Some years back, I attended a breakfast briefing at E3 regarding what was heralded as the next wave in video games: a streaming service called OnLive. The premise was simple enough to grasp. OnLive would stream a game through "the cloud" to any device, computer or otherwise, and let you play anytime and anywhere. In theory, you could play Crysis 2 even if you didn't have a great video card, or Grand Theft Auto IV on a tablet.
It should be pointed out that this was around the time when the first big push to put everything and its dog into "the cloud" started to hit its stride. It was also not too terribly long after the PSN hack, which oddly enough also came from "the cloud." In my particular case, I had a decent enough technical background to realize that what they were doing wasn't theoretically impossible, but sure as hell wouldn't be nearly as effective out in the real world as they thought it would be. The first big weakness was going to be the Internet itself, from the source all the way to the destination. Network latency was going to be a problem, because while the Internet self-corrects around dead spots in the network, it is not always the most efficient at finding the shortest and fastest path. And as I watched the demonstration, my suspicions were proved correct. OnLive didn't last very long. Nor did its nearest competitor, Gaikai, which got subsumed into Sony and was rebranded as PlayStation Now. Admittedly, both of them lasted long enough to actually deliver some services to paying customers, unlike the Phantom from Infinium Labs.
Imagine my surprise when I started reading news items out of CES about another new game streaming service popping up. LiquidSky promises to deliver game streaming anywhere with 30ms latency (which is pretty darned good, in theory) and will do so through a combination of paid tier packages allotting you a certain number of hours on a virtual machine of a certain specification, or you can sit through several minutes of ads to earn credits for up to three hours worth of play time each day. So far, it's been undergoing a very large beta test, is open to let you download games from your own libraries on multiple platforms like Steam or Origin, and had a very successful demonstration at CES.
This is doomed to failure.
Much like OnLive, network conditions are going to be the first area of vulnerability for LiquidSky. Purportedly, the Internet quality at CES was declared "garbage" by LiquidSky's CMO, and yet they got pretty good results. In a perfect world, it's entirely likely that those 30ms quality-of-service claims could be consistently maintained, if not improved upon. In the world we live in, network conditions are highly unpredictable and vulnerable to influence from external sources. Given the recent spate of DDoS attacks over the last few months, it's all too easy to bring something like LiquidSky down to a crawl without even directly attacking the servers running the virtual machines themselves. All you have to do is DDoS the network segments close to where those servers are physically located and the hilarity will ensue. And this doesn't even take into account things like fiber cuts, power outages, ISP disputes, and other issues which would disrupt Internet connectivity. You can't stream games if you have no Internet connection.
The second point of vulnerability is the fact that you're using a virtual machine to host your game. My close friends know how I feel about VMs and cloud services: they are a parlor trick. In some instances, they are a legitimate tool and life saver for situations where you need to have something that is not your actual iron running a program. But for games? Worse, streaming games? Hell, no. Particularly in this instance. While the convenience of being able to stream games from your Steam account to your old busted computer through a VM is undeniably attractive, it also creates a needless security risk because you have no control over that VM. And if you have no control over it, you have no idea what's being done with it when you aren't streaming a game through it. All you have is somebody else's guarantee that the VM is secure and nothing will happen to it or any of your information which happens to get stored on it. Which is fine and well till something like the PSN hack happens. And sure as sunrise, you know somebody will be gunning for LiquidSky before too long to see what juicy data they can slurp out. What black hat worthy of the name could resist an almost literal man-in-the-middle attack vector?
My third point of contention goes to the business model side of things. Put bluntly, the amount of money that people will spend on this service on a per capita basis is probably going to be equal to the cost of building a decent gaming rig. Maybe not a screaming rig, but a good middle of the road computer that can handle most of what you throw at it. Yet LiquidSky seems to be aiming this at people who don't want to be bothered with getting and maintaining a computer. They are looking for renters, basically. Tenant users. Digital serfs. The advent of practical computer virtualization has given rise to a perverse mindset which occasionally cloaks itself in anti-materialist rhetoric while completely overlooking or refusing to acknowledge the rise of a caste of gatekeepers who promise better and newer services all the time, always "free of charge," so long as you basically pledge your undying loyalty to those gatekeepers and do not defy them in any way. When Elon Musk is pissing and moaning about how somebody will not be permitted to use a Tesla vehicle to be an Uber driver, you know something has gone amiss in the basic consumer/producer relationship. You can only imagine how much Windows 10 infuriates me from a philosophical standpoint. LiquidSky is perpetuating this loathsome behavior with the same "trust me" attitude every startup since the millennium has displayed and never once earned.
The business model not only encourages a lack of ownership in hardware, it also encourages (intentionally or not) a lack of awareness and literacy about computers. After all, why would you need to tweak a virtual machine? What purpose would you have to learn about how it all functions? It's just ones and zeroes. Except that it's not. Worse still, and this particularly sticks in my craw, is the way that free-to-play users are treated as peons who are heavily restricted in the amount of game time that they can consume. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the sort of gamer who is likely to end up making the news because I gamed myself to death. Even I have limits of physical endurance. Yet, I can also get mesmerized by a game, lost in the compelling story, or the intricate strategies, or the fascinating characters. Much the same way that I can get lost in a good book. Or binge watching a good TV series. Being a grown adult means that yes, I have the freedom to go through those books cover to cover if it suits me. Or watch an entire season from dawn to dusk, pausing only for bathroom breaks and snack refills. Or going from Turn 1 in Civilization VI all the way to Turn 500 or whatever victory condition I happen to reach first without stopping.
There is a lot of freedom in gaming. The freedom to explore new worlds and new ideas. The freedom to vent your frustrations by shooting aliens in the face until they die. The freedom to find out more about yourself through assumed roles and personas which might normally be considered only in passing, "there but for the grace of God go I..." The freedom to design and execute experiments which in the real world would be flatly impossible. But these freedoms carry responsibilities as well. And let's face it, owning your own gaming rig is as much a responsibility as owning a car, or having a pet, or raising a family. I think that may be ultimately why previous attempts at this sort of thing fail, and why LiquidSky is ultimately destined to fail. We cannot outsource our responsibilities while enjoying the freedoms associated with them. If you want to game, build yourself a rig. Save up money and put in an order with Alienware or Razer. Don't give away your time watching stupid ads for a couple of hours on somebody else's resources. Be a responsible and free gamer.
No comments:
Post a Comment