Comment by boxerbk

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Comment by boxerbk

Hey. I have a lot to say :), and I provided a lot of thoughts to this FastCompany article about the industry - https://www.fastcompany.com/90225352/microsoft-is-the-right-.... Generally, as we have seen media wants to be streamed. And in this case, streaming is a great solution for distributing content and unlocking games from the hardware they've been walled off in. That being said, streaming video games is a very different proposition technically and financially. People have been asking for the Netflix of gaming for a long time, and companies really want to build it because it puts them at the center of an entertainment industry that is growing extremely fast and grabbing more attention every year. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics now says that the average American's day includes 60% more time playing video games than it did in 2011, and people who do play games play for 2.4 hours each day. Most of the technical challenges with this have been worked out.

Streaming video at 60 FPS or greater and at 4K is possible. We do it all day at Parsec, but the economic challenges are real due to the requirement that you need to render video in real-time. Rendering in real-time requires each user to have access to a GPU or 1/2 of a cloud GPU until newer technologies allowing for true virtualization appear on the market. Cloud GPUs are generally very expensive to operate, and as many of us know, the cloud providers charge a lot to use them for gaming and/or ML. Companies with scale can lease them at lower rates and have lower energy costs lowering the overall cost to serve, but they are still very expensive to operate. Even if you get the rates down to $0.15 per hour, you're still looking at overall hardware costs at $10 per month. Your subscription price will have to cover the hardware and the content license. The content itself is very expensive to license as well because we consume games very differently from the way we consume TV and media. When people binge on Netflix, they're binging on many shows or many movies. When people binge on games, they're playing 1 game for 100s of hours. You can see this in the Steam Spy data. The median Steam customer only buys 1-2 games each year - https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260. Many cloud gaming companies and game companies are aiming to increase the market for AAA games via streaming from the cloud. They're trying to reach the latent gamers who don't play games any more. In our opinion, that's a lot less exciting than delivering something valuable to current consumers of games. Consumers don't switch to a new distribution technology because it's a cool technology. They switch when it gives them something unique that they couldn't get before the technology existed.

This is why, at Parsec (https://parsecgaming.com), we're focused on delivering unique experiences around games via streaming technology. We make it so you can find other people around you and invite friends to play local co-op games with you online. We're recreating the couch gaming experience we love and making it available online. This experience brings a new element to gaming that gamers today benefit from and enjoy.

Replies boxerbk · 2018-10-01
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    About YAVCHN

    YAVCHN is a reader for Hacker News and Lobsters, with articles and discussions in separate windows or Classic pages.

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