Take-Two CEO: Game Streaming’s Latency Problems Will Be Over in a Few Years

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While the majority of gamers would prefer to stick with local copies, an increasing number of publishers have seemingly made up their minds already on streaming being the future standard. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, for one, thinks the transition will occur “in one to three years," with large-scale companies rapidly developing their infrastructure and numbers of hyperscale data centers around the world, which will help limit latency issues.

Zelnick's comments come a few months after Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested that streaming games will completely replace consoles after one more generation. Guillemot suggested that changeover would cause a revolution in the gaming market, which will explode in size and accessibility thanks to cheap, streaming-capable boxes delivering big-budget hits. Zelnick agreed that streaming will increase the size of the high-end, big-budget gaming market—because "you don't need to buy a box in order to play our games."
 
It won't, because frankly if the FCC and shitpie get their way no one could afford the bandwidth needed to consistently do this, on top of that who said we were willing to always be online, because I'm pretty sure a single player game doesn't need it.
 
1Nocturnal101 said:
It won't, because frankly if the FCC and shitpie get their way no one could afford the bandwidth needed to consistently do this, on top of that who said we were willing to always be online, because I'm pretty sure a single player game doesn't need it.
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It won't cause latency can only be fixed by moving the server close to you. Places like New York City and San Francisco won't have this problem, but the people who don't live near a big city will have problems. The best solution to fix latency is to just have the computer doing it right in your home, preferably on your TV or monitor. Latency problem solved.

Also, who wants to pay a monthly fee to play games through a stream?
 
The bandwidth will be the killer. Unless they make deals with ISPs to not charge you for it.
 
Unfortunately, isp's all seem to have ceos of the same calibre as Take-Two's; it may not be such a good idea to depend on them to provide that quality connection without some "internet as a service" bs.
 
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leathco016 said:
Bandwidth isn't the only issue. Wide swaths of the United States have no access to true broadband, heck many areas top out at 4G service, and many don't even have that.
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That's fly-over country. We all know the entertainment industry doesn't care about (and indeed, hates) the "deplorables" who live there. You only have to watch an awards show to see proof of that.
 
MMitch said:
BW isn't latency... 1GB/s may have high latency while 5MB/s may have low latency....
Unless they plan to wire optical to every home I don't see how this can be implemented ?

And yes, you also need BW, I merely stated that high BW isn't the solution.
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I live in the second biggest city in Bulgaria. Right now I am literally kicking the optic fibre cable with my feet. Every day I wonder if the dog won't fuck it up. So yeah...optic fibre is the answer.
 
Denjoy said:
It's the ultimate wet dream. Zero piracy and can milk you with a subscription.
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Guess I'll just keep replaying all my old playstation, 3DS/DS, Wii, Xbox and computer games. I have so many it would take years to play though them all again.
Combined with rewatching my DVD collection, it should be enough to last me till retirement. :eek:

By then, I'll probably be to old to play most the games, and I won't remember most the movies any more, so I can just watch them all again :p
 
Part of me hopes the industry goes down this tunnel, so that everytime a big DDoS storm hits part of the Internet, gaming (and streaming) goes completely to hell and everyone has to get off their butts and, I don't know, play with the damn dog or something.
 
They will AI out latency spikes (within reason), you will see.
Also ISPs will make sure latency is acceptable only after the checks from everyone cleared.
Get ready for the 'gaming' package add on for your connection... Only 9.99 extra first year. The money from this 'service' will be used to create the necessary updates so that everybody else's connection who didn't pay will get increased lantency of 500ms at least.
 
If the input data goes outside the room I'm in, then latency will never be acceptable. They'll try shit, they'll end up with a "buffer box" and then finally they'll come full circle and make it do so many tasks it'll just be a "console".
 
MV75 said:
If the input data goes outside the room I'm in, then latency will never be acceptable. They'll try shit, they'll end up with a "buffer box" and then finally they'll come full circle and make it do so many tasks it'll just be a "console".
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How can it not go outside? Well i guess preloaded possibility and outcome something like that? Im thinking input will go outside, but they will be constantly predicting your input, and use those predictions id latency spikes.. that should buy you sometime while things stabilize.. buy i am thinking this would be something to buy some 10- 50 ms something like that.
It is said in Japan the switch has some streaming titles that otherwise the console could not run, and they seem to work well apparently. So like it or not this crap is coming.
 
ianken said:
Einstein and the speed of light says GTFO.
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Let's assume a bad case, you live around San Diego and the servers are located on Long Island:
Distance ~4'000 Km
Speed of light in fiber optics: around 70% light speed so ~210'000 Km/s

(4000 / 210000) = ~19ms one way pure transfer time

Obviously there's some more latency along the way inside repeaters, routers etc. so we might be looking at around 50-80ms round trip time for a pretty bad case actually, if this wants to take off the distance to the nearest data center might be less than 1'000 Km cutting the round trip down to maybe 15-25ms.
Also, it doesn't really matter if you got fiber or copper, both operate on around 70% c currently, although there are researchers working on better fiber optics.

You might not be able to go full on pro gamer on Fortnite but it will be playable, especially on games that aren't as twitchy as shooters or similar.
Also, sparsely populated areas will get the shaft of course.
 
Why do I get the feeling that there is an nvidia server salesman in the background who’s been whispering this into his ear about how great it will be. But as someone pointed out above, we’ve yet to overcome the limitations of the speed of light.
 
zehoo said:
Why do I get the feeling that there is an nvidia server salesman in the background who’s been whispering this into his ear about how great it will be. But as someone pointed out above, we’ve yet to overcome the limitations of the speed of light.
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Not just that. If we only had to contend with the speed of light (or rather more like 70% of it which is about the propagation speed in single mode fiber) it could perhaps be doable. You'd still need stuff distributed all over, but it wouldn't take that many data centers around the globe to make it reasonable for most folks. Thing is, that isn't the only problem. Latency creeps in all over with stuff like this. One culprit many don't think about is the gear in your house. If you have cable or DSL you are probably getting 8-10ms right there on the first hop. Reason is there's some time overhead in encoding and decoding the broadband signal. So there's much more latency than the distance of the hop would indicate. Fiber to the home solves this (usually, not saying providers never screw it up) but how many people actually have that? Then there's just all the routers inbetween. They don't add a lot of latency, less than a ms usually, but each one does add a bit and there can be a lot. You can just through 4 routers before you ever leave your ISP easy. Indirect paths are another problem. Fiber doesn't flow over the shortest route, it goes where it was convenient to lay, often on existing right-of-ways like railroads. The distance a signal travels is usually much rather than the direct distance between two locations.

Then you get to how you are going to handle the streaming itself. If you want it to be robust, able to deal with packet loss and jitter which will happen, you have to buffer the stream. Each frame you buffer adds quite a bit of latency, At 60fps a frame is 16.7ms. So even a fairly short buffer of, say, 4 frames is going to add just under 70ms of latency. If you don't buffer things you can bring the latency down, but it will be at the cost of errors. You are going to drop packets, you are going to have things that get delivered a bit slow, and if you don't have a buffer to deal with that, you will just glitch. This is a problem coming and going too. While most of the buffering needs to be done on the client system, you probably need to buffer on the server too at least one frame. You really can't have it where it has to do an immediate transmit, no hold off.

So you start adding all that up and maybe you say, "Well it isn't so bad." You figure it is in a close data center and can get like 20-30ms round trip, you have a short buffer on the client and server and add only another 50ms there not a big deal... Except that is only the latency getting it to the end user. Now there's the latency of any equipment they have. We all know about all the threads on input lag of displays and so on. Well guess what? None of that went away. So if they have a display that has 50ms of input lag, you add that on top of the 70ms you are already getting. Same deal if the input devices have input lag, have to add that in. Now of course that can be brought down, people can get low latency hardware. But are the kind of users that are going to put up with the quality issues of game streaming the kind of people likely to go and get a low latency display? Probably not, those kind of people probably want the game run locally because it is even lower latency.

It all starts stacking up and can get to be pretty big numbers, and thus pretty obnoxious and noticeable. That is on top of quality issues, of course. Now maybe consumers will decide they don't care, but I'm doubtful. The kind of people who this might appeal to are the kind of people who are likely to have cheap Internet, cheap monitors/TVs and thus who will probably not have a good experience with the streaming. It'll be high latency and not great quality. The people with good lines and low latency gear are probably willing to spend the money to have a computer and/or console in the house to get a better experience.
 
Heavens said:
Let's assume a bad case, you live around San Diego and the servers are located on Long Island
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Someone in San Diego would play on a California server, not a Long Island one.
That's the "numbers of hyperscale data centers around the world" part of the build out.
Streaming is already done this way, and has been for a while:
"A content distribution network—also known as a content delivery network—is a large, geographically distributed network of specialized servers that accelerate the delivery of web content and rich media to internet-connected devices. The world's largest content distribution network, owned and operated by Akamai, spans more than 216,000 servers in over 120 countries and within more than 1,500 networks around the world." -- https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/content-distribution-network.jsp​
 
B00nie said:
Quantum entanglement works instantly, perhaps they plan to use a quantum internet for games :D
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Unknown to most people.. quantum entanglement is still limited by the speed of light. The only thing a quantum entangled pair would do is remove any(most) transmission risk from point a to point b.
 
Hell, I can't even stream Netflix or other services without it buffering! This is at 1080 (I don't know what it streams in at - Netflix has multiple streams and will change as the network changes).
I'm looking to have the service I have. I live on the edge of the sticks. It's probably not profitable for the cable/phone companies to spend too much money in this area. So, this guy is full of it.
 
And marketing wins out again over physics/science/fact! Apple must be involved in this somehow. That is the only marketing department I know of who would be balsy enough to take this on.
 
What theyre after is higher game costs/bigger subscription fees. It's just not gonna be popular end of story
 
Is take two going to come to the middle of the pacific ocean to my house and upgrade a 20 year old conklin DSLAM bin to do this, in a few years?
 
Nafensoriel said:
Unknown to most people.. quantum entanglement is still limited by the speed of light. The only thing a quantum entangled pair would do is remove any(most) transmission risk from point a to point b.
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Lol no it's not. Quantum entanglement works instantly, literally. It works beyond the speed of light and thats why scientists are baffled by it.
 
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