Steam Play thoughts: A Valve game streaming service

My thoughts on DRM/Cloud gaming/Always-Online games is that personally, I have mixed feelings for those things.

I am myself not the type of gamer that goes and re-plays games once I've played the story once. Even with "recurring" games like Rocket League, there comes a time when I leave them for good, when there's no more interest in playing the same game over and over. So on that side, I don't see myself affected by DRM/Cloud/Always-Online in the sense that I do not care if games are taken away from me once I've played them; I have no interest in them anymore anyway.

HOWEVER, on the other side, I am very much against DRM/Cloud gaming/Always-Online - the reason is that I believe games should be preserved for future generations, or players that have never played them. We can not preserve these games if we're actively being hindered by it.

Worst thing is, the industry does not care about preserving games - they actively go against it even years after the game is no longer being sold. I hope for a world where DRM is stripped from games after it's no longer necessary (or not even put in to begin with!), or small server back-ends/offline patches released for Always-Online games, or cloud streamed games getting a downloadable package once it's no longer offered on the streaming services.

It wouldn't be hard for devs to do these tings, and let the gamer community worry about game preservation.

Quoting: dvdCloud gaming will never become a thing. It's just like VR. When people have thousands of dollars worth of computers, people won't tolerate latency, and fiber is not really a reality even in the oh-so advanced North America and Europe.

It's actually the exact opposite to the VR and general situation you describe above. You and those people are not the market for cloud gaming. You might become the collateral if it moves in a direction that makes it less profitable to support existing gaming platforms, but I think with Valve this risk is the lowest (and the highest with Google as they have 0 interest in the existing PC ecosystem).

Cloud gaming is mainly a drive to expand the market to the millions of people out there who either can't effort a gaming PC, or decided since they don't play very often that it is not worth it to buy a fast enough PC. For both groups a cheap streaming flatrate for games that works "good enough" is definitely interesting.

But looking at Valve's previous moves and having had some experience with their less than stellar server infrastructure, I would say that they just don't have nor want to run the needed infrastructure (and even if they wanted, they would probably fail at it badly).

So that leaves them only the choice of looking for a partner with the server clusters. But there isn't much choice there, which would not put them at risk of being dependent of a direct competitor. Microsoft would certainly a bad move as it would make them double dependent. Google is running their own experiments and traditionally doesn't do this kind of business. Amazon is a direct competitor in the sales area and unless this would be a long play to sell the Valve to Amazon, they would be an incredibly bad choice. Then there are some smaller players, all of which probably don't have the needed infrastructure. Last but not least there is IBM and with their recent acquisition of RedHat they would be the only and most likely candidate I think.

So if Valve strikes a deal with IBM/RedHat, then yes there will be a Steam streaming service... otherwise I strongly doubt it.

I don't think it's the exact opposite. VR hasn't flown (not in the nintendo days and not now). Sure with the new powerful technology there are probably some niches it can fit into. I think considering how annoyed people get by buffering on youtube/twitch, just imagime that in a new shiny game. And again, the infrastucture is most widespread in the areas (EU, NA), where people are richer and can afford a personal computer. Some firms will definetly try it, i just don't see people putting up with the latency.

I always thought one reason Valve invests in VR technology is to protect their busyness against such streaming services. You'd need a really great internet connection to be able to stream VR. Impossible with current tech.

On one hand, I find Liam's speculation plausible. Valve might indeed have some ideas in this direction.

On the other, like many here, for reasons they have described, I am not personally wild about the idea of playing games that are "in the cloud" instead of on my computer.

On the gripping hand, I don't think streaming games is the future, at least not the very near future. People have pointed out that in many places broadband is not so broad--and frankly, the big provider companies mostly don't seem interested in investing a bunch of money to improve this. They're all just extracting profits from networks (phone, cable TV) that pre-existed the internet. Even where it's good, hardcore gamers are paranoid about latency. Some people do have concerns about the privacy and "ownership" aspects of the cloud. But above all, people are cheap; we've seen over and over and over again how software companies are just creaming their pants at the ideas of software as a service so they can charge ongoing subscription fees, and we've seen over and over and over again their dreams of endless gravy trains die as they find out people just aren't willing to pay.

Quoting: beniwtv

Quoting: NanobangI'm no fan of "the" cloud in general as it continues the trend of further eroding control of what otherwise would be one's personal property.

Just quickly want to chime in here: Games/software are not your personal property. You may own a physical medium the game/software is on though, which is your property. But you still need a license to use that copy.

So, games and software are licensed. Even FOSS software. Otherwise, you would own the right to them, which you do not.

I get what you wanted to say here, though. And I agree, when owning a physical copy without DRM probably nobody is gonna bother you in the future, to take it away or prevent you from playing it.

I disagree. What you don't own is the copyright. What FOSS software licenses license, set conditions on (or rather, mainly explicitly remove default conditions from), is the copyright. When you buy a game, a copy of the game IS your personal property. You do not hold the copyright so you don't have a right to copy it.
It's true that software companies have been trying hard to make the situation ambiguous and fuzz the law with their EULAs and so forth, but in most countries if it came down to a court case it would turn out that the purchaser of a thing owns it, even if it's a digital thing.

Quoting: Julius

Quoting: dvdCloud gaming will never become a thing. It's just like VR. When people have thousands of dollars worth of computers, people won't tolerate latency, and fiber is not really a reality even in the oh-so advanced North America and Europe.

Cloud gaming is mainly a drive to expand the market to the millions of people out there who either can't effort a gaming PC, or decided since they don't play very often that it is not worth it to buy a fast enough PC. For both groups a cheap streaming flatrate for games that works "good enough" is definitely interesting.

First, a cheap streaming flat rate for all games does not seem to be on offer. Rather, what we're discussing is you buy a game, and then you access it via the "cloud" instead of actually downloading it, and presumably you pay a subscription fee for that because hosting costs money. Second, those millions of people you are pointing to are precisely the people who are likely to have either lousy internet because they're in countries where the internet infrastructure is lousy, or lousy internet because their internet providers are predatory and they can't afford a good plan and so they have usage caps which would be crippling for such a service.

A cheap streaming flat rate for all games might be attractive to many consumers, but how do the game companies make money? What's their incentive to hand the rights to do this over for what would have to be a pittance? I don't think it would be practical.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI disagree. What you don't own is the copyright. What FOSS software licenses license, set conditions on (or rather, mainly explicitly remove default conditions from), is the copyright. When you buy a game, a copy of the game IS your personal property. You do not hold the copyright so you don't have a right to copy it.
It's true that software companies have been trying hard to make the situation ambiguous and fuzz the law with their EULAs and so forth, but in most countries if it came down to a court case it would turn out that the purchaser of a thing owns it, even if it's a digital thing.

But that's exactly what is said! :)

You don't own the copyright, you don't own the work. You may own the physical copy the work is on though, but that still does not make you own the work. You own a license to use the work (described in the license / EULA).

And FOSS licenses do not remove copyright. They just make some exemptions to it, see:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

Copyright isn't just about "copying" the work.

Quoting: beniwtv

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI disagree. What you don't own is the copyright. What FOSS software licenses license, set conditions on (or rather, mainly explicitly remove default conditions from), is the copyright. When you buy a game, a copy of the game IS your personal property. You do not hold the copyright so you don't have a right to copy it.
It's true that software companies have been trying hard to make the situation ambiguous and fuzz the law with their EULAs and so forth, but in most countries if it came down to a court case it would turn out that the purchaser of a thing owns it, even if it's a digital thing.

But that's exactly what is said! :)

You don't own the copyright, you don't own the work. You may own the physical copy the work is on though, but that still does not make you own the work. You own a license to use the work (described in the license / EULA).

And FOSS licenses do not remove copyright. They just make some exemptions to it, see:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

Copyright isn't just about "copying" the work.

I think you are having a fundamental misunderstanding, based perhaps on the currency of the deliberately misleading term "intellectual property". Let's take it away from digital for a second, because the lack of a physical thing tends to confuse people. If I buy a book, like go into a bookstore, pick up a paperback, give a store clerk some money in return for the book and leave the store with the book, I own the book. I can do almost anything I want with the book; I can shred it, I can lend it to a friend and so on. I cannot legally bludgeon someone to death with it, but that isn't illegal because I don't own the book, it is illegal because it's murder. Another thing I can't do is publish it. That is not because I don't own that book, the one I paid money for, it is because just as murdering someone violates criminal law, violating an author's copyright violates copyright law. You could say the author in some sense "owns" "the work", but the author does not own the copy I bought. If the author showed up on my doorstep and wanted my copy, I could say no. If they took it, that would be theft, theft of my property. Note that if I published the book that would not be theft, it would be violation of copyright.

If I buy a game, I also own a copy. I paid money for that copy and the situation was framed as "buying" it, so it is mine. The fact that the copy is digital does not in itself change this. It does make certain legal uses impractical, or their legality difficult to verify, since it can be hard to distinguish between moving a file and copying it, and it does make it possible for the seller to include some practical barriers (such as DRM) to actually treating it as your property. But none of this makes a thing you bought not a thing you legally own.

I'm interested in the experience of playing a game. I'm not interested in owning either a physical box with a DVD or a digital license in a digital library. I want to experience the game itself.

It's pretty much the same with music. I'm not interested in owning the physical media. I want to listen to the music. With all the music streaming services I can do that. I can listen to everything. I don't have to choose or sample a bit before buying an album. I just listen to it. When I like it, I listen to it more, or more of the same artist, or more of the same genre... regarding music, it's just awesome that these borders are not there anymore. You don't have to think about which album to buy - you can just listen to and experience ever more and new music.

I'd honestly love that for games. Of course, I wouldn't want for games to appear and disappear from being playable. Video game conservation is also an important topic. For titles with tight controls, the technology needs to be stepped up quite a bit. Counter Strike over streaming for example isn't possible - at least right now. But when game streaming becomes more common, I think it might be possible that the dedicated hardware gets more evenly distributed and will therefor be nearer to the gamer, and the latency will decrease. I've used Playstation Now for a bit, and for some games the latency right now is OK. Not impressive, but usable.

I don't need beefy hardware with costly cooling equipment directly beneath my desk. Most of what I do with my PC can be done with a way worse computer. The only thing I need a big computer for is gaming (and video compression a little bit... and Boinc...) But... honestly? I think it would a good thing if you don't need to replace your system every few years. Saves money and resources.

If the problems above are fixed, I' welcome a well made game streaming system. Absolutely.

cloud gaming = nonsense for most game genres. board games, yes... something like soul calibur? not. that would be worse than playing laggy network session

unless someone invents faster network than it is currently. that is not really easy as MB/sec doesn't matter. what it would need is increase in data transfer speed from x to y location. currently that is limited to speed of light which means that in perfect conditions lag would be 140ms. sadly, that number is not even remotely everything. you have to add lag on all routers, server and client processing...

most action games are barely playable even if you try playing with bluetooth controller which by itself has lag around 100ms.

the big clue that people miss is that they equate game with video on youtube which is plain wrong. video can be buffered, game cannot unless someone perfects future prediction. while video starts with delay, game cannot and as such every action you do is countered by full amount of lag from network, computer and input.

it is enough to watch NVidia Grid presentation where presenter plays racing game and be a little bit cautious on hw screen and his input are desynchronized. while game seems to run smooth, input insanely lags. and the catch is that servers and client were practically at the same spot for that. now imagine playing from home

Cloud gaming, worst thought up DRM that will probably ever exist. R.I.P gaming if it becomes a thing.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think you are having a fundamental misunderstanding, based perhaps on the currency of the deliberately misleading term "intellectual property". Let's take it away from digital for a second, because the lack of a physical thing tends to confuse people. If I buy a book, like go into a bookstore, pick up a paperback, give a store clerk some money in return for the book and leave the store with the book, I own the book. I can do almost anything I want with the book; I can shred it, I can lend it to a friend and so on. I cannot legally bludgeon someone to death with it, but that isn't illegal because I don't own the book, it is illegal because it's murder. Another thing I can't do is publish it. That is not because I don't own that book, the one I paid money for, it is because just as murdering someone violates criminal law, violating an author's copyright violates copyright law. You could say the author in some sense "owns" "the work", but the author does not own the copy I bought. If the author showed up on my doorstep and wanted my copy, I could say no. If they took it, that would be theft, theft of my property. Note that if I published the book that would not be theft, it would be violation of copyright.

If I buy a game, I also own a copy. I paid money for that copy and the situation was framed as "buying" it, so it is mine. The fact that the copy is digital does not in itself change this. It does make certain legal uses impractical, or their legality difficult to verify, since it can be hard to distinguish between moving a file and copying it, and it does make it possible for the seller to include some practical barriers (such as DRM) to actually treating it as your property. But none of this makes a thing you bought not a thing you legally own.

I agree with you, and it's also what I said. I think we just define "to own" in the context of software differently.

You yourself said you own the physical book, but can't publish it, because you'd violate copyright, as you do not own the work. Software is similar, you do not own the work, but you may own the digital (or physical) copy.

I would just argue that "copyright" is like a license; further restricting what you can do with your "owned" item. Be that a game or book, doesn't really matter, thus not really fully owning it.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFirst, a cheap streaming flat rate for all games does not seem to be on offer. Rather, what we're discussing is you buy a game, and then you access it via the "cloud" instead of actually downloading it, and presumably you pay a subscription fee for that because hosting costs money. Second, those millions of people you are pointing to are precisely the people who are likely to have either lousy internet because they're in countries where the internet infrastructure is lousy, or lousy internet because their internet providers are predatory and they can't afford a good plan and so they have usage caps which would be crippling for such a service.

A cheap streaming flat rate for all games might be attractive to many consumers, but how do the game companies make money? What's their incentive to hand the rights to do this over for what would have to be a pittance? I don't think it would be practical.

Not sure where you have gotten that first "business-model" but of course what you described wouldn't work. I don't think anyone serious is even discussing that (maybe those loonies at EA?). The Flatrate would be of course not for the latest triple A titles, but those slightly older but still good titles they are already selling for a few dollars on sales regularly (or in general in many places of the world due to regional pricing). Maybe there will be options to also temporarily "rent" a AAA game as an addon, but what will draw people in and will make them use such a streaming platform will be some sort of cheap flatrate like Netflix etc.

Oh and I don't know which part of the world you are from, but these days the internet is about the worst in US/EU; expensive and a lot of old legacy tech that makes it slow. All the semi-monopolies there also don't help. In the larger cities of most Asian countries you can get fast and cheap internet these days easily.


Last edited by Julius on 1 November 2018 at 6:08 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: GuestThis is just shit.

Solid feedback, thanks.

He's right, tho.

Very helpful.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Doc AngeloI don't need beefy hardware with costly cooling equipment directly beneath my desk. Most of what I do with my PC can be done with a way worse computer. The only thing I need a big computer for is gaming (and video compression a little bit... and Boinc...) But... honestly? I think it would a good thing if you don't need to replace your system every few years. Saves money and resources.

Okay, this fallacy needs to stop.

Just because you don't consume the energy locally does not mean that the energy isn't being consumed at your request. Pushing movies and games from massive data centers through the internet is vastly more energy exhaustive than having a disc at your disposal.

You're right that the energy a GPU uses stays the same. What I mean with resources are for example cooling for multiple GPUs and CPUs - that would save resources. You can use a big power supply unit for all systems.

Buying a new computer every 2-3 years is just a big waste of energy on its own. New mainboard, new CPU, new GPU, many people buy new cases and so on. Producing those does use a lot of resources. You don't have to use the same components in game streaming data centers. I think Nvidia already produces hardware that is meant for such cases which differs from end customer hardware.

100 players would need 100 system in order to play. 100 streamplayers wouldn't need 100 systems, it would be lower... just a guess: maybe 60 systems? There are of course people who game every single day, but not all do.

I think overall it would lead to less waste. Such calculations are of course tricky because there are a lot of things to consider, and also a bit of looking ahead of what's available right now, but I think centralizing such processing power while stopping the upgrade cycle at home can be quite effective.


Last edited by Doc Angelo on 1 November 2018 at 7:16 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestWhat I don't understand is how displacing that GPU footprint from one location to the other and squeezing the same end-user result through the friction-filled internet reduces resource consumption.

For example, it is correct to say that regardless of transportation method, one passenger still weighs 70kg and has the same inertia. A car needs to overcome that inertia to transport 4 passengers. A bus needs to overcome ten times the inertia to transport 40 passengers. But it can achieve that with less air drag, less friction and less material (engine, chassis, etc..). On top of that comes the fact that people who only use public transport don't need to buy a car, so the energy and resources for the car are saved.

It's similar with centralized game processing. You don't need a power supply/hard drive/disc drive/case/etc for every system. They can be shared. This kind of hardware can be built differently, just as the engine of the bus can be built differently. The cooling of all the system can be designed bigger and differently and maybe even used for warm water in the region.

Things like that. I think there's a lot of overhead for producing and running single game systems in every house hold in comparison to a centralized system. As I said, as soon as the centralized systems are being built all over the country in order to reduce latency, the network load would be reduced and with it the necessary energy used.

It really is a bit like with public transport. If more people would use it, the system can be enhanced and structered differently and would work way better.

Edit: Maybe... those processing centers could be used for scientific calculations. Researching new drugs, calculating other important science stuff... that could run on the systems while its not being used fully. That would be nice. But you don't have to wait for that: There's Boinc and World Community Grid. You can install that on your system right now and start helping scientists with their work. Just thought to throw that in. :)


Last edited by Doc Angelo on 1 November 2018 at 8:46 pm UTC

I realize the two of you are arguing and yet I'm liking you both. But what can I say, you're both thoughtful and cogent.
I take the force of the bus analogy . . . but on the other hand, routinely playing games via cloudy stuff means loads of data going to and fro again, and again, and again; it seems plausible that this would be a serious power-use overhead. It wouldn't be the first time a new computing use turned out to hog a ton of power--look at cryptocurrencies.

steamplay installs directx and .net and some other stuff from MS. i still believe, that MS can chance the license of this software and charge everyone who uses it outside the windowsworld and MS gets the fee

but of course game streaming is the future, but first we need failsafe internet

a couple of things may happen.

valve may try to stream, but i dont think they have enough infra structure to do that.

servers are different from desktop computers, servers has an ridiculous ammount of ram and most of the time they are just copying/moving data instead of processing it, so their current infra structure will not fit.

google is trying to enter the desktop operating system market and they will have an bad time convincing people to buy their games all over again, so they might make an partnership with valve to solve that, or just make it easier to install steam on chromeOS so they solve the problem with old games while still try to stream new games.

we can bet that the google streaming service will be linux based instead of windows based and if valve ever enter this market, it will be linux based too.

valve has some streaming capability since they use it for home streaming and their video service, so they may try it solo instead of with an partnership

in any case the good news for us is, linux is better at servers and developers may target servers since they will be able to sell their games for windows, mac, linux and android all at one shoot.
they may have an backup plan with an native version for those who dont want "online only" games, but at least they will have an big incentive to adopt vulkan.
xbox is more profitable than mac and linux, so they may still have an DX version, but xbox didnt sold so well this generation.

the future looks promissing, but i will not create to much hype just now, i was burned over and over again in the past.

the government of my country (Brasil) tried to push linux, i got excited, but it failed, and all those cheap computers sold with tax incentives (in case they came with linux) and for cheaper since they didnt include the price of an windows licence, became , instead, windows machines and linux reputation got burned in the process (since the games werent there back then and the distro that the oems chose was really bad)

android promissed a lot, but android apps and games were not compatible with desktop linux neither the opposite, and most android games are crap anyway.

then valve promissed the steam machines, i got hyped all over again, only to get disapointed again.
no marketing for it, no exclusives, no reason for the average joe to buy one, and the killer feature that may help it sell at least a little bitch was also avaliable on another product: steamLink.

html5 promissed a lot of things, but instead of geting good games on the browser, all i found is a bunch of crap games (at least sketchfab was borned), the games from the flash era were much better, back then it was possible to fund good games with only the budget from the ad's.

web assembly promissed a lot, but i still dont see the fruits of it, i know it takes time, but i got over excited, game developers will not port their game to it no matter how small the performance hit may be, it still there and they arent willing to sacrifice having the best graphicss to sell their games in order to gain more market selling for mac and linux.

valve made proton and it is great, but only for old games, we still have to wait to play an game, and the average user will not switch to linux unless he can do everything he could on windows or almost it and have something exclusive on linux (theming is not enough)

now this, streaming, its my last hope to see things change for better.

but even if that happens, it will not be without an cost:
we can say good bye to piracy and mods.
you may be against piracy but its the only way to make sure an product will never disapear without legit consumers having anyway to acess it.


Last edited by elmapul on 2 November 2018 at 4:59 am UTC