Becksworth
Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
Haven’t you heard? Cloud gaming is the future! Or so said some guy from Silicon Valley with fiber internet in his house at least. In any case there are now multiple game streaming options out there, so let’s talk about them.
I tried Stadia Pro’s free month trial, but it’s software lineup was lackluster, and I’m sure as heck not paying full price for games only to be stuck streaming, especially from a company with a reputation for starting and killing services like Google. I did learn from the experience that I appear to be one the lucky people whose internet is stable enough and is located close enough to a major data center that cloud gaming may be viable option for me.
So next I tried PlayStation Now, and I actually liked it enough to subscribe for a year. There were three major reasons for that:
I tried Stadia Pro’s free month trial, but it’s software lineup was lackluster, and I’m sure as heck not paying full price for games only to be stuck streaming, especially from a company with a reputation for starting and killing services like Google. I did learn from the experience that I appear to be one the lucky people whose internet is stable enough and is located close enough to a major data center that cloud gaming may be viable option for me.
So next I tried PlayStation Now, and I actually liked it enough to subscribe for a year. There were three major reasons for that:
- PlayStation 3 seems like the Platonic ideal to me for a cloud gaming solution right now. While it wasn’t 360 red ring of death bad, the PS3 certainly had its own share of faulty hardware problems, and that’s going to get worse with time. The cell architecture meanwhile, is extremely unique, and consequently a pain in the ass to emulate, and even if it wasn’t, PS3’s game are sufficiently large enough file size wise that playing them over the cloud isn’t a complete waste of data. Also, PS3 has a large number of titles that were either exclusive to it or were only on it and the 360, and many of those are among the hundreds of games available here.
- Price. Compared to Stadia and XCloud, PS Now is by far the cheapest option, and that’s before the sales price it regularly seems to be put on. It’s library, while limited to PS3 and older PS4 titles, is significantly larger than its competitors, so there is more value on that end too.
- “Portability”. I put that in quotes because let’s be real here, it’s not actually portable. We’re not going to be cloud gaming on road trips or airplane flights anytime soon, if ever. Nevertheless, playing on the cloud does offer me a similar advantage that the WiiU did. I can play at home, but untethered from a fixed point next to the wall. I recently got Surface laptop, and it works great for playing gaming just wherever around the house.
- Lag. Even with me seemingly having a good connection, lag is there, and unlike the lag coming from TVs its an inconsistent amount of it depending on the network conditions at that very moment. It’s impact really depends on what you’re playing. Several games are designed in such a way that it is either imperceptible or not a big deal. The big two exceptions I’ve noticed are FPSes, where fine tuning your aim is even more difficult than normal, and fighting games, which all just feel universally off to me.
- Data. Many of us are probably dealing with data caps, unfortunately, and playing games on the cloud can easily eat into that. PS Now being stuck at 720p is a blessing in disguise in this regard. Stadia targeting 4K can eat up significantly more.
- Outages. It happens unfortunately. Sometimes the servers are unavailable, while sometimes they are, but something else is messed between you and it that makes connecting at a acceptable speed, and sometimes there are just minor hiccups that cause your image quality to temporarily dip during that big cutscene you were watching, and unlike Netflix you can’t rewind.
- Ownership. It’s a problem with all digital distribution and service models, but magnified on the cloud. When a game is removed from the service, it’s gone. No saving it to your hard drive. No saying f the man and pirating it. It’s gone.
