Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown finds the state of cloud streaming to be nebulous

The inevitable day has come: my fiveyear-old has annexed my Switch. I needed it at work one day while he was on his Christmas holidays, and I was out for drinks that night. When he found out he wasn’t getting his post-dinner Mario Kart 8, there were scenes. And so over the Christmas break I barely got a look in, while he spent his screen-time budget on his favourite pastime: sitting on the starting grid until he’s in last place, so he’ll get the best items. He finishes in ninth place, or thereabouts, but at least he’s got a Bullet Bill or two out of it. I wouldn’t mind, but he’s doing it online as well. I have a reputation to maintain.

So, with Switch, and the gaming TV, so often out of bounds (and no, multiplayer isn’t an option, as I would absolutely rinse him, and we worry enough about his self-esteem as it is) I’ve had to get a bit creative when I also want to play something of late. Given all the recent fuss around Google’s Project Stream and Microsoft’s xCloud, I thought I’d check in on the state of cloud gaming.

It’s something I’ve dabbled in, but always walked away from disappointed. OnLive was bobbins. I tried GeForce Now just after launch, and it was better than OnLive but had pretty much the same game library, and there are only so many five-year-old Warner Bros games a man can feign interest in. In the years since, technology has improved, my bandwidth has trebled, and some of the biggest companies on the planet are touting it as the future of games – the moment the barriers come down and everyone on the planet can play the industry’s best on any device. So, to borrow a phrase from the fiveyear-old, are we there yet? The short answer is: no. The long answer is: fuck, no.

I tried Shadow first, a French company whose dedicated Shadow Box I’ve had kicking around for a while. Part of Shadow’s USP is that it gives you your own remote Windows 10 PC to connect to, rather than just a server – but this turns out to be a curse before it’s a blessing. I’d run the setup process some months previously, and it had crashed; booting it up, I find my remote machine has succumbed to a user-account bug and needs a full reinstall. Naturally, I didn’t know the serial number for my copy of Windows, since it’s sat in an underground bunker in Paris. Support were great, but when I finally got in, the mouse lag was so bad I quit before I could even install Steam.

I’ll admit I’m an edge case. I am not just trying to stream a game; I am trying to do so to a 3840x1080 monitor. If something looks or feels slightly off, I will notice, because it’s my job to spot these things. I also live in an old house with thick walls and ancient wiring. But there remain several fundamental issues with cloud streaming that will, I think, put off the sort of casual, mainstream user that these services hope to attract.

I turned again to GeForce Now, whose core library is still small and dominated by old Lego games. Yet the main menu is full of games: some free-to-play ones via Google Play, and paid games too. Big-name titles can be bought through GeForce for streaming; others are shown as being available through Steam, which can be installed on a virtual PC (likewise Battle.net, Epic Games Store and so on). Even as someone who knows what they’re looking at, it’s confusing. It feels less like Netflix and more like a bootleg Kodi install. What can I actually play?

I’m here for Destiny, obviously – but I don’t stick around for long. While running at 60fps, the screen appears smothered in Vaseline and there’s a couple of frames of input lag. It frequently loses connection, in one instance leaving me spinning on the spot for three seconds during a boss battle. I run a network test; apparently my network is ‘optimal for streaming’.

I’ll spare you the details of what happened next: suffice it to say I fell down a rabbit hole of router placement, different kinds of CAT5 cable and the discovery that the homeplugs I bought a couple of years back are now obsolete. Shadow is back on a shelf, Shield is a media box again, and I’m even more suspicious of Microsoft and Google’s confidence in the cloud than I was before. It’s not just about accessibility in the most literal sense of the term; if this is really to take off it must also be intuitive, straightforward and deliver results comparable to the real thing. I get the appeal, I appreciate the ambition, and I hope we get there, but for now I think a little scepticism is healthy. After all, there’s a fine line between blue-sky thinking, and having your head in the clouds.

There remain several fundamental issues with cloud streaming that will, I think, put off the mainstream user