Google GDC 2019 Gaming Announcement

When my ISP catches up to the year 1999 I'll get excited about streaming gaming.
 
I think anyone who thinks these services is about replacing console and PC gaming are fools. Especially if they are the ones trying to launch the services.

That being said, while I believe the first round of this stuff was full of people who thought they could bring the TCO of pc gaming down and replace PC and consoles in one go, I think this time around they have really thought about it, and this is about harnessing potential growth in the gaming market.

If you look at the under 24 crowd, they do NOT watch a lot of video/TV. They DO play a lot of games and watch a lot of game streams though. When they have kids, that trend will likely continue. So at the base level they see potential growth in this sector over time anyway. In addition to that, you have escalating prices for PC gaming equipment. You have escalating game console prices. And you have a shit ton of people where their discretionary income goes to bandwidth and a cell phone.

So where will it pick up customers? People without a lot of money who want to play with fancy graphics. They aren't handing over their cash now, and could be.

For china and other asian markets, this is potentially HUGE. They have lots of people, they have less disposable income, they have cheaper faster internet than a lot of the world, and they have a huge piracy and cheating problem for the gamer population they already have.

That's huge for the dev and publisher side. You can enter China without putting something that is accessible to crackers out there. Cheats can't be installed. The price cna be low. And you can do new massive scale things you do before because your network load is more uniform and predictable across titles. It's controller input one way and a frame buffer the other way.

For the rest of us, we buy in when there is something compellingly different out there that can only work on such an infrastructure.

Some of the gripes are about not owning stuff. But the majority of games these days you paid full price for get microtransactions tossed at you constantly, and the are gone when the server shuts down. You don't own them anyway. The rest of the gripes are "this will suck". Those people will change their tune if it shows up and it doesn't suck. Half the problem is fixed by showing up and being decent.

Put a fun experience out at a compelling price point and people will show up.

Put out a platform that isolates you from piracy and shitheads ruining your gaming community and devs will show up.

Me? I'll judge the product when there's a product. So far all this stuff is bullshit press releases.
 
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