Microsoft gets green light in UK to buy Activision
bbc.co.ukI found this part interesting:
> CMA chief executive, Sarah Cardell, said: "Businesses and their advisors should be in no doubt that the tactics employed by Microsoft are no way to engage with the CMA. Microsoft had the chance to restructure during our initial investigation but instead continued to insist on a package of measures that we told them simply wouldn't work. Dragging out proceedings in this way only wastes time and money."
They keep talking about cloud streaming, is anyone except executives at these companies taking cloud streaming seriously? Every time I've tried it it's been a mess of latency and fuzzy graphics. If I were at the CMA I'm not sure that's a factor in this deal that I would have given much thought at all.
I'm fortunate enough to own a gaming PC, but I wish cloud gaming was around when I was younger. All my buddies owned consoles or PCs, and I felt like a sore thumb when they were discussing the latest titles. There are a lot of people who just can't afford even the cheapest Xbox One but have enough money for a month's worth of Game Pass and can play Starfield. My younger self would definitely have been okay with latency and fuzzy graphics. This isn't hypothetical; I still remember the days when OnLive was around and could play that Disney racing game Split/Second for free for half an hour, I was AMAZED back then.
Sometimes I feel like people dismissing cloud gaming do not consider how the advent of cloud gaming has opened doors for those who previously couldn't afford traditional gaming setups. It's not about the technical specifications; it's about making gaming accessible to more people, regardless of their financial constraints.
I'm not buying that argument at all.
Today there are a ton of cheap 2nd hand console available on different markets, and much thanks to hard-copies they still bring plenty of enjoyment for a cheap coin. The latter also allows access to games no longer published or available for sale.
Cloud gaming will ensure older games will be entirely at the mercy of the streaming provider to keep them up to date and compatible with their technology. Once not, they're gone forever.
> Today there are a ton of cheap 2nd hand console available on different markets, and much thanks to hard-copies they still bring plenty of enjoyment for a cheap coin.
You're missing the point of the parent comment. They aren't saying they had access to no games at all, but rather that they couldn't afford to play the latest games.
Nvidia's cloud gaming service costs $10/month, compared to $10 a month just for multiplayer access on an Xbox or PlayStation plus the $300-$500 upfront cost of buying the console itself.
So there's no doubt that even with the savings of a used last generation console, you would still save a lot of money with cloud gaming.
Just for clarity, I'm not necessarily saying I like cloud gaming. I think if you can afford the hardware to do local gaming, it's a better experience. But it's way more expensive to render everything locally for obvious reasons. Even just the electricity needed to power a gaming PC is expensive.
> Even just the electricity needed to power a gaming PC is expensive.
The average electrical energy rate is 10.3 cents per kwh. A gaming PC might consume 750 watts. So it cost an average of 7.7cents/hr to power a gaming PC. Hardly expensive.
Of course, both cloud and PC gaming requires things like router, monitor, etc that consume electricity. I think it's fair to assume those things are equal between the two setups.
Edit: Average cost is for US. 750 watts is a good power budget for a gaming PC, but of course machines can be made that consume much more power or gaming capable machines can be made that consume less.
As that one kid on 56k while everyone else was on broadband. You didn't miss what you think you missed. Being the worst in the group may not be better than not being in the group at all.
but I hope cloud gaming can deliver that.
But it doesn't work, at least not yet. I live in an urban area with a fast Internet connection. Yet everytime I've tried cloud gaming on my Xbox it's been janky as hell.
Try GeForce Now. I think Streaming is nonsense and it's a complete waste of time, but every time I tried GeForce Now I was massively impressed with both the quality and the latency of the experience.
I used Stadia extensively and it was truly truly a mind boggling experience. People rag on about latency and "how you can't beat physics and the speed of light". But that was simply not the case. Even with a 20mbps down and laptop WiFi, I could instantly jump into triple AAA games and play it. Had lots of fun completing Metro Exodus back then.
Is it a flawless experience? Of course not, it will never match a native PC. But that is not the point at all. The image was a reasonable quality and the latency whilst ever so slightly noticeable, you get used to it after 5 minutes as you get lost in the game. Even played a bit of Destiny 2 and fast paced rhythm games without any issue.
It's not meant to "takeaway muh PC". It's an alternative to those who don't have the horsepower to run these games. Your expectations need to run with this.
It is because regulators don't want a monopoly to be formed around an emerging technology. Sure cloud streaming is not big at the moment but it could literally be the default way to play games in 20 years.
Heck Microsoft themselves point this out to their investors.
Google's monopoly on search and online advertising today could have been easily prevented 20 years ago by some regulations.
> it could literally be the default way to play games in 20 years.
No it couldn't. Its fundamentally inferior to local hardware and no amount of wishful thinking will change the laws of physics.
> laws of physics
Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology? Besides the fact that these services already exist and, provided you have decent infrastructure, which will only become more accessible as time goes on, do serve most people's gaming needs even in this early state.
Of course, there will always be some for whom local will be the preferred option, but they were talking about the future default. There are still people buying and consuming Blu-ray due to its higher quality, but the default (i.e. what the majority use) has become streaming, and I don't see anything preventing gaming going the same way. If you wanna stick with gaming, the majority tend to play on consoles and do view the advantages in convinience to outweigh the disadvantages in terms of possible fidelity, higher framerates and lower latency that a PC may offer (even in cases of similar pricing).
Concerning cloud gaming, network latency will go down, and the offered bandwidth will go up in most areas of the globe. With recent advancements in high quality upscaling, networking demands will also decrease. Physics is not a hindrance, unless I am overlooking something.
Latency can only go down so much because as parent comment said: laws of physics dictate the minimum response time between two points given the distance. And it will be higher with each hop /media change
Ok, but we were talking about the default, the average for the majority of consumers. Did any of them care about the far more significant latency that their TVs processing imposes (or did impose, as now many TVs switch to "game mode" by themselves) on their console gaming experience?
No, the majority never even noticed. The irreducible latency some are talking about is imperceptible, not a factor for the vast majority of the populus. Ease of use, lack of install times, flexibility, and ability to spread out cost, all will outweigh that.
A lot of people discuss it when purchasing tvs, tvs often have game mode as you say, the entire 30/60 fps debate and how many gamers refuse to accept 30fps as acceptable, ping times in games and how variable they can get. Personally I can notice the difference pretty easily.
Lots of people do discuss this and do care, not to mention to even get to the point of it only being “the lowest possible physics allows” you need great home networking equipment plus a fast/well connected isp and a cloud service provider that isn’t adding any processing delay. That excludes a ton of people.
Cloud gaming isn’t going to be “the default” anytime soon, and for many people it will never be an option.
Heck physical copies are still super popular with a large group of console gamers to this day despite digital delivery being so well tested and ubiquitous
How "average" do we want to go? Because another slice of this average population will be mostly fine playing Candy Crush on their mobile.
> Honest question, which of those is in any way applicable to this technology?
Speed of a signal travelling through optical fiber or copper cable? Additional latency of cloud gaming rules out genres that require twitch reactions (e.g. competitive FPS, fighting games, platformers).
If you look at the market, this is a pretty small fraction of gaming revenue. Sure these things will continue to exist in competitive format, but a significant majority of gaming is not highly latency-sensitive in this way.
fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.
Let's check the laws of physics then: Typical latency in games is about 25-80 ms [1]. What's your ping to the closest GeForce Now server? For me it's 10 ms.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/393646/tested-how-nvidia-ref...
The GeforceNow client has its own delay in processing your input, just like the game does. So you have to wait for your input to be captured by the client, processed, sent to their servers, where it has to be processed again, then given to the game process and then used there. And then the visual output has to be sent back, where again it has to be processed and displayed, with all the latency of the local client and display device.
Like, I work in video games for a large publisher - we have done a lot of testing on this technology, both on GeForce Now and our own internal solutions. Without getting into details I probably shouldn't talk about - the lowest latency you can see when streaming is around 150-200ms, and that's in absolutely perfect conditions where you have a data centre super close to you. Unfortunately, 150ms is visible to your average player, and in our testing the enjoyment of the game is directly related to what kind of game it is - strategy games, action games, even driving games? Mostly fine, not really noticable. First person shooters? Extremely noticable, in our testing there is a noticable drop of player performance in online PvP when streaming. We have been experimenting with improving it(by giving the player just a touch of auto-aim assist when they are streaming), and we were able to bring the numbers back up to where they were for non-streaming players. But then you get into a debate about whether that is fair or not.
Either way, like OP said - you can't beat physics.
All the reasons you listed were software reasons, not physics. If physics is only contributing 10 ms then you can beat low latency. This guy can get down to about 50ms with 15-20 ping:
https://youtu.be/XXvKlpkJjFU?si=nSMT8m5onkuqggwo&t=247
Nvidia is advertising 25 ms on the 240Hz tier, even if it's best case it should scale linearly with ping:
Smart phones are fundamentally inferior for playing games on than consoles or PC, that hasn't stopped gaming on mobile from being huge, they're mostly just different games than you get on PC/console.
Developers will adapt their games and how they play to suit the medium based on the mediums popularity.
Cloud streaming would work for the vast majority of games. It just wouldn't work for realtime ones.
Civilization, SimCity, zoo tycoon, Paradox Grand strategy games, etc... Would all be fine to play on a streaming platform
Remember when consoles were touted as having none of the disadvantages of PC (no patches, no loading times, "it just works"), but what we actually got was consoles that are suckier than PC in every way, but instead PC gaming being gimped by consoles existing? (e.g. Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design" and everything to do with a controller having 4 buttons)
So yeah, if it's shittier and allows even harder rent seeking, it'll be the standard in a few decades. Don't count on quality being a factor, gamers are the kings of Stockholm Syndrome and there isn't any hoop you can't get them to buy and then jump through.
>>e.g. Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design" and everything to do with a controller having 4 buttons)
That's an extremely weird argument. Literally no one at Bethesda was being stopped from writing compelling dialogue choices for that game because controllers only have 4 buttons - it's a choice they made conciously, they wanted to simplify the dialogue trees and that's what they ended up with. To even suggest that it's because of consoles is........just odd man. Like, it's not a thing. I've worked in video games for long enough to tell you that the number of controller buttons would never even make it into a discussion about these things, unless it was coming directly from Todd Howard or something.
It was one of many examples, if you want to pretend PC game interfaces (speaking of fallout again, the same key for gun bash and grenades, plus a trillion other things in basically all AAA games) aren't gimped by consoles that's great, but you finding it "weird" and "odd" isn't even an argument.
Nice move of goalposts - interfaces absolutely got nerfed because of consoles, I never argued otherwise. You argued that the reason why Fallout 4 got crappy dialogue options was because controllers have 4 buttons(to quote you "Fallout 4 having four choices at any point in any conversation has zero to do with "writing" or "game design""), which is complete nonsense, but I don't know how to prove it to you other than by saying I have worked in the industry long enough to tell you with absolute certainty that it doesn't happen. If bethesda wanted to have 20 dialogue options they would have done it regardless. The fact that the conversation options suck in that game and that they basically all mean the same thing has nothing to do with how many buttons are on a controller(!!!!). If you walked into any conversation about NPC conversation systems and said with a straight face "I think we should only have 4 dialogue options because controllers have 4 buttons" you'd be laughed out of the room.
Obviously the point of cloud streaming is not that it's better for the consumer, but that it gives the provider more power.
Well...........there is an argument made often that there are a LOT of people in the world(estimated to be at least 2-3 billion) who don't have access to a proper gaming device and who can't afford one. For them "just playing on a console/PC" is really not an option. But.....smartphones and crappy tablets are widespread, even in the poorest regions of the world it's not uncommon to see them - all of these devices could be used for streaming games that these users could literally never experience otherwise.
A cynic would say that it's another way to extract whatever little money these people have. An optimist would say that this technology can bring video games and their joy to people who would never be able to experience them otherwise.
You pick the one that you like more.
Not my experience at all.
Was able to do latency-sensitive gaming like VR gaming from a Shadow PC 200 miles away. Have happily streamed PC games to my phone whilst out and about on 4G networks. I suppose if you're comparing it to 4K ultra quality local gaming you might find it much worse, but for someone who only has a MacBook Pro I found it performed significantly better to stream the game from a PC elsewhere than to try to run Mac native versions of games – and also just let me open up high quality games very quickly from many devices without having to mess around with cables and device drivers and all that stuff.
My partner streams the Xbox games to her Surface laptop which is definitely not powerful enough to play them natively.
That said I know it's still fairly niche, but I think it has a shot of tapping into a much broader casual market than e.g. PC gaming and consoles which require people to already care enough to do a big upfront investment.
I've used Geforce Now in the past and it was very good. I only stopped because it doesn't support mods and rockstar games.
I have a 2080 TI that can still run games very well, and if it lasts a few more years it looks like I'll never have to buy a GPU again.
I realize the CMA is a UK agency and we might be talking specifically to that. Now, with that said, I don't think anyone in the US should take it seriously. Even if they fix latency and the jank, there will still be data caps. Most of the US lives with them. Game streaming will not be able to take off until we fix our infrastructure and regulations thereof.
Not everybody plays games that need such low latencies
e.g. Simulation games like Anno 1800 or Cities Skyline 2 require extremely good hardware if you want good frame rates late game
Besides most competitive players I know all play on lowest settings to minimize risk of lag spikes so they're unlikely to be the target audience anyways
Every now and then I use geforce now as my pc is very outdated and my laptop can't handle some games. Last Christmas I used it to play riftbreaker which none of my devices can handle. So for people like me it's great, I can't justify spending lots of money on a new pc
> If I were at the CMA I'm not sure that's a factor in this deal that I would have given much thought at all.
If a "someone" came along and offered you a benefit in exchange for saying "but won't someone think of the cloud streaming market" you too would give it a lot of thought.
You would give it a lot of thought while dropping your kids off at the new private school you kids just recieved a scholarship to, in the brand new car that arrived (you always wanted the Tesla but it was a Lexus that arrived), feeling much more relaxed after the family holiday (the med is nice over summer but Japan was calling).
This is a wild accusation to throw around.
Have you any proof that Microsoft paid off the CMA? If not, this is just shitposting.
Mate.... please...
The intent is for your entire computer to work that way eventually. If they can get gaming to work under that model, everything else will work too.
>>The intent is for your entire computer to work that way eventually.
Who has that intent, exactly?
they are probably drooling over a future where most people have to rent gpus at a premium due to how expensive they are to buy.
I use GeForce now, it works really well.
How far from northern Virginia do you live out of curiosity? And what kind of home internet do you have?
These are big companies, and we have reached a post-capitalist economic stage where consumer demand is less important, and the big companies can just illegally collude and sell you what they want to sell you at the price they want.
They know this well and the discussions going on at these companies are assuredly not about what gamers want, they are about "Can we convince EA to do titles on our streaming platform" and so on. You will own nothing and be happy.
At what point does Microsoft become a Monopoly in the gaming sector?
Is it even close? 4 of my 174 Steam games have Microsoft's name on it, and if they bought Activision.. it'd still be 4.
Activision Blizzard doesn’t put most of their games on Steam
It's neither #1 in the console business nor does it have the most popular PC storefront.
So it's a long way away.
It probably isn't even #2 in console business either.
Financially speaking, you can't become a monopoly in the gaming sector if you don't have mobile (as in, iOS/Android mobile, not portable consoles) division. So it's a long way to go.
Why would they want Activision? Their games are so bad nowadays.
King. They're getting King, the 100kg mobile MTX adware gorilla
It’s Blizzard too, right?
Blizzard of today, yeah, so their point still stands.
https://stratechery.com/2022/consoles-and-competition/
good article from Stratechery on the history of the field. tl;dr: they want to move games market from buying games to renting them (xbox pass)
Funny that CMA seems to be supporting the late stage capitalism and everything that is wrong with it.
Now that Microsoft gets even bigger, they'll have even more influence and power to distort the markets.
Way to go...