all of this is just making me wish we could play and make smaller games instead of trying to shoehorn enormous experiences into smaller devices
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Hard to know but it looks bad
Video streaming equals 0,3% of global worldwide CO2 emissions from data centers (according to some BBC article) + 0,X% from users
Youtube only consumes 0.4gb / hour by default, Netflix HD 3gb / hour. 20gb/hour for video game streaming is much bigger. The big advantage VG streaming has over video streaming is the lower storage cost, but I don’t know how much that matters
I don’t doubt VG streaming will becole ubiquitous at one point, in the long term all the flaws compared to high end PCs / consoles (except sustainability) will be erased and the advantages will be being to play any game on anything + not having to install games. These are enough reasons for a paradigm change
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I would assume it’s environmentally similar to consoles and maybe more efficient; the increase in data center energy usage and buildout must be compared to people owning and using consoles and PCs themselves, and if streaming ends up with more efficient machine use due to sharing in down times than you’re comparing the extra power of a beefier machine against the idle time an already-built machine spends.
If it costs less because it’s more efficient, it’s very likely it’s more energy and materials efficient too.
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I don’t think this necessarily applies to single player games since they require 0 bandwith, but yeah, fair point. This is definitely true for MP games.
It turns out that games were bad all along
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the worst part about all of this is possibly the idea that Ernest Cline is right
whatever, I already gave the rest of my life to Alphabet, please destroy video games
wasn’t sega meant to have something to do with this?
I would assume it holds for single-player, too – bandwidth is cheap and also relatively low energy-intensive, using a high-powered computer is expensive, but in exchange you’re not using a high-power computer at home, so even if it’s somewhat more energy to use a streaming device, highly efficient sharing probably makes up for manufacturing a lot more computers and transporting them to every house.
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It’s a lot easier to make a datacenter power efficient than thousands of unique machines in people’s homes. Datacenters also tend to be located in places with cheap power, which tend to be near base load power plants, which in turn tend to be more carbon neutral like hydro or nuclear
It is a little hard for me to believe that the power savings possible in the datacenter outweigh the energy used in delivering and displaying the stream, at least for current devicese
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that’s the thing, I think that planned 8k nonsense they’re dangling has to be projecting out to future fixed function AV1 encoding and decoding but in the meantime it’s going to be tricky to define “the cheapest machine they could find” to act as a thin client with current hardware decoding featuresets.
doing 4K HEVC (or I guess this is google, VP9) in software is like you might as well be rendering an entire game engine. It will not be more carbon efficient. Especially if they establish 50mbit as the baseline so they’re just happy with it not increasing from there at higher resolutions. The economic incentives are not there and projecting them onto google is irresponsibly generous.
Ok, I don’t have any specific knowledge, I’m running off general heuristics (cheaper products (and that’s what Google is selling) are strongly correlated with less energy-intensive products) and the tendency to underestimate energy in manufacturing and shipping when looking at these things.
pity me, no one who is willing to run the numbers on video codecs and hardware availability and carry them around in their head is sufficiently critical of corporate decision making
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Can’t wait until YouTube starts constantly prompting me to play Kingdom Come and those old Resistance Records games.
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didn’t kimya dawson have the last word on that one 18 goddam years ago
god I hate young people
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I wonder if konami gets a cut for every controller sold
how can Google harp about recreating the couch co-op experience if they don’t even want to share the 30 lives
rushes in, out of breath did somebody already say capitalism sucks
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the controller has a USB C connection but techs on hand were advocating for the direct-wifi connection it’s capable of as somehow better performing ?? i guess decoupling the playback device from the input device might have some advantages under this set up, and perhaps they’ve already decided they’re eating the latency hit that’s inevitable over wifi (no ethernet via chromecast) but god that sounds… extremely slow & bad!
the numbers look surprisingly not-terrible, all considered https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands-on-with-google-stream-gdc-2019
as a designed object the controller’s look and feel are truly peak google; flat, formless, rounded, hopelessly confused and inconsistent in iconography
i am interested in this thing purely as a technological curio and would absolutely never use it to play games but god, what a weird object. this article mentions the AC demo was switching button inputs to match the controller device in a Steam Input sort of way, which is tidy
i doubt this is a priority, but it’s interesting that this setup perhaps bypasses exclusivity locks like apple’s stinginess around third party controller support, and their refusal of the Steam Link app on iOS if it will just run in a relatively vanilla browser
yeah having the controller connect directly to wifi actually makes a ton of sense as a way of limiting input lag since that makes it exactly as fast as the display, it’s one of the cleverer parts of this
If this is a subscription service, how Spotify will it be in terms of screwing small devs?
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