They talk about the download sizes and updates, but they somehow fail to mention the massive amounts of data that will be used for video streaming. Streaming games will use more data than one time download ever will
When they talk about download sizes and updates, my impression is that the point they're attempting to make is that with streaming you can start a game fast. If today you decide you want to buy a brand new AAA game, you are typically waiting on a large download. A decent connection will still struggle to download it - in fact, a decent connection might end up getting bottlenecked by the servers anyway. On a good day I see 10 megabytes per second from PSN, for example. A 100GB game (and next generation, that kind of size could be typical) would take almost 3 hours to download at typical PSN speeds and still almost an hour to download if I wasn't bottlenecked and could use my full connection speed.
So streaming would beat that - the stream would start in minutes or seconds and data usage of the stream would stay below data usage for the download for quite a while (how long would depend entirely on the bitrate of the stream).
As someone who has had PSNow for awhile Sony biggest addition has been adding downloads. They haven't improved streaming quality or experience so that's why saying they will improve it is hard to accept.
This is not my experience. Obviously people are going to have varying levels of service, but the first time I used PlayStation Now for streaming (about a year ago) it was a bit of a mess - it kind of worked, but lag made it inferior to the point where for any kind of reaction-based game it was almost unpleasant, and quite inferior to local play.
I subscribed to it when it was reduced to €70, largely because of the downloads. I tried streaming again, thought it had improved a bit (especially with 60FPS games) but wasn't good enough to be really worth using often, and stuck to downloads.
I've tried again over the past few weeks and it's been significantly better, to the point where on some games, if someone did a blind test and asked me whether a game was streaming or running locally, I'd probably have wrongly guessed locally on at least a few occasions.
So for me there does appear to have been improvements, though one of the downsides of this kind of service is that everyone has an anecdotally different experience.
People really seem to forget that game-streaming has entirely different problems than movie-streaming.
Even if the bandwith isn't the problem with gaming there can't ever be a single second of downtime for streaming to work as intended. Movies buffer the next vew seconds/minutes so that even if the connection is down for a few seconds here and there the user isn't even aware of this.
With gaming this is not possible. Every single image has to be rendered in the cloud and has to travel to the consumer as fast as possible. There's no technology that can help with that. The hardware can never predict to 100% what you're going to do in the game and therefore the service can't buffer anything.
This technology sounds good on paper but is completely different to movie-streaming.
Maybe someday when the isps can guarantee a 99.9% perfect minimum speed but until then this whole thing is nothing more than new tech dragged out into the wild before it's ready.
Sure, there can't be a second of downtime. But people are playing through and beating games on streaming services today. So those game-breaking fractions of a second of downtime - well, good news, they're not happening very often.
If streaming takes off in a big way, I think what you will see is companies leaving Stadia/Xbox/PSNow left and right to pursue their own services.
Yep.
However I think that when this happens, what you'll see after that is those same companies struggling to attract people to their own services, failing, and moving back to Sony and Microsoft as aggregation services. Like, if there's a Sony service, a Microsoft service, an EA service, an Ubisoft service, a Nintendo service and a Square Enix service, are you subscribing to all of them? If you do, are you then interested in a Warner service? A Bethesda service?
Some of them might succeed, but in the end I think the services run by platform holders are going to be the safe harbour services for companies that can't compete - and I expect that to be the majority of them.
