By the way, did MS change something because last I heard, they were only streaming map assets, not pixels (or in other words, running the entire game in the cloud). Pixel streaming though is the only thing that would theoretically make a local powerful PC obsolete.
I’ve got a little story from the business side of this year’s Gamescom for you. Brace yourselves people, because this is coming to a cinema near you faster than you can blink.
Unfortunately I wasn’t at Gamescom myself this year, but my colleague who went to Cologne told us that he was visited by a sales guy who made the rounds pitching to game developers and other game related service providers (like us).
This company offers you a service fee per user per time used if you integrate their service into yours. What their service does is, it opens a tunnel and lets this company use a fraction of your bandwidth and your public IP to route traffic to the internet. So essentially, by integrating this service, you make all your users proxy servers to this company.
Now at this point, you should be asking yourselves this: “Who TF needs to route legitimate traffic through so many proxies?” And the answer is of course, no one. The sales person by the way didn’t get tired to mention in every 2nd sentence that this was perfectly legal and they had a bunch of big affiliates who were already integrating their service. He didn’t mention what kinds of customers they were selling this service to, but in the current climate, you can bet your buttocks that it is either AI crawlers or spammers (likely both).
I could already kinda see the dollar signs appear in my bosses eyes, so myself and my colleague proceeded to sketch out how we would have to disclose integration of such a service to our customers (we currently don’t use any kind of telemetry in our own binaries, for various reasons) and how that would cost us a good fraction of our sales. I then added that if they ever thought about going into business with that company, they would need to look for a replacement for me.
Seriously, **** this timeline we’re on.