He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.
I had a friend who was a true believer in Stadia, he even sold his gaming PC as he was gaming in Stadia full time.
When Stadia shut down he told me “at least I get to keep the controller”
Stadia was great for what it was. As a hardcore PC gamer who went more casual it was the answer to my gaming needs. Being able to play anywhere on any device was amazing.
They refunded all my purchases and I got to keep a bunch of free hardware I had gotten with Stadia bundles.
Yeah I loved stadia. I built a proxmox VM with sunshine to get my fix back
I don’t think Stadia’s problem was the technology, though. It actually worked pretty well if you had a decent internet connection.
The issue, imo, was that nobody trusted in the longevity of the platform. Given Google’s track record, why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years? I know they ended up refunding people, but it’s not like they do that with every prodict they’ve cancelled.
This is the way with a lot of tech. Someone comes up with an ides, tries to build it and make it successful. When the money starts getting tight, they sell it to a larger company. Usually by the third round, it becomes successful.
why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years?
I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.
Yeah that’s the thing, it’s especially hard to trust a newer service without any track record of longevity or a company with a proven track record of poor support. Even then, everything dies eventually. Companies will shut down servers due to funding/popularity issues (it doesn’t make sense to continue spending money and dev time on a game nobody is playing anymore) or to funnel players into a newer game. It would be great to see more live service or otherwise online games (e.g. MMOs) that are self-hostable.
If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.
I had a good connection back then (FTTH 100mbit, <5ms latency) and it worked like shit. There are WAY too many variables that can screw up this cloud gaming stuff, the whole concept is messed up.
I’m not so sure how ‘quiet’ it was. We’ve been putting desktops in the cloud for quite a while now.
We all keep hoping he’ll stop being a greedy asshole and he hasn’t tried to do that so i guess we’ll all have to live with the disappointment.
Now that’s what I call “owning nothing, and renting everything”. This is one of the stupidest things you’ll do to people. This is why we Linux.
Yeah, nope. No matter what OS, no matter what specs, I’m going to keep my PC.
I’ll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he’ll, I’d go to text based MUDs first.
We need to get MUDs more popular again. But that would require getting Telnet popular again.
But why? You don’t need telnet to transfer text.
Because a MUD that isn’t part of a BBS feels wrong to me.
Can you fill me in on what that means? Searching for mud doesn’t give me useful results.
It means Multi User Dungeon. It’s a networked multiplayer game, usually focused on dungeon-crawling as the name suggests. Early ones were based heavily on BD&D and AD&D, but others got more creative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon
For a list of still-active MUDs:
People were playing text-based multiplayer, effectively mmos with PvP well before Tim-Berners Lee invented the Web Browser.
http://mud.arctic.org/ this one is still around.
Way more even. Just look at emulation on Android, you can play good damn Sekiro on it by now.
Even if they manage to take away our desktops, Smartphones become beautifully powerful and can be docked to TVs and all via USB-C easily.
I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
I just don’t trust bezos to not be greedy.
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
Desktop streaming isn’t the same as web apps.
Its the same idea of putting compute in datacenters
Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client
Amazing how we’re come full circle
Right! I had no idea Bezos used Lemmy either!
I mean, of course Bezos wants to rent you a cloud PC. Bezos would sell your shit back to you if he thought there was a market. Hell, I’d sell your shit back to you if I thought you’d buy it. When I see headlines like these I think ‘Well…duh’.
How do you do, my fellow progressives? Did you know that renting everything instead of ownership is good for the planet? You should rent an apartment NOW! Oh, and throw out that rusty old PS2. You get a lot more value if you buy our monthly Amazon Gaming Plus subscription (you also get 30 second ads instead of a full minute ones! What a crazy value!)
If only “greedy” was his only problem!
what a bunch of bullshit. Act like the individuals are responsible and ignore the massive data centers that would be required using water and power. And most people just use their phone for most stuff like scrolling ticktok YouTube and Reddit.
- This assumes latency between one’s current location and the remote location is almost non-existent. It isn’t.
- This assumes we have fast and available internet all the time. I sure don’t.
- This assumes we can use the remote computer in every way we use our current computers. No way.
- This assumes, as you point out, they won’t be greedy once they control everyone’s machines. They will be.
- This assumes they won’t censor ‘dangerous’ sites on these machines. They will.
In summary. I will happily pay more for freedom from the corporation.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
Modern desktop streaming is quite impressive. 100ms, 5% loss is no problem for most tasks. You don’t even notice it, and as a result your experience can sometimes be better.
Additionally you can offload some tasks to the local machine where appropriate.
You dont need to fit every users needs into a thin client setup, but you could fit probably 50% of all users onto one and they wouldn’t know any different. Think of the energy savings. Think of all that plastic that goes into a desktop or laptop that isn’t needed in a virtualized blade chassis. Think of the rolling performance upgrades. Think of never having your hardware go End of Support. Think of the old equipment that ends up properly e-wasted instead of shoved into a dump. Think of the batteries that no longer need to get produced.
I might play around with this idea and host my own non-profit Desktop as a Service.
I thought he just bought shit for a dollar and sold it for two. That’s pretty common even though he took a big bite of the customer base due to right place/right time dynamics. Why does falling into a shit load of money all of a sudden make you think that you know best on how society should proceed. It’s not just Bezos. Every single billionaire thinks that. Fuck 'em all.
Not quite, he doesn’t demean himself by ‘buying’ anything, he just built a place where other people can buy stuff for a dollar and sell it for two, and Jeff takes a cut.
Even worse, a middle-man.
Hope he falls out a 10 story window
Why not 11?
And when we don’t he’ll just use AWS to make our PCs worse on the net than his cloud services?
Little Lex Luthor should climb into one of his dick rockets and aim for Venus.
Isn’t that where Amazon makes 1/3 of their money?
Yeah its their cash engine they use for funding everything else so they can monopolise everything else by undercutting everyone
Thanks for reminding me to tear down my test AWS instances
If you pay for them with credits it’s just costing them money
Till u need to move ur data and u get got by their data lockin fees
I will build my own in a garage…use wood for the case…
It doesn’t take 3nm/2nm chips to make a great computer. The Switch 2 is has a Samsung 8nm SoC. Steam Deck is TSMC 7nm. A Steam Deck has a better processor than my Intel N150 NAS. We don’t need the strongest hardware for self hosting. Don’t need it for a good gaming experience. Someday we’ll get second hand server parts salvaged into home equipment. The PS5 had that jailbreak. That can someday be a useful Linux machine. Someday the Xbox Series. Someday there’ll be a wave of RISC-V SBC’s that are better than the most recent raspberry pi
Fuck that, I want to own my shit and will build my own fucking server before renting space in a corporate owned server.
Starting to see the real motive behind the “AI hardware” hoarding.
