Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware. This pricing is for renting the GPUs, same as GeForce Now and plenty of other services. And it's a pretty solid deal for people who don't want to build a multi-thousand dollar rig for gaming 10-20 hours a week.
GeforceNow is actually a weird service - you don't only rent the GPU. Nvidia needs to have a licensing deal with the game publisher you want to play (the game you already own). They removed quite a lot of games, because big names like ActivisionBlizzard, 2K and Bethesda withdrew licensing agreements. If I only rent hardware, I don't think I need permission by the IP holder whose software I intend to run there.
Why would companies withdraw licensing agreements? They get money from Nvidia and also from the consumer that has to buy the game separately.
They certainly aren't launching it on a different game-streaming service or intending to compete with it. Withdrawing doesn't make customers buy more of their games either - probably less.
So why would they be withdrawing from licensing agreements that are effectively free money for them?
Game streaming services like that are harder to reliably hardware fingerprint and introduces unusual install patterns (same game potentially repeatedly installed large amount of times by same user).
For DRM and ban avoidance detection this means either false positives (which is bad rep) or if it's tuned to ignore those signals on specific service provider hardware makes it easier to do account sharing (and thus not buying the game).
if we've learned anything from movie and show streaming then yes, publishers will absolutely all start their own game streaming service if it ever takes off. nice that Microsoft is building a gaming monopoly, can't have multiple platforms if there's only one mega-publisher.
It sounds exactly how netcafes operate where the public can lease a computer and play games for a few hours. I don't think it's weird they have to get special licenses just like netcafes do.
Do you need to have purchased the game at those cafes? Cause you do at geforce now. Game publishers who withdrew from geforce now are just greedy.
There are a few models.
- They have majority of popular games already installed but you need to log in to your own steam account and only have access to the games you already own.
- They provide an in-house account and offer games available in that account to be played. This is usually for cafes offering playtime for console games.
- Partnerships with games studios/publishers, but really I only know about this in Korean PC Bangs for specific games where some content is locked. For example in League of Legends, you unlock playable characters over the course of playing the game so a low level account might not have the full roster unlocked. If you log in your account to affiliated PC Bangs, you have all characters unlocked while playing there.
Well it is bad user experience. While GeforceNow allos me to connect my steam and epic account, the list of games actually playable is not my collection there, but the subset of games nvidia has a licensing deal (a lot less). Also they are free to remove support for games - as happened when big players withdrew their licensing.
I've seen tech videos from LTT and alike where they build remote gaming rigs using windows Hyper-V with GPU passthrough to the guest - that is essetially what they should do, and let me rent a virtual machine with hardware support and low latency video compression. I don't see a reason you would need any licensing deals there.
That is very different, because the netcafe own those games. This would be like needing to rent the computer at the cafe, bringing your own purchased game, but then the netcafe also needs a license to allow you to play your own games at the computer.
Because the model is diverged from the existing model Microsoft established via Game Pass, which made game streaming part of the licensing, not an add-on to purchasing.
Feels bad to buy an expensive piece of hardware, a $60+ game, and then be asked to pony up another hourly fee to play it on your tablet.
Of course, free game streaming was never a viable business model, so this isn't unexpected, but people aren't going to love the change either way.
If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.
This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.
Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.
I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.
There is no bait-and-switch, but this is going to change things.
The industry is scared of recompiling and how AI has driven costs for people to host their own servers. That includes games like GTA where a lot of recurring revenue is from people spending money in online mode.
Microsoft would "solve" that issue, as well as normalize more players to spend monthly instead of once.
“Nothing changes” for your DVD/CDs when Netflix and Spotify arrived.
I personally have my doubts this is going to work, but the thing this model does open up is mainstream games having LLM driven NPCs.
>but people aren't going to love the change either way.
Perfect quote to summarize the direction of modern gaming. People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave. Remember when Oblivion horse armor was over the line? Literally everything has gotten worse from that point despite no one being happy about it.
It seems businesses also believe this, even when it's plainly not true.
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PS1 = 102 million units sold
PS2 = 160
PS3 = 87 million
PS4 = 117 million
PS5 = 95 million (June 2026)
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These numbers would be bad alone, but two things make them especially awful. The first is that there's no meaningful competition anymore. XBox has completely dropped the ball whereas the PS2 initially had the original XBox (which wasn't great, but had novelty going for it), Dreamcast, GameCube, and others all viably competing in the same approximate domain.
The second is that when the PS2 launched in 2000 the US population was 281 million. Now it's 349 million. I'm using US as a proxy for rest of the world, instead of the global population, since we're mostly interested in the developed world as that's the market for game consoles. So the break-even point in terms of marketshare relative to the PS2 would be 349/281*160 = 199 million units sold, and that's if we assume significant competition.
So not only are people leaving consoles, they're leaving in droves. And that leaves the companies squeezing their shrinking player bases even harder, which will make people leave even more quickly. They've lost around 50% of their adjust playerbase over the past 20 years, and at this rate I doubt game consoles will even exist in 20 more years.
It could be more interesting to look at all the consoles, not only the playstations.
N64/PS1/Saturn: 146 million units sold worldwide
GC/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox: 214
Wii/PS3/Xbox 360: 275
WiiU/Switch/PS4/Xbox One: 338
Switch 2/PS5/Xbox Series: 150
So since only the last generation has lower number of units sold, it seems to me that the market for console is either only recently declining, or the cycle is much longer and people takes more time to buy the new generation.
You missed the biggest reason the newer consoles couldn't reach PS2 numbers: Sony managed to bring its price all the way down to $99. PS3 and PS4 only went down to $299. PS5 instead has had multiple price increases and is now way more expensive than it was at launch.
While this is true and has special reasons this gen, the PS4 was 'normal' except there was another difference there as well. Prior to the PS4, companies subsidized hardware to an extreme degree. For instance in the original XBox the video card in that system was worth significantly more than the entire console's MSRP.
But from the PS4 onward, the consoles were made of a relatively lightly modified retail hardware that was sold for profit as quickly as possible. Both the PS4 and PS5 were being sold for profit (on the hardware), less than a year after launch. I think this was due to again companies squeezing a shrinking playerbase even harder, to try to maintain profit levels.
I think the obsession on next quarter, while pretending that there's no such thing as long-term consequences, is eating companies alive. Because there are absolutely long-term consequences.
PlayStation sells better in Europe than it does in North America. XBox sells better in North America than it does in Europe, but has never sold as well globally as the PlayStation of its generation:
https://www.vgchartz.com/
https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...
> People are in stockholm syndrome over it though and aren't going to leave.
People usually dont - until the levies break, and they do. The PlayStation 4 won its generation, because people left XBox for it, in part, over game sharing (or lack thereof)
It feels like PS4 winning was more a result of the halo 3 world of all chat staying in lobbies xbox live dying than anything else. PS3 outsold xbox outside North america too so its really only a regional phenomenon. Hard to really articulate what a social phenomenon halo 3 was in its time. We all just assumed every new game would be like this going forward, but there was never a game like it since. Communities too fractured into different nonexclusive IPs. Death of allchat and staying in lobbies and no one bothering with the mic anymore. No more interest in offering stuff like custom game tools or mapmakers like forge. No fileshare like what bungie.net had for clips and maps.
So shocking in hindsight how ms never realized this formula as it was happening and let it wither on the vine.
Call of duty black ops at least recently has all chat at the end of the game. I think that’s the game trying to remember. Been maybe a year since I played latest CoD on XBox
Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.
I can't even remember what MS did or didn't do in that keynote. Are they really hurting in this gen? I think their success vs PS is all about (lack of) good platform exclusives along with how online gaming got more siloed and less communal. Halo 3 won them the north american market and it wouldn't have been the same without all chat and everyone still having a working mic at that point in the 360s life.
Xbox One was originally going to require frequent online check ins, I think daily or weekly, games on disc were going to tie themselves to your account and publishers could choose whether or not you could resell them at select retailers or share them with your friends, IIRC you could share a game one time with a friend. They also didn't focus on games when showing it off and it was priced $100 higher than PS4 despite being weaker because of the bundled Kinect nobody wanted.
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
The announced a few things.
1. Concentrating on Cable (LOL in retrospect, but controlling the living room was always the plan so I get it) 2. Getting rid of physical games
People are happy enough to spend their money on it though. (Personally I'm amazed people pay money for some different coloured pixels in a game, but in general I don't really like modern games. I aged out somewhere around the PS2 era and now mostly buy from gog.com or play emulators: I'm not the target market!).
Yeah I don't understand the skins/cosmetics stuff at all, just seems lost on me and gamers of my generation. Always shocking to me when I see gamers online complain about say the lack of compelling cosmetic offerings in the in game store, as if that's a big selling point of the game for them. I always use default skins. Earned skins are another story, I'll use those because they mean something. Purchased skins though is almost like stolen valor.
Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
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Streaming games from your own Xbox is free. This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
> This service is for people who don't have that "expensive piece of hardware".
Right, but those people also don't own Xbox games. So this goes from "add-on fee to play the games your already own conveniently", to "buy a $60 game and then pay $/hour to actually play it"
Are you saving money in the second scenario vs buying a console? Almost certainly. But it doesn't feel that way to the person paying a big whack upfront and then also stacks of game time.
There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward. The cost of games is the same in either case. Beyond that you either pay $800-$1000 for a console/$2000+ for a gaming PC, OR $10-20/mo for cloud gaming. Depending on your needs #2 might be the better option, which is why services like GeForce Now are so popular.
> There's no need to overcomplicate it with "feelings", the math is fairly straightforward
It turns out that the customer's perception of a product is pretty vital to its performance in the marketplace. The math can math just fine, but if the customer doesn't feel good about it, you don't make the sale.
Subscriptions try to soften the blow of a big purchase by lowering the monthly payments under your "casual expenditures" threshold. Upfront payments reward you with an immediate sense of ownership, and no recurring anxiety about affording the item.
Combining the two in this particular order is sort of the worst of both worlds - there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
Balloon payment loans are very rare in the United States. I don't know where you live but I don't think you realize how unusual balloon payment loans are.
They are the default in much of Europe, though the expectation is that you'll likely trade the car in when the balloon comes due.
not in my part of europe?
> there's a reason car loans are always low monthly payments to start, with a balloon payment at the end, when you are maximally invested...
What (where?) in the world are you even talking about?
Not present in the math is that the cloud gaming service is able (and likely) to raise prices substantially, worsen the service or simply disappear.
One of the silver linings of a subscription model is that you're able to stop paying and move when it's no longer interesting, here you're asked to invest in a platform that can be taken from you.
What are you investing in exactly? You can pay $10/mo while the service is good, and then stop. The games you buy are still yours.
> The games you buy are still yours
Are they really? You will "own" digital licenses to the games, but you will not have any way to play them once you stop paying for the subscription.
That doesn't feel like "ownership" to me...
They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.
You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).
Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.
I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.
So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.
>The games you buy are still yours.
They're not yours. Can you resell and recoup? Nope, digital licenses.
Can you buy a 2k computer and play them? You can't or won't, that's the whole reason you're using this system instead.
So you effectively have 60 bucks per game as a moat to hold you in while they boil the water.
I tried #2 from here in Australia, but the experience was incredibly poor despite fibre to the home at 500mb/s. You'd be better off buying one of the gaming mini-PCs with 32GB DDR5 and a 760/780M iGPU for ~3-4yrs worth of monthly costs, but the Vimes theory of economics might prevent that.
(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)
That is not quite accurate -- the Game Pass library was a subset of what could be streamed -- things that were not available in Game Pass could still be streamed provided you owned them. When games went out of Game Pass you could purchase them and continue streaming.
Seriously! They're not charging you for the "streaming" or for the "game you already bought" -- they're charging you for renting the Xbox in the cloud that is running the game, the GPU.
I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.
In the UK at least you are looking at electricity costs that are not that far away from those prices frankly.
It is not unexpected to pay 30p/kWh, which if you have a 500W graphics card is 15p/hr to play a AAA videogame, in graphics card cost alone. This ignores you will also be thrashing your CPU, which is maybe another 125W.
This is still a premium over that, but you don't need to buy the graphics card in the first place, so it's pretty understandable.
> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
well, unless you want to play some peer to peer multiplayer, then there is a sub you need to pay
That isn't specific to cloud gaming.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
To imply it being somewhat controversial, so people jump in and generate clicks.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part?
Because they're trying to push a specific narrative.
10-20 hours a week is a lot of gaming. Was it suggested that was a small amount and not worth the investment to have an actual machine? 10-20hrs over a month is more in the realm of streaming imo.
Quick math -
Xbox Cloud Gaming gives you 50 hours for $12. You could game for 3333 hours to equal the Xbox Series X in price ($800). Say you want to depreciate the device over 7 years, that's about 500 hours of gaming a year, or ~9-10 hours a week.
I'd say that's a pretty reasonable limit for a low volume, casual gamer.
That heavily assumes MS does not increase the price, which has been proven to be false when they increase Gamepass price in the past.
The average American watches 4 hours of TV per day!!!
Half of all Americans watch more…..
"Average" probably means the mean here, not the median. So it's not half who watch more than that. There's probably a big gap between the mean and the median. Nobody publishes the median because that number is published by the ad industry which has no interest in showing the lower median.
TV can be passively watched though while you do other things. Gaming has to be actively engaged with
Is that statistic active watching, or skewed by those that leave it on 24h news or shopping or whatever 24/7?
Because they want to find a reason for you to be angry. Anger gets clicks
I strongly suspect that 'gamers rise up' style campaigns are promoted by the same people who promote the WEF as a boogeyman.
If they had charged people the economic price up front instead of intentionally bait and switching this wouldn't be controversial.
Cannot wait for "they want you to pay for the gas to drive a car you already bought!"
In the case of Xbox, you'd get something comparable to Xbox Series X (or S in some situations). So it's hardly comparable to a multi-thousand dollar rig.
> Why do they keep stressing the "games you already bought!!!" part? There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
Correct, that is why the "to stream games you bought" qualifier exists in the title :)
Yeah, it sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
Rentals are not solid deals. They are designed to hamper ownership and force you to rent forever. At least be honest and say you think monopolies should be able to make hardware artificially unaffordable so people are forced to pay subscription fees instead.
And then one generation from now there are no more hardware consoles and you are stuck streaming games from the cloud from your thin-client smart TV. Yet another joy of actually having a physical thing taken away from us, yet again.
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> There is no charge to play the game on your own hardware.
They want to eliminate that. AIs will open source their games otherwise.
Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.
AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.
Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.
Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.
The reality is that proprietary HW from past console generations can be significantly improved and made less expensive via modern tech advancements to provide a superior gaming experience without load times or latency. A $200 modernized PS2 or $100 modernized SNES will dominate gaming long before streaming does.
> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
How could the possibly have been trained on the proprietary source code of games made many years ago?
How could they have trained on books that they didn't buy or source from libraries?
I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.
How is Claude going to be trained on GTA5'S game engine source code if it's closed source?
It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
Well funny enough, the code for GTA5 did leak not too long ago...
It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.
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You make agent A decompile the code and describe the behavior of each function in a spec. Then agent B with no access to the internet or the original code implements it.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
You have an automated pipeline, that includes decompilation. I highly doubt the courts will see the nuance that you apparently do.
The pipeline begins with decompilation. Maybe it doesn't save all that information, but it is part of the pipeline, and so, will be part of the consideration when discovery happens.
"""Open sourcing""" (this needs maximum scare quotes) games by AI-washing the decompilation is legally just about the same as cracking. You won't be able to deploy the result on a walled garden console and most likely not for for money anywhere, and FOSS people won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Illegality isn't going to stop anything. It's going to happen regardless.
Fixing this requires the end of free personal computing as we know it today. Every computer must become a walled garden. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for must be destroyed.
Sure, but illegality means it's not going to happen commercially.
And the game industry has continued to grow in spite of rampant piracy for decades, so there's not much to change here other than a slight reduction in the value of console exclusives if they can be easily vibe ported to PC (but the majority of players will play them on console anyway, as is the case with current console platforms that are easily emulated like Switch).
.. yeah because that has put a stop to all the iptv providers.
It is going to happen, but mostly for older games to keep them playable and maybe to get console exclusives to PC. It doesn't make sense to compete with the copied games because it's illegal. It doesn't make sense to "crack" the games like that because one can just crack the original games the usual way (probably with AI support, but that doesn't matter).
They will just eliminate "your own hardware".
Or if you do own the hardware it'll be a simple thin client.
Because games couldn't be pirated before AI?
Copyright infringement has always been trivial, but the same couldn't be said about reverse engineering. AIs changed that. The market fot remakes and ports is now threatened. Instead of just waiting ages for some company to port their games to PC, people can just do it themselves.
AI or otherwise, porting and QAing a title is orders of magnitude more difficult than downloading a cracked copy of an existing port.
So at most, vibe ports will marginally lower the value of platform exclusives, and lead to fewer exclusives and/or shorter exclusivity periods.
I, for one, have no problem with this outcome.
Predicting it now that people will vibecode open source clones built from having bots play the closed game for training data.