Right. Google owns so many submarine cables and a whole chunk of the network, they're at the front of statistical gathering to know what is best. You would expect them to be able to pull it off. I suppose their Stadia service uses a mix of interlacing and correction of packet losses so it's averaged over several frames, and perhaps even throw in some interpolations calculated locally, which is a trick that should be used more often since we don't need this protocol to be used to obtain 100 Hz, but simply reach a decent enough range of 25-30 FPS. But since I haven't looked much into it to be honest, I'm throwing rough ideas here. Valve had a good following and first used this for updating their own games and then selling some official mods. Being a respected and visible gaming entity, it offered them some serious leverage to push people towards a new standard. Google won it because of their lending strategy and making Chrome the default browser on Android phones. Google could technically achieve some here if they focused a bit more on the Play side of services. The issue being that it's Google. There's a part of regional cultures playing a role in this too. The European spirit of law made property more important over virtual goods, which means the old world is perhaps less likely to jump into game streaming as soon as other Western nations would. Plus games were extremely reliable on computer back then, Q&A really meant something, there was nothing like day-1 patch cancer. I would not say that a patch was seen like a stigmata but since it required an action from the player to get the update and there was no guarantee that every body would move on at the same time, patches had to be fewer and meaningful. The removal of the last physical barriers by making updates a low effort perpetual process means today we don't care about those constant changes, as games slip through our fingers and so do their identities. Logically, following this, game streaming should become much more popular, but is it all for the good reasons? If it's in a large part due to convenience and laziness, there is perhaps a threshold that shouldn't be crossed, where we will regret having lost so much control over the games we played with friends. There also are the brick and mortal shopping centers that weighted against this evolution. Now, with lockdowns, people have almost been moved by force into an even less proprietary vision of the world of what they read, view and use on a daily basis, but psychologically wise they may resent that forced change because the virus was no joke at all. That could act against the perceived value of streaming content. But the major barrier will probably be one that is both cultural and political, since streaming is a loss of control and sense of ownership, towards which we are brought by all sectors of big tech industry and political forces. There might very well be a backlash at this though. There is perhaps that much people are willing to give up on before they realize how much they have lost by not caring and accepting the pressure. Does this amount to good memories or not? Those of times when games were complete, bug free, fully packaged, in no need of updates nor an internet connection. Internet made us lazy. Aren't players turned into regular guinea pigs now? A gold release is more and more meaningless and it's more like a good enough release where only the punchy scheduled marketing defines the before and after of what remains nothing more than a product in constant beta phase. Yes that's true. For the music industry, CD Baby had to foreclose because their business model was archaic. There are legal differences in the world on this topic, and you still have the legal and customer rights to opt out of updates for both your device and tool. However, as most people download updates as they are rolled out, people in general have accepted not having much of a say in the form taken by the content they download, so that's true in some way that any sense of ownership if there were any is largely virtual by now. It's true on the legal front, but it's irrelevant by a consensus largely dictated from above. I don't know if there was that much opposition really. It's just that games were bought on physical support and for the most part in retail ships and, at best, in online stores that just shipped them, and that was far more convenient because of the amount of data that could be stored on discs whereas the internet was simply not fast and stable enough. So what are the gains now of storing games physically, at home or on our own devices? Most of them cannot be modded. Most of them always require enormous updates. Many sit in the casual or semi-casual range (Supercell's games as an example), and all multiplayer servers are now centralized, you can't set them up yourself. The main gain, as pointed out by other members, is the lasting presence of the game on a device if the company closes, which is not a recurrent enough case. Also many apps can be downloaded on gray websites or from purely illegal places. And if need be, devices can be jailbroken, which is an activity left to a very few people that wouldn't matter to the main forces in this market. The only way we could reduce the feeling of a loss of ownership were if we could compensate this excess of control from the centralized streaming platforms by being able to publish games on decentralized streaming platforms. Such exciting times for sure. I am curious about how we will feel about the customization of game content (superficial graphical content) if the ownership over the content itself is removed by a notch because it too would be entirely dematerialized on top of being located far away. Certainly the more trivial content would be, the less we'd care. Spending virtual money on virtual goods in a virtual game stored in a far way data center all contributes to adding steps in detachment from the "good" being acquired. We can play with speculative projection here and look at the rise of NFTs and how they might throw a wedge into this evolution, although few studio would perhaps even bother creating such content when it's much more profitable to sell many copies of the same fancy hat.
I feel like this post needs a bit of life, has anyone played any exclusive M1 iOS titles yet? Do they even exist?
Google Stadia is officially dead. Not that I didn’t see this coming because games as a service have a life span, but because Google Stadia never gained much traction from the beginning, despite all marketing spin and “it’s here to stay”. It never really had the interest of core gamers - which are the ones that are drivers for AAA-AA, not some “dad” looking to stream some small cheap game for 5 minutes in a given week, that dad can just play on his mobile phone for that. After a while at looking at Apple’s App Store, I recon THIS is the very reason why AAA games don’t do well on mobile. IF and most likely when Apple is eventually forced to end their App Store monopoly other app stores like - Steam - Origin - Gog Etc would allow for AAA-AA games to flourish on the mobile platform. Steam vs Apple’s App Store if users where given an actual choice? There would be no competition. Steam: - AAA - AA - Indie - Retro - established community of core gamers - mods/Steam workshop
Yes along with metal 3 just awaiting iPad os 16 and no man’s sky coming to iPad as announced at wwdc 2022 personally I’m excited for no man’s sky on iPad we just don’t know weather it will be M1 exclusive just yet
I have an M1 MacBook Air, its pretty outstanding to be honest... I tested it with a couple of games I have such as World of Warcraft and Batman Arkham Knight and it literally runs them with no issues whatsoever!
Yes but those games are ancient and there are countless AAA-AA games not on Mac or not running natively on Macs. There’s things like Crossover or you could use Parallels. I used to be into Mac gaming for years and tried to make the most of it. Had high hopes that the M1 Pro/Max would give reasonable RTX3060-3070 like levels of game performance in Parallels for Virtual Windows gaming but that wasn’t the case. Apple is what is holding back AAA-AA gaming from taking off, it is quite lackluster on Macs and very much barren on M1 iPads/iPads. Apple’s App Store is a monopoly. gamers are missing out on an incredible wealth of AAA-AA indie classic Emulation of classic console games (Android gamers can play emulated games from the Atari up to Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube) because Apple doesn’t want sideloading and no other App stores, let alone the likes of Steam GOG because they would destroy Apple’s App Store in terms of games Xbox Games pass would annihilate Apples’ Arcade. Apple would be forced to compete in the digital market space on iOS/IPadOS which benefits consumers with more choices.
Oh boy. First a technical note: new Macs no longer run on Intel processors, so Parallels runs in emulation; it’s not surprising that performance for recent games is subpar. To be clear, all the new PC gaming handhelds (Steam Deck, AYN Loki, etc) run on Intel-based architectures. ARM-based devices like the Odin (or M1 Macs, iPads or A16 iPhone 14 Pro) can be fantastic for console emulation (up to the Wii U, though I’ve seen some decent performance on Switch games) but they’ll never run recent AAA PC games in any acceptable fashion — unless the games are ported to the hardware. That’s the only way games like Doom, Witcher 3, and No Man’s Sky can run decently on Switch (while games like Control had to settle for streaming). And there’s the rub. Just like for Switch, porting games, whether to MacOS, iPadOS or iOS is expensive for developers and publishers. The question is: why do publishers make that investment for an aging platform like Switch and not for the much faster (not to mention better screen’ed) iPhones and iPads? Both platforms are just as closed, both charge the same in royalties. The answer is simple: gamers. Due to historical happenstance and Apple decisions in the late 90’s, Macs are not a platform of choice for people who care about PC gaming. It’s a vicious cycle: gamers tend not to buy Macs because they don’t support the latest games; since the gamers are not there, publishers don’t bring games to the Mac; since neither the games nor the gamers are there, Apple puts their marketing and r&d money elsewhere. And so on. The same logic applies to iPhones (and other mobile devices): for every one of us who would love to play AAA games on our phones or tablets, there are ten gamers would pay less attention to a game if they knew it was also on mobile. That has nothing to do with Apple or having a “closed” App Store and everything to do with confirmation bias in the gaming community. (I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “looks like a mobile game” as a pejorative). Developers port games to the Switch because that’s where the gamers are, even though Nintendo runs as tight a ship as Apple. Now, when it comes to classic games, you are absolutely right: Apple has made the decision not to support emulation, and having a closed system means that they can enforce that platform-wide. Emulation is, of course, of questionable legality (Nintendo has closed down a number of sites already). It’s not surprising that Apple has decided to stay out of that space. It would be great for classic games enthusiasts if Apple supported side loading; the question is whether that would be a good thing for other Apple consumers who value privacy and security over being able to play the N64 game catalogue. Personally, I am not troubled by the ethics of ROM downloading, so I own hacked PSP-Go and a decent Android gaming handheld to get my classic game fix (currently 20 hours into Legend of Heroes: Zero, which is awesome). As to having other stores on the iOS: what are you smoking? Neither Steam nor GOG carry ARM-based games, and the idea that AAA developers would rush in if Apple would open its platform is easily disproven by the fact that they are not doing that on Android. Currently the only way to play Steam games on ARM devices is either through Steam Link (through a Mac or PC) or GeForce NOW, both of which are available on Android and iOS. And XBox GamePass killing Apple Arcade? I’m a happy user of both on my iPhone 14 Pro (GamePass through Cloud Gaming) and they fill different niches. I also don’t feel that I’m missing out on indie games on iOS, since it’s rare for good titles to be ported to Android and not IOS and there are hundreds of indie ports on the App Store already (in fact, I’m having a blast with Transistor at the moment). Anything that’s not available natively I can play on my device through GamePass. TL/DR: if your favorite AAA or indie game is not available on your favorite Apple device, it’s likely that 1) it’s not because Apple runs a closed system, and 2) you can stream it. I’m with you on emulation, but I’d rather play my illegally downloaded ROMs on a dedicated device than making my phone less secure.
No man’s sky for iPad has not arrived yet I hope it comes q1 next year that’d be my guess does anything else take advantage of metal 3 yet for iPad Pro?
Guys have you heard about war mongers apparently it came out today for iPad but you need the m1 or m2 model to play also the minimum requirement you have to be running iPad os 16
Also forgot to mention alien isolation came out about 2 years ago it really looks great if you have a more recent iPad Pro I have the m1 so yeah only problem i have is that the game really makes the iPad Pro overheat I guess because it’s a really graphical intensive game
Guys we now know that the resident evil games are coming to iPads with M1 later this year plus I read an article on macrumors that said developers are working to bring the games on iPhone 15 pro to iPad models with M1 and later this is huge news guys update we now know death stranding is also happening with the same thing M1 and later
Quick update resident evil village comes to iPhone and iPad Pro m1 and up on October 30th 2023 don’t know about resident evil 4 but should be coming can’t wait to see how resident evil performs on iPad
wow resident evil village on iOS performs very well and I’m on the base M1 iPad Pro and I’m shocked how good this port is and visually there are some downgrades compared to pc and high end consoles but at the end of the day this is a native AAA game finally on iOS and you get almost every graphical option as well
