On Game Streaming Services: Past & Present
A potentially disruptive technology is making the rounds in the gaming world these days and it goes by the name of ‘Game Streaming’. Let’s take a look at the current landscape along with its issues and then expand on the possibilities of the next generation in a future story.
These days, when you hear the phrase ‘game streaming’ one’s mind instantly jumps to one of two things. An individual creator who entertains tens of thousands of viewers at a time whilst live-streaming his gaming sessions (and maybe earning lots of money doing it) OR, secondly, a service that enables its users to play certain games -usually from a limited collection- on their PCs, Laptops, Game Consoles or Mobile devices, regardless of the performance capabilities of said devices. This entire article is about the latter.
So how do they do it? All the heavy lifting, the computing, is mostly done on servers in the Cloud and then streamed back to the user’s device via the internet. This means that your GSSP (Game Streaming Service Provider) takes upon itself the financial costs involved with acquiring the hardware needed to run the games, offering its users access to these products via a different payment plan, usually a Subscription. Usually GSSPs also establish relationships with existing game publishers in order to build an attractive game library for its potential subscribers.
If we do a quick, back of the envelope calculation based on the current gaming experience, considering that an existing owner of a PlayStation4 system also owns 9.56 games², we find out that existing PS4 users have spent around $970, on average, over the last 6 years since the console was launched. $459 , or 47%, of this sum is paid upfront, representing the launch price of the console plus one game.
Recent years have seen the emergence of multiple efforts regarding economically viable game streaming service but all have struggled to gain real traction with users, for various reasons.
NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW is a game streaming service, launched to a limited number of players in 2018, that requires its users to buy the games at full price and pay a fee per every minute played. Sony launched their PlayStation Now streaming service in July 2014, after a series of acquisitions in the cloud gaming space, most notably Gaikai in 2012 for $380 million and later OnLive. PS Now enables subscribers to play any of the 600+ games in its library of PS2, PS3 and PS4 products for a cost of $99,99/year.
Other, smaller services are currently in operation -e.g. LiquidSky, Parsec or Shadow- but their adoption rate is negligible at this point, PS Now being the market-leading product in the space by far and wide.
Problems, we have them. Reading the above you might ask yourself ‘All of this sounds great, why aren’t these services more popular by now?’ This is not without reason.
Quality-wise, current streaming services are plagued by latency, specifically Input lag. When you stream a movie on Netflix, the information only goes one way: from their servers to your device. As a bonus, since movie watching is a linear and non-interactive experience, this data can be buffered. With game streaming, the information has to travel from the user to the server and back again every time a button is pressed.
All games have a certain amount of input lag even when they run locally, but streaming adds a variable amount of lag on top of that, depending on how many times the data from your inputs has to bounce between different data centers until it reaches the one that renders your game.
Another issue relating to the quality of the experience in the process of streaming a game is the quality of the picture itself, usually due to slow internet connections. While most of the top games released in the past 2 years easily run at a 4k resolution at 30FPS, the quality you can expect from GeForce NOW is 1080p between 30–60FPS (depending on the game) and PS Now’s is at half that, with a resolution of just 720p at 30FPS.
Internet connection speed. While internet speeds everywhere have greatly improved over the past 5 years as new infrastructure is laid in place, the mean download speed at planetary level is still just 9.1 Mbps. GeForce NOW requires a minimum speed of 50 Mbps for games that run on a 1080p resolution at 60FPS and 10Mbps for 720p at 30FPS, with PlayStation Now matching that second requirement. The top 64 countries in the World have mean connection speeds above 10 Mbps while Singapore is the only country that clocks higher than 50 Mbps.
In comparison, Netflix requires a minimum internet connection speed of 5 Mbps for a smooth 1080p streaming experience.
Availability. The existing companies all seem wary and risk averse as they struggle to find a balance between the quality of the experience and investment cost of building new data centers in an effort to reduce delays in the system as much as possible. PlayStation Now is available in just 19 countries³ -16 of which are European- while GeForce NOW is in a limited, BETA stage release since it launched in May 2017 limiting public access via a long waiting list. NVIDIA’s CEO stated at the time that the technology is ‘still years away from really becoming a major gaming service’.
Accessibility. Both Sony and NVIDIA have chosen to severely limit the variety of devices on which you can stream a game from their libraries, offering just the PC as an option to their own hardware and cutting out the competition. PS Now titles can be streamed on either a PS4 console or a PC/Laptop while GeForce NOW allows you to play from either a PC or on their proprietary hardware, the NVIDIA Shield.
Library size. Another essential aspect in deciding between streaming services, be they for streaming music, TV shows or games, is the variety and quality of the content to which you get access once you fork over you money and become a member. While the selection offered by PlayStation Now looks attractive at first glance, once you dig into it you realize that most of the products are old titles and games from publishers like EA, Activision and Ubisoft are not on the list. GeForce NOW falls short on both quality and variety with its limited 80-game library.
¹ I consider Social Media feeds to be ‘streams’ as well but they act more towards enabling human interactions and less so towards offering entertainment value; even though some of them are mighty entertaining :)
²Data about the number of console or games sales on Microsoft’s XBOX has proven to be impossible to obtain. Steam Store ownership numbers are less relevant since Steam is a marketplace business model, driven mainly by aggressive sales and the quality of the data suffers the big number of Bot accounts.
³PS Now is available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.
