We have Google Stadia (soon), PlayStation Now, Xbox Game Streaming, EA's Project Atlas is coming and more but what about Valve with Steam? Well, sounds like Steam Cloud Gaming is coming.
For those who don't remember or perhaps aren't regular readers, I actually wrote an article back in November 2018 describing how I thought Valve would launch such a service. Well, there's more pointing towards me being right in some way about that.
SteamDB put out a Twitter post today, showing off a code update to the partner site, with new terms developers need to sign which talks about Steam Cloud Gaming.
Everything Valve has been doing over the last few years would add up quite nicely to this. Valve worked on the Steam Link hardware to stream around the home, moving onto the Steam Link application to expand it further to mobile devices, In-Home Streaming was re-branded to Remote Play and started allowing you to stream from your PC to any other outside the home and just recently, Remote Play Together to let you host a local co-op/multiplayer game for others across the world to join in as if they were sat next to you.
The next logical step? Certainly seems like a full streaming service would fit in with where they're going with all this. Now we think about Steam Play Proton, Valve's attempt to get Windows-only games to work and perform well on Linux. If Steam Cloud Gaming turns out to be something you stream from Valve, it's safe to assume it would be from Linux-powered servers so Steam Play would fit in there.
With all these new streaming services coming, Valve did need to do something extra to stay competitive if this is where gaming is going. Like it or not, they're already here and a lot of people already use them. The more that do, the less likely people are to get games from Steam.
This is all speculation though of course, nothing is yet confirmed. For all we know, whatever this Steam Cloud Gaming bit is that developers need to sign could just be the umbrella branding for all of Valve's current and future streaming stuff and not necessarily a brand new thing.
What are you thoughts? What exactly will Steam Cloud Gaming be? Let us know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Nevertheless Nov 6, 2019
Quoting: peta77I don't like streaming stuff, requires a very good internet connection and I don't want to have screen resolution in the game restricted by any server. Also for single player games it doesn't make any sense to make an online connection a mandatory to be able to play. So I hope there's no upcoming titles which are exclusively available through cloud gaming. Would significantly throw back desktop gaming.
The same applies (even more) to VR. I also don't think it's good no one owns the hardware the games run (and are developed) on.
Like I said earlier. If Valve can pull that (free choice if stream or local play) off, the gotta do it!
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Quoting: jensSorry, but no interest in having this discussion.
Good, then don't please (you kind of started it).
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Quoting: jensDo you have any source for that? Would be interesting to know what the exact requirements are for using the Stadia SDK.
Some details here:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdz4b5psrhE
* https://dzone.com/articles/a-first-look-at-google-stadia
Though of course stuff can change, i.e. nothing stops Google from making their SDK work with Wine, allowing Windows games wrapped through Wine and dxvk / vkd3d work on Stadia as well.
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 November 2019 at 9:47 pm UTC
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One question I have about this is, can they handle issues like latency? Google seems to be planning to somewhat overcome such problems by the brute force expedient of they already have servers bloody everywhere, so huge chunks of the market can be physically close to where their games are running. Can Valve match that?
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Quoting: rustybroomhandleThe wall in this case is shifting from being Windows, to Microsoft services that can exist on other platforms.A point I've argued for a few years is that in this day and age the core platform shouldn't necessarily be thought of at the operating system level, at least not locally. While I think Bill Gates is an asshole (and no amount of charity is going to change that), I will credit him for saying as much in 1995 (i.e. the potential to essentially commoditize the operating system such that it doesn't matter if you're running Windows, macOS, or Linux, what matters is what browser you use, what cloud computing platform you use, etc). We are on the cusp of this. The gates (no pun intended) and the gatekeepers become more obfuscated, but they are still there.
These are all corporations, and they act in their own interests. Sometimes those interests align with things we care about (e.g. open source, cross-platform multiplayer, etc), but when any of these companies support those things, it is merely a means to an end for them, not the end in and of itself. Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that they have all been equal in their positive and/or negative impacts. Obviously, Valve stands head and shoulders above Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, etc in terms of desirability, but Valve doesn't do what it does in order to be the good guy. Valve could have brought its games to other digital distribution platforms for example, but there is no real percentage in it for Valve to do that, so it hasn't happened.
Sheesh, remember when Tim Sweeney railed against UWP, and mentioned that Microsoft wanted to "monopolise games development on PC" and that "they’re trying to force this thing on the industry and it’s woefully inadequate for the tasks they’re trying to serve it for"? Seems like a lifetime ago, given Epic Game's current exclusives strategy and its woefully inadequate store and launcher. Tim is a shining example that all of these actors should be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Last edited by vector on 7 November 2019 at 3:44 am UTC
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Quoting: peta77I don't like streaming stuff, requires a very good internet connection and I don't want to have screen resolution in the game restricted by any server. Also for single player games it doesn't make any sense to make an online connection a mandatory to be able to play. So I hope there's no upcoming titles which are exclusively available through cloud gaming. Would significantly throw back desktop gaming.
From Stadia, yes, google plan this. But from steam, i think and hope, they don't planing de jure exclusivity for cloud, but is there posibility for de facto time limited cloud exlusivity, because they can use better CPU, more cores,... and then nobody without today threadriper can play it localy, but in some time, it can be posible.
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Quoting: ArtenThe only thing that would make sense regarding hardware capacity would real-time-raytracing, like that old remote-rendering i.e. SGI did long ago, where your render CPUs/GPUs would be somewhere in the basement and bigger than your appartment. But other than that, for gamers with high-end hardware it would just be a giant step back. I understand that such things are good for tablet or smartphone gaming, but not for the desktop. I don't want to go back to dumb terminals that rely on tons of external hardware and a hyper reliable high bandwith network. I'm pretty happy with having a "supercomputer" under my desk, even if it costs a bit more.Quoting: peta77I don't like streaming stuff, requires a very good internet connection and I don't want to have screen resolution in the game restricted by any server. Also for single player games it doesn't make any sense to make an online connection a mandatory to be able to play. So I hope there's no upcoming titles which are exclusively available through cloud gaming. Would significantly throw back desktop gaming.
From Stadia, yes, google plan this. But from steam, i think and hope, they don't planing de jure exclusivity for cloud, but is there posibility for de facto time limited cloud exlusivity, because they can use better CPU, more cores,... and then nobody without today threadriper can play it localy, but in some time, it can be posible.
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Quoting: peta77Quoting: ArtenThe only thing that would make sense regarding hardware capacity would real-time-raytracing, like that old remote-rendering i.e. SGI did long ago, where your render CPUs/GPUs would be somewhere in the basement and bigger than your appartment. But other than that, for gamers with high-end hardware it would just be a giant step back. I understand that such things are good for tablet or smartphone gaming, but not for the desktop. I don't want to go back to dumb terminals that rely on tons of external hardware and a hyper reliable high bandwith network. I'm pretty happy with having a "supercomputer" under my desk, even if it costs a bit more.Quoting: peta77I don't like streaming stuff, requires a very good internet connection and I don't want to have screen resolution in the game restricted by any server. Also for single player games it doesn't make any sense to make an online connection a mandatory to be able to play. So I hope there's no upcoming titles which are exclusively available through cloud gaming. Would significantly throw back desktop gaming.
From Stadia, yes, google plan this. But from steam, i think and hope, they don't planing de jure exclusivity for cloud, but is there posibility for de facto time limited cloud exlusivity, because they can use better CPU, more cores,... and then nobody without today threadriper can play it localy, but in some time, it can be posible.
I don’t think so. You thinking only on graphics, but there is more. Your high-end gaming rig can have bottle neck on RAM, CPU or both. There are games with coplex physical simulation, like kerbal space program, where more compute power can be great benefit for developers and players. In KSP, you have physical time warp with all physic calculated and High-speed time warp, which stops all physical calculation except gravity and collisions. With epyc CPU with enaught cores (and multithread physical engine) you can have Physical time warp for higher warp. Yes, if you have high-end PC, but you can buy Epyc/threadripper with 128GB RAM or more and use it at home for gaming and call it gaming high-end...
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Quoting: peta77The only thing that would make sense regarding hardware capacity would real-time-raytracing, like that old remote-rendering i.e. SGI did long ago, where your render CPUs/GPUs would be somewhere in the basement and bigger than your appartment. But other than that, for gamers with high-end hardware it would just be a giant step back. I understand that such things are good for tablet or smartphone gaming, but not for the desktop. I don't want to go back to dumb terminals that rely on tons of external hardware and a hyper reliable high bandwith network. I'm pretty happy with having a "supercomputer" under my desk, even if it costs a bit more.
It's not targeted at gamers with high-end hardware. In the end, it might even be unreasonable from a financial standpoint to keep buying hardware for a thousand bucks every some years instead of "renting" the computing power. (I'll probably still do it, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable.)
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