Cloud vendors can't resist the lucrative smell of gaming dollars – and they're all in it to win it For better or worse, it looks like cloud computing is here to stay. Among other things, "someone else's computer" is changing how people buy and consume entertainment, and after murdering television, the cloud is now messing with the very nature of video games. Games are the biggest entertainment industry, dwarfing home video …
"[Unity], the world's most widely used game engine"
where does this come from? On wikipedia, there are only figures for mobile and VR ("As of 2018, Unity has been used to create approximately half of the new mobile games on the market and 60 percent of augmented reality and virtual reality content") and I haven't found anything else.
I know that Unity was used for Heartstone, which alone might put it at the top for game engines. I know it's also used for Harebrained Studios Battletech series and for the new Lion King movie. I'm sure there are others, but I don't know any of the top of my mind. It's definitely becoming popular among my daughter's IMGD major crowd, and I would guess they are young enough not to get the Crisis joke.
There are only 3 (4) commercial game engines on the market:
1) Unity (C#)
2) Unreal (C++)
3) Crytek (C++/C#)
4) Lumberyard (Crytek)
EA has a proprietary game engine called Frostbite, that came out of DICE in Sweden, ActivisionBlizzard uses various game engines including propriety depending on the game.
With that I don't doubt that Unity has the biggest market share, although from professional experience I will say that Unreal has the largest market share when it comes to Console/PC AAA titles.
Um, game streaming is, if I'm not mistaken, integrated by default into a lot of games these days, and there is an order of magnitude more channels on YouTube that are all about showing what players are doing on a multitude of games.
So, crazy as it sounds, I do think there is a use case for game streaming. The only problem is choosing to uphold streaming for the popular games. Well, if you want to monetize it, that is, and since we're talking about the Cloud, of course they want to monetize it.
So, the question is not "will game streaming work for the mass market" ? It already is. The real question is : "can we make money out of it ?".
"The real question is : "can we make money out of it ?"."
Kids will pay $50 for weapon skin, so probly yes thay can make money.
kids be idiots with their money.
The advantage of game streaming will be high quality graphics for people who dont have a £1000 games "rig".
Thats gotta be a marketable angle surely!
@Pascal Monett
This isn't about streaming games as in videos of gamers playing ( what we currently get on YT, twitch etc) but physically streaming the game itself from the cloud.
I.e plug a controller into a screen connected to the internet, connect to a game on google's cloud, and have their cloud handle the compute/ram/gpu etc requirements.
The monetisation is built in.
Pay us £x per month, and have access to every game hosted on the service.
Think netflix. I don't pay for a movie, I pay netflix for all their movies.
This would be no more guying games, simply pay your monthlies to your provider or providers of choice, and get all their games.
"This would be no more guying games, simply pay your monthlies to your provider or providers of choice, and get all their games."
Not a console owner, but I got the impression PS Plus was pretty much this.
Not so much all the games, you have a library. But you get some number of "rental" ones that you can switch around.
The game saves to the cloud are also a big appeal.
PS plus gives you unlimited access to select titles every month, whatever game is selected that month you can purchase for free, and as long as you keep up your PS sub, it's yours. Stop paying the sub and you lose access.
What we're discussing here is closer to Xbox's Game Pass which allows access to a massive number of games for a select monthly fee, just like Netflix does for movies.
Cloud is a fancy term for hosted services, albeit with more tools etc.
Having the gaming server hosted on someone else;s hardware has been pretty common for a decade, and before that depended a bit on what your ISP felt.
Seeing as 99% of players never run a server (unless hosting) I don't really see how this is going to make any difference.
The "rent a rig" is stupid too, unless they are getting a massive price break somewhere. Compare the rental price points that are discussed, and compare them to the cost of buying your own on credit and paying it off over 24 months. So if you can afford it, then you're better off owning it, especially if you're planning on playing on it for more than a few hours at a time.
I believe MS is serious when you can use an xbox like this.
The "rent-a-rig" isn't stupid fom a commercial point of view...
There is such a thing as platform lock-in, you know.. So it's not rent-"a"-rig, but "rent-several-at-once for the convenient price of...." as opposed to buying an ungodly amount of hardware to play whatever you feel like today.
And licencing aside ( but you're talking about an industry that's gotten good at licensing..) , it makes a lot of sense to do a single proper conversion of a popular game for cloud delivery, as opposed to having to do it for multiple platforms, each with their own idiosyncrasies and challenges. Especially since you open up your game to the entire potential gaming market, instead of just the part that owns [consoleX].
But by the time you pay off your cutting edge gaming rig in 24 months it is obsolete.....and you need to get another. If you are paying, let's say, $20 a month for the gaming service then you spend less than $500 over the 24 month period on your "gaming rig" and it's always up to spec for whatever game you want to play. This would also cover the cost of the games themselves too. Hard price to beat with the "own your own" model....
It still bothers me that most, maybe all new, games cannot be played in multi-user mode on XBox. I remember when my two children could each log into their XBox and two friends could as well and play with or against each other on the one device. Games seem to have developed away from that and that does bother me.Talk about a money grab.
Being an old fart I have never felt the need to play on-line games.
My preference is single player games like Supreme Commander, quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc.
Actually, I hardly ever play now, hard to find anything new to play (ON PC).
I definately do NOT want multiplayer gameplay.
I was in my mid-twenties when Doom came out and I enjoyed that game. Played Quake a bit too, but maybe I was a bit old by then to be bitten hard by the gaming bug.
As a side note, my daughter-in-law who's in her mid-twenties is expressing some interest in old school D&D so we may facilitate a family Sunday evenings D&D event. I'm looking forward to that. It appears there's a rip in that universe's time continuum and the D&D goes to edition 5 and that Pathfinder is similar to edition 3, I think.
Anyone have any advice on D&D versus Pathfinder?
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