Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Microsoft is probably hoping that game streaming will have done to gaming what video streaming did to movie watching, and if they can have some big exclusives (on their game streaming service) then people will have to subscribe to that.

Has any game streaming service been successful however? I recall several going under over the last few years. They keep pushing this stupid cloud gaming down our throats and it keeps failing. Why? Because large parts of America have shit internet infrastructure, or you have asshole ISP's with data caps (looking at you Comcast). Both of which would cause issues for gamers. I much rather have games locally installed. 

 

The only way Microsoft could make these games a subscription is to put them on Game Pass. OR created new MMO's with the IP's that Activision and Blizzard have and hope people will be willing to pay to play like they do WOW. The next best thing is to do like they did in Diablo 4 and sell vanity items (There is a market there, I know someone who wants half the paid items in Diablo 4). 

 

 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Why? Because large parts of America have shit internet infrastructure, or you have asshole ISP's with data caps (looking at you Comcast). Both of which would cause issues for gamers. I much rather have games locally installed. 

Or it just plays better locally and consoles aren't really that expensive either. Some people can more easily handle one off purchases over a subscription fee, death by 1000 cuts can be noticed and hurts more so you more readily want to get away from it.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, VinLAURiA said:

I think the Microsoft Store has gotten better in recent years. For every program I use, if there's a version on the Microsoft Store (which actually remains updated in a timely manner *coughGIMPcough*), then I tend to switch to the Microsoft Store version because it makes keeping those programs updated absolutely painless. VLC, Blender, Inkscape, Audacity, and Paint.net to name only a few.

 

Also, isn't the Microsoft Store supposed to have standard Windows program support nowadays, rather than requiring UWP?

The Microsoft store is incredibly obnoxious, you download something from it, and you can't move it, can't delete it, can't put it on another computer (redownload required instead of just moving it to a USB.) 

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Has any game streaming service been successful however? I recall several going under over the last few years. They keep pushing this stupid cloud gaming down our throats and it keeps failing. Why? Because large parts of America have shit internet infrastructure, or you have asshole ISP's with data caps (looking at you Comcast). Both of which would cause issues for gamers. I much rather have games locally installed. 

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

Or it just plays better locally and consoles aren't really that expensive either. Some people can more easily handle one off purchases over a subscription fee, death by 1000 cuts can be noticed and hurts more so you more readily want to get away from it.

 

The exact same things were said about video streaming ~15 years ago as well.

"I don't have an Internet service good enough"

"I don't want to pay monthy"

"Buying DVDs and Blurays isn't that expensive and I own them forever"

"Nobody has been successful at video streaming" (this was when Youtube maxed out at 240p and 4:3 format, with the most popular video having around 20 million views)

 

 

These things will probably be fixed as time goes by. A trend I have seen in the last 10 or so years is that games seem to become more and more short-lived. Some game gets hyped up a lot, people play it for maybe a month or two, and then the next big game is out and everyone focuses on that. It think game streaming will become big in the next decade or two, and I think Microsoft is planning on betting on that as well.

What we learned with video streaming is that the vast majority (where all the money is) does not care about getting the best experience possible in terms of quality (and for gaming, possibly latency). If the quality is good enough, it's less of a hassle, and you get access to more stuff then people will pay.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The exact same things were said about video streaming ~15 years ago as well.

Yea and people left Cable services because of it, now people are leaving streaming services because of it. If it's ever going to take off then first party, extremely low cost access devices are going to be required. Game streaming keeps dying because there isn't a "console" package for it so you have a device that can just play the games anyway and the experience compared to local does indeed suck.

 

I don't think it won't get bigger but it's not going to overtake the status quo and it'll still be fraught with usability problems as an interactive game sessions is literally nothing at all like video streaming. Anyone with good VDI experience can tell you that. All the challenges of VDI are the same for game streaming and then x10 on top of that. Protocol innovation is required to really make it better.

 

P.S. Video stream is mostly successful because it is or was free. Paid video streaming is literally heading to a crisis point.

[Albi368]

FTC going to appeal it and UK's CMA willing to engage with both parties if there is a modification to the transaction

Microsoft-Activision faces fresh blow to bid to buy Call of Duty maker - BBC News

[LAwLz]

13 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yea and people left Cable services because of it, now people are leaving streaming services because of it. If it's ever going to take off then first party, extremely low cost access devices are going to be required. Game streaming keeps dying because there isn't a "console" package for it so you have a device that can just play the games anyway and the experience compared to local does indeed suck.

Who is to say we won't get low cost access devices in the next 15 years?

If you think you need, and will forever need, an Xbox or other gaming console to play Xbox cloud games then I think you will end up very wrong. Samsung TVs have it built in these days, and you can easily play it on a Raspberry Pi as well since there is a browser-based version. You just need hardware-accelerated video decoding and a somewhat stable Internet connection.

 

We already have low-cost access devices. And yes, video streaming sucked compared to buying DVDs and Blu-rays back in 2007 as well (hell, even now if we are talking about video quality). Those things will change with time.

 

 

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I don't think it won't get bigger but it's not going to overtake the status quo and it'll still be fraught with usability problems as an interactive game sessions is literally nothing at all like video streaming. Anyone with good VDI experience can tell you that. All the challenges of VDI are the same for game streaming and then x10 on top of that. Protocol innovation is required to really make it better.

Oh how I wish I had a crystal ball can that could look 15 years into the future.

Maybe I'll save this thread and come back to it in the year 2038 if the forum still exists then and provide an update.

 

 

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

P.S. Video stream is mostly successful because it is or was free. Paid video streaming is literally heading to a crisis point.

I'm sorry, but are you really trying to tell me that Netflix became popular because it was free? 

Video streaming might be in a rocky situation right now, but let's not pretend that Netflix hasn't gone from a scrappy startup, to basically dominating an entire industry for several years, and enjoyed several years of being the king of the hill. Just because things have changed in the last 3 or so years doesn't invalidate the 5+ years where they were the de facto standard if you wanted to watch a movie or TV show.

Netflix didn't become a success because it was free.

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Who is to say we won't get low cost access devices in the next 15 years?

I'm not saying we wont, the issue is we don't have them now.

 

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I'm sorry, but are you really trying to tell me that Netflix became popular because it was free? 

Video streaming is mostly successful because it was free.

 

Did I say Netflix in the above part?

 

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Paid video streaming is literally heading to a crisis point.

^ Neftlix

 

Paid services are literally struggling to keep subscribers and have crippling service costs. The same way cable services had/are still having. Paid streaming is just cable but a different cable, they have made the same mistakes, followed the same paths. Learnt nothing from history.

 

Free streaming, but monetized is not. None of the fiascos around "adpocalypse" ever put or could have put that in jeopardy. Time and time again what people say isn't what they do or the majority. 

 

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Raspberry Pi

Never going to change an industry, not ever. Pi's are for the hyper rare people and not a factor.

 

Put it in to a proper "console" with actual retail support and marketing different story, a Pi is a Pi. A Pi base product is not a "Pi"

 

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

If you think you need, and will forever need, an Xbox or other gaming console to play Xbox cloud games then I think you will end up very wrong.

Do you not actually understand what I said? If Microsoft gaming streaming is ever going to take off then it's going to need an Xbox Streaming device, until then it's simply not going to shift the market. The reason is people actually want a trusted device, they want to be told "this is the thing to buy". It really won't matter how many TV's have an app for this it'll be just as buried in 5-10 years as it will be now.

 

The Xbox didn't become popular because it happened to exist, that's not how things work.

 

31 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Oh how I wish I had a crystal ball can that could look 15 years into the future.

Maybe I'll save this thread and come back to it in the year 2038 if the forum still exists then and provide an update.

Perfect because 10-15 years ago I said the same thing about VDI needing protocol innovation to work well and guess what happened? PCoIP, VMware Blast, Citrix HDX. All of them created and had ongoing updates and optimizations over years to get to a widely accepted user experience standard. VDI sessions are less latency sensitive and are about 10th of what game streaming currently requires. Game streaming is simply more difficult than VDI and it actually hasn't been that long since VDI has not been considered difficult anymore.

 

Want to guess when VDI started to get pushed in to market? 2008-2010.

[leadeater]

33 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Just because things have changed in the last 3 or so years doesn't invalidate the 5+ years where they were the de facto standard if you wanted to watch a movie or TV show.

I'll quote what every company is legally required to say about investment portfolios: "Past success is not an indicator of future success"

[LAwLz]

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm not saying we wont, the issue is we don't have them now.

And I have time and time again said I am specifically talking about things 10-20 years into the future.

 

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Video streaming is mostly successful because it was free.

 

Did I say Netflix in the above part?

No, but I did, and you were responding to me so it is not a big stretch to assume your response is talking about the same thing I was, especially since you later in your post started talking about Netflix (when talking about streaming providers struggling).

Anyway, if you weren't talking about Netflix then fair enough. I thought you were. Can you please be more specific in the future so I won't misunderstand you? 

 

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Never going to change an industry, not ever. Pi's are for the hyper rare people and not a factor.

 

Put it in to a proper "console" with actual retail support and marketing different story, a Pi is a Pi. A Pi base product is not a "Pi"

I think those devices will come. I was just pointing out that it is possible to get those devices today, even if they aren't well-packaged yet. If Microsoft pursues this (which I think they will) then they will probably make some of their own. But as of writing today, pretty much everyone already has a device that they can stream Xbox games to, that isn't a console.

Their Chromebook, their non-gaming PC, their phone, their TV (in the case of Samsung), and so on.

 

 

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Do you not actually understand what I said? If Microsoft gaming streaming is ever going to take off then it's going to need an Xbox Streaming device, until then it's simply not going to shift the market. The reason is people actually want a trusted device, they want to be told "this is the thing to buy". It really won't matter how many TV's have an app for this it'll be just as buried in 5-10 years as it will be now.

 

The Xbox didn't become popular because it happened to exist, that's not how things work.

No I don't think I understood what you said in that case.

My point is that I think in the next 10-20 years the industry has a real chance of changing, and game streaming will become very popular. I also think Microsoft thinks this, which is why they are investing such huge amounts of money into it, and this purchase of Activision Blizzard is an investment in game streaming in the long term.

 

I don't think game streaming will need a "first-party dedicated game streaming box" just like Netflix didn't require a dedicated Netflix box. If it becomes available on several platforms such as smart TVs, phones and so on, then I think it has a chance to take off regardless, just like music streaming and video streaming.

 

 

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Want to guess when VDI started to get pushed in to market? 2008-2010.

I don't understand your point. It sounds like you are agreeing with me, yet your tone indicates to me that you disagree. 

 

 

22 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'll quote what every company is legally required to say about investment portfolios: "Past success is not an indicator of future success"

I don't see your point. I never said it will happen because it has happened in the past.

I said I think Microsoft are aiming for it to happen, and I believe they have a real shot at it. They want to follow the path of Netflix, minus the fairly recent turbulence in the streaming world.

I think Microsoft buying up a lot of studios is an attempt for them to not fall for the same issues as Netflix has done in recent years, which is the studios creating their own streaming services and pulling their content from Netflix.

If you own the studios, you can keep those things exclusive and thus "force" people to subscribe to your service. I really don't think Microsoft cares if people play COD on a Playstation, an Xbox, or a Samsung TV, as long as they do so using a subscription to Microsoft's service. I also think that is a long-term goal and their plans are 10+ years into the future, hence why they agreed to the 10-year deal. That's my take, repeated once again for clarification.

[Stahlmann]

Sony and Microsoft are constantly fighting about exclusive IP and even governments are getting involved. Meanwhile Nintendo is just sitting at the side hopiong no one sees them. Most of their IP is completely exclusive to their underperforming platform. It's a miracle they haven't been sued to oblivion for their monopolistic behavior.

 

Exclusivity is ALWAYS bad for the consumer, so why don't these "consumer protection" agencies not go after the root of the problem, but instead fight these smaller battles? It's probably something the EU will once again have to tackle, before the rest of the western world follows.

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The exact same things were said about video streaming ~15 years ago as well.

"I don't have an Internet service good enough"

"I don't want to pay monthy"

"Buying DVDs and Blurays isn't that expensive and I own them forever"

"Nobody has been successful at video streaming" (this was when Youtube maxed out at 240p and 4:3 format, with the most popular video having around 20 million views)

 

Well all of this is still an issue. Internet service does suck in the US. In some instances you just have crappy connection in others you have stupid things like data caps. Ive seen how much data can be used with video streaming and Im talking no more than HD quality. So I can imagine how much data would be used with games. 

 

Everything is a subscription now days. Here's the deal. People only make x amount of money each month. Now everyone wants to sell you a subscription. Its getting fucking ridiculous at this point. I mean hell car manufactures are trying to get subscriptions now for like heated seats and shit. 

 

As far as physical media goes, you will have it forever. Louis Rossmann just did a video on Steam and them cutting Windows 7 and 8 support by the end of the year. There are people who do use older OS's to play games. One of the reason cited in the video is that the games in question ran better on Windows 7 and were much more buggy on Windows 10. With Steam support ending the person in question would no longer be able to play any games bought on Steam on that machine anymore. Its one of the issues with going all digital on the PC. 

 

If game steaming does every succeed, it wont be because I subscribed. I wont participate in that. I will vote with my wallet, which wont be the first time of me doing that.

[LAwLz]

12 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

If game steaming does every succeed, it wont be because I subscribed. I wont participate in that. I will vote with my wallet, which wont be the first time of me doing that.

People said the same thing about Netflix, Steam, and so on.

I understand that the future might (in your eyes) be bleak in that regard, but you will most likely be in the minority. We have been over this in several industries already such as music, books (to some degree), video, a lot of software, hell even some games already since they require Internet connections and can shut down at any point, making you unable to access them ever again.

[Donut417]

36 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

People said the same thing about Netflix, Steam, and so on.

I understand that the future might (in your eyes) be bleak in that regard, but you will most likely be in the minority. We have been over this in several industries already such as music, books (to some degree), video, a lot of software, hell even some games already since they require Internet connections and can shut down at any point, making you unable to access them ever again.

Video streaming and game streaming are two separate things . Game streaming is heavily tied to how good your internet is. So if your only options are Cellular or Satellite then it’s not going to work well. Before you start talking about these plans happening well in to the future, the American People have invested a serious amount of money in to expanding internet access, we have not gotten a good return on our investment. I don’t expect anything different in the next decade. 
 

You also keep ignoring subscription fatigue. Every one wants their product or service to be a subscription. Eventually you get to a point where services stop growing as a result of subscription fatigue. Every streaming service is about at that point. Netflix is not doing so hot. Disney brought Bob Iger back because they also were not doing well. Wall Street up and told Paramount they should just kill their service. Hell even YouTube is having issues to the point of blocking ad blockers. 
 

The only reason these services did well before is because when a counties central bank sets interest rates at .25% it makes taking a loan a non trivial task, because you can more or less afford the little bit of interest you will have to pay. Those days however are over, interest rates are not coming down to pre inflation levels anytime soon. 

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

I'm not saying we wont, the issue is we don't have them now.

 

Video streaming is mostly successful because it was free.

 

Did I say Netflix in the above part?

 

^ Neftlix

 

Paid services are literally struggling to keep subscribers and have crippling service costs. The same way cable services had/are still having. Paid streaming is just cable but a different cable, they have made the same mistakes, followed the same paths. Learnt nothing from history.

 

Free streaming, but monetized is not. None of the fiascos around "adpocalypse" ever put or could have put that in jeopardy. Time and time again what people say isn't what they do or the majority. 

 

Never going to change an industry, not ever. Pi's are for the hyper rare people and not a factor.

 

Put it in to a proper "console" with actual retail support and marketing different story, a Pi is a Pi. A Pi base product is not a "Pi"

 

Do you not actually understand what I said? If Microsoft gaming streaming is ever going to take off then it's going to need an Xbox Streaming device, until then it's simply not going to shift the market. The reason is people actually want a trusted device, they want to be told "this is the thing to buy". It really won't matter how many TV's have an app for this it'll be just as buried in 5-10 years as it will be now.

 

The Xbox didn't become popular because it happened to exist, that's not how things work.

 

Perfect because 10-15 years ago I said the same thing about VDI needing protocol innovation to work well and guess what happened? PCoIP, VMware Blast, Citrix HDX. All of them created and had ongoing updates and optimizations over years to get to a widely accepted user experience standard. VDI sessions are less latency sensitive and are about 10th of what game streaming currently requires. Game streaming is simply more difficult than VDI and it actually hasn't been that long since VDI has not been considered difficult anymore.

 

Want to guess when VDI started to get pushed in to market? 2008-2010.

Yeah, thats a big thing, "game streaming" maybe sounds good in adverts, but people will still wonder how and with what, they need a good controller etc too... and then the latency issue,  not sure how that's ever going to be fixed (granted i think thats mostly a local isp problem, but still)

[LAwLz]

19 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

-snip-

Time will tell.

[pas008]

seriously this fight is kinda ridiculous imho

did the disney acquisition of fox have this much shit? considering how much  disney actually acquired

 

 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah, thats a big thing, "game streaming" maybe sounds good in adverts, but people will still wonder how and with what, they need a good controller etc too... and then the latency issue,  not sure how that's ever going to be fixed (granted i think thats mostly a local isp problem, but still)

Latency can be fixed by protocol improvements as well as shifting to an asynchronous style approach, although that is difficult the more I think about it. One of the simple things over in VDI land that made huge improvements was to only graphically update portions of the screen that actually changed so if all you did was click on the start menu only that amount of screen change data is transmitted to the client which cuts down on bandwidth and also helps mask any image delays because only a small portion of screen is changing which gives a different perception. 

 

Game streaming is harder to do the above because a lot more of the screen is changing and is doing so all the time but I can actually think of a few ways. First is to use techniques similar to DLSS3 and intentionally delay what is being displayed on the screen and also synchronize input to that. Then you reconstruct the image based on changes and also prior frame image and cut down on the data that needs to be transmitted to the client.

 

The second is massively more complicated where you get the client device to built/2D render the image. The server does most of rendering pipeline, creates a special compressed data format and send that to the client for the raster phase and displayed. I assume this would be less computational demanding since it's only working in 2D. This could just be stupid impossible hypothetical. Point being the server doesn't have to do absolutely all the work and doesn't even need to be sending complete rendered frame data. This comes with a sever warning of this could be a really stupid idea and it worse not better 

 

Either way there are ways to improve user experience, entire screen image updates every screen update is not the best path forward for user experience or even image quality since you can use that precious bitrate on data that actually changed rather than sending the same over and over and over. Sure that is way more challenging than it sounds but you can play games on VMware Horizon, it's just not that great for it since it has lots of QoS features in place to smack down hungry client sessions although for many games perfectly serviceable. 

[Taf the Ghost]

A couple of things, then addressing the trends discussion.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ATVI?p=ATVI&.tsrc=fin-srch

 

ATVI still has a 70B USD market cap as of this morning. In fact this news has drug up the total valuation by almost 10%.  MS is paying a lot, but in line with what the company has been valued at for 5+ years.

 

It's an 9x Cost / Revenue deal with large IP. But their IP is really top heavy. Per their own filings, it's CoD, Warcraft and Candy Crush that make up about 80% of their revenue.

 

Digging into their 10K form, CoD was a little larger of a % than I expected.  But, MS wouldn't have a strong desire to remove CoD from Playstation. That was an easy concession for MS to make to get through regulatory filings. ATVI makes only 23% of revenue from Consoles, which is going to be I think about 70% from Playstation. Pulling CoD off Playstation would lose a lot of revenue for very little utility, something Sony basically acknowledged in the hearings.

 

As for the other discussions, Video Streaming is a failed business model. Netflix might be the only one to survive.  Everyone else is still losing money, and it might be viable for 2 platforms to exist in totality, at scale.  Companies have been trying to make it work since at least the late 90s. (Online Streaming is a Infrastructure Company, but they also have to pay for the Content. That's why the model only worked when Netflix could get everything for cheap.)

 

As for Game Streaming, it's a useful add-on service, but it's popularity will always be rather limited. Real Time games operate on their mechanics and "mechanic feel" is one of the absolute biggest selling points in a lot of titles.  If a game doesn't feel good to control, it normally doesn't do great. That's the inherent technical problem with game streaming. For turn-based games or ones that wouldn't be affected much by delay, they can generally run native on almost any modern-ish device. It's the reality of the whole "Run Doom on a Toaster" effect. As the power usage per computation drops, the super low power devices reach quite high levels of capability. Any mainstream smartphone is more than capable of handling F2P and Turn-based games locally.  Thus, you have a small market, super high infrastructure costs and a hard to market product. Google Stadia was DOA as it was, but even they wouldn't have had the stomach to absorb the costs of truly making it work (if they were competent to make it one anyway).

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Latency can be fixed by protocol improvements as well as shifting to an asynchronous style approach, although that is difficult the more I think about it. One of the simple things over in VDI land that made huge improvements was to only graphically update portions of the screen that actually changed so if all you did was click on the start menu only that amount of screen change data is transmitted to the client which cuts down on bandwidth and also helps mask any image delays because only a small portion of screen is changing which gives a different perception. 

 

Latency is a property of the speed of light. There is no way you can have a round trip packet take 8ms and be more than 1,631km away from where the servers are. Add in the game and encoding overhead and that is drastically reduced.

 

It's fundamentally the same problem with with video conferencing and audio phone calls. However you can compensate by having echo-cancellation preventing feedback. When you talk to someone on the other side of the planet, you have to wait a second and avoid speaking over them.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Game streaming is harder to do the above because a lot more of the screen is changing and is doing so all the time but I can actually think of a few ways. First is to use techniques similar to DLSS3 and intentionally delay what is being displayed on the screen and also synchronize input to that. Then you reconstruct the image based on changes and also prior frame image and cut down on the data that needs to be transmitted to the client.

Honestly, I think it's barking up the wrong tree. If I locally encode a game with h265 1080p CQP 16 P5 single pass main profile (which does what you're saying, tries to maintain quality by focusing on what's changing) it can range from 4GB/hr (2D games) to 10GB/hr (3D games). It's not a one-size fit all, and streaming is always set to a fixed bandwidth because of network QoS requirements. So streaming will ALWAYS be lower quality than a fixed medium.

 

Where I think the best opportunity to "stream a game" has to come from, has to be designed around a RGBA-based video codec that takes into account the game's own z-buffer (eg GUI elements being prioritized, background quality being de-prioritized.) That way if it has to crunch data it's working front-to-back rather than on the flat image. 

 

Existing video compression codecs are designed around YUV which is basically a mathematical transform of getting red and blue from the green component, and then using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling because it's the least noticed and reduces the bandwidth by 50%. That works fine when it live action video which is already a bit fuzzy, but makes games look muddy.

 

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

The second is massively more complicated where you get the client device to built/2D render the image. The server does most of rendering pipeline, creates a special compressed data format and send that to the client for the raster phase and displayed. I assume this would be less computational demanding since it's only working in 2D. This could just be stupid impossible hypothetical. Point being the server doesn't have to do absolutely all the work and doesn't even need to be sending complete rendered frame data. This comes with a sever warning of this could be a really stupid idea and it worse not better 

Probably won't work for bandwidth reasons. Here's a real example.

So you know dosbox right? Dosbox's ZMBV codec is a lossless video codec that stores the "game" video screen in the format displayed (which for many dos games is 320x200 or 640x480 with 8-bit palette) The codec is extremely efficient to the point you can remove all the I frames, and as long as no data has been lost due to disk latency, the entire picture still runs at 70fps. 

 

If you take apart the video, you'll usually see like a 64KB video I frame followed by 768byte palette changes every frame plus a few bytes. the rest of the delta frame is just "black with full transparancy" This works out to be super-efficient, even if you are playing the dosbox game scaled up to 1024x768, because the video itself is still the original resolution, aspect ratio and color depth. 

 

If you scale this up to a modern game, at 1080p60 that I frame becomes 8294400 bytes, and every change in the frame is transmitted, so ZMBV becomes absolutely useless in a 3D context. But a 2D game? still works reasonably until there is a screen transition. 

 

Point being, a lot of games have too much data being changed per frame, and "streamable" games really have to be decisively designed around being streamed. Where on a local system you might have to sacrifice some 3D performance features, on a stream has to sacrifice animations (which is why DLSS works so poorly, as it only focuses on foreground detail.)

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Either way there are ways to improve user experience, entire screen image updates every screen update is not the best path forward for user experience or even image quality since you can use that precious bitrate on data that actually changed rather than sending the same over and over and over. Sure that is way more challenging than it sounds but you can play games on VMware Horizon, it's just not that great for it since it has lots of QoS features in place to smack down hungry client sessions although for many games perfectly serviceable. 

 

I think the way forward will be decisively "Streamable" versions/modes of games where the game can tell the encoder what to focus on rather than the encoder trying to determine what to focus on without any context. As mentioned above, simply knowing the the "z depth" of a pixel could give the encoder a way of knowing if something is foreground or background, and games can create "Streamable" modes that stop animating background objects that are farther than the players focus area (eg the center of the screen) and to prioritize GUI elements that are vital.

 

Stadia's "negative" latency was a bit of a joke and it basically just a version of "treat button-press as button-down until received a button-up", the WiFi in the controller basically being a way to bypass going through the computer/television latency. Can't say that wasn't a bad idea, but it contributed to a disconnect between the player's input and feedback.

 

Another thing that might improve the streaming experience is simply having "streaming" end points in more capable hardware. That stadia chromecast ... got super hot, regardless of anything being streamed. It would have made more sense to have an app on smart televisions, tablets, phones that could effectively show the same stream at the same time by having a "device" plugged into the router that is the real stream endpoint, and thus the apps, web browsers etc all connect to this device and you can switch between rooms or devices without having to reconnect/relogin. If this device could take an AV1 4K/1080p stream from the upstream and send the correct stream to the device (eg h.264, h.265, vp9) or be plugged directly into a computer monitor's HDMI, you also enable a "same screen" multiplayer that doesn't have to be the same device. There are many games that support "same screen multiplayer" that work just fine streamed already with Steam.

 

The stadia experience was kinda the reverse of this, where it was a barely-capable device, or your more-capable computer's web browser, in both cases you were basically just getting a lowest common denominator experience rather than an app that communicated directly with the video decoder.

 

But I also feel a lot of issues with streaming come simply from trying to stream games that are decisively not designed around high-latency multiplayer, and thus don't have latency compensation by design. Like a MMORPG has these features, but that latency compensation is in the game client, not the stream end point, so in effect you've doubled the latency by streaming it. When what needs to happen with these games is the server needs to be "moved closer" to the datacenter clients to give more room for the stream latency.

[Raytsou]

On 7/11/2023 at 1:10 PM, Mark Kaine said:

Imho this is a clear anti trust case, making Microsoft having way too much influence in a single market (gaming)

I disagree, without this merger there isn't a single company large enough to compete with tencent

[Brooksie359]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

The exact same things were said about video streaming ~15 years ago as well.

"I don't have an Internet service good enough"

"I don't want to pay monthy"

"Buying DVDs and Blurays isn't that expensive and I own them forever"

"Nobody has been successful at video streaming" (this was when Youtube maxed out at 240p and 4:3 format, with the most popular video having around 20 million views)

 

 

These things will probably be fixed as time goes by. A trend I have seen in the last 10 or so years is that games seem to become more and more short-lived. Some game gets hyped up a lot, people play it for maybe a month or two, and then the next big game is out and everyone focuses on that. It think game streaming will become big in the next decade or two, and I think Microsoft is planning on betting on that as well.

What we learned with video streaming is that the vast majority (where all the money is) does not care about getting the best experience possible in terms of quality (and for gaming, possibly latency). If the quality is good enough, it's less of a hassle, and you get access to more stuff then people will pay.

I am not sure how you can compare them tbh. Originally with Netflix a big deal was you got access to a ton of content for a fraction of the price of cable making it way better especially because it was commercial free and on demand. Sure you could buy expensive movies and have a DVD or blu-ray player but you would be spending alot of money for a couple of movies that would easily pay for a couple month subscription and give you access to a big library that was Netflix which has now dwindled but that is not really the point. The big issue with game streaming is that unless you have a good library of free titles to go with the service I don't think it will get off the ground. Paying a subscription and having to pay for the games just feels bad to alot of people especially when the gaming experience is objectively worse than local hardware. 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

Latency is a property of the speed of light. There is no way you can have a round trip packet take 8ms and be more than 1,631km away from where the servers are. Add in the game and encoding overhead and that is drastically reduced.

That's only per packet latency not protocol and data latency. It's the same reason why MTU 9000 helps out with storage I/O, you need less packets per I/O operation and what I mentioned achieves the same result, less packets required equaling lower end to end latency.

 

You aren't sending high quality images over the internet in single packets.

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's not a one-size fit all, and streaming is always set to a fixed bandwidth because of network QoS requirements.

Streaming is not always fixed bandwidth. That's platform requirements of Twitch etc. It's not a fundamental requirement of streaming nor is it why Twitch goes that path. Fixed bandwidth actually requires less control overhead and allows more easily to predict and control user experience and network bandwidth requirements.

 

VMware View for example is variable bit rate as well as variable encoding.

 

Quote

The PCoIP and Blast Extreme display protocols provided by VMware adapt to varying latency and bandwidth conditions.

 

For display traffic, many elements can affect network bandwidth, such as protocol used, monitor resolution and configuration, and the amount of multimedia content in the workload. Concurrent launches of streamed applications can also cause usage spikes.

 

Because the effects of these issues can vary widely, many companies monitor bandwidth consumption as part of a pilot project. As a starting point for a pilot, plan for 150 to 200Kbps of capacity for a typical knowledge worker.

 

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Streaming is not always fixed bandwidth. That's platform requirements of Twitch etc. It's not a fundamental requirement of streaming nor is it why Twitch goes that path. Fixed bandwidth actually requires less control overhead and allows more easily to predict and control user experience and network bandwidth requirements.

 

VMware View for example is variable bit rate as well as variable encoding.

 

 

But you're not having 100's of people using the VMWare server as a desktop replacement simultaneously. And you are right, it's not a REQUIREMENT to stream, but it is a requirement to stream to all current streaming systems (Twitch, Youtube, Tiktok, etc) and if you select a variable bitrate that is "capped" at the fixed bandwidth, it will just not work as expect. Possibly because the ingress server expects the fixed bitrate and passes it to be transcoded at it's own settings. Twitch will pass the input directly to the output.

 

At any rate, it's a problem that will likely never be solved because game streaming needs to focus on latency (which is one of the things that Twitch excels at and youtube does not. Some of the twitch holdouts to moving to youtube cite the high latency, poor chat experience, and inability to do things like "raid" other creators the same way.