This is an article in response/agreement with Rich’s article from last week.

A pretty universal constant of the video games industry is that Michael Pachter is always wrong. The latest sound bites describe his prediction that services like Onlive will be major competitors for the Big Three console manufacturers, if the Big Three don’t themselves jump on the streamed gaming bandwagon.  This is crazy wrong and here’s a more in-depth explanation as to why.

For starters, quasi cloud-based gaming has been around for years now.  Garage Games’ Forgotten Empire: Legions streams game files to your PC as you play it.  It’s not streaming video, but it gives every advantage to the consumer that streamed gaming does, except for extremely low hardware requirements.  Despite this, gamers and businesses aren’t exactly flocking to this model.  To the casual gamer, it’s just one more plug-in to install.  For the hardcore, they’re used to installing games and they already have their high-end PCs and a fat bandwidth on their internet connections.  And as NamelessTed pointed out earlier this week, streamed gaming doesn’t really appeal to either the casual or the hardcore, and PC gamers are generally one of those extremes.

The internet infrastructure in the US doesn’t exist.  We have to be realistic here; internet connections in North America are barely good enough to play traditional FPSs multiplayer, where only kilobytes of data are being transferred per second.  Streamed gaming will require transfer rates megabytes per second, even with a high compression rate and only 30fps.  Now, most homes in North America these days can stream on-demand video at that kind of bandwidth just fine, but the key difference here is that kind of video is buffered.  A gaming service has to keep that high-bandwidth low-ping (HBLP) transfer rate up for the entirety of the gaming experience.  It can’t buffer in advance, nor stop to buffer mid-way.

And it’s not just the consumer side that matters here.  We’re talking crazy bandwidth on the server side.  Think of YouTube on steroids for the kind of outgoing bandwidth these servers will have to handle, but with much higher demands for a constant, un-interrupted stream while loads vary wildly as users log on and off.  The network doesn’t exist for this kind of service yet.  The combined costs of cloud-based computing with real-time requirements are higher than having the consumer buy their own gigahertz.

But these are just the reasons PC gaming won’t see Streamed Gaming for at least a decade.  Join me next time for Part 2: Why Console Gaming Won’t See Streamed Gaming.