Streaming gaming has been the Next Big Thing for a few years now, even as hype built for the launch of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Nvidia has been at the forefront of bringing streaming titles to the PC business, and the company announced last night that it intends to take its Nvidia Grid service out of beta and formally launch it later this year, alongside its new console.
In theory, streaming games makes a great deal of sense. Players have access to vast title libraries without the need to keep track of local disks or risk broken consoles. The living room space and power consumption costs are all outsourced to a remote server, and all the player has to maintain is a fast Internet connection and pay a monthly service fee.
Nvidia has been experimenting with game streaming for years, starting with its GameStream service, which allowed Shield owners to stream games from their local PCs to an Nvidia Shield handheld. That service has been evolving steadily since, with independent game streaming provided by the beta Grid service since last fall.
Reports on the state of the technology have varied, with various reports noting that you needed a steady 10Mbit connection over wireless for many titles. Nevertheless, Nvidia has pushed ahead and announced that the service will debut across the US with many more servers than were available at debut six months ago.
So far, Nvidia has announced two service tiers: basic and premium. Each tier will include free titles, but Nvidia has called both “subscription” services, which strongly implies that both will cost money. There’s also apparently an option to buy games at standard PC retail prices alongside the streaming option.
For now, the service is going to be limited to Shield owners — Nvidia sees this as part of its value-add for Shield, not a broader gaming service.
Could Shield revolutionize game streaming?
If you’re a Shield owner already, Nvidia Grid could be a nice option — but a great deal is going to hang on pricing. The idea of buying full-price games on Nvidia’s network isn’t particularly appealing — I suspect most people try to keep their game libraries concentrated on as few services as possible. The beta version of GRID hasn’t had much in the way of multi-player options, and testers have reported some vexing save-game loss issues, but presumably these are both related to its beta status and will be ironed out before launch.
Grid still has to contest with latency, but Nvidia is only targeting console-level lag.
The one killer feature that I wish Grid offered was better integration with the PC side of the business. The ability to move games or game sessions between PC and desktop while streaming titles from remote servers would be huge. It’s possible that Nvidia is limiting Grid’s feature set for now precisely because scaling up its infrastructure is difficult enough — adding features that yanked in vast swathes of the PC world at once could overload latency-sensitive servers and lead to substandard performance for everyone.
Personally, I think Grid is going to be a baby step as opposed to a giant leap forward. The problem is twofold: If you stream games to the new Nvidia console, you’re positioning a $200 micro-console with streamed titles against $350 – $400 consoles with local play — and local play is going to win every time.
Positioned as a solution for Shield tablets or handhelds, game streaming is a great idea — but my interest in it drops precipitously if I can’t shift the game session back to a wired Ethernet connection on my PC. It’s a good idea overall, but there are some pieces to the puzzle that Nvidia may still need to fix before the solution becomes compelling and the Shield platform can stand apart from other console competitors.
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