All my exposure to streaming games (outside LAN remote play) has been so shitty that I do not grasp people entertaining streaming services as a viable way to play games. I understand some people have very low standards, but surely for the overwhelming majority of people who like video games, playing them with heaps of input lag and shite bitrate streaming video is worse than not playing them at all, right?
Even with the lowest latency possible and reasonable bandwidth, game streaming over the internet at acceptable quality is not there yet with current technology, as far as I have witnessed and as far as I have heard from anyone else.
I have yet to hear anyone with any kind of gaming chops say anything respectable about over-the-internet game streaming services. The people who push them the most seem to be the type who care less about the game they want to play and more about the platform itself. Like, if you want to find anyone mentioning they played a game on Stadia, you'd have to go to Reddit and look up r/Stadia.
Even in-home streaming is only worthwhile if your hardware is all new and high quality. This isn't most people at all, even including niggas like you and me, nerdy enough to post on the internet about such things, and people with computers that cost as much as an economy car. Or maybe you live somewhere where you're entirely reliant on wifi, and you can't just drill holes in your wall to run networking cable. There are a thousand ways in-home streaming can just not be viable, let alone streaming a game from some Sony server farm.
Tons of places still don't have gigabit ethernet. Even if you do, having tons of bandwidth doesn't mean shit if you just happen to live too far away from your ISP's headend or whatever, which would make your ping times ass. And if you're reliant on mobile data? You can completely forget it. If you have any data caps, you will burn through them faster than if you just did a lot of video streaming at the same resolution.
What I'm trying to say is, this shit is only even remotely viable if:
- the thing you're playing on has a good network interface (most likely if it was built no earlier than 2019)
- your router is high quality
- your connection to your ISP is very low latency, so you live in a big city
And even at that, due to how all of this works, you will still have:
- a bit of input lag that'll make everything feel a little uncomfortable
- compression artifacts that make the image softer everywhere
- tons of compression artifacts that make everything a giant mess if explosions happen
- infetterence somewhere along the way
also, game streaming services advertise goofy shit like this as serious ways to play their games portably:
instead of, you know, a little pocket-sized dedicated game machine, which just isn't a thing anymore here in Clown World.
Everything about game streaming is terrible, and not at all ready for the masses, let alone enthusiasts. The fact that Sony's locking PS1/2/P games behind one, rather than farting out some emulation solution for a console as powerful as PlayStation 5 makes me wonder what the fuck's going on. It's like you can just say to investors "game streaming", and they just start deluging you with money, because internet streaming is hot shit, and they don't understand that games aren't at all like movies and music on technical levels.
I've given game streaming a chance, too. I got a free copy of Doom 64 on Stadia. It is a bad experience. Hiccups happen more and more frequently the longer your session runs. Your session closes out and you lose your place if you pause and go away longer than a few minutes without saving. You wind up with a sense of imposing dread when you enter a room with a lot of enemies, because you know the video compression will shit out if too much happens on-screen at once, and a small network hiccup could lock you up and kill you by no fault of your own. There was one situation where I had a hiccup that lasted about 20 seconds, and it happened while I was firing, so it wasted a bunch of my ammo by holding down fire for like 20 seconds. That is not acceptable at all. 30 years ago, a shitty gaming setup would be if you were trying to play a game on a blurry CRT with a weak RF switch, and a junky Mad Catz controller. Even that still gave you a consistent picture without input lag. You just cannot have the risk of abrupt interruptions mid-game, where you can't even pause in time to wait out the problems. And that's something that simply cannot be fixed, because there will always be a problem somewhere along the line.
$120 a year to stream 25 year old games on your new powerful $600 console that's not even running them locally, even though it could trivially do so, just like the PlayStation from 16 years ago actually did. The PlayStation 5 and its services have been a disaster for video games.
