Steam cloud gaming/streaming

[Macro]

I tried to see if anyone had come up with this before but couldnt find much on the topic.

So was wondering if steam had thought about offering their own steam based streaming service? I know that there is CloudLift, but Onlive does not seem to be in the best position financially nor does it have a massive collection of games available. There is also Nvidia grid but there is no public statement as to when PC support is coming and if they would support steam games etc.

So I was wondering with the advent of cloud based gpu processing it would theoretically be easy enough for steam to farm out the processing to an existing infrastructure provider, then just charge some form of subscription through stream to be able to play you games via a cloud GPU rather than via your own computer.

They have already made leaps in this direction with in home streaming, which is a great step, however I personally (I know not everyone will agree) would rather just get rid of the need of having my own gaming pc to play the games. This is also one problem with adoption of such a service, I am sure a large portion of gamers want to keep their super ace PC, and let them if they have a gaming powerhouse, but it would be another great offering for the platform which can bring certain people to the platform who may not have a gaming PC, so this would lead to more sales from people who play on laptops and maybe even allow you to enter in the tablet gaming market etc as you can stream the output to whatever then.

Although I am not sure if (from a financal perspective) this may conflict with the steam system? however as cloud based GPU can be provided as an "on demand" service you can only pay for what you use so its not like Steam would need to spend millions on infrastructure and ongoing maintanance, they just pay for the GPU time and maybe even hook it into the Steam system/console.

Anyway I know that I would happily pay/subscribe to a service which lets me play *most* of my steam games at a decent quality (not fussed about top end settings), also like I say provides more value to the steam platform generally.

[Macro]

Just a bump as we now have broadcasting which is kinda 1 tick in the box, any news on remote playing etc?

[Fork_Q2]

Given OnLive's failure, probably not in the near future.

Maybe one day when everyone has optic broadband. But even then, I don't really see the advantages of "cloud gaming" worth the drawbacks.

[Macro]

I guess it is down to personal preference, I would rather pay $10 a month to play all my games at higher than average settings without having to install any of them or have beefy hardware to run them. Granted some people would turn their nose up at it as they would prefer the responsiveness and prestige of their own gaming PC, but for the rest of us we at least has an option which would mean we can play our steam games on any platform with bare minimum hardware.

On a side note I tried playing OnLive in its original form over my 3g phone connection and it played fine, it was great on my old 6mb ADSL, now I have 30mb fibre I cannot see it being an issue. Connection speeds are only going to go up, and as steam (the platform) only really cares about getting people to buy games from them rather than others, how much of a boon would it be to their platform to allow you to play their games without even needing a gaming computer, just anything with a cpu capable of decoding h264 or whatever the codec is they use these days. Hell you could even do it through a web browser if you really wanted to.

The only drawback of cloud gaming is the possible delay if your connection goes down, but I am happy to have that as part of the risk, its not like I would freak out if my game lagged a moment and I got killed every now and then. Better to play it in higher settings with occasional blips than low settings with less chance of blips (for me anyway).

[Fork_Q2]

Originally posted by Macro:

On a side note I tried playing OnLive in its original form over my 3g phone connection and it played fine, it was great on my old 6mb ADSL, now I have 30mb fibre I cannot see it being an issue.

I played the demo for Aliens Vs Predator on my 50MB broadband connection when the service first launched in the UK - it was a horrible and unresponsive experince, managable only by increasing the image compression all the way down.

Even my fancy dual-band N router I have for the Steam in-house Streaming service (as much as I love it) isn't suitible for faster twitchy gameplay, I can only imagine it would be worse for most other people (and over the internet to boot). Lots of tech has to catch up before playing faster games streamed over the internet becomes a realistic prospect.

$10 per month for all your games sounds too optimistic; IIRC, with OnLive you paid a flat rate of $5-7 per month, but you still had to buy the games at higher or equal to retail prices anyway. Once you stopped paying, you lose your entire library.

Price of gaming has been pretty damned low for the last few decades; decent hardware components are pretty cheap now, prices of games have largely resisted inflationary price rising and F2P games now exist. Not forgetting that there are far more video game publishers then there are film or TV producers, any video gaming service that is going to try and copy the Netflix model is only ever going to cover a fraction of video game publishers. Even Steam is missing out on EA and Blizzard games right now, and Ubisoft is slowly spinning away from Steam altogether.

[Macro]

I am in the UK, didnt have too many problems. Current cloudlift service is £4.95 which is like $8 so this functionality is already available under the $10 mark, just they dont have too many of the games on there yet due to publisher issues etc, and I mean the $10 a month for just the service, you would still need to purchase your games on steam etc before you could play them on this proposed service.

I do no think a netflix style pricing model could work for gaming, as publishers would never go for allowing you to play newly released games under a subscription model, they prefer their day 1 release money. So I think the service based model could work and there is less risk in it as all you are doing is basically acting as a remote GPU for the system really.

Your point is right about gaming being pretty cheap and hardware prices coming down etc, but I just cannot be bothered constantly upgrading, especially as I only use laptops these days which are pretty much non upgradable. This laptop I use now is able to run games in low settings but is perfect for everything else, and I do not want to have to move to a desktop or be forced to buy new hardware when we have the technology to allow remote rendering etc, it is far more convenient for me to just pay someone else to host me the hardware on a subscription basis and they have to keep upgrading and I can happily use this laptop for a few more years, as other than gaming there is not really much reason to upgrade computers at the rate we upgrade them now.

Finally I agree that Steam is losing a lot of titles due to other customers trying to get more of the profit on their own platforms, however this brings more of a reason to make the steam platform more feature rich than its competitors. Currently steam offers far more than all its competitors and is constantly evolving, if it allowed you to buy games then instantly play them in a web browser or by some thin client style app, then it would be bringing more value to the platform. I personally do not buy games anywhere else than Steam because I want my library in one place an will not buy anything from Origin, UPlay etc directly as I do not want to support those platforms, so if people start petitioning those providers to provide features comparitive to steam they may end up finding it not as profitable to run and would end up moving their titles back to steam. In the long run there is a lot more to gain from adding more features to steam, be it to help people get into gaming or do the social stuff around gaming.

Also just to mention again you can buy GPU time on providers like Amazon etc, so if not many people use it, it is not like Steam would lose much money, the more people who use it the more they make, the less who use it then they just dont get charged for the throughput, so it seems like its worth them dabbling in given they have a lot of the tech around it already, and this sort of technology is only going to get more prevelant in the future.

[Fork_Q2]

Originally posted by Macro:

I am in the UK, didnt have too many problems. Current cloudlift service is £4.95 which is like $8 so this functionality is already available under the $10 mark, just they dont have too many of the games on there yet due to publisher issues etc, and I mean the $10 a month for just the service, you would still need to purchase your games on steam etc before you could play them on this proposed service.

Yeah, and this is the other big reason why I don't think streaming games off the internet would take off. Films and TV shows can have many streams of revenue for the copyright owners (TV syndication, DVDs, cinema ticket sales, rentals, licensing to airlines, tourism etc), video games only make the money by units being sold to consumers.

Couple that with the vastly larger number of independent games publishers, the price of subbing to an OnLive-like service isn't going to be anywhere near as cheap as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video are. If the biggest advantage of streaming games is the price, it does not look like a realistic prospect in the near future, to be honest.

The thing about UPlay and Origin is that you made the choice not to use these services, I however have to if I want to play their games. So do many other people. And if Valve were to go full online streaming, I and anyone else who buys games from outside Steam, would simply end up paying even more for games. And if a company as big as Amazon or Google were to set up their own game stream services, this would only fragment the PC gaming platform between all the providers I have to continue paying a sub, if I want to play their games. At least Steam, UPlay and Origin are all free right now.

[Macro]

I do not mean everyone has to pay for this service, I just mean its an optional offering from steam. If you want to play your games in the cloud pay them $N and you get access, if not then do not worry. So I could not see it having a negative effect on the consumer.

I know what you mean about Origin and UPlay etc, I would like to try some of the games on their service, same with Blizzard, however I am taking the stand as EA are doing this purely as a profit building exercise and to exercise more control over the consumer base with less of the benefits. So I just choose not to purchase anything off there even if I would like to play it, if I buy from them I am telling them it is ok to close down purchase options etc. Not everyone will share my perspective here and they are free to support whatever system they want, and this is slightly off on a tangent now...

Also I just want to clarify I do not want a subscription model to games, I specifically mentioned this before, all I want is to rent GPU time. So the scenario would be:

Given I purchase a steam game
When I go to the game in my library
And I go to "Play" the game
Then I should see an option called "In Cloud"
And the game should be rendered in the cloud

So there is no need to change the way publishers sell their games or the way that we buy them etc, it would literally just be like an extended option of "In Home Streaming" but rather than be stream from a computer upstairs I stream from a computer in the cloud somewhere.

This way there should be very little publisher hassle as Steam already has the game files, and controls the licences so you are just using their infrastructure to render it too, much like you use it to broadcast, save, share screenshots etc.

The problem Onlive Cloudlift has currently is that it has licencing loopholes to jump through because it has to have permission to host the game files etc and certain publishers wont allow certain games on certain platforms, i.e Bioshock Infinite cannot be played on a tablet or mobile device only on a windows device on their service.

However the technology behind it (imo) is a brilliant idea, and that ist he crux of what I am after here, not a new game payment mechanism or anything, just a way to get my game rendered via steam and streamed to me to play.

[HLCinSC]

They'll probably wait to see how PS Now is received by both gamers and game makers. They will need both to make it work and no one has cornered the market yet so they still have time to learn from the mistakes the others make.

[pedronarra]

I had this same idea today, so I was searching on the internet and found this post. I completely agree with Macro. Essentially this would be a server rental to have the option of play the games that you already bought on the cloud. The main advantage to the GeForce Now is that you can play locally and then continue your save in the cloud. And for people that do not have a high end pc, 120$/year is a great deal, with the money of a high end pc you could subscribe the service for around 8 years, without the worry of having to upgrade or if the game is compatible.

[Macro]

Yep, I dont know why so many people are against this sort of thing, I used OnLive Cloud Lift before it went under and it was great. Granted the graphics were not SUPER AMAZING but they were good enough and just as good if not better than consoles. Also this opens up being able to play your steam games on almost any device which has the CPU power to decode fast enough, meaning you could theoretically play your games on your mobile phone/tablet/netbook etc.

[Pablo]

Originally posted by Fork_Q2:

Originally posted by Macro:

I am in the UK, didnt have too many problems. Current cloudlift service is £4.95 which is like $8 so this functionality is already available under the $10 mark, just they dont have too many of the games on there yet due to publisher issues etc, and I mean the $10 a month for just the service, you would still need to purchase your games on steam etc before you could play them on this proposed service.

Yeah, and this is the other big reason why I don't think streaming games off the internet would take off. Films and TV shows can have many streams of revenue for the copyright owners (TV syndication, DVDs, cinema ticket sales, rentals, licensing to airlines, tourism etc), video games only make the money by units being sold to consumers.

Couple that with the vastly larger number of independent games publishers, the price of subbing to an OnLive-like service isn't going to be anywhere near as cheap as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video are. If the biggest advantage of streaming games is the price, it does not look like a realistic prospect in the near future, to be honest.

The thing about UPlay and Origin is that you made the choice not to use these services, I however have to if I want to play their games. So do many other people. And if Valve were to go full online streaming, I and anyone else who buys games from outside Steam, would simply end up paying even more for games. And if a company as big as Amazon or Google were to set up their own game stream services, this would only fragment the PC gaming platform between all the providers I have to continue paying a sub, if I want to play their games. At least Steam, UPlay and Origin are all free right now.

I love to read these old discussions. Shows how great people are that have a vision.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Macro:

Yep, I dont know why so many people are against this sort of thing, I used OnLive Cloud Lift before it went under and it was great. Granted the graphics were not SUPER AMAZING but they were good enough and just as good if not better than consoles. Also this opens up being able to play your steam games on almost any device which has the CPU power to decode fast enough, meaning you could theoretically play your games on your mobile phone/tablet/netbook etc.

You liked it. Many didn't and the price point at which it was offered simply was not profitable. You'd need to pay a lot more and the guarantee of quality would never be there. And then what with data caps and all that being a thing.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Valve decided to go another way with the Steam Link and Link app.

[Macro]

Ive got them, they are ok but the still dont solve the problem of me needing a high spec computer on-site to play my games. There are now plenty of companies doing this commercially though, LiquidSky, Parsec via Paperspace/Others, Shadow and loads more if you google it. It will be a mainstream thing at some point, its just a matter of when.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

FWIW, I can't speak for playing higher-spec games, but as a person who plays action games that don't require higher-end specs, this proposal wouldn't work for me. I'd benefit far more under the current system where I download games to my local drive and run them directly.

Given the latency issues of an internet connection, this probably wouldn't work except for games that don't require real-time action. Movies and TV shows can be buffered in advance; games cannot.