Penny Arcade - Comic - Now You’ve Done It

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Now You’ve Done It

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Grendus

Accurate.

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure why they object to GeForce Now. It seems like they were hoping Stadia would take off and they could sell their games again, maybe? Or else they're all hoping to do their own subscription based streaming services? Not really sure. Seems like GeForce Now would actually increase the value of their products, maybe they were concerned they'd be expected to support it? Or they don't want NVidia to have more of the market?

It's weird.

dennis

They object to it because they realized it was an idea that they should have had and they think would make them money. Now they're all going to go off and make their own inferior Now clones. They'd rather risk making less money than make the same amount of money and have someone else adding value and getting paid for it.

Photosaurus

To go a little further with Tycho's questions in the post:

So: now that you know what you know, that these games have been purchased by you, under what possible pretext could somebody say you couldn't use it? I can stream a Steam game from upstairs into the basement, or via the Steam Link app, but I can't log into a remote computer with my own credentials and use stuff I already paid you for? Under what auspices?

This could actually raise some interesting issues. I mean, what is the difference between signing up for Now and logging into a VM to then log in to Steam and play your games versus walking into a gaming cafe and paying to rent a physical PC and logging into Steam from that? Because I've definitely done the latter in the past few years.

Absalon

Board members and shareholders do not understand new technological solutions.

ironzerg

I tested this out. Ran No Man's Sky from my laptop. On Ultra, without it skipping a beat. Normally to run it looking good enough, I have to have my laptop cooling pad cranked up to max, and the laptop still cranks the fans. Going through this Nvidia dimension, my laptop was silent.

So I loaded up ARK. Ultra settings. Ran like a dream. Laptop silent as a ghost. My SSD didn't groan under the stress of having hundreds of gigabytes stuffed down it's throat.

I don't know if Tycho's game loaded up with basic graphic settings that he needed to adjust. But from what I just tested, it was next level, super-crisp, as if I was playing on a machine that costs 10x what I paid for my laptop.

All without skipping a beat.

It's fucking magic. Nothing you can tell me will convince me otherwise.

dennis

Oh, and as for "what could they do to stop them", I think NVIDIA would win if they took it to court. But I think it would probably do enough damage to their relationship with AAA game shops being gung ho to support their gfx cards that they don't want to risk it.

Giant Sloar

Finally someone made the sensical argument. It's a service to remote stream games you already own onto devices that otherwise would not be able to run them. Game companies have attempted this for decades but the infrastructure wasn't there. Thanks to major companies and a reclassification of what represents high speed, services like this are now more viable. Not everywhere but most major cities carry high enough speeds to make hi def game streaming work. Again, we should NOT have to repurchase the same game to play it on our Surface in flight from NY to LA. Game companies have our money, we have the license. Get your hands out of our pocket or we will be forced to amputate!

DM_Steel

If anything, for me, this service would allow me to purchase more games. My wife wants to game with me sometimes, but she doesn't have a gaming PC, and doesn't game often enough to really justify purchasing one for a while. This would have allowed her to play games like World of Warcraft with me, and gave Blizzard that second subscription and game sale. It would have seen me buying more games on Steam and gifting them to her so she could stream them.

Those are sales, they've now missed out on, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in a similar situation.

Namrok

This just gives the goals of game streaming away. The true goals. They don't want you to have more options, or to play on cheaper hardware. It's not even necessarily about making more money.

It's to strip you of any notion of ownership what so ever.

We've gone from software on discs you conceivably own and can do whatever you want with, to software that phones home and controls how you use it, to software where a significant part runs on a server but still has a client you run. The goal is to have software that never even touches the users machine, so companies have complete control of it. That way there can be no illicit WoW classic servers when modern WoW has been driven into the ground. They have complete and total control.

And if you prefer the old product to the new, shittier, less fun, less featured, product, fuck you. Old product is gone. You can never get it back. You'll just have to satisfy yourself on whatever new shit they've squatted out for you.

AAA devs know they've lost the ability to make the quality of games they used to. Their end game is giving you no other choice. Total control of the platform is their means of doing so.

zepherin

Namrok wrote: »

This just gives the goals of game streaming away. The true goals. They don't want you to have more options, or to play on cheaper hardware. It's not even necessarily about making more money.

It's to strip you of any notion of ownership what so ever.

We've gone from software on discs you conceivably own and can do whatever you want with, to software that phones home and controls how you use it, to software where a significant part runs on a server but still has a client you run. The goal is to have software that never even touches the users machine, so companies have complete control of it. That way there can be no illicit WoW classic servers when modern WoW has been driven into the ground. They have complete and total control.

And if you prefer the old product to the new, shittier, less fun, less featured, product, fuck you. Old product is gone. You can never get it back. You'll just have to satisfy yourself on whatever new shit they've squatted out for you.

AAA devs know they've lost the ability to make the quality of games they used to. Their end game is giving you no other choice. Total control of the platform is their means of doing so.

I mean it looks like. The ideal from a AAA developer is for you to pay them 60 dollars for the game, then pay 10 bucks a month for access to the game, then pay 20 bucks a month for a season pass for all of their DLC, then pay 2.50 for loot boxes. All of the money. They want every fucking penny.

Namrok

zepherin wrote: »

Namrok wrote: »

This just gives the goals of game streaming away. The true goals. They don't want you to have more options, or to play on cheaper hardware. It's not even necessarily about making more money.

It's to strip you of any notion of ownership what so ever.

We've gone from software on discs you conceivably own and can do whatever you want with, to software that phones home and controls how you use it, to software where a significant part runs on a server but still has a client you run. The goal is to have software that never even touches the users machine, so companies have complete control of it. That way there can be no illicit WoW classic servers when modern WoW has been driven into the ground. They have complete and total control.

And if you prefer the old product to the new, shittier, less fun, less featured, product, fuck you. Old product is gone. You can never get it back. You'll just have to satisfy yourself on whatever new shit they've squatted out for you.

AAA devs know they've lost the ability to make the quality of games they used to. Their end game is giving you no other choice. Total control of the platform is their means of doing so.

I mean it looks like. The ideal from a AAA developer is for you to pay them 60 dollars for the game, then pay 10 bucks a month for access to the game, then pay 20 bucks a month for a season pass for all of their DLC, then pay 2.50 for loot boxes. All of the money. They want every fucking penny.

Don't get me wrong, they want all the money too. But they can already get all the money, assuming the consumer is compliant. Which is a problem, because the consumer is frequently not compliant. They ask for the newer installment of Game to be good. Sometimes they turn their nose up at it, and stick with older titles in Game series. Sometimes they aren't sufficiently attached to Franchise and jump ship to another Franchise instead.

Once you take the software off the client's hardware, you go a long ways towards solving lots of these issues. You can sunset the previous entries they enjoyed more to remove their choices. You can force them into Gaming as a Service schemes. You can really take advantage of a sunken cost fallacy where after paying $5 a month for 3 years, the person is reluctant to cancel the service and "lose" all they accomplished.

Because stockholders love money. But they also love stability. It does no good to make all the money one quarter, and slightly less than all the money next quarter. Being a hit driven industry has consistently been a drag on AAA publisher stocks. Transitioning to Games as a Service, and especially Games as a Service where nothing actually runs on user hardware, is like the holy grail towards addressing this Achilles' Heel.

ironzerg

You know what makes money? Being able to sell 100x the number of copies of your game because now EVERYONE can run your game, and the latest and greatest isn't gate behind needing to upgrade your machine to play it.

The smart companies are going to recognize this as a leap forward and dive in. The dumb ones are going to be the companies that our kids read about in business school, replacing the words "Blockbuster Video" with "Electronic Arts".

V1m

Namrok wrote: »

zepherin wrote: »

Namrok wrote: »

This just gives the goals of game streaming away. The true goals. They don't want you to have more options, or to play on cheaper hardware. It's not even necessarily about making more money.

It's to strip you of any notion of ownership what so ever.

We've gone from software on discs you conceivably own and can do whatever you want with, to software that phones home and controls how you use it, to software where a significant part runs on a server but still has a client you run. The goal is to have software that never even touches the users machine, so companies have complete control of it. That way there can be no illicit WoW classic servers when modern WoW has been driven into the ground. They have complete and total control.

And if you prefer the old product to the new, shittier, less fun, less featured, product, fuck you. Old product is gone. You can never get it back. You'll just have to satisfy yourself on whatever new shit they've squatted out for you.

AAA devs know they've lost the ability to make the quality of games they used to. Their end game is giving you no other choice. Total control of the platform is their means of doing so.

I mean it looks like. The ideal from a AAA developer is for you to pay them 60 dollars for the game, then pay 10 bucks a month for access to the game, then pay 20 bucks a month for a season pass for all of their DLC, then pay 2.50 for loot boxes. All of the money. They want every fucking penny.

Don't get me wrong, they want all the money too. But they can already get all the money, assuming the consumer is compliant. Which is a problem, because the consumer is frequently not compliant. They ask for the newer installment of Game to be good. Sometimes they turn their nose up at it, and stick with older titles in Game series. Sometimes they aren't sufficiently attached to Franchise and jump ship to another Franchise instead.

Once you take the software off the client's hardware, you go a long ways towards solving lots of these issues. You can sunset the previous entries they enjoyed more to remove their choices. You can force them into Gaming as a Service schemes. You can really take advantage of a sunken cost fallacy where after paying $5 a month for 3 years, the person is reluctant to cancel the service and "lose" all they accomplished.

Because stockholders love money. But they also love stability. It does no good to make all the money one quarter, and slightly less than all the money next quarter. Being a hit driven industry has consistently been a drag on AAA publisher stocks. Transitioning to Games as a Service, and especially Games as a Service where nothing actually runs on user hardware, is like the holy grail towards addressing this Achilles' Heel.

Plus ca change...

ironzerg

This is a perfect example of The Infinite Game vs Finite Games.

A game company exists to get more people playing more games more often. And if they can do that successfully that'll lead to amazing growth and huge piles of cash. Anyone who's running a company to make huge piles of cash with people playing games as the by-product will fail. Sometimes not fast enough, unfortunately.