Xbox Scarlett's Next-Gen STREAMING Console?

i personally know that i dont have much interest in a streaming console. as good as my connection can be its not reliable enough to stream games.

eww. I've known game-streaming devices are where gaming's headed for a long time now, and I intend to resists it for as long as possible. It stacks on all kinds of additional hoops to jump through, and provides the users with much fewer options to handle issues themselves. I think it's a perfectly fine as an 'option'. If it stays only an option forver, then I would be fine with it, but once it becomes successful, I have little doubt that all the big companies are gonna push to make it as mainstream as possible and then try to get rid of local gaming entirely. It's just too much of a good business oportunity to be able to control that much of their users' experiences with their product and keep everyone on leashes, regardless of whether or not it makes for a better or worse experience. And they'll introduce all kinds of reasons why it's "better" for everyone like the near elimination of piracy and cheating and whatnot, and everyone's gonna think it's great until we're all locked in, and suddenly the service gets lazy and all the "obsolete" games start dropping from the online menus like flies due to liscencing issues and they just drop out of existence since no one ever had hard copies to begin with and then the whole earth exploads in a spectacular, fiery display. THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS *queue dramatic Halo 3 music. nah, but seriously, I don't care for now, but I'm not a fan of a lot of its implications for the future.

inb4 the blockchainers

I've tried out this one streaming PC service called LiquidSky and it does cloud(ish) based processing for the graphics and locally the computer handles the input, so it's not that much of a farfetched concept. Latency wasn't that bad, it did have a slight delay for FPS titles but 3rd person action games like Assassin's Creed had minimal impact on the controls. Overall I'd say it's a decent concept, but the image quality would have to be either extremely compressed (if using ultra high settings), or the "screen size" would have to be drastically dropped to keep bandwidth usage as low as possible, as in instead of 1080p60, you'd get 900p30 or 720p60. That's also speculation on my part, but it's based on streaming for twitch and mixer since I've used both. I've found that in order to stream 720p60 or 1080p30, I need to use a lot of traffic. 900p would be almost as effective as 1080p, but again, it's about keeping bandwidth usage as low as possible. I've also used PSNow, which wasn't a terrible experience, but the lag was pretty bad for FPS games, sometimes as far as 3-4 frames, which at 30fps is a lot. Also played Assassin's Creed on that (it's my favorite franchise, if you couldn't tell), and the early titles were rough. 2 and Brotherhood were just about unplayable with how snappy the controls needed to be. Revelations, 3, and Rogue weren't as bad since there was a bit of a cushion with the character doing a transition animation to get up to speed, but it still kinda felt sluggish to me. Borderlands multiplayer was just about unplayable tho. There's already a lag since your game has to send the controls to the host player's game and then you receive the corresponding result. Even when not using PSNow, it's rough. Add in that 3-4 frame delay and you try to hit an enemy but it's so delayed that they've already moved and you miss, pretty much every single time. Lastly, the image quality was horrendous. While I don't normally complain about 720p, this is like if someone dropped the bitrate to 480p and 400kbs and then upscaled it. The sharpness was all washed out, the pixalation made the normally beautiful scenery a modern art interpretation of what a blind person thinks a field looks like, and the random lag spikes would make your side freeze up while the game is actively running and you have no control over what happens next. I think if the new console can get around those issues, there might be a chance for it to catch on. I wouldn't bet on them being the only iteration in the "next gen" (if there really is a full gen to go to now), and I don't see dedicated hardware leaving for at least a whole generation, if not 2 or 3 more.