Firefox VPN is great for beginners, but it assumes too much and isn't flexible enough for power users. I had to cancel it because "Allow LAN connections" didn't base itself off my local subnet, but on RFC1918. My network is in a private IPv4 net other than that, and I couldn't configure split-tunnel manually.
Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
I'm a moderator of a fairly large (600K) subreddit, and it's relentless. We have to keep upping the minimum karma req's to post but bots just start acquiring more and more. It's a never ending battle.
I'm not sure why it wouldn't, and having dead content enabled, I've seen some weirdly incendiary responses to pretty harmless comments recently. It's weird.
I wouldn't be surprised if the HN team is already doing a lot of work already. Another factor that may have spared the HN community is that there are lower hanging fruit to pick first, reddit being the prime example.
It's pretty strange that the CMA is most concerned with a market that functionally doesn't exist right now, and may not ever be "a thing". Cloud gaming is still fundamentally not a great experience.
Having said that, I don't think the deal should go through anyway. Large companies should not be allowed to purchase other large companies within the same market as them.
> It's pretty strange that the CMA is most concerned with a market that functionally doesn't exist right now, and may not ever be "a thing".
Microsoft, Activision, and most competitors who were against the merger want it to be a thing, though. If the entire industry considers this to be an important future market, the CMA would be foolish to ignore that.
But you ignore all of the headwinds that it faces. We live in a world where players will shell out big bucks for ultra fast monitors with <1ms lag, where gamers measure their abilities in actions per second, and where first perspective shooters LIKE COD are the most popular games and demand split second reactions. How do you expect them to be ok with >100ms ping and dropped packets? I have google fiber with 4ms ping and I hate the experience when cloud gaming.
I'm not sure if the niche of hardcore competitive guys buying expensive low-latency monitors is really something to be concerned about.
But dropped packets/lag spikes are a real issue. I gave the Stadia trial a shot and never had a play session where I didn't have several instances where the game would start stuttering or straight-up freeze for a few seconds and I'd have to wait until it sorted itself out before I could continue playing. Maybe that's fine if you're playing a turn-based RPG or visual novel, but that's a complete dealbreaker for any game with real-time action (most of them).
And I don't know how you fix that issue without making internet infrastructure 100% perfect and reliable. Good luck with that.
> without making internet infrastructure 100% perfect and reliable
If this really takes off, I'd expect we'd see a further stratification of ISP offerings with QoS guarantees.
Currently, there's little incentive for ISPs to optimize for jitter, and yet they already often market their highest bandwidth offerings as "good for gaming."
The players buying <1ms monitors will continue to buy them. Its the other 95% gamers that are the targeted audience. An example: As a dad of two 3 year olds, i don't have time to game more then a couple of hours a week. Its not worth it for me to keep up with the hw trends for that amount of dedication. However, using Shadow to stream my games, i get between 30 and 50ms ping on wifi. Perfectly fine for the type of games i play.
I had a similar experience with GeforceNow and Stadia (40 to 60ms for them as their servers are farther away).
> How do you expect them to be ok with >100ms ping and dropped packets?
You don't. Cloud gaming is not aimed at those people. People like that, who want to compete at higher levels(that includes me) will not play in cloud competetively. But 99,9% other gamers won't care if the tech gets to sub 100ms delay. That's an insanely big market. You could just run any game you want, without worrying about your PC/console specs, there's huge value in that.
It's not the CMA's job to make that judgement, that's what expert testimony is for.
But:
- Residential broadband quality is stagnating in large parts of the world; theoretical peak speeds keep increasing, but so is overprovisioning, and latency is worsening due to increased reliance on 4G/5G for residential connections, leaving vast demographics incapable of having the required stable, low jitter, high bandwidth connection during the typical "prime entertainment" time slots. Noninteractive media can compensate for that easily, interactive… not so much.
- Externalizing energy and cooling costs to customers can be attractive, especially in high-cost locales like Western Europe. Additionally, space for data centres close to customers is limited, and competition is high. Microsoft has enough synergies with their other cloud offerings to make this feasible as long as demand is low-ish, but if it dramatically increases, they'll have to make tough decisions wrt pricing. And even if it comes out ahead… this is the sort of monopolist advantage that CMA is worried about. Sony etc. don't have this advantage. (Presumably one of the reasons why Sony's current cloud gaming offerings are noticeably worse in quality.)
- Game console manufacturers aren't doing much R&D these days, the machines are standard PCs/tablets with mildly modified off-the-shelf software on top. Customers, meanwhile, are much more likely to be loyal to and seek to justify their invest into the $500 box in the living room, than a service they can subscribe to when a new game comes out, and unsubscribe from at the end of the month when they're done with it.
- Leasing has been the dominant model for 10+ years. Steam and other game launcher do not let their customers own anything, and "subscribe to play the 5 most advertised games" services are highly popular. Cloud gaming is not required for this business model. Indeed, freeing these services from the requirement to own a $500 box would make it easier for users to keep switching to whoever has the best offering currently, which reduces profits.
- See above, game consoles are already highly standardized with little effort needed to port between them. And cloud gaming just adds more platforms, since each vendor will have his own (vendor lock in) optimized image formats/APIs/whatnots.
Its bad value if you only care about a few games. Its bad value if you have bad internet. Another issue is if people no longer have their own hardware then there will be much less incentive for providers to make cloud options cheap.
I have used it on my Series X and it's just not as good as playing it locally. I've got it hooked up to a 4K120Hz TV that supports VRR and ALLM, and the exeprience over the cloud will never be as good. It's very convenient that I don't have to download 50GB to play a game, but if it's a game I want to actually play, the 50GB is worth it.
I also have a PS5 with the PS+ Premium package, and their cloud offering is even worse.
For developing markets playing through a controller attached to their phone, its pretty killer. Especially if they get cell providers to bundle in the service with an unlimited plan or as a trial offer.
You need to think of Cloud as the mass-market play, and the enthusiasts will want to own a cloud node (Series X) in their own home. The enthusiast console market tends to top out at ~140 million people, very small compared to the number of smartphones out there.
That’s so hard for me to believe - what kind of awful degraded experience would that be?
Like is that your phone, with a controller Bluetoothed in - do you get a Bluetooth headset too? Or are you playing sound through the device speaker? Or wired through a headphone jack? Squinting at a tiny little screen in your lap? Or somehow on a stand up closer to your eyes? Do you cast your screen out to an external display or maybe pipe the video out through your charge port? Doesn’t all that murder the battery? I’m guessing you need it plugged in too? And what, you’re on wifi this whole time? Doesn’t using your smart phone as a nexus for all this put it through a wringer?
And at the end of all that, what are you doing - you’re pushing your phone to pretend it’s a gaming console? As compared to just using a low end laptop?
It’s just such an alien concept for me. Why such a tortured process to get to stream a game you don’t even own… when you could just use appropriate hardware and play a better suited game?
You attach your phone to the controller and the sound comes through your bluetooth headphones that you no doubt already own. It's basically like using a Switch or a Steamdeck. With fast 4G or 5G network performance is perfectly fine for game streaming. Given that Nintendo have sold roughly 400 million portable consoles so far, it seems many people don't particularly mind "squinting" at a small screen when playing games.
As compared to just using a low end laptop?
Modern phones have better screens and faster CPUs/GPUs than many low end laptops.
Because that hardware is $300-$500 and not portable. Most controllers are wired-in because they snap to the phone, like the Razer Kishi.
Probable using Airpods or other earbuds.
Since the processing isn't happening on the phone, it doesn't use much more battery than watching video.
Mobile is the predominant form of playing games these days. The goal is to allow the existing mobile players to access other types of games that won't run well natively on a phone. It's not aiming to convert existing hardcore gamers.
And I’ll add that this same discussion used to happen with pc gaming vs mobile gaming where purists thought it was crazy that anyone would play mobile games, but if you look at the markets now, mobile gaming is estimated as more than twice the size of PC gaming. A lot of that is because most people don’t have gaming PCs.
That doesn't mean that playing on the cloud is good though, does it? It's still a subpar experience in terms of reponsiveness and image quality, even on a 60Hz display.
It's not my internet connection either, as I have my Series X hooked up with an ethernet cable, and my line is a 500/500 fiber line from Bell, with at most 5ms latency. I should be the ideal customer for cloud gaming, and it's still not good.
Cloud gaming is fantastic. I use it daily as I don't have or want to buy a PC or console. I pay $10 a month to play Destiny's latest expansion and I can unsub when I'm done. 4 months of gaming worth $40 instead of the console/PC price. It's also extremely convenient to try new games with a very low barrier of entry. Fantastic service
My experience is that it's much better than the alternative of games running natively on your phone. I would say better than the switch too in most cases for me (more battery life, shorter load times) though may depend on the game.
I also noticed a significant improvement running it on WiFi after I upgraded to a mesh network. I've only tried over cloud a few times, can appreciate connection requirements may very high, but even being able to load it up wirelessly in different parts of the house or backyard is a big plus for me.
I am in the Midwest and have the opposite experience. Most of the time I can't tell the difference between playing on the cloud vs locally on my Series X.
Playing battle toads, forza, spelunky 2, etc... I'll sometimes get visual artifacting. I even played Wo Ling and it felt as good as playing locally. When I stream, it's in my Galaxy Fold 4 so resolution doesn't matter to me on that size screen.
Admittedly I haven't kept up with the PS5 but the PS4 Pro at least basically let you choose between 4k and 60fps and couldn't do both, and generally you're not going to get 4k120hz on any game, let alone at maximum graphics settings. I feel like the intersection between enthusiasts and console gamers is quite low because most people buy a PC.
whether someone can afford something and whether someone wants to use it consistently are two different things. I can afford a $3000 gaming PC, but I would never buy one since I'm not that into playing games at the highest settings.
I'm a fast twitch FPS person from the nineties so I expect low latency when playing a solo game. I played through Cyberpunk using GFN on a home connection in London (ping was 2, which is faster than my mouse latency) and it was fine.
