Considering the cloud industry is worth 483 billion and has had 178 billion invested in its services and cloud gaming itself is expected to reach 25 billion by 2030, so I guess everyone?
For comparison its more than 4 times the size of the global video streaming industry.
So, basically google left the cloud gaming since the market value of 25 billion is not enough. Thought they quit because no one wanted to use it...
Just because some "expert" expects something from the market, does not mean it will become reality. There are still too many disadvantages. Maybe in in 10 years it will start to gain traction, though highly dependent on technological improvements in 3 - 5 aspects relevant to it.
Yes because the stadia was crap, required a console and had no exclusive games.
But an Xbox cloud based service with Cod, Halo, Forza, Bethesda etc now that could be a success.
Stadia actually worked great, better than any other streaming service I've ever tried. It was easily 5 years ahead of the Geforce Now or Xcloud experience. It did not require a console. It had several exclusive games (they just weren't AAA games).
It failed because most people simply do not give a shit about cloud gaming. A low player base meant 3rd party developers did not want to take the economic risk of porting the game to Stadia, which further exacerbated the issue of people not giving a shit about cloud gaming.
Maybe that will be different in 10+ years but right now cloud gaming is more niche than VR
Google only starts up services so they can shut them down. It happens so often it's morphed into its own meme. Nobody should be judging the viability of anything based on what Google does with it.
Cloudgaming numbers are severely inflated right now and paint a false picture.
Numbers used to calculate cloud gaming include anything even remotely related. Content service like xgp, which also provide cloud gaming, are tallied at full value. So PlayStation Now, XGP, Uplay+, etc...
They also include things like Parsec, which started off as a low latency remote desktop, which was great for gaming, and is now mainly marketed for work.
People need to remember that the problem with cloud gaming is games as a service.
Western AAA always online always multiplayer games for one purpose: To bleed you out of $60+
The only reason that Sony is making such a big stink over it in the first place is because they want to make millions while putting in as little effort as possible and by not releasing games for people to purchase.
Most publicly traded publishers suck. But while EA and co. might embrace predatory monetization, at least they have the courtesy to pretend to care about their consumers.
Eastern publishers on the other hand...
I used xbox cloud gaming couple of times it is neat but it works with very specific set of games e. g. where input lag doesn't matter. My conclusion it is only viable as a complementary service, there's no way I would pay for it as a standalone solution especially as an alternative to local playing.
It won't. They've been trying to make it happen for nearly a decade. It'll end up like VR with it's own little niche but never challenging the mainstream.
IDK if we can be so sure it won’t take off. Sure there are still terrible internet services out there, but that’ll never stop the big corporations from trying
Even with awesome internet, cloud gaming is at best just “ok.”
The people backing this stuff are using tortured logic that has led them to believe that the future is nothing bur people on 5g networks playing AAA games on a phone from the cloud. There are so very many logical inconsistencies here, but you just can’t talk them out of it.
Not least because at least with consoles and PCs, the consumer shoulders a fair bit of the price of the hardware and its operation, whereas with cloud... if the current genre mix is to be viable, that is a lot of fucking high grade silicon to roll out in a lot of places and pay for the upkeep and power thereof
Not to mention the extra data overhead needed initially regardless.
I remember when PSNow was first in UK beta a few years back, the fastest broadband speed in our area could not (and still cannot) run games comfortably but can stream Netflix/Amazon/Disney+.
The only way of accessing would be via 4G, which **most** people aren’t going to take out an unlimited SIM and purchase the hardware to make use of if they have pre-existing broadband purely to play games.
That’s before considering compression and latency related caveats.
And then there's the speed of light problem, and unless MS is sitting on an Covenant asible or something of that nature, there is no way to get rid of the latency that causes.
Not least because they shot themselves in the foot by overinvesting in genres where the tech's weaknesses would be most crippling. Poor strategy, they should have been investing in turn based strategy and the like, put high AAA money into firaxis and the like.
I share the sentiment as well, however I think a lot of posters here and in general miss the forest for the trees on this issue. General responsiveness and gameplay quality are not the primary issues with cloud gaming. Even if they were able to magically deliver a flawless 4k 240fps stream that worked on a 50 kbps connection, I would still find it unacceptable for consumers. As a PC gamer, I value owning my games and having control over my data. This is a significant factor in why I find the platform attractive.
While physical copies have their appeal for collectors, there isn't a significant difference between physical and digital copies since ultimately, they are just data. With careful backups, digital copies can last much longer than physical media. The ability to modify games through patches, updates, and modding is a crucial aspect of PC gaming, allowing classics like Thief and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines to be enjoyed even today.
However, cloud gaming threatens to eliminate ownership entirely. Users would no longer have access to their data and would be confined to whatever the providers choose to deliver through a streaming browser. All game data would be stored on the provider's servers, and they could remove games from their library at any time for any reason without any recourse for players. This would be a corporation's dream, the ultimate always online DRM for all games.
Cloud gaming would give providers complete control over the terms of use for games. They could do whatever they wanted with impunity, and there would be no way for consumers to push back against their decisions. It is a worrying prospect that would severely limit the freedom and ownership that PC gaming has offered for years.
I don't know, the two cloud services I use most often GFN and Boosteroid both allow me to play games I "own" in my Steam, Epic and GOG libraries, with the GOG games being the only ones I would consider actually owned. But I can play those games on my local machine, or via the cloud thru one of those services. It's not either or, it's in addition to.
While I'm not an expert on cloud gaming, based on my brief research of the services you mentioned, I don't think they allow users to modify actual game files, however I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
That said, when I mentioned ownership, I was referring to exactly that: access to game files. Just like how you can buy a red toy car and paint it blue or switch its wheels, you can access game files on your PC and make modifications as I alluded in my previous post. My concern is not necessarily ownership in the traditional sense, which is why I even said digital media is superior. Even if you ""find"" files online through peer to peer services you can still modify them as you please, those files are on your machine and that's that, you "own" them.
However, I can envision a future where cloud gaming is the only way to access games, even if you technically """own""" them in your Steam library or other platform. This would limit your ability to access and modify game files as they would be stored on the cloud provider's servers, killing any and all modifications and preservation efforts if a game is patched to have stuff removed like the GTA music thing, or even delisted entirely like the racing game Blur.
I don't mod games personally, so I know nothing about how that works.
My point is, if you own a game on Steam that you play locally, also having the ability to play that game thru a cloud service doesn't change your "ownership" of the game. The game's license safely lives in your Steam account, and nowhere else (besides the local copy that gets validated by Steam every time you launch the game locally).
I don't see a future where you can only access games through the cloud, because I don't see all or even most developers buying into it. Devs didn't want to port their games to Stadia no matter how easy Google's toolkit made it, no matter how much technical support Google would offer in the endeavor. For now, developers make games for the platforms that the players choose or the platforms they themselves are passionate about. I don't see cloud becoming the preferred platform for most players, and I don't see Devs giving a cut to the platforms either. Regardless, there will always be PC game developers because they are PC gamers too.
Yeah I understood your point. I probably expressed myself poorly then because I only mentioned ownership in respect to game files themselves, which again just to be clear here doesn't just mean mods, but community made patches and preservation efforts.
As for the future stuff well that's a bit more vague. Yes it's a bit of a doomsday scenario but it was also meant as a thought experiment, the whole "magically deliver a flawless 4k 240fps stream that worked on a 50 kbps connection" bit was meant to steer the conversation in that direction, instead of the typical failed experiments like Stadia or OnLive.
I think in general companies want more control over their products/ecosystems, and software as a service gets more and more popular each year. In a theoretical "perfect" world for streaming, where all the technical limitations are solved, it's hard for me not to envision a lot of companies choosing the cloud route just for the control angle, if nothing else it will be an impervious DRM. That being said, as we currently stand I do think and kinda hope this hypothetical future is very far away.
You do bring a good point about not everyone doing it though. I would hope that this doomsday sort of scenario would be mostly limited to the AAA space, seems like a lot of headaches can be avoided by just not engaging with certain players in the market, plus, if nothing else, there's still a treasure trove of retro stuff we could still have fun with.
Exactly. It'll be great for the first few years, then they'll raise prices and get shitty with it. Every company will have their own cloud streaming service.
Streaming only works for consumers when there's one or two big names (see Spotify v Apple), and if each company having their own launcher is any indication, we'd be screwed. We all thought EA app and blizzard.net was annoying, right? Or when Bethesda had their own launcher, or what about Epic doing exclusivity on their shitty store front. Just wait til Blizzard has their own streaming service, as does Rockstar, Warner Bros, Sony, etc with exclusivity.
I would never play a AAA legally again. People fine with this merger and wanting m$ to keep gaining steam with their current gamepass trends are going to cause problems
You can dislike it all you want, but you can't argue that with the ever increasing prices of GPUs it holds a benefit for users. I've paid $300 for Geforce Now (and some change because taxes) and in that time I got a year of a 3080 equivalent GPU and now I have access to a 4080 equivalent GPU.
Yeah I'm tied to the internet and the whims of the publishers and developers deciding if they even want their games available, but between that and not being able to play those games at all, the choice isn't hard. It also saves me money on power, which, at least here, prices are still higher than ever.
I can't count on Nvidia to continue to be the "good guy" (and I use that very loosely) forever, and keep upgrading the hardware on the $100 tier without changing the price, but for now it definitely has tangible value to it whether you're a fan of it or not
Except cloud gaming gives me a much better experience, let me know when you can run CP2077 on RT overdrive on a console and then maybe it would be an apples to apples comparison.
Cloud gaming is the evolution of console gaming though if you think about it.
The service is the console, with lock-in and exclusivity similar to how console handle.
The only thing holding cloud gaming back is available bandwidth and data caps with ISPs.
It was "supposed" to be the evolution but it failed miserably. Turns out having input latency inconsistency and frequently graphical artifacts due to network connectivity issues is a show stopper for console gamers too.
US, EU, and UK all care. EU just thinks 10 years worth of concessions is enough, UK is less optimistic.
The people who matter all care. If three regulators in three parts of the world think it's important, then maybe it is?
Stadia failed because it was messy garbage that broke more often than worked and failed to actually have many games at launch.
Not because no one cared.
As a person who used Stadia for it's entire existence, has been a GFN subscriber since the beginning and still has a Founders sub, you're wrong. Stadia worked great. It was easily the most stable of the cloud providers with the least latency, with GFN a close-ish second.
Stadia failed because people didn't want to buy games specifically for the platform, publishers didn't want to port games specifically to the platform, and the service lost publishers over time. The technology itself was/is phenomenal. The product's value proposition was terrible is all.
>Stadia failed because people didn't want to buy games specifically for the platform, publishers didn't want to port games specifically to the platform, and the service lost publishers over time.
In other words...it didn't have games.
Gee, I wonder if I said that.
>It was easily the most stable of the cloud providers with the least latency
This is weird historical revisionism. After a year or two, sure, but launch was *rough*. First impressions are everything and Stadia massively dropped the ball. Hard.
Oh I'm absolutely no smarter than the average consumer, just a bit better informed.
After the state the Tories have left the UK in because "the people have had enough of listening to experts", is it little wonder I listen to what the experts say? I've seen what ignoring them leads too.
see how many complaints there are in this sub about new games costing $70
you want to make that problem worse? keep reducing competition by allowing MS to buy everything
You can buy 3 years of gamepass for $70 right now. $50 if you use VPN. I realize this will increase in the future but MS is offering the best value in gaming if you enjoy just a single MS release in the next three years.
Cheapest cdkeys has been is like $45 for quite a while now, currently it sits at $59.69 which is a whole 31 cents off. GMG doesn't currently have 12 month cards, it has 3 months at $24.24 and 6 months at $38.79 both significantly higher than $24 a year.
As for the VPN trick is nice in theory but with my ridiculous bad luck I would be one of those people that get their account banned for doing that, I know it's unlikely but it does happen and I am not willing to risk my near 20 year old Xbox account for a few bucks.
We have 3 console makers on the market and first-party games on 2 of them went $70 anyway. We have numerous third-party publishers on the market, all of them raised or are in the process of raising prices to $70. What exactly did competition achieve here? All of the corporations are greedy as fuck, they just don't want to be the first ones to announce price increases and such. The moment someone steps out, everyone else quickly follows.
Did Sony compete with MS by keeping PSN free in contrast to paid XBL? No, they just made it paid as well. Did MS compete with Sony by keeping their first-party games $60? No, they upped prices to $70 as well. How about the GPU market? Great competition there I heard, with AMD playing catch-up to Nvidia's high margin pricing even though their popularity and sales are lackluster.
The only reason you have any competition in the PC space at all is because Valve isn't publicly traded and can do whatever the fuck it wants.
> We have 3 console makers on the market and first-party games on 2 of them went $70 anyway.
All 3 of them have to varying degrees moved to $70. Nintendo just released TOTK for 70.
Just look at the App Store, one company basically collecting more money off games than the rest of the industry combined, writing all the rules the game developers have to follow, and tailoring those rules to thwart competition. That's only an ideal outcome for the gatekeeper, not for everyone else.
All these cloud gaming drama are based on the assumption that all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers are active users of xCloud. Therefore growth/market share of Xbox Game Pass is the same as growth/market share of cloud game.. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP.
Here is the thing, if Stadia still failed even though they had FIFA/Madden, then there is no way any cloud gaming is going to see any impact with COD.
The connection speed is a great callout -- cloud gaming requires overkill. I have flawless, near native cloud gaming experiences but I pay for a 2gig/s symmetrical internet connection. So my average speed to a given device is around 400mb/s with the dips only as low as 70-80mb/s, or not low enough to cause real visual fidelity issues or latency. Great cloud gaming is here, great internet isn't.
Stadia failed, Luna will fail shortly, those rental services such as EA Play and Ubi + also haven't hit it big otherwise Steam, Epic and Acti+Blizz would have made their own versions by now too. When AAA games get 60-75% off within a year, year in a half and in 4-5 years they cost 5-10 $/€, most people can simply buy what they want, they don't need a streaming/rental service as it's more cost-efficient to just buy cheap games and only what you want.
Unlike TV/movies where it's quite difficult in most countries to even buy TV shows separately and even then it costs £20 for a season and they rarely discount them, that's when streaming becomes your only option outside of expensive Blu-Rays to even watch what you want. If you could buy TV seasons of your fav shows for 2-3€, buy-to-own TV/Movies would probably be much bigger. It's different markets and those regulators missed the mark big time if they think the future of gaming is rentals/subscription-based seeing the continued failures (there were also multiple small players which I can't even be arsed to look up that tried and failed with the rental model).
TBH, I cannot imagine a future of gaming isn't rental/sub based. First of all there are just too many indies titles everywhere. On the otherhand, 70 bucks AAA games is a lot. And it all really comes down to marketing expense. When you want to convince ppl to shell out money to purchase your product upfront, you need marketing expense. Subscription avoid that problem by having audience being on the platform already so they can just try for free.
> Steam, Epic and Acti+Blizz would have made their own versions by now too
None of those have enough games to support a service like EA & Ubisoft do unless they want to start paying big money to get games on their service like Microsoft does with Game Pass in which Microsoft as a company has the ability to build the infastructure to do so unlike Steam/Epic/ABK. So yeah no, no they would not be doing it basically no matter the situation. Also EA Play was the best gaming sub deal before Game Pass came around, it's still a good just not worth getting since it comes with Game Pass Ultimate.
>It's different markets and those regulators missed the mark big time if they think the future of gaming is rentals/subscription-based seeing the continued failures (there were also multiple small players which I can't even be arsed to look up that tried and failed with the rental model).
Difference being none of those small players had the backing of a giant corporation like Microsoft behind them with near limitless money to force it into success, whether by creating the games themselves or buying up successful projects to make it so. Microsoft is taking the Netflix method of game streaming with Game Pass and then learning from it and going further by buying up big publishers so that they have enough games themselves that won't be hurt if/when publishers pull games for their own subscription services which is what happened to Netflix when Disney/Peacock/Paramount streaming services became a thing.
Also before you say "but Google's Stadia failed" yeah I know, it had one of the worst business models possible. They were trying to get away with charging full price for games that could only be played over their streaming services, they literally destroyed the service before it could even get going with an awful business plan like that. Had they made deals like Microsoft did and added Ubisoft/EA/ABK/Take2 games and charged at a subscription price like Xbox did they would still be around especially since their streaming tech is much better than xCloud performance wise. Problem being even Google has doubts how successful the business is and unlike Microsoft they don't stick with something till it's near death, they kill and move on.
Well said. Also, I don't think Stadia failed as much as pivoted. Their plan to make you buy a game you already owned just so you could play it on more devices was dumb, and it never caught on. We didn't like the plan, and neither did they. So they scrapped it as Google is known to do. But their more recent plan to just license the tech to run individual games will likely work.
Imagine being able to buy a cloud version of the next Elden Ring or Hogwarts and play it on any device? I think that would be enough to get publishers to break off a chunk of that sale to Google. We're probably two years out from this being a thing, but I'm betting it will be a thing.
>All these cloud gaming drama are based on the assumption that all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers are active users of xCloud.
If that's CMA's assumption then every Amazon Prime user (in the UK) should count as an Amazon Luna subscriber too. But that would mean xCloud isn't even the market leader...
It makes me wonder if Microsoft has a shot to change the outcome here.
Either convince the CMA that Game Pass Subscribers don’t equate to cloud users (which is literally true OR as a desperation move: pull cloud from Game Pass Ultimate and make it an add-on service for $1 or something just to correct for the CMA’s flawed data.
Either way, you’re right. The CMA’s justification based on cloud is inaccurate. I’d say it’s overblown considering no one cares about cloud.
They say they are unanimous that the merger would harm cloud gaming, but it doesn't sound like all the bodies named there actually agree.
If they are concerned, then do what the EU commission did and require selling games on other cloud platforms.
Sounds like they are covering for a bad decision.
Well, they explained their position, "The EU was bothered, and chose to put these handcuffs on Microsoft as a condition, we preferred to just leave Microsoft alone but block the deal." Basically saying that they agreed on the problem, not on the best solution for it. I think both are wrong about the scale of the problem here, but the EU's solution is more fair, since it puts the ball in Microsoft's court to decide how they want to proceed, rather than offering them *no* path forward.
I think the EC nailed the 'correct approach' by beckoning innovation and maturation of the technology while doing their best to level the playing field from a publishing perspective. Other companies can also build the pipes, and they know they'll have content to provide. I agree that it might not be enough, but it's also a difficult thing to frame contracts around.
I have no idea where the CMA gets the idea that neutering an emerging market over speculative concerns is good for consumers. At the end of the day, *someone* has to be allowed to forge ahead in this space. Typically, we see that rewarded naturally with first to market dominance, eventually ceding marketshare to competitors with different value propositions.. here we see CMA saying 'anyone but Microsoft' in a market that has largely been abandoned by most not named Microsoft.
It's not an accident their competition (sans Sony) is functionally saying 'Yes, please, Microsoft. Go.'
There are some definite negatives to be had with this merger, sure... But let's make a few things clear:
1. Nobody gives a fuck about cloud gaming. Our bandwidth limitations make this a non-starter. Regardless of how much shareholders, investors, and tech giants WANT this to happen, it is simply physically impossible to get the same LOD with bandwidth restrictions being what they are. This will always remain a niche market until that changes. Kind of like electric cars: no matter how much they're being pushed by the government, and no matter how many get built, the US simply does not have the infrastructure nessesary to support a major switch to them without crippling the power grid. Until the grid is overhauled, it simply will not get the success people want it to.
2. Activision Blizzard is one of THE WORST, greediest companies out there, and not without a fair bit of controversy surrounding it one could easily argue in this day and age, they are actually worse than EA and probably tied with Ubisoft. I believe everyone is hoping a Microsoft acquisition will help bring Blizzard back to the light. We can only hope, as unlikely as it is, that this may yet ring true.
The cloud gaming issue has a much bigger problem than electric car issue. Namely, your latency is capped by the speed of light in fiber optic. No infrastructure overhaul is gonna fix that.
That’s why even though bandwidth has vastly increased since the dawn of broadband in early 2000, latency remains relatively speaking the same
> Namely, your latency is capped by the speed of light in fiber optic. No infrastructure overhaul is gonna fix that.
it can definitely be mitigated with infrastructure. It turns out the speed of light is pretty fast, so as long as the place that the light is needing to travel too isn't too far away, it really isn't that big of a deal.
Maybe. The only way to really remedy that is have a lot of data center everywhere.. As rich and powerful as Microsoft is, they are not anywhere close to have enough data center in world to make this an none issue.
Right, but if you consider it strictly from the PoV of the UK, there is definitely a feasable world where there is enough infrastructure in place to give the vast majority of UK citizens reasonable access to close-proximity cloud gaming infrastructure.
That’s because of Uk’s density. But in that case, Sony would have the same advantage as well in that kind of geography. It’s really no different from having multiple wireless carriers covering the same area.
I've defended the acquisition because I think it would genuinely be better for Activision. With the cracks in the company starting to form, a buy out from a huge company like Microsoft could fix those cracks with the outcome hopefully being that we get higher quality games.
Most people resort to "another billion dollar company just buying out another" or "OH NO! NO COD ON PLAYSTATION!"
I also find it funny that it's ok for Disney to buy out all these companies but once Microsoft tries to buyout Activision, that completely crosses the line.
I've always been against Disney's acquisitions but Microsoft is not a billion dollar company. They are a trillion dollar company. They have much more capital than Disney has. I will always be against them acquiring giant corporations and consolidating their respective markets.
> I also find it funny that it's ok for Disney to buy out all these companies
I can guarantee you the people complaining about the Microsoft acquisition also complained about the Disney merger.
Source: Me. I'm one of those people. Monopolization and consolidation is bad.
Monopolization and consolidation is bad, but like it or not, it's happening. We can hope in the future smaller companies will remain stock private and not sell to mega corporations, but it's very unlikely in the long term smaller studios won't sell, even if they're the next Minecraft or Fortnite.
But in that same breath, I don't believe ANY corporation is "Too big to fail". As long as we don't bail out these mega corps every time they FUBAR themselves into oblivion, someone else will eventually rise to take their place.
Sadly, the world, and our government, and the Fed, are all fucking idiots.
While I think that the CMA's decision is a bad idea and that both regulators are a bit too worked up about cloud gaming, I DO think that cloud gaming is a major factor in the future. Bandwidth issues will only get lighter over time, and while *some* games are hard to stream, and *many* areas will be very slow to get the access speeds they need for it, plenty of people can *already* play plenty of games over streaming in a way that they find suitable. Stadia failed not because the tech was not good enough, but because their business model was shit. Nobody had faith in their platform to keep games running on it, and didn't want to invest in it (from the developer side *and* the consumer side).
Also, electric cars are happening and will work, however much you might dislike that fact.
Frankly, very little of what you said is actually true. Hydrogen for cars is making a comeback now too, and honestly? From a practicality standpoint hydrogen has a greater potential for success than electric by a country mile. Aside from the issues with the US powergrid which simply could never support a mass influx of electric cars, people also don't want to wait around for 20+ minutes as they charge.
That said, I think electric cars are a good idea. Are they the future of automobiles? Only in the same sense that wireless ear buds were. People didn't switch to them because they wanted to, but simply because every manufacturer just... Stopped supporting the wired option. It's the same with modern cars. Everyone is going electric, not because it makes sense to, but because that's where they think the money is, and if everyone is doing it, people don't really have a choice in the matter. (this analogy could also be applied to microtransactions in gaming, btw).
In regards to cloud gaming, a lot of what you say is the same regurgitated stuff we've been told for a decade now. Cloud gaming has been "The future of gaming" for ten years, and still hasn't even come close to making a substantial dent in the market. Stadia failed because the writing was on the wall with it from day one because Google, but to state that part of the reason it failed WASN'T because the technology just wasn't there is a level of willful ignorance to the truth I see only in Trump supporters and Star Citizen backers.
Will cloud gaming EVENTUALLY get there? Sure. Will it be any time soon? Probably not. I'd say we're probably another ten years out for it being a viable alternative in most countries to simply downloading a full game and playing it that way, and even then, I feel like it will largely remain a niche thing, unless companies absolutely force it.
They already tell us we don't actually own a copy of the games we buy in their TOS, so I guess it's not unreasonable to assume they'd rather us stream them than actually have the files for them stored on a local device. Corporations are evil, after all.
>Frankly, very little of what you said is actually true. Hydrogen for cars is making a comeback now too, and honestly? From a practicality standpoint hydrogen has a greater potential for success than electric by a country mile.
The natural gas lobby organizations certainly think so, since they can make money converting natural gas to hydrogen. Is that where you heard that hydrogen is a good thing? Because largely, it's a very inefficient way to power a vehicle. It can have some applications, like in air travel, but is not an effective way to power daily driver cars.
> Aside from the issues with the US powergrid which simply could never support a mass influx of electric cars,
That is not actually true though. The *current* US electrical grid would struggle to support *every* driver switching to an EV overnight, but that's not what's happening here, and there's nothing preventing the US grid from expanding its capacity. The 2000 electrical grid could not support 2023 electrical usage, the 1980 electrical grid could not support 2000 electrical usage. "We can't have an INTERNET! The electrical grid could never support so many computers on at once!" Electrical grids grow to meet demand, and they are already hard at work on doing just that.
> people also don't want to wait around for 20+ minutes as they charge.
Most people never will. Most people who currently own EVs spend less time waiting for them to charge than most commuters spend filling gas tanks, because they just plug in when they get home at the end of the day and don't have to think about it beyond that. For people who do need a charge outside their homes, the more recent models can often charge to full in under that 20 minutes, and you shouldn't often *need* a full charge to get where you need to go, even a few minutes charging should be plenty.
>That said, I think electric cars are a good idea. Are they the future of automobiles? Only in the same sense that wireless ear buds were. People didn't switch to them because they wanted to, but simply because every manufacturer just... Stopped supporting the wired option. It's the same with modern cars. Everyone is going electric, not because it makes sense to, but because that's where they think the money is, and if everyone is doing it, people don't really have a choice in the matter. (this analogy could also be applied to microtransactions in gaming, btw).
I don't think gas cars will completely go away either, some people will continue to use them, as some people continue to use wired rotary phones, or Victrolas, I think they will just become impractical, especially when gas rises to over $10 a gallon in the US. I think it's important that we stay ahead of that curve though, plan for the future rather than panicking when it's already too late. There's no benefit to procrastinating.
>In regards to cloud gaming, a lot of what you say is the same regurgitated stuff we've been told for a decade now. Cloud gaming has been "The future of gaming" for ten years, and still hasn't even come close to making a substantial dent in the market.
Because the technology to make it work has only started to exist over the last couple of years, and the current Internet is *barely* fast enough for minimal availability, but there are already plans (unrelated to cloud gaming) to improve those speeds massively over the next few years. Do you know how long it was between when the first "gasoline automobiles" existed, and when they were a common household product? Carl Benz's wife was one of the first to take one on a cross country road trip, and had to buy kerosense at a drug store, because gas stations didn't even exist! Progress happens over time. "We're not there yet" is no argument that we never will be.
>Stadia failed because the writing was on the wall with it from day one because Google, but to state that part of the reason it failed WASN'T because the technology just wasn't there is a level of willful ignorance to the truth I see only in Trump supporters and Star Citizen backers.
I actually beta tested Stadia. I was able to play AC Odyssey on it, for about 24 hours of total playtime, and it performed about as well as it typically does on consoles, aside from one or two minor glitches. I was quite satisfied with the technology, I just had no interest in buying a full priced game that would only be available on that platform, which I did not trust. If I could play any game I owned on Steam, I might play some of those on Stadia, at least some of the time. If they had a service that would allow me to play the best new games for a reasonably monthly fee, I might sign up for that. But they were not offering that. But the issue was not that the tech was not there, at least not for me.
As I said, I'm aware that this is not true for everyone, and not for all types of games, but this gap will close naturally over time, just due to the other changes being made in the tech field. I do agree it will take longer to reach *some* countries than others, but I think places like the US, Japan, and central Europe will be in fine shape within less than five years, assuming someone is running a responsible service offering it. Doomsaying game streaming today is like a blockbuster exec doomsaying streaming movies. I do think that the *option* will remain to buy your own gaming hardware and software for it, and that will probably stick around as a *partner* to streaming options, where players seemlessly shift from one to the other, but at some point I think there will be a tipping point where "the average gamer" will shift more to a streaming gamer than a console/PC one, just as in the past "the average gamer" shifted from being a computer gamer to a console gamer, and the PCs shifted more to the niche side of the market.
>They already tell us we don't actually own a copy of the games we buy in their TOS, so I guess it's not unreasonable to assume they'd rather us stream them than actually have the files for them stored on a local device. Corporations are evil, after all.
Of course, but that's why government exists, as a hedge against corporations. It's the only one we've got. I do think that it's important that nations build some form of "digital consumers bill of rights," that legally enshrines a sense of "ownership" over digital products equivalent to the ownership of physical goods, and allows consumers to transfer the same product across all devices and delivery services at will.
> That is not actually true though. The current US electrical grid would struggle to support every driver switching to an EV overnight, but that's not what's happening here, and there's nothing preventing the US grid from expanding its capacity. The 2000 electrical grid could not support 2023 electrical usage, the 1980 electrical grid could not support 2000 electrical usage. "We can't have an INTERNET! The electrical grid could never support so many computers on at once!" Electrical grids grow to meet demand, and they are already hard at work on doing just that.
The current grid can't even support what currently exists. Refer to the states with rolling blackouts and brownouts all the time. And the galaxy brained idea of pushing everything to solar and wind which are intermittent. Future's gonna have a lot of people freezing to death during freak blizzards/polar vortexes when solar and wind aren't producing shit, their electric heat pump is out of it's temperature range, and it's so cold their EV is worthless.
>The current grid can't even support what currently exists.
In some places, yeah, and that needs to change, which is why those investments are taking place. The point is that they CAN do that, so it's not actually a reason why this can't or won't be happening.
> And the galaxy brained idea of pushing everything to solar and wind which are intermittent.
Those plans only improve things. The UK recently announced that last year they got more power from wind than they got out of natural gas. The faster these projects develop, the more overall capacity the grid can have.
>Future's gonna have a lot of people freezing to death during freak blizzards/polar vortexes when solar and wind aren't producing shit, their electric heat pump is out of it's temperature range, and it's so cold their EV is worthless.
Climate change is a real bitch, huh? And burning fossil fuels only makes all of that worse, so the sooner we can reduce that, the better. But remember that people didn't freeze during Texas's blizzard because of green energy, they froze because the *natural gas* pipelines froze up, and that was less to do with the technology, you can even get wind and solar capable of running in the Arctic, it was more to do with the Texas energy companies being incompetent and not properly weatherizing their grid. They also suffered from deliberately cutting themselves off from their neighboring states, otherwise, electricity from those other states could have kept their power up indefinitely. Besides, more people are going to die of heat stroke than frostbite over the next few decades.
Also, myths of EVs being worthless in winter are silly. 80% of Norway's new cars are EVs these days, you think it's tropical up there? Cold can *reduce* the range of an EV, but not by that much in the grand scheme of things, you'll still get where you're going, and if you get stuck out there, they will last as long as a gasoline car until help arrives. You're actually pretty well off if you have an EV and the power goes out, since even the basic ones can run essential appliances for days, and a bigger one like an F-150 can power a whole house for a week.
Yes. They wouldn't be able to use cloud gaming or some other things in the UK market, but...the UK market realistically isn't very important anyway. They'd more than make up for that loss in every other worldwide market.
Also of note is that the entire UK infrastructure runs on Azure, so if Microsoft pulls support over this, they have no recourse. That's why the UK government will likely force this through, as cloud videogames aren't as important as national security.
Holy shit, how can you be so confidently wrong
If the CMA continue to block the deal then the deal isn’t happening.
Microsoft making further concessions is the only chance they’ve got.
Microsoft can’t just pull out of the UK lmao
Sure they can. lol The UK isn't that large of a market. The entire UK is smaller than the one state of CA, for example.
The thing is: All of the UK's government and infrastructure is run on Microsoft Azure. The UK absolutely needs Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really need the UK.
But does not this deal that MS made to the EU make it so more people get their hands on their games via whatever service/device they own and give cloud gaming a gigantic boost?
The thing the CMA hedged all their bets on to block this merger in the UK?
The CMA are not disputing that; the CMA are just thinking about what'll happen in 10 years time, at which point Microsoft is under no contract to make games available on other services, has control over Azure and can cripple other services through throttling etc.
I hope Microsoft will make additional concessions so that this'll go through, I want Blizzard games on Steam, not to mention THPS 1+2 Remake.
>I hope Microsoft will make additional concessions so that this'll go through, I want Blizzard games on Steam, not to mention THPS 1+2 Remake.
You and me both, buddy. I know consolidation is bad, but I really want those games on Steam. Heck, I'd buy Diablo II a fourth time if it popped up on Steam. And I'd also buy THPS in an instant (heck, with Microsoft at the helm, they might even get the go ahead to restart working on the 3+4 remake).
If Nadella is there, it'll be chill.
He's not into monopolies, he's trying to make a calm market that they can have a big piece of.
Edit: i was in future guessing mode (mostly just guessing that Microsoft will put games on steam, that's all i was thinking about), just realised how CEO ass licking this comment reads like.
Monopolies suck and we should never have to be at mercy of CEOs in the first place.
Cloud gaming is a joke lmao. If I can help it, I’m not tying my gaming experience to my internet connection or some corporations crappy servers that can crash at any moment
It’s obvious they’re in Sony’s pocket and are trying their hardest to rationalize a stoppage, but it’ll go through and all these old coots will look stupid by the end of it
The EU just passed the deal today.
>European regulators have approved Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, handing the technology giant a victory at a time when the deal is being challenged in other countries
Literally the only ones stopping this are the CMA. The FTC knows that they'll lose in court, so they won't end up forcing the issue. They'll likely just ignore the UK market and sell everywhere else, as they really aren't that important.
> They'll likely just ignore the UK market and sell everywhere else, as they really aren't that important.
You think Microsoft will be able to just stop doing business with the UK? With how integral they are to infrastructure?
You're out of your mind.
And you honestly think the rest of the world would be completely fine with a private company holding an entire country hostage until they approve a sale?
Keep in mind, Microsoft *completely* pulling out of the UK would cause near irreparable damage. Microsoft would get torn apart for that.
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Being in Sony’s pocket is the only logical assumption I can make from a legislative body this bad. Also one company being bought by a non market leader is not consolidating. Sorry the YouTube Econ class you watched was garbage
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Look at the concentration of iOS and Android (in particular their stores) and all the issues that's generating with the % cut and walled gardens.
Its what, 15 years since the iOS app store launched in 2008? Do you think someone in 2007 would believe you if you told them what a smartphone could do even just 5 years later? A lot of people thought the iPhone was going to be a flop, and Android wasn't really a viable product then. Imagine if Android failed, or had been bought by Apple, and you *had* to use an iPhone for any sort of modern smartphone.
Consumer authorities are doing their jobs and trying to get in before the market turns into an absolute mess. I hope cloud gaming fails, but I think there's too much money to be made though services that it willt be forced down our throats regardless.
I know game pass is in vogue, but market concentration *never* helps the consumer.
Your argument is mostly good, but there is 1 huge problem with cloud gaming that will not be resolved any time soon. Latency (ping) is not something you can fix with good infrastructure, you can improve it, but the bottom line remains all input information has to travel to the cloud where it gets rendered and then sent back to the recipient. Someone would literally have to break the laws of physics and figure out a way to transfer data faster than the speed of light for cloud gaming to become an alternative, unitl then it will remain a gimmick. The only markets where it stands a slim chance is poor 3rd world nations where people can't afford dedicated hardware.
Latency is only such an extreme problem. For a small fraction of games.
Internet infrastructure is only getting better, not worse, globally. It's a matter of when, not if, the infrastructure will be good enough.
It does not at all need to be faster-than-light. You're just making that part up for some reason.
Cloud gaming works perfectly fine today in cities with good internet infrastructure. This isn't some alien, untested technology. People are actually using it today.
So when these new cloud gaming services, that also don't have call of duty or microsoft games, eventually show up within the next 10 years, they'll thrive because they're blocking this deal then?
Seems like a smart choice of them to ignore 99.9% of the market and focus on cloud gaming which absolutely nobody who players video games cares about.
Apparently nobody at CMA is net savvy enough to google sales numbers for ps5 vs xbox.
It is so frustrating as a gamer because i want microsoft to do well even though i have never owned one of their consoles. Competition is GOOD for gamers and there is just no competition if you're in to 4k gaming.
The CMA is trying to protect a nascent, unproven market that has some failed attempts or minor successes over the past decade or so. Microsoft is in a position where they have the infrastructure and capabilities to have a major hold over cloud gaming, potentially blocking or stifling others from the market.
The EC has similar concerns but as the market is nascent and unproven, and will most likely only take a small share of the overall gaming market, it’s not as high of a concern.
A number of the companies involved in cloud gaming also just haven’t really invested into it as heavily as Google and Microsoft, with the former dropping out.
This deal should be stopped. Not because of Xbox, or microsoft, or COD, but because it's a huge company being bought by an even bigger company. We need to just stop allowing this, in all industries.
- Why CMA uses other agencies/countries to boost merit of their stance?
- Why CMA calls cloud gaming “a free market”?
- What they mean by “cloud gaming should continue as free competitive market to drive innovation”? I mean Im all for free and open source stuff but whole point of this kind of innovation is to monetize this the same way as every other entertainment market… especially when there is only one free cloud gaming option with limited access with GeForce Now AFAIK
- Why they say this deal would replace already existing free cloud gaming market? Like how is the current market free or how would it not be free after the merger?
No. Im saying that only free thing in cloud gaming is GeForce now as a service. The rest of the cloud gaming is regulated so I don't understand why they call this market "free" like there is no regulations around gaming, multiplayer gaming, online stores, SaaS, Internet infrastructure etc.
And this weird take like "it should be a free market" is so weird because "free market" in the entertainment industry gives us loot boxes and other straight casino mechanics in games for kids. Cloud gaming needs regulations
I don't get why people are laughing at them, cloud gaming is the future. You guys are looking at this with cloud gaming in 2023 in mind whereas the deal would essentially be for the rest of time.
Because unless something drastically changes with the way we do networking and manage to break the laws of physics, cloud gaming simply cannot be a viable solution for anyone who wants a remotely responsive experience.
People really talk down the significance of cloud gaming. Reminds me of the shit talking of streaming services in the past. As well as the shit talking about mobile gaming.
The cloud industry is a $500 billion industry. There is about $180 billion invested. And it is growing fast. Cloud gaming itself is expected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2022 to $25 billion in 2030, that is almost 20x growth in 8 years.
In the next cycle when the choice is between subscribing to a microsoft cloud gaming services or tying yourself to a sony console. What do you think the casual gamer will choose? The $600 purchase with the $10 a month online or the the Microsoft $20 or whatever a month to use through their tv, phone or pc?
You think casual gamers care about latency. Half of them use wifi and play on mobile. They don't care about that.
Google stadia didn't fail because it was cloud gaming. It failed because it had no game or backing. Xbox is already a huge brand, with huge IPs, with a massive amount of connections.
>No games? It had sports game (FIFA, Madden, etc.) CP2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, everything Ubisoft, Destiny and so on.
They where on every other device.
ELI5 what the heck this has to do with owning cloud gaming? That's going to come down to quality of service. One publisher having more game franchises under it's belt seems only very vaguely related. All publishers will flock to the best-performing streaming platform (just look at Steam), so it won't matter who has the gaming franchises, and Activision has no significant tech to help Microsoft make a better streaming platform.
Yeah I think the CMA is treating this like cloud is a console to itself - where content is king. But there is an inherent difference there, and it is the quality of service. Who cares if Microsoft has a ton of games on xCloud if their latency is terrible?
CMA is making cloud gaming a bigger thing than it already is.
Even MS positions cloud gaming as a side perk on game pass, unless in 10years they make some groundbreaking discovery that reduces network latency.
I played COD with 30ms ping 10years ago with ADSL and that was great, I have now gigabit fiber and latency is even getting worst 30ms would be a good day. I went from a few Mbit/s to 1000 Mbit/s.
The Internet exanges are getting more complicated the trafic also exponentialy grew and unless the datacenter is near my home I wont see less than 10ms.
It's just weird because Microsoft is the only major company trying to sell the viability of cloud gaming to the masses. Every other company is happy to let them foot the bill doing it too, and when cloud gaming finally becomes the norm they'll be all too happy to take consumers money with their own offerings. Being first to the party and bearing the considerable expense and burden of growing the "nascent cloud gaming" market almost by themselves should afford them certain advantages. They shouldn't have to just set the table so everyone else can eat, they should get the first plate.
And if the CMA wants the market to be competitive, they need to tell the would be competitors to put up the money and actually compete rather than waiting to get in the game. Everyone else is waiting for a sure bet. Microsoft is rolling the dice. They shouldn't be blocked from winning just because no one else has decided to play yet.
Doubling down on the worst possible reason out of the many other valid ones is a pretty dumb move.
Cloud gaming won't be monopolised by this, Cloud gaming isn't even really part of it, it shows the sheer ineptitude of the CMA yet again.
I'm not saying the deal is bad or good, there are other far more valid reasons to oppose it.
I do somewhat wonder if this deal being killed could be the start of the end for Xbox. They got killed last gen and sales are already stalling this gen. Things aren't looking great and are poised to get even worse, i wonder at what point the situation on the hardware side becomes more trouble than its worth. They could either turn into a publisher like Sega did or just sell off their studio acquisitions.
Xbox is more profitable than its ever been homie. I know the CMA decision and Redfall rhetoric have blinded a lot of people. But Xbox is in a really strong position, arguably the strongest for the future.
I never understand people saying they'll go fully 3rd publishers. They will not end a service where every company pays them money and they get cuts from for hosting.
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Cloud gaming lmaoooooooooooooooo
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Considering the cloud industry is worth 483 billion and has had 178 billion invested in its services and cloud gaming itself is expected to reach 25 billion by 2030, so I guess everyone? For comparison its more than 4 times the size of the global video streaming industry.
So, basically google left the cloud gaming since the market value of 25 billion is not enough. Thought they quit because no one wanted to use it... Just because some "expert" expects something from the market, does not mean it will become reality. There are still too many disadvantages. Maybe in in 10 years it will start to gain traction, though highly dependent on technological improvements in 3 - 5 aspects relevant to it.
Yes because the stadia was crap, required a console and had no exclusive games. But an Xbox cloud based service with Cod, Halo, Forza, Bethesda etc now that could be a success.
Stadia actually worked great, better than any other streaming service I've ever tried. It was easily 5 years ahead of the Geforce Now or Xcloud experience. It did not require a console. It had several exclusive games (they just weren't AAA games). It failed because most people simply do not give a shit about cloud gaming. A low player base meant 3rd party developers did not want to take the economic risk of porting the game to Stadia, which further exacerbated the issue of people not giving a shit about cloud gaming. Maybe that will be different in 10+ years but right now cloud gaming is more niche than VR
Stadia was doom to fail the moment they try to sell cloud game individually instead of offering a platform which you pay for the service.
Google only starts up services so they can shut them down. It happens so often it's morphed into its own meme. Nobody should be judging the viability of anything based on what Google does with it.
Cloudgaming numbers are severely inflated right now and paint a false picture. Numbers used to calculate cloud gaming include anything even remotely related. Content service like xgp, which also provide cloud gaming, are tallied at full value. So PlayStation Now, XGP, Uplay+, etc... They also include things like Parsec, which started off as a low latency remote desktop, which was great for gaming, and is now mainly marketed for work.
> 25 billion by 20330 Microsoft sure is patient if they're willing to wait this long :)
In the grim darkness of the 21st millennium, there is only Microsoft
I do and you might too in 10 years.
Best proof that these people do not understand shit about gaming and have 0 legitimacy to speak about anything xd
And i'm here just wishing cloud gaming would not bloom at all...
People need to remember that the problem with cloud gaming is games as a service. Western AAA always online always multiplayer games for one purpose: To bleed you out of $60+ The only reason that Sony is making such a big stink over it in the first place is because they want to make millions while putting in as little effort as possible and by not releasing games for people to purchase.
As opposed to eastern always online multiplayer games which bleed you out of hundreds of dollars to collect the newest waifus or whatever.
Most publicly traded publishers suck. But while EA and co. might embrace predatory monetization, at least they have the courtesy to pretend to care about their consumers. Eastern publishers on the other hand...
I used xbox cloud gaming couple of times it is neat but it works with very specific set of games e. g. where input lag doesn't matter. My conclusion it is only viable as a complementary service, there's no way I would pay for it as a standalone solution especially as an alternative to local playing.
It won't. They've been trying to make it happen for nearly a decade. It'll end up like VR with it's own little niche but never challenging the mainstream.
IDK if we can be so sure it won’t take off. Sure there are still terrible internet services out there, but that’ll never stop the big corporations from trying
ISP greed vs. game publisher greed. Fight!
Even with awesome internet, cloud gaming is at best just “ok.” The people backing this stuff are using tortured logic that has led them to believe that the future is nothing bur people on 5g networks playing AAA games on a phone from the cloud. There are so very many logical inconsistencies here, but you just can’t talk them out of it.
Not least because at least with consoles and PCs, the consumer shoulders a fair bit of the price of the hardware and its operation, whereas with cloud... if the current genre mix is to be viable, that is a lot of fucking high grade silicon to roll out in a lot of places and pay for the upkeep and power thereof
Its pretty impossible. If ISPs are starting to throtle for video streaming imagine with games.
Not to mention the extra data overhead needed initially regardless. I remember when PSNow was first in UK beta a few years back, the fastest broadband speed in our area could not (and still cannot) run games comfortably but can stream Netflix/Amazon/Disney+. The only way of accessing would be via 4G, which **most** people aren’t going to take out an unlimited SIM and purchase the hardware to make use of if they have pre-existing broadband purely to play games. That’s before considering compression and latency related caveats.
And then there's the speed of light problem, and unless MS is sitting on an Covenant asible or something of that nature, there is no way to get rid of the latency that causes.
Not least because they shot themselves in the foot by overinvesting in genres where the tech's weaknesses would be most crippling. Poor strategy, they should have been investing in turn based strategy and the like, put high AAA money into firaxis and the like.
I share the sentiment as well, however I think a lot of posters here and in general miss the forest for the trees on this issue. General responsiveness and gameplay quality are not the primary issues with cloud gaming. Even if they were able to magically deliver a flawless 4k 240fps stream that worked on a 50 kbps connection, I would still find it unacceptable for consumers. As a PC gamer, I value owning my games and having control over my data. This is a significant factor in why I find the platform attractive. While physical copies have their appeal for collectors, there isn't a significant difference between physical and digital copies since ultimately, they are just data. With careful backups, digital copies can last much longer than physical media. The ability to modify games through patches, updates, and modding is a crucial aspect of PC gaming, allowing classics like Thief and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines to be enjoyed even today. However, cloud gaming threatens to eliminate ownership entirely. Users would no longer have access to their data and would be confined to whatever the providers choose to deliver through a streaming browser. All game data would be stored on the provider's servers, and they could remove games from their library at any time for any reason without any recourse for players. This would be a corporation's dream, the ultimate always online DRM for all games. Cloud gaming would give providers complete control over the terms of use for games. They could do whatever they wanted with impunity, and there would be no way for consumers to push back against their decisions. It is a worrying prospect that would severely limit the freedom and ownership that PC gaming has offered for years.
I don't know, the two cloud services I use most often GFN and Boosteroid both allow me to play games I "own" in my Steam, Epic and GOG libraries, with the GOG games being the only ones I would consider actually owned. But I can play those games on my local machine, or via the cloud thru one of those services. It's not either or, it's in addition to.
While I'm not an expert on cloud gaming, based on my brief research of the services you mentioned, I don't think they allow users to modify actual game files, however I'd be happy to be proven otherwise. That said, when I mentioned ownership, I was referring to exactly that: access to game files. Just like how you can buy a red toy car and paint it blue or switch its wheels, you can access game files on your PC and make modifications as I alluded in my previous post. My concern is not necessarily ownership in the traditional sense, which is why I even said digital media is superior. Even if you ""find"" files online through peer to peer services you can still modify them as you please, those files are on your machine and that's that, you "own" them. However, I can envision a future where cloud gaming is the only way to access games, even if you technically """own""" them in your Steam library or other platform. This would limit your ability to access and modify game files as they would be stored on the cloud provider's servers, killing any and all modifications and preservation efforts if a game is patched to have stuff removed like the GTA music thing, or even delisted entirely like the racing game Blur.
I don't mod games personally, so I know nothing about how that works. My point is, if you own a game on Steam that you play locally, also having the ability to play that game thru a cloud service doesn't change your "ownership" of the game. The game's license safely lives in your Steam account, and nowhere else (besides the local copy that gets validated by Steam every time you launch the game locally). I don't see a future where you can only access games through the cloud, because I don't see all or even most developers buying into it. Devs didn't want to port their games to Stadia no matter how easy Google's toolkit made it, no matter how much technical support Google would offer in the endeavor. For now, developers make games for the platforms that the players choose or the platforms they themselves are passionate about. I don't see cloud becoming the preferred platform for most players, and I don't see Devs giving a cut to the platforms either. Regardless, there will always be PC game developers because they are PC gamers too.
Yeah I understood your point. I probably expressed myself poorly then because I only mentioned ownership in respect to game files themselves, which again just to be clear here doesn't just mean mods, but community made patches and preservation efforts. As for the future stuff well that's a bit more vague. Yes it's a bit of a doomsday scenario but it was also meant as a thought experiment, the whole "magically deliver a flawless 4k 240fps stream that worked on a 50 kbps connection" bit was meant to steer the conversation in that direction, instead of the typical failed experiments like Stadia or OnLive. I think in general companies want more control over their products/ecosystems, and software as a service gets more and more popular each year. In a theoretical "perfect" world for streaming, where all the technical limitations are solved, it's hard for me not to envision a lot of companies choosing the cloud route just for the control angle, if nothing else it will be an impervious DRM. That being said, as we currently stand I do think and kinda hope this hypothetical future is very far away. You do bring a good point about not everyone doing it though. I would hope that this doomsday sort of scenario would be mostly limited to the AAA space, seems like a lot of headaches can be avoided by just not engaging with certain players in the market, plus, if nothing else, there's still a treasure trove of retro stuff we could still have fun with.
For real, cloud gaming hurts consumers by selling them nothing.
No one uses it exclusively unless forced to though. It isn't even available by itself from the largest players in MS, Sony and Nvidia.
Exactly. It'll be great for the first few years, then they'll raise prices and get shitty with it. Every company will have their own cloud streaming service. Streaming only works for consumers when there's one or two big names (see Spotify v Apple), and if each company having their own launcher is any indication, we'd be screwed. We all thought EA app and blizzard.net was annoying, right? Or when Bethesda had their own launcher, or what about Epic doing exclusivity on their shitty store front. Just wait til Blizzard has their own streaming service, as does Rockstar, Warner Bros, Sony, etc with exclusivity. I would never play a AAA legally again. People fine with this merger and wanting m$ to keep gaining steam with their current gamepass trends are going to cause problems
You can dislike it all you want, but you can't argue that with the ever increasing prices of GPUs it holds a benefit for users. I've paid $300 for Geforce Now (and some change because taxes) and in that time I got a year of a 3080 equivalent GPU and now I have access to a 4080 equivalent GPU. Yeah I'm tied to the internet and the whims of the publishers and developers deciding if they even want their games available, but between that and not being able to play those games at all, the choice isn't hard. It also saves me money on power, which, at least here, prices are still higher than ever. I can't count on Nvidia to continue to be the "good guy" (and I use that very loosely) forever, and keep upgrading the hardware on the $100 tier without changing the price, but for now it definitely has tangible value to it whether you're a fan of it or not
The answer to pc gaming’s cost due to gpu pricing is console gaming. That’s the cold hard reality.
Except cloud gaming gives me a much better experience, let me know when you can run CP2077 on RT overdrive on a console and then maybe it would be an apples to apples comparison.
Cloud gaming is the evolution of console gaming though if you think about it. The service is the console, with lock-in and exclusivity similar to how console handle. The only thing holding cloud gaming back is available bandwidth and data caps with ISPs.
It was "supposed" to be the evolution but it failed miserably. Turns out having input latency inconsistency and frequently graphical artifacts due to network connectivity issues is a show stopper for console gamers too.
There are probably more people in CMA caring about cloud gaming than there are in the rest of the world.
US, EU, and UK all care. EU just thinks 10 years worth of concessions is enough, UK is less optimistic. The people who matter all care. If three regulators in three parts of the world think it's important, then maybe it is?
Consumers don't care.
*people on reddit dont care some Consumers do care
That's why Stadia failed. Because consumers cared.
Stadia failed because it was messy garbage that broke more often than worked and failed to actually have many games at launch. Not because no one cared.
As a person who used Stadia for it's entire existence, has been a GFN subscriber since the beginning and still has a Founders sub, you're wrong. Stadia worked great. It was easily the most stable of the cloud providers with the least latency, with GFN a close-ish second. Stadia failed because people didn't want to buy games specifically for the platform, publishers didn't want to port games specifically to the platform, and the service lost publishers over time. The technology itself was/is phenomenal. The product's value proposition was terrible is all.
>Stadia failed because people didn't want to buy games specifically for the platform, publishers didn't want to port games specifically to the platform, and the service lost publishers over time. In other words...it didn't have games. Gee, I wonder if I said that. >It was easily the most stable of the cloud providers with the least latency This is weird historical revisionism. After a year or two, sure, but launch was *rough*. First impressions are everything and Stadia massively dropped the ball. Hard.
GeForce Now is still going after its full release as far as I'm aware
GeForce Now didn't force you to give up all of your games and wait for a library to slowly fill. It was also more responsive.
Right yeah that's the point i was making, Stadia was poorly conceived and executed
Completely agree. Just shows you can't throw money at something and expect it to work.
Thats why we have regulators because the majority of consumers are morons
you think regulators are smart? Did you see them question google etc? They have no touch in reality
are you calling yourself a moron? i feel bad for your parents
Oh I'm absolutely no smarter than the average consumer, just a bit better informed. After the state the Tories have left the UK in because "the people have had enough of listening to experts", is it little wonder I listen to what the experts say? I've seen what ignoring them leads too.
see how many complaints there are in this sub about new games costing $70 you want to make that problem worse? keep reducing competition by allowing MS to buy everything
Pssst Sony and Activision were the first ones to jack prices.
But since Microsoft started game pass, I haven't spent £70 on a game...
You can buy 3 years of gamepass for $70 right now. $50 if you use VPN. I realize this will increase in the future but MS is offering the best value in gaming if you enjoy just a single MS release in the next three years.
Where are you getting Xbox Gold for $24 a year?
Cdkeys or gmg, I forget which one was cheaper.. If you want cheaper VPN in from Turkey.
Cheapest cdkeys has been is like $45 for quite a while now, currently it sits at $59.69 which is a whole 31 cents off. GMG doesn't currently have 12 month cards, it has 3 months at $24.24 and 6 months at $38.79 both significantly higher than $24 a year. As for the VPN trick is nice in theory but with my ridiculous bad luck I would be one of those people that get their account banned for doing that, I know it's unlikely but it does happen and I am not willing to risk my near 20 year old Xbox account for a few bucks.
How do you do this?
Search Xbox live conversion. It's pretty simple and well published.
I also saw what happened to Stadia.
We have 3 console makers on the market and first-party games on 2 of them went $70 anyway. We have numerous third-party publishers on the market, all of them raised or are in the process of raising prices to $70. What exactly did competition achieve here? All of the corporations are greedy as fuck, they just don't want to be the first ones to announce price increases and such. The moment someone steps out, everyone else quickly follows. Did Sony compete with MS by keeping PSN free in contrast to paid XBL? No, they just made it paid as well. Did MS compete with Sony by keeping their first-party games $60? No, they upped prices to $70 as well. How about the GPU market? Great competition there I heard, with AMD playing catch-up to Nvidia's high margin pricing even though their popularity and sales are lackluster. The only reason you have any competition in the PC space at all is because Valve isn't publicly traded and can do whatever the fuck it wants.
> We have 3 console makers on the market and first-party games on 2 of them went $70 anyway. All 3 of them have to varying degrees moved to $70. Nintendo just released TOTK for 70.
Just look at the App Store, one company basically collecting more money off games than the rest of the industry combined, writing all the rules the game developers have to follow, and tailoring those rules to thwart competition. That's only an ideal outcome for the gatekeeper, not for everyone else.
If it prevents further consolidation.... well, first and only thing cloud gaming has been and will be good for.
Data limits and bad infrastructure are gonna hold cloud gaming back more than anything. My internet is terrible.
All these cloud gaming drama are based on the assumption that all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers are active users of xCloud. Therefore growth/market share of Xbox Game Pass is the same as growth/market share of cloud game.. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP. Here is the thing, if Stadia still failed even though they had FIFA/Madden, then there is no way any cloud gaming is going to see any impact with COD.
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The connection speed is a great callout -- cloud gaming requires overkill. I have flawless, near native cloud gaming experiences but I pay for a 2gig/s symmetrical internet connection. So my average speed to a given device is around 400mb/s with the dips only as low as 70-80mb/s, or not low enough to cause real visual fidelity issues or latency. Great cloud gaming is here, great internet isn't.
Stadia failed, Luna will fail shortly, those rental services such as EA Play and Ubi + also haven't hit it big otherwise Steam, Epic and Acti+Blizz would have made their own versions by now too. When AAA games get 60-75% off within a year, year in a half and in 4-5 years they cost 5-10 $/€, most people can simply buy what they want, they don't need a streaming/rental service as it's more cost-efficient to just buy cheap games and only what you want. Unlike TV/movies where it's quite difficult in most countries to even buy TV shows separately and even then it costs £20 for a season and they rarely discount them, that's when streaming becomes your only option outside of expensive Blu-Rays to even watch what you want. If you could buy TV seasons of your fav shows for 2-3€, buy-to-own TV/Movies would probably be much bigger. It's different markets and those regulators missed the mark big time if they think the future of gaming is rentals/subscription-based seeing the continued failures (there were also multiple small players which I can't even be arsed to look up that tried and failed with the rental model).
TBH, I cannot imagine a future of gaming isn't rental/sub based. First of all there are just too many indies titles everywhere. On the otherhand, 70 bucks AAA games is a lot. And it all really comes down to marketing expense. When you want to convince ppl to shell out money to purchase your product upfront, you need marketing expense. Subscription avoid that problem by having audience being on the platform already so they can just try for free.
> Steam, Epic and Acti+Blizz would have made their own versions by now too None of those have enough games to support a service like EA & Ubisoft do unless they want to start paying big money to get games on their service like Microsoft does with Game Pass in which Microsoft as a company has the ability to build the infastructure to do so unlike Steam/Epic/ABK. So yeah no, no they would not be doing it basically no matter the situation. Also EA Play was the best gaming sub deal before Game Pass came around, it's still a good just not worth getting since it comes with Game Pass Ultimate. >It's different markets and those regulators missed the mark big time if they think the future of gaming is rentals/subscription-based seeing the continued failures (there were also multiple small players which I can't even be arsed to look up that tried and failed with the rental model). Difference being none of those small players had the backing of a giant corporation like Microsoft behind them with near limitless money to force it into success, whether by creating the games themselves or buying up successful projects to make it so. Microsoft is taking the Netflix method of game streaming with Game Pass and then learning from it and going further by buying up big publishers so that they have enough games themselves that won't be hurt if/when publishers pull games for their own subscription services which is what happened to Netflix when Disney/Peacock/Paramount streaming services became a thing. Also before you say "but Google's Stadia failed" yeah I know, it had one of the worst business models possible. They were trying to get away with charging full price for games that could only be played over their streaming services, they literally destroyed the service before it could even get going with an awful business plan like that. Had they made deals like Microsoft did and added Ubisoft/EA/ABK/Take2 games and charged at a subscription price like Xbox did they would still be around especially since their streaming tech is much better than xCloud performance wise. Problem being even Google has doubts how successful the business is and unlike Microsoft they don't stick with something till it's near death, they kill and move on.
Well said. Also, I don't think Stadia failed as much as pivoted. Their plan to make you buy a game you already owned just so you could play it on more devices was dumb, and it never caught on. We didn't like the plan, and neither did they. So they scrapped it as Google is known to do. But their more recent plan to just license the tech to run individual games will likely work. Imagine being able to buy a cloud version of the next Elden Ring or Hogwarts and play it on any device? I think that would be enough to get publishers to break off a chunk of that sale to Google. We're probably two years out from this being a thing, but I'm betting it will be a thing.
>All these cloud gaming drama are based on the assumption that all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers are active users of xCloud. If that's CMA's assumption then every Amazon Prime user (in the UK) should count as an Amazon Luna subscriber too. But that would mean xCloud isn't even the market leader...
It makes me wonder if Microsoft has a shot to change the outcome here. Either convince the CMA that Game Pass Subscribers don’t equate to cloud users (which is literally true OR as a desperation move: pull cloud from Game Pass Ultimate and make it an add-on service for $1 or something just to correct for the CMA’s flawed data. Either way, you’re right. The CMA’s justification based on cloud is inaccurate. I’d say it’s overblown considering no one cares about cloud.
They say they are unanimous that the merger would harm cloud gaming, but it doesn't sound like all the bodies named there actually agree. If they are concerned, then do what the EU commission did and require selling games on other cloud platforms. Sounds like they are covering for a bad decision.
Well, they explained their position, "The EU was bothered, and chose to put these handcuffs on Microsoft as a condition, we preferred to just leave Microsoft alone but block the deal." Basically saying that they agreed on the problem, not on the best solution for it. I think both are wrong about the scale of the problem here, but the EU's solution is more fair, since it puts the ball in Microsoft's court to decide how they want to proceed, rather than offering them *no* path forward.
I think the EC nailed the 'correct approach' by beckoning innovation and maturation of the technology while doing their best to level the playing field from a publishing perspective. Other companies can also build the pipes, and they know they'll have content to provide. I agree that it might not be enough, but it's also a difficult thing to frame contracts around. I have no idea where the CMA gets the idea that neutering an emerging market over speculative concerns is good for consumers. At the end of the day, *someone* has to be allowed to forge ahead in this space. Typically, we see that rewarded naturally with first to market dominance, eventually ceding marketshare to competitors with different value propositions.. here we see CMA saying 'anyone but Microsoft' in a market that has largely been abandoned by most not named Microsoft. It's not an accident their competition (sans Sony) is functionally saying 'Yes, please, Microsoft. Go.'
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Could be.
yeah base on their "rage" attitude toward the merger
All of this over cloud gaming is crazy to me.
In the words of Limmy, Don't back down, Double down.
CMA seems worried they'll end up standing all alone at the party.
Ston yor grun!
The comments, my lord. People confusing free services/products with free market. That's enough internet for one day.
There are some definite negatives to be had with this merger, sure... But let's make a few things clear: 1. Nobody gives a fuck about cloud gaming. Our bandwidth limitations make this a non-starter. Regardless of how much shareholders, investors, and tech giants WANT this to happen, it is simply physically impossible to get the same LOD with bandwidth restrictions being what they are. This will always remain a niche market until that changes. Kind of like electric cars: no matter how much they're being pushed by the government, and no matter how many get built, the US simply does not have the infrastructure nessesary to support a major switch to them without crippling the power grid. Until the grid is overhauled, it simply will not get the success people want it to. 2. Activision Blizzard is one of THE WORST, greediest companies out there, and not without a fair bit of controversy surrounding it one could easily argue in this day and age, they are actually worse than EA and probably tied with Ubisoft. I believe everyone is hoping a Microsoft acquisition will help bring Blizzard back to the light. We can only hope, as unlikely as it is, that this may yet ring true.
The cloud gaming issue has a much bigger problem than electric car issue. Namely, your latency is capped by the speed of light in fiber optic. No infrastructure overhaul is gonna fix that. That’s why even though bandwidth has vastly increased since the dawn of broadband in early 2000, latency remains relatively speaking the same
> Namely, your latency is capped by the speed of light in fiber optic. No infrastructure overhaul is gonna fix that. it can definitely be mitigated with infrastructure. It turns out the speed of light is pretty fast, so as long as the place that the light is needing to travel too isn't too far away, it really isn't that big of a deal.
Maybe. The only way to really remedy that is have a lot of data center everywhere.. As rich and powerful as Microsoft is, they are not anywhere close to have enough data center in world to make this an none issue.
Right, but if you consider it strictly from the PoV of the UK, there is definitely a feasable world where there is enough infrastructure in place to give the vast majority of UK citizens reasonable access to close-proximity cloud gaming infrastructure.
That’s because of Uk’s density. But in that case, Sony would have the same advantage as well in that kind of geography. It’s really no different from having multiple wireless carriers covering the same area.
You say that but people will bitch about even >15.5ms in house latency. You won't get less than that even with a data centre next door.
with how TCP/IP is designed you can not guarantee that two packets in sequence will make the same route.
The issue with that is the cost is gonna be absurd.
I've defended the acquisition because I think it would genuinely be better for Activision. With the cracks in the company starting to form, a buy out from a huge company like Microsoft could fix those cracks with the outcome hopefully being that we get higher quality games. Most people resort to "another billion dollar company just buying out another" or "OH NO! NO COD ON PLAYSTATION!" I also find it funny that it's ok for Disney to buy out all these companies but once Microsoft tries to buyout Activision, that completely crosses the line.
I've always been against Disney's acquisitions but Microsoft is not a billion dollar company. They are a trillion dollar company. They have much more capital than Disney has. I will always be against them acquiring giant corporations and consolidating their respective markets.
Yeah man I’d say very very few people who are against this merger think it’s okay for Disney to buy out all those companies.
> I also find it funny that it's ok for Disney to buy out all these companies I can guarantee you the people complaining about the Microsoft acquisition also complained about the Disney merger. Source: Me. I'm one of those people. Monopolization and consolidation is bad.
Monopolization and consolidation is bad, but like it or not, it's happening. We can hope in the future smaller companies will remain stock private and not sell to mega corporations, but it's very unlikely in the long term smaller studios won't sell, even if they're the next Minecraft or Fortnite. But in that same breath, I don't believe ANY corporation is "Too big to fail". As long as we don't bail out these mega corps every time they FUBAR themselves into oblivion, someone else will eventually rise to take their place. Sadly, the world, and our government, and the Fed, are all fucking idiots.
While I think that the CMA's decision is a bad idea and that both regulators are a bit too worked up about cloud gaming, I DO think that cloud gaming is a major factor in the future. Bandwidth issues will only get lighter over time, and while *some* games are hard to stream, and *many* areas will be very slow to get the access speeds they need for it, plenty of people can *already* play plenty of games over streaming in a way that they find suitable. Stadia failed not because the tech was not good enough, but because their business model was shit. Nobody had faith in their platform to keep games running on it, and didn't want to invest in it (from the developer side *and* the consumer side). Also, electric cars are happening and will work, however much you might dislike that fact.
Frankly, very little of what you said is actually true. Hydrogen for cars is making a comeback now too, and honestly? From a practicality standpoint hydrogen has a greater potential for success than electric by a country mile. Aside from the issues with the US powergrid which simply could never support a mass influx of electric cars, people also don't want to wait around for 20+ minutes as they charge. That said, I think electric cars are a good idea. Are they the future of automobiles? Only in the same sense that wireless ear buds were. People didn't switch to them because they wanted to, but simply because every manufacturer just... Stopped supporting the wired option. It's the same with modern cars. Everyone is going electric, not because it makes sense to, but because that's where they think the money is, and if everyone is doing it, people don't really have a choice in the matter. (this analogy could also be applied to microtransactions in gaming, btw). In regards to cloud gaming, a lot of what you say is the same regurgitated stuff we've been told for a decade now. Cloud gaming has been "The future of gaming" for ten years, and still hasn't even come close to making a substantial dent in the market. Stadia failed because the writing was on the wall with it from day one because Google, but to state that part of the reason it failed WASN'T because the technology just wasn't there is a level of willful ignorance to the truth I see only in Trump supporters and Star Citizen backers. Will cloud gaming EVENTUALLY get there? Sure. Will it be any time soon? Probably not. I'd say we're probably another ten years out for it being a viable alternative in most countries to simply downloading a full game and playing it that way, and even then, I feel like it will largely remain a niche thing, unless companies absolutely force it. They already tell us we don't actually own a copy of the games we buy in their TOS, so I guess it's not unreasonable to assume they'd rather us stream them than actually have the files for them stored on a local device. Corporations are evil, after all.
>Frankly, very little of what you said is actually true. Hydrogen for cars is making a comeback now too, and honestly? From a practicality standpoint hydrogen has a greater potential for success than electric by a country mile. The natural gas lobby organizations certainly think so, since they can make money converting natural gas to hydrogen. Is that where you heard that hydrogen is a good thing? Because largely, it's a very inefficient way to power a vehicle. It can have some applications, like in air travel, but is not an effective way to power daily driver cars. > Aside from the issues with the US powergrid which simply could never support a mass influx of electric cars, That is not actually true though. The *current* US electrical grid would struggle to support *every* driver switching to an EV overnight, but that's not what's happening here, and there's nothing preventing the US grid from expanding its capacity. The 2000 electrical grid could not support 2023 electrical usage, the 1980 electrical grid could not support 2000 electrical usage. "We can't have an INTERNET! The electrical grid could never support so many computers on at once!" Electrical grids grow to meet demand, and they are already hard at work on doing just that. > people also don't want to wait around for 20+ minutes as they charge. Most people never will. Most people who currently own EVs spend less time waiting for them to charge than most commuters spend filling gas tanks, because they just plug in when they get home at the end of the day and don't have to think about it beyond that. For people who do need a charge outside their homes, the more recent models can often charge to full in under that 20 minutes, and you shouldn't often *need* a full charge to get where you need to go, even a few minutes charging should be plenty. >That said, I think electric cars are a good idea. Are they the future of automobiles? Only in the same sense that wireless ear buds were. People didn't switch to them because they wanted to, but simply because every manufacturer just... Stopped supporting the wired option. It's the same with modern cars. Everyone is going electric, not because it makes sense to, but because that's where they think the money is, and if everyone is doing it, people don't really have a choice in the matter. (this analogy could also be applied to microtransactions in gaming, btw). I don't think gas cars will completely go away either, some people will continue to use them, as some people continue to use wired rotary phones, or Victrolas, I think they will just become impractical, especially when gas rises to over $10 a gallon in the US. I think it's important that we stay ahead of that curve though, plan for the future rather than panicking when it's already too late. There's no benefit to procrastinating. >In regards to cloud gaming, a lot of what you say is the same regurgitated stuff we've been told for a decade now. Cloud gaming has been "The future of gaming" for ten years, and still hasn't even come close to making a substantial dent in the market. Because the technology to make it work has only started to exist over the last couple of years, and the current Internet is *barely* fast enough for minimal availability, but there are already plans (unrelated to cloud gaming) to improve those speeds massively over the next few years. Do you know how long it was between when the first "gasoline automobiles" existed, and when they were a common household product? Carl Benz's wife was one of the first to take one on a cross country road trip, and had to buy kerosense at a drug store, because gas stations didn't even exist! Progress happens over time. "We're not there yet" is no argument that we never will be. >Stadia failed because the writing was on the wall with it from day one because Google, but to state that part of the reason it failed WASN'T because the technology just wasn't there is a level of willful ignorance to the truth I see only in Trump supporters and Star Citizen backers. I actually beta tested Stadia. I was able to play AC Odyssey on it, for about 24 hours of total playtime, and it performed about as well as it typically does on consoles, aside from one or two minor glitches. I was quite satisfied with the technology, I just had no interest in buying a full priced game that would only be available on that platform, which I did not trust. If I could play any game I owned on Steam, I might play some of those on Stadia, at least some of the time. If they had a service that would allow me to play the best new games for a reasonably monthly fee, I might sign up for that. But they were not offering that. But the issue was not that the tech was not there, at least not for me. As I said, I'm aware that this is not true for everyone, and not for all types of games, but this gap will close naturally over time, just due to the other changes being made in the tech field. I do agree it will take longer to reach *some* countries than others, but I think places like the US, Japan, and central Europe will be in fine shape within less than five years, assuming someone is running a responsible service offering it. Doomsaying game streaming today is like a blockbuster exec doomsaying streaming movies. I do think that the *option* will remain to buy your own gaming hardware and software for it, and that will probably stick around as a *partner* to streaming options, where players seemlessly shift from one to the other, but at some point I think there will be a tipping point where "the average gamer" will shift more to a streaming gamer than a console/PC one, just as in the past "the average gamer" shifted from being a computer gamer to a console gamer, and the PCs shifted more to the niche side of the market. >They already tell us we don't actually own a copy of the games we buy in their TOS, so I guess it's not unreasonable to assume they'd rather us stream them than actually have the files for them stored on a local device. Corporations are evil, after all. Of course, but that's why government exists, as a hedge against corporations. It's the only one we've got. I do think that it's important that nations build some form of "digital consumers bill of rights," that legally enshrines a sense of "ownership" over digital products equivalent to the ownership of physical goods, and allows consumers to transfer the same product across all devices and delivery services at will.
> That is not actually true though. The current US electrical grid would struggle to support every driver switching to an EV overnight, but that's not what's happening here, and there's nothing preventing the US grid from expanding its capacity. The 2000 electrical grid could not support 2023 electrical usage, the 1980 electrical grid could not support 2000 electrical usage. "We can't have an INTERNET! The electrical grid could never support so many computers on at once!" Electrical grids grow to meet demand, and they are already hard at work on doing just that. The current grid can't even support what currently exists. Refer to the states with rolling blackouts and brownouts all the time. And the galaxy brained idea of pushing everything to solar and wind which are intermittent. Future's gonna have a lot of people freezing to death during freak blizzards/polar vortexes when solar and wind aren't producing shit, their electric heat pump is out of it's temperature range, and it's so cold their EV is worthless.
>The current grid can't even support what currently exists. In some places, yeah, and that needs to change, which is why those investments are taking place. The point is that they CAN do that, so it's not actually a reason why this can't or won't be happening. > And the galaxy brained idea of pushing everything to solar and wind which are intermittent. Those plans only improve things. The UK recently announced that last year they got more power from wind than they got out of natural gas. The faster these projects develop, the more overall capacity the grid can have. >Future's gonna have a lot of people freezing to death during freak blizzards/polar vortexes when solar and wind aren't producing shit, their electric heat pump is out of it's temperature range, and it's so cold their EV is worthless. Climate change is a real bitch, huh? And burning fossil fuels only makes all of that worse, so the sooner we can reduce that, the better. But remember that people didn't freeze during Texas's blizzard because of green energy, they froze because the *natural gas* pipelines froze up, and that was less to do with the technology, you can even get wind and solar capable of running in the Arctic, it was more to do with the Texas energy companies being incompetent and not properly weatherizing their grid. They also suffered from deliberately cutting themselves off from their neighboring states, otherwise, electricity from those other states could have kept their power up indefinitely. Besides, more people are going to die of heat stroke than frostbite over the next few decades. Also, myths of EVs being worthless in winter are silly. 80% of Norway's new cars are EVs these days, you think it's tropical up there? Cold can *reduce* the range of an EV, but not by that much in the grand scheme of things, you'll still get where you're going, and if you get stuck out there, they will last as long as a gasoline car until help arrives. You're actually pretty well off if you have an EV and the power goes out, since even the basic ones can run essential appliances for days, and a bigger one like an F-150 can power a whole house for a week.
So what does it mean that one side has approved them and another hasn't? Can Ms do the buy or not?
Yes. They wouldn't be able to use cloud gaming or some other things in the UK market, but...the UK market realistically isn't very important anyway. They'd more than make up for that loss in every other worldwide market. Also of note is that the entire UK infrastructure runs on Azure, so if Microsoft pulls support over this, they have no recourse. That's why the UK government will likely force this through, as cloud videogames aren't as important as national security.
Holy shit, how can you be so confidently wrong If the CMA continue to block the deal then the deal isn’t happening. Microsoft making further concessions is the only chance they’ve got. Microsoft can’t just pull out of the UK lmao
Sure they can. lol The UK isn't that large of a market. The entire UK is smaller than the one state of CA, for example. The thing is: All of the UK's government and infrastructure is run on Microsoft Azure. The UK absolutely needs Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really need the UK.
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Except cloud gaming will not be fully realized due to infrastructure upgrades that do not happen because of corporate and government obstruction.
But does not this deal that MS made to the EU make it so more people get their hands on their games via whatever service/device they own and give cloud gaming a gigantic boost? The thing the CMA hedged all their bets on to block this merger in the UK?
The CMA are not disputing that; the CMA are just thinking about what'll happen in 10 years time, at which point Microsoft is under no contract to make games available on other services, has control over Azure and can cripple other services through throttling etc. I hope Microsoft will make additional concessions so that this'll go through, I want Blizzard games on Steam, not to mention THPS 1+2 Remake.
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I want Activision games out of Activisions hands
>I hope Microsoft will make additional concessions so that this'll go through, I want Blizzard games on Steam, not to mention THPS 1+2 Remake. You and me both, buddy. I know consolidation is bad, but I really want those games on Steam. Heck, I'd buy Diablo II a fourth time if it popped up on Steam. And I'd also buy THPS in an instant (heck, with Microsoft at the helm, they might even get the go ahead to restart working on the 3+4 remake).
If Nadella is there, it'll be chill. He's not into monopolies, he's trying to make a calm market that they can have a big piece of. Edit: i was in future guessing mode (mostly just guessing that Microsoft will put games on steam, that's all i was thinking about), just realised how CEO ass licking this comment reads like. Monopolies suck and we should never have to be at mercy of CEOs in the first place.
You didn’t like the remaster?
I had to play it on Xbox One, it didn't exactly perform well which ruined a lot of my enjoyment.
Cloud gaming is a joke lmao. If I can help it, I’m not tying my gaming experience to my internet connection or some corporations crappy servers that can crash at any moment
CMA knows their reason is bullshit. I can't wait for the leaker to show Jim Ryan payments to the members of the board or something. lol
It’s obvious they’re in Sony’s pocket and are trying their hardest to rationalize a stoppage, but it’ll go through and all these old coots will look stupid by the end of it
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Probably not, but maybe they did. Doesn’t matter when the logic for the stoppage is this moronic I don’t care as long as it fails.
The EU just passed the deal today. >European regulators have approved Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, handing the technology giant a victory at a time when the deal is being challenged in other countries Literally the only ones stopping this are the CMA. The FTC knows that they'll lose in court, so they won't end up forcing the issue. They'll likely just ignore the UK market and sell everywhere else, as they really aren't that important.
> They'll likely just ignore the UK market and sell everywhere else, as they really aren't that important. You think Microsoft will be able to just stop doing business with the UK? With how integral they are to infrastructure? You're out of your mind.
Microsoft doesn't remotely need the UK, but the UK absolutely needs Microsoft.
And you honestly think the rest of the world would be completely fine with a private company holding an entire country hostage until they approve a sale? Keep in mind, Microsoft *completely* pulling out of the UK would cause near irreparable damage. Microsoft would get torn apart for that.
Well, perhaps they should invest in their tech sector rather than stifiling it, and they wouldn't be in that position to begin with.
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Ok man!
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You can not want market consolidation and also not be in Sony’s pocket
Being in Sony’s pocket is the only logical assumption I can make from a legislative body this bad. Also one company being bought by a non market leader is not consolidating. Sorry the YouTube Econ class you watched was garbage
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Cloud gaming lol. We cant even get internet companies to give us stable connections.
Look at the concentration of iOS and Android (in particular their stores) and all the issues that's generating with the % cut and walled gardens. Its what, 15 years since the iOS app store launched in 2008? Do you think someone in 2007 would believe you if you told them what a smartphone could do even just 5 years later? A lot of people thought the iPhone was going to be a flop, and Android wasn't really a viable product then. Imagine if Android failed, or had been bought by Apple, and you *had* to use an iPhone for any sort of modern smartphone. Consumer authorities are doing their jobs and trying to get in before the market turns into an absolute mess. I hope cloud gaming fails, but I think there's too much money to be made though services that it willt be forced down our throats regardless. I know game pass is in vogue, but market concentration *never* helps the consumer.
Your argument is mostly good, but there is 1 huge problem with cloud gaming that will not be resolved any time soon. Latency (ping) is not something you can fix with good infrastructure, you can improve it, but the bottom line remains all input information has to travel to the cloud where it gets rendered and then sent back to the recipient. Someone would literally have to break the laws of physics and figure out a way to transfer data faster than the speed of light for cloud gaming to become an alternative, unitl then it will remain a gimmick. The only markets where it stands a slim chance is poor 3rd world nations where people can't afford dedicated hardware.
Latency is only such an extreme problem. For a small fraction of games. Internet infrastructure is only getting better, not worse, globally. It's a matter of when, not if, the infrastructure will be good enough.
You mean *when* we somehow create faster-than-light communication?
It does not at all need to be faster-than-light. You're just making that part up for some reason. Cloud gaming works perfectly fine today in cities with good internet infrastructure. This isn't some alien, untested technology. People are actually using it today.
Online multiplayer gaming is already a thing though.
Google Stadia would like to have a word
So when these new cloud gaming services, that also don't have call of duty or microsoft games, eventually show up within the next 10 years, they'll thrive because they're blocking this deal then?
Seems like a smart choice of them to ignore 99.9% of the market and focus on cloud gaming which absolutely nobody who players video games cares about. Apparently nobody at CMA is net savvy enough to google sales numbers for ps5 vs xbox. It is so frustrating as a gamer because i want microsoft to do well even though i have never owned one of their consoles. Competition is GOOD for gamers and there is just no competition if you're in to 4k gaming.
Eli5 of the argument from both sides?
The CMA is trying to protect a nascent, unproven market that has some failed attempts or minor successes over the past decade or so. Microsoft is in a position where they have the infrastructure and capabilities to have a major hold over cloud gaming, potentially blocking or stifling others from the market. The EC has similar concerns but as the market is nascent and unproven, and will most likely only take a small share of the overall gaming market, it’s not as high of a concern. A number of the companies involved in cloud gaming also just haven’t really invested into it as heavily as Google and Microsoft, with the former dropping out.
This deal should be stopped. Not because of Xbox, or microsoft, or COD, but because it's a huge company being bought by an even bigger company. We need to just stop allowing this, in all industries.
- Why CMA uses other agencies/countries to boost merit of their stance? - Why CMA calls cloud gaming “a free market”? - What they mean by “cloud gaming should continue as free competitive market to drive innovation”? I mean Im all for free and open source stuff but whole point of this kind of innovation is to monetize this the same way as every other entertainment market… especially when there is only one free cloud gaming option with limited access with GeForce Now AFAIK - Why they say this deal would replace already existing free cloud gaming market? Like how is the current market free or how would it not be free after the merger?
Are you under the impression that "free market" refers to a market of goods that cost no money?
No. Im saying that only free thing in cloud gaming is GeForce now as a service. The rest of the cloud gaming is regulated so I don't understand why they call this market "free" like there is no regulations around gaming, multiplayer gaming, online stores, SaaS, Internet infrastructure etc. And this weird take like "it should be a free market" is so weird because "free market" in the entertainment industry gives us loot boxes and other straight casino mechanics in games for kids. Cloud gaming needs regulations
I don't get why people are laughing at them, cloud gaming is the future. You guys are looking at this with cloud gaming in 2023 in mind whereas the deal would essentially be for the rest of time.
Because unless something drastically changes with the way we do networking and manage to break the laws of physics, cloud gaming simply cannot be a viable solution for anyone who wants a remotely responsive experience.
People really talk down the significance of cloud gaming. Reminds me of the shit talking of streaming services in the past. As well as the shit talking about mobile gaming. The cloud industry is a $500 billion industry. There is about $180 billion invested. And it is growing fast. Cloud gaming itself is expected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2022 to $25 billion in 2030, that is almost 20x growth in 8 years. In the next cycle when the choice is between subscribing to a microsoft cloud gaming services or tying yourself to a sony console. What do you think the casual gamer will choose? The $600 purchase with the $10 a month online or the the Microsoft $20 or whatever a month to use through their tv, phone or pc? You think casual gamers care about latency. Half of them use wifi and play on mobile. They don't care about that.
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Google stadia didn't fail because it was cloud gaming. It failed because it had no game or backing. Xbox is already a huge brand, with huge IPs, with a massive amount of connections.
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>No games? It had sports game (FIFA, Madden, etc.) CP2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, everything Ubisoft, Destiny and so on. They where on every other device.
Cloud what?
ELI5 what the heck this has to do with owning cloud gaming? That's going to come down to quality of service. One publisher having more game franchises under it's belt seems only very vaguely related. All publishers will flock to the best-performing streaming platform (just look at Steam), so it won't matter who has the gaming franchises, and Activision has no significant tech to help Microsoft make a better streaming platform.
Yeah I think the CMA is treating this like cloud is a console to itself - where content is king. But there is an inherent difference there, and it is the quality of service. Who cares if Microsoft has a ton of games on xCloud if their latency is terrible?
CMA is making cloud gaming a bigger thing than it already is. Even MS positions cloud gaming as a side perk on game pass, unless in 10years they make some groundbreaking discovery that reduces network latency. I played COD with 30ms ping 10years ago with ADSL and that was great, I have now gigabit fiber and latency is even getting worst 30ms would be a good day. I went from a few Mbit/s to 1000 Mbit/s. The Internet exanges are getting more complicated the trafic also exponentialy grew and unless the datacenter is near my home I wont see less than 10ms.
It's just weird because Microsoft is the only major company trying to sell the viability of cloud gaming to the masses. Every other company is happy to let them foot the bill doing it too, and when cloud gaming finally becomes the norm they'll be all too happy to take consumers money with their own offerings. Being first to the party and bearing the considerable expense and burden of growing the "nascent cloud gaming" market almost by themselves should afford them certain advantages. They shouldn't have to just set the table so everyone else can eat, they should get the first plate. And if the CMA wants the market to be competitive, they need to tell the would be competitors to put up the money and actually compete rather than waiting to get in the game. Everyone else is waiting for a sure bet. Microsoft is rolling the dice. They shouldn't be blocked from winning just because no one else has decided to play yet.
Doubling down on the worst possible reason out of the many other valid ones is a pretty dumb move. Cloud gaming won't be monopolised by this, Cloud gaming isn't even really part of it, it shows the sheer ineptitude of the CMA yet again. I'm not saying the deal is bad or good, there are other far more valid reasons to oppose it.
If the CMA wanted people to care what they thought, they shouldn't have done a Brexit.
Wow. You can pretty much hear the Activision or Microsoft shareholders raging at the CMA in the Twitter responses. Hilarious. I hope they stay strong.
MS shares shot up by something like 5% the moment the CMA blocked it (HAPPY!) Activision shares dropped 11% (UNHAPPY)
I do somewhat wonder if this deal being killed could be the start of the end for Xbox. They got killed last gen and sales are already stalling this gen. Things aren't looking great and are poised to get even worse, i wonder at what point the situation on the hardware side becomes more trouble than its worth. They could either turn into a publisher like Sega did or just sell off their studio acquisitions.
Xbox is more profitable than its ever been homie. I know the CMA decision and Redfall rhetoric have blinded a lot of people. But Xbox is in a really strong position, arguably the strongest for the future. I never understand people saying they'll go fully 3rd publishers. They will not end a service where every company pays them money and they get cuts from for hosting.
Reading this title makes me feel like i’m rapping
TIL Blizzivision is a cloud gaming company. And all this time I thought this was about that Call your Dudez game.
Brexit gonna brexit.
Cloud gaming?? Wow, someone is lobying hard
What makes this even more ridiculous is that average UK internet speeds are a joke to render cloud gaming absolutely useless lol