Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.
Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.<p>It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares-to-native-pc-gaming/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...</a>
> <i>the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer</i><p>Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.<p>Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?
They’re not a hardware company*. Sony and Nintendo are. MS is kinda questionable.<p>* Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.
I really have mixed feelings about this. Sure, emulation existed for a while but it always lagged enough or had small bugs to rarely match the spirit of the original (in rare cases it improved things with better framerates, resolution boosts and loading time cuts).<p>I guess this is somewhat late in the lifecycle of the PS5 but it feels different, like a death blow. Now that this is possible, it would most likely be easy to replicate when the PS6 comes out, or for any other console. Whatever competitive advantage with exclusives consoles have, goes away. And these deals cost a lot of money and take years to plan and execute.<p>I guess companies then transition to being software only, like Sega did? (though they never recaptured the charm they had when they were making their own hardware). Are we slowly witnessing consoles go the way of the cd player?
You’d be surprised with how much lag is actually tolerable when you have good prediction.
Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.
This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.<p>As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud <i>streaming</i>, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
I don't even know if a smaller company like Nintendo can pull something like that off. They have been behind so much in the tech space because they spend modestly and their primary differentiating factor is their IP. Their lawyers are going to be working non stop until they figure something out. I guess have a strategic partner?
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this characterization. They've certainly been behind in tech that's like "stuff the most FPS and fanciest graphics into this small box as possible", but I'd argue they've been pretty much the only one playing in the "make a good experience for most users without configuration with relatively cheap local hardware" up until relatively recently (SteamOS certainly has made some inroads, but I've yet to see anything particularly impressive in terms of an Xbox handheld, and Sony has basically given up it since the Vita). I don't think either of these broad technical areas are particularly aligned with making cloud streaming viable for gaming, but if I had to pick one side, I'm not sure I'd pick the side that's invested way more into expensive hardware on the local side rather than figuring out how to make the constraints of lower power go further.
Cloud game streaming has gotten to be extremely impressive, at least on a wired connection, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell you’re streaming. It’s been hard for me to consider upgrading my old gaming PC considering how good GeForce Now is for the $20 a month that I spend.
I subscribe to XBox Game Pass and used to subscribe to Geforce Now too. They're both really great for me as more of a casual gamer, but at the competitive level in the fighting game genre, it's totally insane and people will notice a sub-100ms lag in their inputs because they're sort of pushing the limits of human reaction time.
> at least on a wired connection<p>There goes 95% of your market. If not more.
Surely no one playing competitive real-time games are doing it on a PS5?
Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly (<a href="https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-asha-sharma-interview-samsung-2000738661" rel="nofollow">https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as...</a> and <a href="https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-of-hours-you-can-use-streaming-each-month-but-says-not-to-worry-because-it-will-only-affect-4-percent-of-players-2000731012" rel="nofollow">https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o...</a>) so that's not happening any time soon.
Well Microsoft always seems to be making the wrong decision at the wrong time and this is probably yet another one. Probably due to competing factions hat don't really have a unifying vision for the company. It provides enormous amounts of comedy and I guess we will find out if this was another instance of "whoops we closed down that thing we could really use right now"! :)
But they've just announced exclusive GTA VI streaming rights: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49987245">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49987245</a>
Microsoft also made it significantly easier to put play their xbox games on the PC, even their xbox 360 games.
Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.<p>Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".<p>Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.<p>On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
Don't forget PC gaming. Steam will keep growing, without even having to try that hard, simply because they:<p>1. already have their foot in the door<p>2. are not overwhelmingly hostile towards their customers
Have agents play the game 1000s of times and distil the gameplay itself into a new game.
Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.
I know 10 year olds already doing this. It’s great. Remove the barrier to imagining your own games !
Why on earth would anyone watch that nonsense? Who cares if it’s even cohesive. It’s the bedrock of “derivative.”<p>Ugh I know the answer but it’s just sad. I don’t want all media to become cotton candy.
I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case.<p>For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.
AI generated Star Trek is an oxymoron. Gene Roddenberry's ghost stirs the longer we even consider the idea.<p>Two quotes from Star Trek "The Ultimate Computer" - a very prescient episode.<p>KIRK There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away.<p>---<p>BONES Compassion. That's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps men ahead of them. Care to debate that, Spock?<p>SPOCK No, Doctor. I simply maintain that computers are more efficient than human beings, not better.
There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away.<p>It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.<p>I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.<p>Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming <i>per se</i>. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking <i>someone else's game code</i> in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.<p>Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.<p>Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if <i>someone else</i> vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.
I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.
Already happening on insta and tiktok with genAI stuff, people are creating a lot of funny stuff
Well isn't Roblox kinda this? I play it all the time with my niece and nephew...it sucks, its enshittification to the max. Part of an entertainment property is you are devoting time to enjoying the creative process of someone who put in the effort to produce something polished and with effort. The end result is the culmination of all the work done (possibly years/decades) to get to that point and you are paying for the result of all that effort. Could a Roblox game be like that? Possibly but the incentives dont seem to be as aligned despite the democratizing force it has had.<p>I am reminded of a scene from the Jobs movie where they were arguing Open vs Closed systems. This feels similar...<p>[1]:<a href="https://youtu.be/TYvXOHAJTiU?t=81" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/TYvXOHAJTiU?t=81</a>
Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.
It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.
It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important
Maybe they'll go streaming-only, but I'd at least wait until the Switch 2 is hacked before making that prediction.
Then they'd have RAM as their own capex cost rather than pushing that on to the consumers.
How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.
Gamers won’t tolerate cloud gaming for long. I remember when QuakeLive was supposed to revolutionize publishing. Cheat free games!<p>Except the UX is horrid. If studios will certainly try it but there will be massive backlash.
Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.
It's already over. At the very least this will push for more internet connectivity and be good for PC gaming.<p>Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh
Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …).<p>I have only had success with single player games.
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I honestly welcome cloud gaming.
Action RPGs might be dead in the water,
But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1.
Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games
This is saying you'd be ok with books being only permitted to be read at the library, behind a sealed kiosk screen, because otherwise people might post spoilers online.
If the library is completely AI generated, and only the sealed kiosk screen contains (possibly) human-authored content,<p>How does the equation change?<p>I am saying I'd rather enjoy POSSIBLY human content, than AI generated ones. And if cloud gaming cannot deliver on this, I'd rather stop gaming altogether. The idea of consuming AI generated content is completely disgusting to me.
Meh, overblown. Very easy to not go looking for that and just enjoy your games.