GWJ Conference Call Episode 650

Generation Zero, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Holedown, The Division 2, Google Stadia, Oculus Rift News, Your Emails and More!

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This week Shawn, Elysium and Julian dive into GDC news. We have OPINIONS.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind.

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00:01:40 Generation Zero
00:09:20 Holedown (mobile)
00:11:20 Path of Exile
00:16:39 The Division 2
00:20:45 Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
00:31:07 News from GDC
00:57:48 Your Emails

Question: Does streaming mean the end of modding and non-programmed in cheats? Because I’m not sure how you would do either if it’s all streamed.

Hey GWJ, I have to comment on the google streaming service, in that it pisses me off.

Basically I don't think this announcement was meant for gamers. I don't even think it's meant for casual gamers. It is meant for shareholders who are more interested in the glimmer of a shiny innovation without wondering "what problem does this innovation solve" or "does it reduce production costs compared to similar tools or services". How is google fibre, the previous big thing to transition [market-segment] into a new age, progressing?

In terms of value added by this new service, I scratch my head - as a technodumbo, it seems to me that the only difference is that the calculations that would otherwise be made by a device at home, are now made at a datacenter hundreds of miles away, and the results of those calculations are broadcast to your device. Not only does the datacenter require the same hardware performance, there are stronger spec requirements because the calculations have to compensate for lag along the way as well.

Given that we have recently learned that it's gonna cost 20 gigabytes of data for ~1 hour of gameplay - how is this more efficient, exactly??! Put into context, Gone Home, a short game that is more about soaking in the mood and narrative, and not at all about defeating difficult bosses, clocks in at ~3 hours according to howlongtobeat - it would cost 60 gigabytes. Gone home the game costs 3 gigabytes to install. Doom clocks in at between 12 and 25 hours, depending on competionism. Put otherwise, this stream service would demand between 240 and 500 gigabytes, or between 3 and 7 times the installation footprint. For one (1) playthrough. A big time waster like the witcher 3 starts at 50 hours to beat, 100 gigabytes or 3 times the install footprint. That's not even going into time vampires like Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, EU4 or Eve Online.

I may be a lefty communist pinko, but I don't think we need this additional, massive energy consumer to "solve" a problem no-one was complaining about. If the conversation we want to have is "gaming hardware is too expensive", then the answer is to boost the minimum wage, or to innovate to make consumer hardware less expensive. Not this abomination of a service.

Lastly, my question to you is this: we are talking about google, a company known for 2 things: putting ads on everything, and absorbing all data it can have in order to sell more efficient ads. Do you honestly want to give them the chance to interrupt your gameplay with a 30 second unskippable ad (bypassed with a premium service for only $30/month)?

Do you trust google to not put ads in there?

jrralls wrote:

Question: Does streaming mean the end of modding and non-programmed in cheats? Because I’m not sure how you would do either if it’s all streamed.

I’d guess yes, along with the death of games preservation, secondhand game sales and any concept of “game ownership” that we still retain.

I am not skeptical that Google can make the technology work, but I think Rabbit’s point about it being great for major metro centers while being utter @$$ for people elsewhere (I’m paraphrasing, but I think that’s the conclusion) is worth paying attention to, and somehow I don’t get the impression that google much cares about customers living more than a few miles from big cities.

I don’t like any part of this, based on what’s been shown. It’s neat technology, and as an engineer I appreciate the effort that went into it, but I don’t like the consumer implications. I’ll wait and see, though, because a few years ago we all thought that FarmVille was going to be the future of gaming, and that didn’t happen either.

What if, when the technology is more mature, Nintendo were to offer NESflixs, every Nintendo game ever made streamed to your device plus new games coming out each month? Would that appeal to people? Because I’d jump at something like that.

jrralls wrote:

What if, when the technology is more mature, Nintendo were to offer NESflixs, every Nintendo game ever made streamed to your device plus new games coming out each month? Would that appeal to people? Because I’d jump at something like that.

That’s theoretically part of the Nintendo Onlibe service, except licensing and legal wrangling prevents it from being “all” Nintendo games, and the result is we get one game plus two ROM-hacks every month.

For classic games I can see it working as a business model,but I don’t love it as a model for AAA games.

Ironclad wrote:

Given that we have recently learned that it's gonna cost 20 gigabytes of data for ~1 hour of gameplay - how is this more efficient, exactly??! Put into context, Gone Home, a short game that is more about soaking in the mood and narrative, and not at all about defeating difficult bosses, clocks in at ~3 hours according to howlongtobeat - it would cost 60 gigabytes. Gone home the game costs 3 gigabytes to install. Doom clocks in at between 12 and 25 hours, depending on competionism. Put otherwise, this stream service would demand between 240 and 500 gigabytes, or between 3 and 7 times the installation footprint. For one (1) playthrough. A big time waster like the witcher 3 starts at 50 hours to beat, 100 gigabytes or 3 times the install footprint. That's not even going into time vampires like Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, EU4 or Eve Online.

I may be a lefty communist pinko, but I don't think we need this additional, massive energy consumer to "solve" a problem no-one was complaining about. If the conversation we want to have is "gaming hardware is too expensive", then the answer is to boost the minimum wage, or to innovate to make consumer hardware less expensive. Not this abomination of a service.

In your analysis of the "cost" of streaming services, and your laserlike focus on the bandwidth consumed, what you've failed to account for is the other side of the equation. I'm $2000 better off from the get-go because I haven't bought the high performance PC to run my games (with the concomitant environmental footprint to manufacture and deliver the device to me).

Thing is, bandwidth gets cheaper over time, where hardware doesn't (or at least, the price of a high-end rig remains roughly constant, even as the spec churn means that a given piece of hardware gets cheaper). As a long-term play, this absolutely makes sense from this perspective.

Looking forward to your further thoughts on Sekiro. I haven’t dived in yet.

Also, I hope Jeff Green streams a play through. No sign as yet

Edit: According to his Twitter he’s purchased Sekiro and is musing over whether to stream on not

In your analysis of the "cost" of streaming services, and your laserlike focus on the bandwidth consumed, what you've failed to account for is the other side of the equation. I'm $2000 better off from the get-go because I haven't bought the high performance PC to run my games (with the concomitant environmental footprint to manufacture and deliver the device to me).

Thing is, bandwidth gets cheaper over time, where hardware doesn't (or at least, the price of a high-end rig remains roughly constant, even as the spec churn means that a given piece of hardware gets cheaper). As a long-term play, this absolutely makes sense from this perspective.

you're right in that I maybe focused too much on one aspect. Thing is, though ... when do people game, en masse? Sure there will be a small fraction who game at 10 am - night shift workers, college students, kids during holiday, but it seems likely that the vast majority will start gaming somewhere around 8-9 PM - and the server farm will be built to accomodate the highest level of traffic (think traffic jams, you build 4-lane roads to accomodate peak traffic, but at night the lanes are superfluous). The cost of building and maintaining peek traffic will be pushed to the customer as is normal, but when tallying up hardware and maintenance costs and network costs, for the provider, as well as the price for the consumer of purchasing uncapped bandwidth I have serious doubts that this is very cost-efficient in the long term.

In addition to that, I have big-ass questions about your 2k price point for a gaming pc. That's the rolls royce of gaming, you can have a decent rig for $1000. If the subscription model costs $100/month all in, the break-even point is less than a year. If it is $30/month then the break-even point is ~3 years. Most consoles seem to have a shelf-life of 5-7 years, and I can't find anything to indicate that pc rigs "decay" at a faster rate. So in order to compete with that, the monthly subscription service would need to be cheaper than $17/month.

I ... really don't see that as a viable price point, unless they fill it with ads in addition to the subscription.

Maybe I'm naïve, i donno.

Sure, but the appeal of a working streaming service to us enthusiast folk would be that we can get Rolls-Royce level of performance from the data center hardware without have to shell out of it.

Jonman wrote:

Sure, but the appeal of a working streaming service to us enthusiast folk would be that we can get Rolls-Royce level of performance from the data center hardware without have to shell out of it.

Leaving aside the question of why people should feel entitled to Rolls Royce performance for Schwinn prices, remember that we’re talking about Google, so even if you’re not paying money you’re still paying something.

I listened to a podcast recently where a developer was very excited about Stadia because of all the user-data he’d be able to sift through, like how long players spent doing X or how much of the game they actually played. I don’t know if he realized how chilling that sounds to those of us who are old enough to remember a time before people started wiretapping themselves just so they wouldn’t have to walk all the way to a keyboard to order toilet paper.

Maybe I’m just old and paranoid, but I think Google (and the rest of those big data peddlers, for that matter) already knows too much about me. It’s too late to un-ring that bell— after all I’m the one who started using gmail, so it’s my own fault for that—, but maybe I don’t want to ring another one.

And while I’m being paranoid, I don’t want Google running my library. With Steam or Sony there’s some expectation that I’ll be able to download my library in perpetuity, because the server that’s storing it is relatively cheap to run. Sure, Nintendo recently dropped this Wii Ware servers, but that’s Nintendo so using them as an example of what normal companies do doesn’t count. Also, they caught some bad PR for that, but nothing like the crap-storm that Sony is Valve would have seen if they did the same, because they’re Nintendo and nobody cares if they are anti-consumer (anyone still boycotting them over their YouTube position? Didn’t think so)

With a pure cloud-based operating system my old game takes up server time that’s actively needed to service all of the people playing the new stuff, which incentivizes Google to maintain a fixed number of games and just dump anything unpopular. We see a little of this on streaming video sites when something isn’t popular enough for Netflix to renew the license agreement, so it goes away. Stadia presents a real problem for game preservation.

I’m with the Game King. This streaming nightmare doesn’t solve any real problems but it creates a lot of new ones.

I agree with you that there are game preservation issues inherent in this.

It's just that my position is that game preservation is a canard that's irrelevant for all but a tiny, if vocal, niche audience. To whit, I don't have access to my old Spectrum games anymore, nor my Genesis, SNES, N64, Dreamcast, PS2, or OG Xbox games anymore. The clock is ticking on my Gamecube, Wii and 360 libraries too.

There's thousands of games that I used to have and no longer do, and I'm fine with that. For many of them, I could get them again if I cared to. Emulators exist. ROM greysites exist. Remakes and re-releases exist (I was personally dumbfounded to see an old Spectrum game I played 30 years ago turn up in the Switch eShop).

Even if I can't access that old game I'm pining for, my gaming life is constantly drowning in an embarrassment of riches, and I find it hard to feel like there's much of a loss there.

I also have a lot of old games that I can’t play anymore. The difference is that I decided I was done with them. If an old console breaks, and I’m dedicated enough to keeping it going, I can fix it. Or I can seek our emulators, as you mentioned.

Google has a history of unceremonious cancellations, and since it’s all in the cloud, there’s no local install to build an emulator for.

I’m ok with abandoning an old console. I am ok with an old system breaking. . I’m not ok with it being taken from me by someone else’s volition.

Maybe that’s an irrational line to draw, but it’s my line and I’m drawing it.

I’m not a member of “mmmmmdrop”, but I’m pretty sure it’s NOT a reference to the Hanson song. It’s a reference to “The New Style” by the Beastie Boys. At 3:09 into the song, “kick it over here baby, pop. and let all the fly skimmers... feel the beat... mmmmmmmDROP!”

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I’m ok with abandoning an old console. I am ok with an old system breaking. . I’m not ok with it being taken from me by someone else’s volition.

Maybe that’s an irrational line to draw, but it’s my line and I’m drawing it.

Fair enough. Appreciate you recognizing the abritrary-ness of your own line.

I'm aware that my Steam library exists at Valve's whim. If they went bankrupt tomorrow, that could be gone. Same for my Switch, since I've mostly eschewed physical carts on that system too.

Which is basically the exact same situation that we'd be in with Stadia, no?

It's an unexpected upside of the storefront fragmentation we're seeing across the industry. My eggs are becoming more distributed among an increasing number of baskets.

I want to tackle two questions:

1) "what problem does this innovation solve"

And

2) "does it reduce production costs compared to similar tools or services”

Regarding 1) I love my Switch. It solved a problem I never knew was a problem. Before I got it, I never knew that I really really really really like being able to play AAA games on my big screen AND effortlessly pick them up and play them while laying down in bed or on commute. But it turns out that was a serious problem for me because I’ve been ridiculously eager to buy games that I already own for full price, AGAIN, just so I can have that luxury. My only problem with the Switch is that EVERYTHING isn’t on the Switch. There is not a game I own that I don’t wish wasn’t also on the Switch. And it seems to me that the end result of Stadia and it’s successors will be that reality.

Regarding 2) I’ve owned 9 different middle to high-end PC’s over my lifetime and 11 different consoles. The end state of a Stadia-like system would seem to me to be a world where every five or so years I buy another $30 dongle, like the one I have for playing Netflix on my non-smart TV. That seems to represent a significant savings to me.

I think there is going to be a large generational divide with people who have grown up on a Netflix with its very fluid concept of ownership, or mainly play Online Only Games were they are utterly dependent upon the internet working and the company still supporting the game, being much more fine with a streaming game service.

For me, I’m an old timer whose first system was the Atari, but I’ve been darn near digital-only for ten years now (one or two exceptions) and I have so little time to play new stuff that I really want to play that if for some reason say the …. oh, the Shadow of Mordor games were deleted from my Steam library I’d just shrug. I put 40 hours into each of them, but I can’t see myself every wanting to play them again. And that’s true for the vast amount of the games in my Steam library.

I used to like to have a large DVD collection (and before that a VHS collection) but once streaming came along those just became clutter. Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu (the services I use) all have far far far more than I can ever watch. And they all have really high quality original programing (the equivalent of AAA games) and if there is something not on them that I really really want to watch, I can always sign up for a new system for a couple of months (that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Game of Thrones). I just assume that the gaming world is going to follow the Netflix-model. Maybe Google’s stadia will become the Netflix, maybe it’ll become the Sling and some dark horse will become the Netflix. I don’t see anyone being able to become a monopoly which makes me think that eventually whatever game I want to play, I’ll be able to play it anywhere anytime.

Fine, I get it. I’m an irrational dinosaur.

I didn’t want to go digital but had to because that’s the way the market went, and my compromise was to never pay more for a game than I’d be ok with losing in a fire. Most of my steam library is from bundles, gifts and deep sale discounts.

If Epic succeeds in destroying Valve, that library goes away. I’m not happy about it, but I made my peace with it. Now I guess I have to make my peace with needing a consistent high speed internet all the time and not even being able to pretend I own rhe games I bought anymore.

But it’s not like we own anything else. Microsoft owns my computer, Apple owns my phone, and google and various social media platforms owns most of my actual life (at least that’s how they act) so why should games be any different?

Oh, I'm right there with you. I like games that are complete experiences, that aren't paid for by by ads, data snooping or design that prods you into microtransactions. I like owning games. I like replaying my favourites.

Unless it's a post-scarcity socialist utopia, the future of everything being free to play and streaming sounds utterly terrible.

What could potentially be interesting to me about Stadia is if it could open up some truly "next gen" innovations. One interesting implication that I think was hinted at in the announcement was on multiplayer:

“Where battle royale games can go from hundreds of players today, to thousands of players tomorrow. And yes, no cheating, and no hacking.”

If this opened up some unique multiplayer experiences, that could peak my interest.

RawkGWJ wrote:

I’m not a member of “mmmmmdrop”, but I’m pretty sure it’s NOT a reference to the Hanson song. It’s a reference to “The New Style” by the Beastie Boys. At 3:09 into the song, “kick it over here baby, pop. and let all the fly skimmers... feel the beat... mmmmmmmDROP!”

This made my day.