet for cheap. but here in south africa, internet is expensive and most of these services have data caps. there more data you download, the more you pay. some services easily charge you around $10 per GB. and the nicer, faster internet with higher data caps are limited in availability. so having to download a 100GB game is, in many cases, not affordable in internet data costs. you also cant currently trade in digital games for store credit like you can with physical copies. you cant re-sell digital games. also, when these games are tied to an online account, you can easily lose access to playing the game if your account is banned or locked. in our current extreme politically correct culture, it can happen really easily. games also frequently disappear off digital stores, so if you dont have it downloaded already, you could lose your purchase.
it is about to get worse though. the new future of gaming are streaming services like google stadia. at first i thought this great, you sign up for a service like netflix for cheap and get access to lots of games and you can game on nearly any device! however, as more info emerged, i soon realized there are a few issues with google stadia:
- game purchases. you are still required to buy individual games at the same price as retail or other digital stores. this is not a cheaper alternative.
- data costs. the amount of data games streaming will use is huge, which as explained above, will be costly for users in south africa and many other countries.
- google frequently just abandons or cancels projects/services. image you buy thousands of dollars of games and google just decides, nah we are cancelling this service. all gone
- latency. google insists it wont be a problem but i'm sorry, there will be some latency when playing over the internet versus on local dedicated hardware. even if you remove video streaming out of the equation.
- permanently online requirement. to use this service, you'll need a very stable line. if your connection drops or google servers are under maintenance, you dont get to play.
- internet congestion. most of use live in a household or community with multiple internet users. because this game streaming service requires a stable & fast connection, you will have issues if your little sister is surfing on instagram or mom is checking something on netflix. sure it is not an exclusive from to game streaming but the difference is that now if mom wants to watch netflix, you play some offline single player games instead of team deathmatch. actually, most online games use little bandwidth so you could probably even play team deathmatch will mom is on netflix. but games streaming uses way more data and there is no offline single player to resort to, it is all online, all the time.
- service availability. because this service uses a lot of internet traffic and requires massive servers and infrastructure, it will take a while for this service to become available to places like africa and south america.
- game performance. here is something no one seems to be talking about. ok so a modern game uses quite a bit of resources to push out all the nice graphics and sound. google says that these games will run on powerful servers with limitless power. yeah, things dont really work that easily. it will still take a significant chunk of computing power and there will be thousands of users. i cant see how these servers can flawlessly run these high end game at 60fps, streaming it to users with no stuttering or frame drops. also, how often will these servers be upgrade or new ones added to keep up with gaming technology? and if you tell a game developer they get limitless power to run their game, they will likely not optimize their game properly resulting in an endless cycle. that is what happens with PC gaming, you need to upgrade as time goes on. but now it is out of your control and up to google.
- the games. from the look of things, these are PC games running on the servers with controller support. that means that console exclusives will likely never come to google stadia. another problem with this is that developers will prioritize the PC development and support for steam. stadia compatibility will be further down the list. it's the same reason why nintendo doesn't get much 3rd party support. developers and publishers just rather focus on the xbox and playstation versions since that is where they will make more money.
lots of questions and issues at this point. one thing that really makes me wonder is why wouldn't they just do a simple netflix subscription type service? surely it would be more profitable. from their perspective, they get a constant stream of money through subscriptions and there are many advantages to this model since you can sell x amount of time on special where people feel compelled to use the service they paid for, people are lazy to cancel month-to-month subscriptions etc. you can then also easily plan and use this stream of money to make the service better and maintain it. that is why subscription based xbox live was so successful during the xbox 360 / ps3 era and the free playstation networked suffered. now google seems to just rely on game and chromecast sales? doesn't make sense does it? you know why? what is google primary business? advertising. yip, google stadia is just another way to push ads. that is why they have a "free" model, they can push as many ads as they like and will still expect you to buy the games at full price.
from a consumer perspective, a netflix type subscription service would be much better i believe. if you get access to a bunch of games for a mere $10 a month, the non-ownership problem is easily ignored. if a game disappears it sucks but you don't feel like your property is taken away. at that price you can use it as a secondary gaming platform. so you have a playstation, xbox or nintendo for console exclusives and stadia for the other games and you can use your crummy laptop to play them on. but if the internet goes down or data cap is reached, you jump back onto your console.
there are other issues with digital only. big download sizes really hurts a lot of internet users. i know that most first world countries have uncapped high speed internet for cheap. but here in south africa, internet is expensive and most of these services have data caps. there more data you download, the more you pay. some services easily charge you around $10 per GB. and the nicer, faster internet with higher data caps are limited in availability. so having to download a 100GB game is, in many cases, not affordable in internet data costs. you also cant currently trade in digital games for store credit like you can with physical copies. you cant re-sell digital games. also, when these games are tied to an online account, you can easily lose access to playing the game if your account is banned or locked. in our current extreme politically correct culture, it can happen really easily. games also frequently disappear off digital stores, so if you dont have it downloaded already, you could lose your purchase.
it is about to get worse though. the new future of gaming are streaming services like google stadia. at first i thought this great, you sign up for a service like netflix for cheap and get access to lots of games and you can game on nearly any device! however, as more info emerged, i soon realized there are a few issues with google stadia:
- game purchases. you are still required to buy individual games at the same price as retail or other digital stores. this is not a cheaper alternative.
- data costs. the amount of data games streaming will use is huge, which as explained above, will be costly for users in south africa and many other countries.
- google frequently just abandons or cancels projects/services. image you buy thousands of dollars of games and google just decides, nah we are cancelling this service. all gone
- latency. google insists it wont be a problem but i'm sorry, there will be some latency when playing over the internet versus on local dedicated hardware. even if you remove video streaming out of the equation.
- permanently online requirement. to use this service, you'll need a very stable line. if your connection drops or google servers are under maintenance, you dont get to play.
- internet congestion. most of use live in a household or community with multiple internet users. because this game streaming service requires a stable & fast connection, you will have issues if your little sister is surfing on instagram or mom is checking something on netflix. sure it is not an exclusive from to game streaming but the difference is that now if mom wants to watch netflix, you play some offline single player games instead of team deathmatch. actually, most online games use little bandwidth so you could probably even play team deathmatch will mom is on netflix. but games streaming uses way more data and there is no offline single player to resort to, it is all online, all the time.
- service availability. because this service uses a lot of internet traffic and requires massive servers and infrastructure, it will take a while for this service to become available to places like africa and south america.
- game performance. here is something no one seems to be talking about. ok so a modern game uses quite a bit of resources to push out all the nice graphics and sound. google says that these games will run on powerful servers with limitless power. yeah, things dont really work that easily. it will still take a significant chunk of computing power and there will be thousands of users. i cant see how these servers can flawlessly run these high end game at 60fps, streaming it to users with no stuttering or frame drops. also, how often will these servers be upgrade or new ones added to keep up with gaming technology? and if you tell a game developer they get limitless power to run their game, they will likely not optimize their game properly resulting in an endless cycle. that is what happens with PC gaming, you need to upgrade as time goes on. but now it is out of your control and up to google.
- the games. from the look of things, these are PC games running on the servers with controller support. that means that console exclusives will likely never come to google stadia. another problem with this is that developers will prioritize the PC development and support for steam. stadia compatibility will be further down the list. it's the same reason why nintendo doesn't get much 3rd party support. developers and publishers just rather focus on the xbox and playstation versions since that is where they will make more money.
lots of questions and issues at this point. one thing that really makes me wonder is why wouldn't they just do a simple netflix subscription type service? surely it would be more profitable. from their perspective, they get a constant stream of money through subscriptions and there are many advantages to this model since you can sell x amount of time on special where people feel compelled to use the service they paid for, people are lazy to cancel month-to-month subscriptions etc. you can then also easily plan and use this stream of money to make the service better and maintain it. that is why subscription based xbox live was so successful during the xbox 360 / ps3 era and the free playstation networked suffered. now google seems to just rely on game and chromecast sales? doesn't make sense does it? you know why? what is google primary business? advertising. yip, google stadia is just another way to push ads. that is why they have a "free" model, they can push as many ads as they like and will still expect you to buy the games at full price.
from a consumer perspective, a netflix type subscription service would be much better i believe. if you get access to a bunch of games for a mere $10 a month, the non-ownership problem is easily ignored. if a game disappears it sucks but you don't feel like your property is taken away. at that price you can use it as a secondary gaming platform. so you have a playstation, xbox or nintendo for console exclusives and stadia for the other games and you can use your crummy laptop to play them on. but if the internet goes down or data cap is reached, you jump back onto your console.
project xcloud from microsoft is similar to google stadia and certainly has most of the same problems. you are limited to xbox games too it seems but for that reason performance, scalability and game compatibility is much less of a concern. also a lot of people already have a lot of games in their xbox game library. with the xbox game pass model, you then actually have a netflix type subscription. probably. there arent that many details available right now, so i guess we'll see.
