Many players dream of playing their favorite games at maximum image quality, without lags and crashes. Unfortunately, modernizing computer equipment in step with the times is not always easy and quite expensive. However, even players with low-powered systems have the opportunity to enjoy the unforgettable graphics of today's gaming industry.
In this article, we will not talk about ways to optimize and overclock a computer, but about a special Playkey service. This innovative program has already won many fans. At the moment, good results have already been achieved, but the developers continue to develop their offspring in order to provide players with better conditions. Let's take a closer look at what Playkey is and whether it is possible to play there for free without using subscriptions.
What is PlayKey?
Possible problems:
- Ping. Some providers use long enough trunks, so the signal must pass through European countries or America before getting to the Playke service and back.
- WiFi. The creators strongly recommend using a wired connection during the game (direct or through a router) in order to minimize the loss of data packets. It is noteworthy that at the moment the developers are busy looking for a solution that uses 3G-4G networks.
- Low internet speed. For a comfortable game, it is desirable to have at least 30 Mbps, or better, a higher rate.
- Too weak video card. In fact, the only thing required from the user's PC is to decode the received signal. Of course, old video cards aged 10-15 years are not capable of this.
By the way, check out this article too: Login error: Invalid session, restart launcher and game - what to do
Play for free and without a subscription?
In fact, finding an effective method is extremely difficult. The reason is that developers keep a close eye on their product and emerging hacking methods. This is important due to the fact that there are practically no specialized servers in Russia. For rent and leasing, you need to pay serious amounts that are spent from investment deposits. Therefore, the existing loopholes are closed promptly. However, there is an opportunity to play for free:
- We recommend searching the internet. valid promo codes. In fact, this is the only stable chance to get a few hours of the game for free.
- Join the official public service
Playkey (Play Kay) is a special program for remote connection of games. The essence of this application is that the developer offers the gamer to use the services of one of the many remote servers of the company, on which the game is launched. In this case, only streaming video is transmitted to the user. Thus, modern games can be run even on weak computers, but you can play at high settings.
This approach allowed the company to create a completely new software product designed for the Russian gaming market - Playkey technology based on storing information in the "cloud" and based on providing users with paid services of remote resource servers. The resource is paid and gamers, in order to use the services of the application, make out a monthly paid subscription, gaining access to powerful servers and, as it were, renting these capacities to run games on their PCs. However, there are those who manage to play for free without a subscription.
This principle, which involves the use of powerful servers remotely, makes it possible to run even the most demanding games of world developers on simple user PCs, as well as on some tablets and TVs that support the Smart TV function. Playkey is adapted to work with all popular operating systems (it supports Microsoft Windows, Mac OS from Apple, as well as mobile OS: Android, iOS and others).
Thus, the concept appeared as "cloud games" that are launched remotely, but you can play on your computer. The main condition for this is a stable and high-speed Internet connection.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the use of the NVIDIA GRID platform, on the basis of which Playkey provides high data transfer speeds and high-quality graphics. Despite the use of powerful servers, the video streaming speed does not exceed 5-10 Mbps, which allows you to run the game on almost any computer.
Platform features
The program has a number of advantages, due to which it has practically no competitors. Among the main and undeniable advantages of this software product, it is worth highlighting:- High-speed video streaming, including excellent graphics quality.
- The ability to support even the most demanding games from global manufacturers, which is so important for avid gamers.
- You can download Playkey for free in Russian (client for connecting to servers).
- The parameters of the system itself remain unchanged. do not require any special working conditions.
- The application, due to its cross-platform, makes it possible to install it on any of the known operating systems and even on mobile devices.
- Using Playkey does not require downloading and installing the game, because the game itself is launched on a remote application server, and only streaming video is transmitted to the user.
- A huge catalog of games of a wide variety of directions and genres.
- The service servers allow you to save information about registered gamers: the player's profile, data about him, game files, etc.
Another pleasant moment in working with the resource is the constant updating of game versions, installing new drivers, and providing other technical support. resource support.
Despite the huge number of advantages, the Playkey service is not without some disadvantages. Thus, the transfer rate of streaming graphics depends on the remoteness of the locality where the client PC is located, from the Playkey server that provides its capacity. Also, the video rate is 30 fps, which is more like working with old consoles and can be quite annoying. In addition to the speed of the broadcast, many users have noticed lag between user actions when entering data from the keyboard or mouse, with a response on the display.
conclusions
To work with a client, it is enough to download Playkey for Windows for free, install it on your computer, and then go through registration on the site, creating an account and paying for a subscription. After these procedures, the user gets access to the games, where he can select the game he is interested in, confirming the launch of an external application. Before subscribing, resource developers offer users to use free gamesto give an opportunity to evaluate the quality of the application. After subscribing, the PlayKey user gets full access to a huge catalog of games of various genres and directions.With all this technology OnLive were advanced. The developers created a system that worked stably, without problems on the user's side if there was a good connection.
After the bankruptcy, all the patents and assets of OnLive were sold to the investment company Lauder Partners, and then the OnLive service was restarted, but with a new team.
The latest effort to gain a foothold in the market was the CloudLift service, which offered modern games from Steam and the instant continuation of an interrupted game session on another device. Just before the shutdown, OnLive even began offering a CloudLift Enterprise option: streaming business applications to low-powered devices for large corporations and enterprises.
Screenshot from the OnLive website showing termination of service information
However, all this did not help, and in 2015 the company announced the sale of all patents to Sony and the termination of activities.
Success Gaikai
Gaikai was also announced at the Game Developers Conference 2009. The company intended to do so later, but the announcement of OnLive at GDC 2009 forced the company to retaliate.
Screenshot from Gaikai website
On July 1, 2009, Gaikai founder David Perry posted Gaikai data and a demo video on his personal blog. The video showed some games, including Mario Kart 64 and World of Warcraft, running in a browser window. Perry stated, “We designed this [meaning Gaikai] for the real internet. We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, it didn't take us seven years, and we don't claim to have developed a specialized hardware chip for one-millisecond latency encoding. As you can see, we do not need all this, and therefore our costs will be much less.
On the same day, GameSpot published an interview with David Perry, in which the latter talked about the Gaikai service, its difference from OnLive, its relationship with publishers, and the business model. Unlike OnLive, the company did not attempt to sell cloud services to the end user. Instead, it provided a platform for game makers to try demos of the latest titles for free.
As Perry stated in an interview about OnLive: “They plan to fight Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo at the same time, which will not be an easy task. In addition, they will have to use an expensive marketing strategy to attract players. And even if they can do this, they will only be able to take some market share from Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.”
As history has shown, this approach worked, and in 2012 it was announced the sale of the service for $380 million to Sony. At the same time, for 2012, OnLive and Gaikai had technologies similar in level. For example, you can see a detailed comparison of the work of these 2 services using several games as an example.
Cloud gaming services today
The Wikipedia page contains a couple of dozen services, active and already deceased. Let's try to understand this apparent abundance. I discarded projects that were no longer active, as well as projects that were related to file streaming. As a result, the list of projects for consideration has been significantly reduced. The rest were divided into 3 parts: current commercial projects for PC, projects for set-top boxes and TV, and small projects.Commercial projects for PC
▍LiquidSky
The founder of the service is a young 23-year-old Ian McLoughlin. The service itself is at the beta testing stage, which does not prevent it from having more than 500,000 users around the world today. In September 2016, the service received an investment of $4,000,000 from a group of investors. You can read more about this. The LiquidSky service is built on Nvidia GRID technology.
Screenshot of the LiquidSky virtual desktop
This service is interesting primarily because the Liquidsky service itself does not care at all what you do in this cloud. A typical situation is when players, using this service and having an account on Steam, quickly download any previously purchased game to a remote server, launch it and play for their own pleasure, saving on Steam itself. At the same time, having paid a monthly subscription for $14.99, users receive an additional 500 GB of data storage on the server. If you look at Dropbox, which is asking $8.25 for 1TB of data, it doesn't seem that expensive. Subscription limit is 80 hours per month.
Screenshot from LiquidSky website
This service appeared quite recently and at the time of its appearance had a huge number of bugs. Since the service is quite active in social networks and the Internet, you can see what kind of shortcomings the service has at the moment. A few months ago, for example, when I logged into my account, I noticed that the cursor was moving randomly around the screen, and I had difficulty controlling its movement. When I finally went to my library of games on Steam, I noticed that other people's games were there. It turns out that I got into someone else's account and the owner of this account and I fought for cursor control, which explained his strange behavior.
▍Playkey
The service itself is a Russian project, also built on the basis of Nvidia Grid. The implementation of the idea to create a project began in 2012, and throughout 2014 the service was in open beta testing. At the turn of 2014-2015. the project has reached the release stage, launched into commerce.Their website has a list of games that the user can play. When paying a monthly subscription for 590 rubles. the user gets access to 150 free games on the service and gets the opportunity to buy some paid games and play them on Playkey. Subscription limit is 70 hours per month.
The project is local, which automatically protects it from other competitors. However, initially the service did not go. You can read more about this in the article.
Screenshot from Playkey website
According to the CEO of Playkey Egor Guryev, in May 2015 the number of paying users was only 282 people. However, the company managed to correct the situation by changing the business model. As of March 2016, the service had 200,000 registered, 10,000 subscribed, and 4,000 regular paying users. To change the situation, the following changes were made to the company's activities:
- We changed the business model - “At the first stage, we had a subscription, buying which, the user got access to 120+ games, but in this way we could not get new items from the developers and offered old content, .... Users saw the minimum values in such a selection. Games that are available at low cost on sales have been played by many more than once and at the same time worked well on computers that were upgraded 1-2 years ago. The developers did not give new content to the subscription, and it is understandable why - they were afraid of losing income from the sale of games in retail, receiving absolutely unpredictable income in the subscription. We launched a piece purchase of content and the ability to play games that were previously purchased. This gave us access to new products that account for 85% of demand. At the same time, we transformed the subscription to the catalog of games (which was abandoned), into a payment for the use of our server capacities. According to current indicators, we see that on average a user plays Playkey for 20 hours a month.”
- Rebuilt marketing - “We faced a very low conversion, due to the fact that our communications did not have an answer to the question - who are we, what are we, what problems do we solve. Now we are focused on one thing - "Play modern games on a weak computer." The 'GTA 5 Calculator' video we sponsored has 820k views on YouTube."
- We changed the content - “We talked about this in paragraph 1, but I will add that we have focused our offer on those games that are demanding on the user's computer and are in high demand (that is, new items). We gave up everything else. That's why we don't have JA2, 3 Heroes, etc. These games work well on smaller laptops and can be played without using our technology, saving money.”
Screenshot of Saints Row 4 running on Playkey
If you compare Playkey's problems in 2015 with the causes of OnLive's bankruptcy in 2012, you can see the similarity of the sources of problems for both companies: they both did not have a well-thought-out business model, did not offer content to customers that would be in demand, and both lacked a well-thought-out marketing strategy.
▍PlayStation Now
PlayStation Now is a game streaming service that allows you to play PlayStation 3 games on PC, mobile devices, TVs, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4. The service itself is the result of technology and development from Gaikai, which Sony acquired in 2012 for $380 million. Officially launched as a subscription service in the United States on January 13, 2015.
Screenshot from PlayStation Now website
In August 2016, the first PlayStation Now for PC launched in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands. At the moment, the service provides access to more than 400 games released on PS3. For new users, a seven-day free trial is provided.
All you need to use it is to download the dedicated PlayStation Now app and connect a DualShock 4 or other joystick. The service is not yet available in Russia, but some craftsmen have found methods to bypass this limitation. you can see how they did it.
According to the latest figures, the company has sold more than 40 million PS4 consoles worldwide - a huge market for the company. However, the service has a problem, which is that only PS3 games can be played on this service. The reason for this lies in the technology used by Sony.
Due to these same features, it is impossible to play PS3 games on PS4 consoles without a cloud service. these consoles are completely incompatible.
Discounts on PlayStation Vue
In addition, Sony's service is quite expensive - PlayStation Now is the most expensive of the listed services and costs $20 for a 1 month subscription. And the pricing of their PlayStation Vue video streaming service “surprised” me to say the least. By comparison, Netflix offers a similar service in the US for $9.99 per month.
Services for set-top boxes and TV
I have never used such services, perhaps that is why I am a little biased towards them. However, the GeForce NOW and GameFly projects are big development projects that I couldn't miss. They had to be given a separate category. I took the picture below from the Nvidia website. It can hardly be called objective, but from it you can get a general idea of \u200b\u200bthe GeForce NOW, PlayStation Now and GameFly services.
Comparison of services from the Nividia website
▍GameFly
Previously, the company's business was expressed in the figure below. As you can see from it, the company used to be engaged in the provision of games for rent. But time passed, and already such a model ceased to be competitive in the modern world.
The old GameFly business model
Therefore, in June 2015, she acquires the Israeli company Playcast Media Systems, and immediately launches a new service. The company changes priorities and starts to look in step with the times.
Screenshot from GameFly website
At the moment, the main markets for the service are North America and Europe. According to the company, the number of subscribers of the service is about 334,000 people. To use it, you need to be the owner of one of the smart TVs manufactured by LG, Samsung or Philips.
▍GeForce NOW
The GeForce NOW service allows you to play on a subscription device Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, Shield Android TV. The service offers 3 months free to Shield series purchasers and then requires a $7.99 per month subscription. Most of the games are included in the subscription, but you have to pay for the rest.
Devices to use GeForce NOW
I could not find the number of subscribers for this service, but, according to the company, more than 100,000 people in 190 countries participated in testing the service alone.
Small projects
▍UbitusGameNow
The service is more dead than alive. The latest articles and tweets on this service by the Taiwanese company Ubitus date back to 2013. The service has a working site with games, but only a couple of them I was able to launch after several attempts. I can’t say that my Internet is excellent, but the rest of my services started without any problems.
Screenshot from Ubitus GameNow of King's Bounty: The Legend
▍PlayGiga
Despite the start of the project in 2013, the final product was not presented to users. The company maintains a website where information is updated, but the project has not yet taken off. It is not even clear yet what platforms they are going to work on.▍Gface
Everyone ran from the series, and I ran. It seems that Crytek, the creator of the service, did not fully understand what games in the cloud are, and made a forum for players to communicate with their game.▍Kalydo
The Wikipedia page says the service is live, but it looks like it died quietly in early 2016, maybe earlier. It was a file streaming service where you could start playing almost instantly after purchasing the game, and download the rest of the data as you played.▍Loudplay
A Russian project that has not taken off yet. There is almost no information on the project website itself. There are several reviews on testing the service. The essence of the service is that the user rents a game server on which you can install any game. According to some information on the Internet, the service is dead, and its developers have disappeared.▍Playincloud
Also a Russian project, very peculiar. According to the developer, the service is not commercial, but at the same time, the site indicates the tariffs for its use. Players use the service in turn: one entered, the other left. The server has pre-installed games that users can play.▍Leap Computing
It didn't take off, and maybe it won't take off. The developers demonstrated the operation of the system under controlled conditions, and at this point the project stalled. The developers promised a year ago to provide a working version, but things are still there.
Screenshot from Leap Computing website
▍Turbo.net
The service does not apply to games. As the developers of the service indicate, it is intended for developers and IT managers and allows you to create a virtual space for developing applications.▍G cluster
Initially, I believed the information on the Wikipedia page that the service had stopped working, but this turned out to be not entirely true. Yes, the G-cluster Global Corporation itself went bankrupt and was liquidated, but all of its assets, patents, etc. passed to its parent company Broadmedia Corporation, which continued to provide services to provide the service. But the error on the page is understandable, because. I could not find a single assessment in English, how really good this service works.The service is a pioneer of game streaming and was created back in 2000, but never became profitable, which led to the liquidation of the company. For all this time, it has not become popular in the world. It also doesn't seem to be very popular in Japan, the main market for the service, based on Google Play ratings. you can see the history and business model of this service for 2010.
▍Other
There are other participants in the cloud gaming market that are not mentioned in this article. For example, Ubisoft Entertainment, Amazon, CiiNOW, GamingCloud, Google, Happy Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Nintendo, Samsung Electronics, TransGaming, Valve (I took this list from an analytical report by Technavio) were noted on it. As you can see, almost all major electronics companies can be found in this list. Probably, other companies offering network solutions such as IaaS, PaaS or SaaS could offer some product to end users, but so far there have been no such attempts.Comparison of using Playkey and LiquidSky services
For Russians from large gaming services in the cloud, only these 2 indicated projects are available so far. There are also, for example, the Russian Playincloud or Ubitus GameNow, which you can also try to use, but they are either small or only partially functioning.For a visual comparison of these services, I used the game Europa Universalis 4, a computer game in the genre of grand strategy, which was developed by Paradox Interactive. This is not the best game to compare the two systems, but its example is sufficient to illustrate the difference in operation between the two services:
As you can see from the comparison of the services provided, both have their advantages and disadvantages. For me personally, the LiquidSky service is more interesting, but the remoteness of the available servers nullifies all the advantages and does not allow using this service.
Pros and Cons of Cloud Gaming for End Users
The advantages and disadvantages of cloud gaming have not changed since the advent of OnLive and Gaikai. However, with the development of technologies, the quality of communication and the acquaintance of an increasing number of users with this technology, the priorities of these features change, i.e. how important they are to the user.Advantages
Flaws
- Image quality - the higher the image quality, the more resources will be spent in the cloud and the higher the requirements for the bandwidth of the communication channel and its stability. Often there is a situation when cloud service providers compress the image that comes to end users.
- Internet traffic - cloud services require a large amount of traffic. At the same time, the Internet speed must be stable, at least 5 Mbps. Playing games in the cloud, the user can consume more than 3 GB of Internet per hour. As the picture quality improves, the traffic consumption increases proportionally. If game streaming becomes more mainstream, network congestion will skyrocket.
Image quality in the cloud and on PC
- Delay - from which you can not get away. The game will respond to the player's actions faster when it is running on the local computer.
- Copyright protection - publishers can prohibit or restrict the use of games in certain territories, set their own prices or terms of use.
- Emergence of a monopolist - a situation may arise when a monopolist appears on the market, which will be able to establish rules in the local market.
- Bankruptcy of the service or changes to the terms of use - the situation with OnLive may repeat, when all purchased games and subscriptions simply disappeared in 2015, when Sony bought all the company's assets, but did not compensate for any obligations to users.
Technologies
In 2009, when OnLive and Gaikai emerged, they showed that game streaming was possible. Prior to this, there was an opinion that this was impossible due to the high delay between the server and the local computer: the information must reach the server via networks, be processed, compressed and sent back to the client device.Companies have taken different approaches to solve this problem. OnLive focused on hardware and developed its own video encoder. Their idea, according to this article, was to divide the stream into 16 rectangular sections and process each of these sections with a separate encoder. Gaikai approached the problem with existing hardware solutions, but using their own software solutions.
OnLive proprietary video encoder
To date, there are 3 companies that own and use their own game streaming technologies: Nvidia, Sony and GameFly. Most other game streaming services use Nvidia technology.
Nvidia
Nvidia developed the Nvidia Grid technology which was announced in 2012. The company immediately announced that Nvidia Grid is not a gaming service, but a product that will be offered to cloud gaming service operators. At that time, this solution was used by almost all startups in this area, including Gaikai, Playcast, Ubitus, CiiNow and G-Cluster services. Now this technology is used by LiquidSky and Playkey. On this The video shows Nvideo Grid in action for the end user.
Description of how Nvidia GRID works from the Nvidia website
The core element of Nvidia GRID is the Nvidia GPU. On the Nvidia website you can see the specifications and how it all works.
At the moment, the company offers its gaming service GeForce Now. It requires an Nvidia device to use: one of the devices in the Shield Portable, Shield Android TV, or Shield Tablet product line.
Sony
In 2012, Sony acquired Gaikai. This allowed the company to create the PlayStation Now platform based on Gaikai technologies in 2014. In 2015, Sony acquired OnLive's patents in 2015.Sony's new division was tasked with developing technology that would allow PS3 games to run in the cloud for PS4, TVs, tablets and smartphones. At first, they experimented with installing regular PS3s in data centers, but the experiment was not successful for obvious reasons. After that, Sony developed a motherboard that houses the smaller components of eight PS3s that can work independently. By placing such boards in data centers, Sony created the PlayStation NOW service. The GPU used in this board was jointly developed by Sony and Nvidia 11 years ago based on Nvidia's GeForce 7 GPU.
Motherboard for the PlayStation NOW service
It is clear that because of this technology, the Playstation Now service can only work with games on the PlayStation 3.
gamefly
GameFly acquired in June 2015 the Israeli company Playcast Media Systems, which it claims to offer its own "market ready and scalable" technology. This service is available on Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV devices. Compared to Nvidia and Sony, this company is much smaller, and previously Playcast used Nvidia Grid in their activities. I probably wouldn't add this company to this list if Nvidia didn't consider the GameFly service as one of the main competitors for their own service. This can be seen from the comparison of their services from the Nvidia site in the article earlier.
Incumbent companies in the game streaming market with their own technology
Development and market problems
When the OnLive service appeared, it caused a sensation. "The most powerful gaming system in the world" and "Gaming Revolution" could be found in the headlines of magazines and newspapers. In 2012, analysts estimated its value at $1.8 billion shortly before its bankruptcy. Four years have passed since then, but it still remains difficult to predict the future of the game streaming market.The situation in the world
In its Cloud Gaming Services Market Outlook Report 2016-2020, Technavio predicts that the global market will grow by 29% per year. Seemingly great prospects for market participants, even outpacing the 18% growth in the video streaming market, according to Markets and Markets.However, looking back, it is difficult to believe the accuracy of this forecast. Even in the previous report, Technavio named G-Cluster, Nvidia and OnLive as the main providers of gaming cloud services, of which 2 companies have already ceased their activities by this moment.
Picture from the presentation of Technavio (collage)
There is no doubt that the cloud gaming market will continue to grow as The speed and quality of the Internet in the world is constantly growing, and large companies have begun to invest in projects in the cloud gaming services market, but with all this, the market remains risky.
There are several factors hindering the development of the cloud gaming market. Firstly, it is a delay in signal transmission, which cannot be completely eliminated. Unlike streaming video, where it is possible to use a memory buffer, this is not possible for games in the cloud.
The second problem is that big tech companies with established businesses simply don't need games in the cloud. With the development of games in the cloud, the market for games on physical media will be cannibalized and sales of computer equipment will fall. Perhaps that's why neither Nvidia nor Sony tend to massively introduce these technologies to the end user and only offer them as a kind of fashionable feature for their devices and only mostly outdated games.
In the future, companies working in this field may face the problems that have arisen with the world leader in video streaming, Netflix. According to the latest information, during 2012-2016, the catalog of films offered by the service decreased by 2 times. The reason lies in the complexity and high cost of rights to purchase content and intensifying competition in the market. The same can happen in the gaming equipment market, because when using the cloud, it does not matter what device the player uses.
Netflix's main competitors
Problems for market participants may arise not only with game manufacturers, but also with their distributors, for example, Steam, GOG.com or Origin services. Thus, under the terms of the Steam Subscriber Agreement, all customers are subscribers, i.e. do not own the rights to the purchased games and, if Steam is liquidated, may lose all games. Such an event could have a negative impact on market development prospects.
Situation in Russia
Research company Akamai Technologies has published the results of testing the speed of Internet access in different countries. In Russia, the average speed of Internet access increased by 29% compared to last year and amounted to 12.2 Mbps in the first quarter of 2016.
Image from Russia Insider website
According to the statement of representatives of the services, the minimum bandwidth of the channel should be 5-15 Mbps for their use. However, this is only the minimum required speed, which I would raise to at least 25 Mbps for comfortable use. For example, my ISP provides me with a 60 Mbps channel. Despite this, it often turns out that Playkey determines my poor connection quality. Based on these estimates, if the same rate of Internet speed growth continues in the near future, the required level of 25 Mbps in Russia will be reached within approximately 3 years.
Picture from Yandex research
It seems that from the diagram above it follows that so far only in the KFD and the Far Eastern Federal District the speed of the proposed Internet is significantly lower than the required 25 Mbps, but not everything is so good. It is enough to look at such reviews of one of the Internet providers offering speeds from 50 Mbps, such as these: “Burn in hell”, “NO FOR WHAT”, “Worse than where, cheating”, etc. - and it becomes clear that these people are unlikely to become happy users of games in the cloud in the near future.
Conclusion
Over the past 7 years since the emergence of OnLive and Gaikai services, the industry has come a long way. At the moment, the market is growing rapidly and so far companies do not have to push their elbows to attract players. But soon this may change, the market will saturate and large companies will start the battle for end users.While many gamers have already become frustrated with cloud gaming due to the high cost of services, poor connectivity, or outdated games, talking about game streaming technologies is no longer surprising. The necessary technologies already exist, the speed of the Internet connection is constantly growing, and companies offer players more and more advanced services.
Cloud Mario
After leaving the market services OnLive and Gaikai, you should not put an end to games in the cloud. Business pioneers usually have a hard life. You don't have to look far for examples. The leaders of the modern market in most areas are not their pioneers at all. Amazon wasn't the first to sell books over the Internet - first it was Books.com. Searching the web is not the idea of Google, but of companies like AltaVista. Social networks don't owe their existence to Facebook - MySpace was before. Add tags
A major upgrade or the purchase of a powerful gaming computer at today's ruble is comparable to the purchase of a used car.
- Budget GeForce GTX 1060 + average Core i5 will cost about 40 thousand rubles.
- The average GeForce GTX 1070 + older Core i5K or younger Core i7K cost around 60 thousand rubles.
- The top GeForce GTX 1080 + the older Core i7K that reveals it will lighten the wallet by 80 thousand rubles or more.
We add a mother, cooling, RAM, SSD, case, power supply, monitor (in the case of the GTX 1080 they take a 4K screen, otherwise it makes no sense), accessories, and the price of the initial configuration from current components with a good start for the future comes to 80 thousand rubles . The average is over 100-120 thousand. The cost of a top gaming assembly is even scary to consider.
System requirements in games are growing, people don’t have money for new computers or upgrades, and this is the statistics:
- Over the past three years, the share of eligible gaming computers and laptops in the population has decreased from 23% to 5%.
- 76% of gamers are not satisfied with the power of their computers.
- 48% of gamers are deprived of the opportunity to invest in a computer upgrade, and only 6% of game fans can afford an upgrade worth more than 20 thousand rubles.
What to do? Credit? The toad will suffocate, the wife will not understand. It takes a long time to save, but I want to play now. Accept and play what the current computer pulls? No. Modern technologies come to the rescue.
Gaming PC as a Service
You use cloud storage, mail, instant messengers, social networks and so on. Their work is provided by data centers. You send and receive data, and remote servers handle processing and storage.
Around 2015, several companies emerged offering "cloud gaming," a service that promises to turn your cheap laptop into a powerful gaming platform with the power of the cloud (and a fast internet connection).
A lot has changed over the years and cloud gaming is now a fully realized service with many different options to choose from.
What is Cloud Gaming / Cloud Gaming?
With cloud gaming, the game provider runs the game on their servers and then streams it back to you.
The host application on your computer sends your mouse movements and keyboard strokes back to the server where the game is running. So it doesn't matter what specs you have on your laptop as the server can run any game in great quality as long as you have a connection good enough to play 1080p 60FPS video.
A few years ago, the technology was in its infancy, with very high latency and significant compression. Now that they've had time to improve, and especially with the rise of high-speed fiber optic internet, this is a very real option for people who can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming PC.
Cloud gaming is not just a buzzword; it is an increasingly popular service that is trying to change the way you play PC games.
Instead of paying thousands of dollars for a gaming console or a powerful computer, you can now rent your favorite games, it's like watching movies based on streaming media. Microsoft, EA () and even Google are working on their services, so the market is definitely developing very quickly.
Why buy a computer for cloud gaming?
The most important thing holding back cloud gaming is internet speed. You need a fast, stable internet connection to take advantage of cloud gaming.
Ideally, you'll need a 50Mbps serial speed, and if you're not sharing that speed with other users who are playing games at the same time, or with someone streaming video in another room, then that should be enough.
You can test your internet speed using Ookla's Speedtest service.
When testing your speed, check the ping value, which is the time it takes for a computer to send a packet to a server and receive a response. In practice, every 16ms of extra ping time on your connection is another frame of delay, and it depends on local latency due to server processing.
Location to the data center where the game is running also contributes to latency Latency (from Latin latentis "hidden, invisible") in computer and network technologies, latency is a delay or waiting that increases the real response time compared to the expected one;
In computer networks, it shows how long it takes for a data packet to travel from one intended point in the network to another;
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. If you're close, you can watch with a good connection, but if you live in a rural area far from data centers, you'll be watching with more than 50ms of extra latency.
However, with a good connection, most gaming services can experience a total input lag of up to a few frames - usually less than a twelfth second. Of course, this is much higher than what you could get in the game with your real computer, and if you play super popular multiplayer games, such cloud gaming will not be very pleasant.
For hardcore gamers, the cost of using the service can also quickly get out of hand. Since most services charge by the hour, playing 40 hours a week can quickly blow your budget.
But for the average gamer, spending a couple of dollars a month to play a few games over the weekend is cheaper than buying a PC or even a console.
For most people stuck with laptop gaming, cloud gaming can be a great medium between not being able to play at all and spending hundreds on a PC.
NVIDIA GeForce NOW
NVIDIA is investing heavily in the development of GeForce NOW, even so far as offering the service completely free of charge (despite the huge server costs at its end) in order to attract interest and, most importantly, beta testers to the platform.
NOW is only blocked for supported games (unlike some of the other apps we'll talk about in a bit) and this can be partially inconvenient if you want to play something that isn't supported or use it for anything other than gaming .
But what they have now is the best in the business. Everything there is intuitive and does not require any settings to get started. Just log in, click on the game you want to play, log in to Steam (or other supported launchers) and you're good to go online.
After playing on several cloud gaming services, I can say that the waiting time in NOW is by far the lowest. This is likely due to the fact that Nvidia GRID technology is very good for virtualization and reduces processing latency on the server.
NOW everything is going very smoothly. For most people, once you've just started a running game, nothing will change. There's a certain amount of lag if you're being extremely picky, but as long as you're not demanding too much, it won't hinder your game.
Here's the downside: it's free. No, it's really free because it's in closed beta (at the time of this writing, at least). This means that you may have to wait several months to enter the beta program and may not be accepted at all.
Nvidia will release the service on a paid basis in the future, but when is still a mystery.
Parsec is a great little app and its capabilities go beyond cloud gaming. It is indeed a very fast streaming client similar to VNC Virtual Network Computing (VNC)
a system for remote access to the computer desktop using the RFB (Remote FrameBuffer) protocol.
Control is carried out by transferring keystrokes on the keyboard and mouse movements from one computer to another and relaying the contents of the screen through a computer network.
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, but without any delay and brakes.
This is the same streaming client that NOW uses, but you have to rent the server yourself. However, this is not difficult as they partner with Amazon Web Services to offer in-app purchases.
You only pay for the hours you play, and these prices range from $0.50 to $0.80 per hour (depending on the host) and storage costs. Typically, you can spend somewhere in the $40 range per month if you play regularly.
You will have to configure and install games yourself, but this is not a big problem. Those interested in streaming to Twitch or making YouTube videos can also run OBS in the background to capture high-quality footage or play your game.
But the most interesting thing about Parsec is not the games, although this is the software for them. Since you are not locked out to only run games, NOW, you can install anything and run it with a high performance machine.
Want to make a long video that your Macbook can't process? Create it on Parsec.
Need a workstation for high-load tasks? Parsec has one.
Parsec can also run on your own computer so you can stream anything from your desktop to your laptop from any distance, which is great.
It also has the weird feature of adding multiplayer support for online games that don't have online multiplayer.
This allows your friend to run the app on their computer, add you as a friend, and then let you connect as a second player. They transfer the entire gameplay to you by playing it on their computer.
If NOW and Parsec don't work for you, there's still an option to get a gaming PC in the cloud.
LiquidSky: Similar to Parsec, but slightly more streamlined due to being more modern and more expensive. They charge by the hour but perform similar functions to a prepaid plan, forcing you to buy more hours in "packages".
Luckily, hours carry over from month to month.
Shadow: Cloud gaming at a fixed price. Shadow functions as a subscription service, the price is $35 per month, no matter how much time you spend. For those of you who play a lot, this service might be for you.
It's also similar to Parsec in that it's essentially a computer in the cloud, so you can run any application you want on it.
Vortex resembles a browser for cloud games. They have their own apps, but the browsing client is something unique. They are also a subscription service, work like NOW but only support games.
Not to be confused with the similarly named Nvidia service, this is a gaming streaming service that includes Playstation games, including exclusive Playstation versions.
This allows you to play on PC, which means you can play PS4 games on your laptop.
Microsoft is working on a similar service for Xbox games, but now there is Playstation Now.
Does Cloud Gaming have a future?
Looking at how the industry has evolved, it looks like the future of cloud video game streaming is the brightest (sorry for the tautology).
Everything seems to be moving towards subscription-based business models that cloud gaming services play well with.
The ability to pack a lot of power into a small space is something the computer industry has been trying to do for decades, and now we can have unlimited power on any machine capable of playing video.
Even in the past few years, cloud gaming services have improved a lot, so who knows what cloud gaming as a whole will look like five years from now.
Will we see consoles replaced by mobile phones? Or are latency and connection issues holding back the industry? In any case, if the games are good, people will continue to play.
