TL;DR : WE'RE MAKING ASSASSIN'S CREED ODYSSEY PLAYABLE ON YOUR GOOGLE CHROME TABLET USING YOUR GARBAGE 25MBPS INTERNET!
The Video Game's industry knows NO BOUNDS in it's schemey ways of trying to take your money and give you nothing in return.
Google has now officially decided it's going to try to make Onlive a reality once again. Need I remind you that Onlive was an Online Service much like Spotify or Netflix, but for Video Games. Now your Crappy Laptop that couldn't run Darksiders because it has a crappy on board graphics card can finally run the game as if it was on a computer capable of running it. AMAZING RIGHT? WONDERFUL!...except when your Internet cuts off and you can't access the game anymore! Also the quality was horrible, imagine trying to play something like PUBG or Overwatch using a Streaming service where not only would the latency alone would make you want to eat your brain out, but the video quality will blur. Yeah the video quality, you ever see a Twitch Stream or a Youtube video with a low bit rate? IT AIN'T PRETTY!
Video Games are not the same as Movies or Music. Each song in spotfy is probably a few megabytes in size, if we were to compare that to Final Fantasy XV which requires 100gbs in hard drive space on your computer you'd be listening to the Entire Kingdom Hearts Soundtrack about 354 times in it's entirety, which is 26,904 songs. And since this is the Kingdom Hearts Soundtrack that Soundtrack takes about 2 hrs and 27 mins to finish from song 1 to song 76. Which would mean 26,904 songs in this scenario would probably take you about 448 hours give or take to finish. Which is probably the equivalent of 18 days. So for a video game streaming service about 1 day's worth of streaming is the equivalent of 18 days for music.
Typing this out I realize that's probably not how it works, but I think there's some credence to it. I'll have a hard time figuring out if both Video Games and Music have the same size time to stream, but I have a feeling that just like how Netflix boned a lot of Internet bills in the past that Video Game Streaming will likely hurt people with slow internet. Not to mention if these games that are getting streamed rely on good fast connections to get good. Games like Overwatch, Starcraft, and Tekken 7 all rely on good reliable connections and are highly competitive, so making these games available for streaming gives an advantage to those who live closer to the servers and have good internet. It will be impossible for those who live further away and have no access to good internet to be able to even get good at the game let alone enjoy it.
I'm rambling on and didn't even make mention that Streaming services also make it impossible for Game preservation to even be a thing. Remember Scott Pilgrim vs the World? Yeah That game was awesome, too bad no one can buy it now thanks to Ubisoft and Universal owning the rights and Anamanguchi having made the soundtrack. Thanks to this licensing hell, the Game was delisted back in 2014 (4 years after release). Only those who downloaded the game when available have access to it and can spread the word on why this game was so amazing, but imagine if this game wasn't just delisted from store fronts, but was a streamed only game? The Delisting wouldn't just mean no one could buy the game, a delisting from a streaming service means NO ONE CAN PLAY the game.
For years I keep seeing people cry how there "Needs to be a Netflix for Video Games." and all I can see why there SHOULDN'T be a "Netflix for Video Games."
This post sucks, but I just wanted to bring to your attention about Google's video game streaming service and why you really shouldn't support it.
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