Oh how we all laughed at Brian back in 2013 when he told us OnLive was going to be the future. Maybe he was right after all? Well, maybe not about OnLive specifically (that went tits up in 2015) but in terms of game streaming being the next big thing. Well done Brian.
We've seen quite a lot of movement in this area lately. Microsoft seem to be leading the charge with XCloud - you can now stream rather a lot of the Xbox Game Pass library to PCs, mobile devices and even other Xboxes, and their stated aim is to make the whole Xbox ecosystem platform-agnostic - so they are hoping in the future people will simply subscribe to Game Pass without necessarily needing Xbox hardware. Maybe a little optimistic but who knows? Certainly XCloud is pretty decent: it works, it's a bit stuttery sometimes and the picture quality is a bit soft but particularly if you're playing on a mobile device that's not really a problem. I've used it a few times to boot stuff up on the Xbox to try it for ten minutes without needing a lengthy install and it's been pretty handy. Although I would never consider it a substitute for the actual hardware, not at this stage.
However I've just recently tried GeForce Now and to be honest I'm a bit blown away. This allows you to play Steam and Ubisoft games you already own, and I've essentially used it to transform my resolutely non-gaming laptop into a very capable gaming PC. Within a couple of clicks I'm playing stuff at maximum graphics settings and honestly the experience is good enough, even over wi-fi, that I quickly forget I'm streaming at all. I've tried it with several mouse-based games (where you'd expect the additional lag to be most noticeable) and to me it's more or less indistinguishable from games running locally. It's a shame the games it supports are a bit limited due to publisher shenanigans, but in terms of this being the future, or a form of it, I'm fairly convinced. I've even stumped up for a month of the paid service just to try it out fully - and to play through a couple of the PC exclusives in my Steam backlog I've always meant to get around to.
Other solutions exist. I haven't tried Google Stadia, PlayStation Now or Amazon Luna - anyone got any experience with these?
Brian bought an Ouya, I'm not sure he was a Steve Jobs level visionary of streamed gaming.
I bought an Ouya for £10. I’m not Mr Gizmodo.
Other solutions exist. I haven't tried Google Stadia, PlayStation Now or Amazon Luna - anyone got any experience with these?
Balls. My brother in law (outside of wedlock, but whatever) offered us a Stadia for free and I forgot to pick it up when I was in Ireland last weekend. Dunno if I can be arsed having him send it over, the postage and customs would be a pain. Oh well.
I bought an Ouya for £10. I’m not Mr Gizmodo.
I'm just saying, I think Gar has mixed up your prophetic powers with your random purchase of an Ouya.
And I think GeForce Now is certainly the pick of the current batch of streaming services. My experiences of Stadia and Xbox streaming were hit and miss, but I did try GFN for a while and was impressed. It does have a bit of an air of cold fusion about it ("this technology is only 10 years away!!!!") but I do think it's the inevitable end point for gaming.
I've often wondered if the big advantage OnLive had was that no fucker was using it so the service was super responsive.
I’ve been using GeoForce for a year now, but only to play Tabletop Simulator.
I’ve been meaning to expand my Steam library.
I used GeForce Now during the beta (when all the premium stuff was free) and it was a revelation. Even more impressive, I was using it to play WoW. It felt like witchcraft to be connected to an MMO remotely like that.
I can’t see it ever working for some stuff. Mario with input lag would be hell. And I don’t play them, but I imagine fighting games would just go off and do their own thing.
Apart from Alastor who has frame perfect timings down on fighting games here? Eventually I suspect it'll be like Spotify: good enough. And the hardcore will be the only people left on dedicated hardware.
Not at a serious level but I feel it would be too much for sports games too. Still play a lot of Madden online and sometimes kicking or player selection is an issue in online matches, doubt that is helped by the game also being streamed?
I played through Doom 2016 on Stadia and have played several games on GFN. It's pretty impressive, really. Never thought it would be. Now I don't have to buy ridiculously expensive PCs.
I played through Doom 2016 on Stadia and have played several games on GFN. It's pretty impressive, really. Never thought it would be. Now I don't have to buy ridiculously expensive PCs.
I can't work out what surprises me more: Dok playing Doom 2016, or using game streaming to do so. Anyway, welcome to the future, Dok. Hope you're doing OK, man. 2016 has never been anywhere near as good as 1993, in so so many ways.
I've been using GeForce Now all week to play The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The game itself is unexpectedly tremendous, in an early 2000s Eurojank RPG way. GeForce Now, though, has been a complete revelation, almost completely flawless throughout after some minor tweaking of the settings. I've had two minor hitches in a week, and one crash to desktop, which I am sure was my janky old game bombing out and nothing to do with GFN. Otherwise it's been indistinguishable from playing locally, and I've put at least a dozen hours into it. Colour me very impressed indeed, on a technical level at least.
GFN's major problem then is its limited library. I don't have the biggest Steam library in the world but even so it's picked up only about a third of what I own. I can't play Civilization and I can't play Total War and that's very nearly a showstopper for me. Luckily I can play Anno and Cities Skylines so it gets a stay of execution but I hope at some point Nvidia find a way of getting more publishers on board. Genuinely if this had 100% coverage of my Steam and Epic libraries I would just subscribe to this and never think about buying any PC gaming hardware ever again.
I'm not so distressed about modern gaming any more, really. I don't care for a lot of it, but it's really none of my business. Still wish you all would use a freaking mouse and keyboard for console FPS though :)
Classic Doom is definitely many times better than 2016 to me, but I could see how people had a blast with 2016 – there were points where there was a lot of fun running around like a crazy man dodging and blasting everything.
I also wish GFN had a bigger percentage of my library. This is why I don't bother subscribing to it and accepting its queues and time limitations. At least I "own" (as much as you can own a streamed game) Doom2016 on Stadia and play it.
Witcher1 is definitely jank though. 2's a bit more fun but still weird and I've never had the opportunity to play 3.
At least I "own" (as much as you can own a streamed game) Doom2016 on Stadia and play it.
Pretty sure I read yesterday that Google had 'deprioritised' Stadia and were hawking the tech around to other companies under the name Google Stream. So, sadly you might not own it for much longer.
Pretty sure I read yesterday that Google had 'deprioritised' Stadia and were hawking the tech around to other companies under the name Google Stream. So, sadly you might not own it for much longer.
Yeah, I figured that'd be the case one day given how fickle Google is with its services. Remember Google+? All the other "great" A++ Around Forever things Google has overhyped? All dead. Stadia/Google Stream/whatever they want to call it dying isn't a surprise at all.
Has anyone had a good experience with xcloud? It’s been unplayable for me since launch (actually unplayable, not Internet Unplayable). Everything pauses for half a second, every second.
Admittedly this is on Wi-Fi, on my phone, but then surely that’s the point of these things. And I have 200mb internet, over 5ghz, so not exactly slow.
GeForce Now always works without issue. XCloud has always been poo.
The only device I've found XCloud to be even halfway decent on is the Xbox itself, which is fairly pointless. Even then the picture quality is pretty poor and it's in no way a substitute for playing locally.
On my laptop it loses connection and crashes out within a few minutes (this is the same laptop that gives me a perfect experience with GFN, so it's not my Wifi). I haven't even bothered with trying it on my phone, apart from about two minutes once where I realised there was no way I was going to be able to adjust to touch controls.
Even streaming locally from my own Xbox to my own laptop gives a fairly poor experience. I just think the bandwidth they allocate to this is too low.
Bringing this one back up, because I played for about three hours last night on my phone. For reference, I've got the Razer Kishi controller (the Xbox version as opposed to the generic one) and an Android phone where the screen size is basically the same as a standard Switch (not the body form, the actual screen). I'm using 150mb fiber broadband with a 5ghz connection.
Using the Game Pass app on my phone, using it to dive back into a game I already have in progress (Nobody Saves The World), it just works for me. No issues, no stuttering, no glitches or lag. It just feels like playing handheld Xbox, which is to say no different than if I was playing Switch. Granted, I had an initial moment where I was pressing the wrong buttons, but that's just muscle memory from the Switch A/B being reversed. Otherwise, all good. It didn't even kick the shit out of the battery life, I was about 60% when I started playing and around 30% when I stopped, which really surprised me.
Would it work just as well with a game that was faster paced, needed precision movement or had a constant online requirement, meaning there's double the amount of data streaming needed? Maybe not, though I have played Sea of Thieves on my phone and bar a few frame drops, that was okay too. Would it work just as well away from my home network? Probably not, but as a means of playing something while the TV is otherwise in use, it's good for me. The lack of feedback in a vibration sense is also initially noticeable, but you get used to it.
+1 for the 'I actually like this' camp then. I'll use it more in the future, I reckon.
I'm paying for Geforce Now at the moment, and it's SO much more impressive than Xcloud. I think I'm fairly sensitive to input lag, and with a pad it's basically non-existent. You can feel it on an FPS with mouse and keyboard, but even then only just.
Also, thanks to our glorious overlords at the CMA, all of Game Pass is on here.
I reckon it's at the point now where this is more viable than a local desktop. At £10 a month, that means you're spending 600 quid over five years. And that's for hardware that'll always be updated (I'm currently getting rigs with 3060s, so not bleeding edge, but enough to run anything at full speed with this DLSS magic).
You'd be spending a lot more than that to stay current with a physical PC.
GeForce Now is great but it has two problems - a limited game library, and an overly aggressive timeout. The amount of times I've been in the middle of something, gone to make a cup of tea or had a quick chat with someone and come back to find it's terminated my session and lost all my progress is infuriating.
Also ten quid a month gets you a fairly basic 1080p/60fps experience, I mean it's not bad but it's not what most people want from a gaming PC. You have to double that cost to get fancy features like 4K resolution, HDR or ray tracing. I think that's less than last time I checked though and it still works out cheaper than a local desktop over any reasonable timeframe.
XCloud is a weird one because by default it's dogshit but it looks like the only reason for that is that Microsoft are being really conservative with the bandwidth they assign to it. There's a little app called XBPlay that allows you to tweak all the settings (codec, resolution, bandwidth) and if you whack those all up to max then you end up with an experience that's not far off GFN. I've been using XBPlay to play various Game Pass games on my Steam Deck and not once have I felt that the experience has been anything less than native. I can't comprehend why Microsoft would intentionally gimp their apparently very capable streaming service to the point where everyone just assume it's shit, but then I don't understand much of what Microsoft does these days.
Agree about the catalogue on Geforce Now. I've already had a couple of disappointments, including the new Riven remake. It's more of a surprise when something is there, than when it isn't. Hopefully that changes as the world's biggest company start spending the big bucks on licensing.
I've just upgraded to the £20 tier, after being sold on the tech, and it's pretty breathtaking. 120fps, HDR, 4K, every setting maxed out. It's definitely how I'll be playing Microsoft's big first-party games.
Geforce Now Ultimate is on sale at the moment, 50 quid for six months of the top tier.
50 quid for six months of a 4080 with all the bells and whistles is an incredible deal, if you've got decent wired internet.
Geforce Now Ultimate is on sale at the moment, 50 quid for six months of the top tier.
50 quid for six months of a 4080 with all the bells and whistles is an incredible deal, if you've got decent wired internet.
I signed up for this - damn you Mr Party Hat!
My impressions of GeForce Now remain much the same as previously. It's just insanely impressive, and the 4080 tier handles 120fps/1440p without a hitch even over wifi. I genuinely completely forgot I was playing a stream last night, there was nothing whatsoever that gave it away - no hitching, no compression artefacts, no lag, nothing. It's witchcraft.
Having access to a top-end machine is hilarious too, now what settings shall I apply? MAXIMUM EVERYTHING, maybe? I also discovered the delights of DLSS which appears to me to simply be a tick box that makes your games run 50% faster. Lovely stuff.
It's neat having the Game Pass library on there (and even neater that it flawlessly picks up your Xbox saves and lets you carry on from where you left off) though it does make you sign into your Microsoft account every time you start a game, which feels like a bug rather than a feature. Also, turns out The Lamplighters League runs like shit on everything, which maybe isn't surprising although it does wheeze slightly less on PC than it did on Xbox. Still a great game.
The range of games remains sadly really limited. I wanted to play the Sony games but apart from Death Stranding they don't appear to be on there. Only a few Total War games are there and no Civ. No Arkham games either. This time I am determined not simply to play Anno 1800 for six months straight but thinking about it I might actually do that! Still an absolute bargain.
Death Stranding is the only Sony game to ever exist. It always was and always will be. Everything before and since has just been left wing lies and deceit, trying to cow you into a woke existence.
God of War was on there for a bit, apparently. Then Sony decided they don't like money and removed it.
25 new games added to GFN today including - at last - Civilization 4, 5 and 6, as well as the FF16 demo. Hopefully a sign that the service is getting more support now.
Automatic sign in for Microsoft games too, which is great. No more entering your password every time you load a Game Pass title, it'll feel even more like a local experience.
