Posts by eyemessiah

If this works...

A few thoughts:

Latency & streaming resolution limitations (due to limited or inconsistent bandwidth) might turn out not to be a show stopper because for many folk the bar the service needs to clear is like something like "good-enough" only - especially if its priced competitively and super convenient. The history of technology is rife with scenarios where convenient, low cost formats have left higher fidelity ones in the dust (for better or for worse).

Stadia or something similar might well be able to make a compelling selling point out of offering access to higher-than-you-could-otherwise-afford performance. Assuming it works this might turn out to be a no-brainer for consoles but if it scales up to some multiple of the performance of my gaming PC that's interesting too. In some future where this takes off I could see developers targeting a higher spec than anyone can reasonably afford to own (but which google et al can afford to rent to you) and that could change the landscape quite a bit. Enthusiast level PC hardware is already too expensive for large portions of the gaming market – what if the economics of streaming services mean that the baseline ends up being some multiple of today’s high-end such that its basically impossible to replicate that performance level without building your own datacentre?

Depends of course very much on what economies of scale google can achieve with their data centre and also how much performance each user consumes and for how long. If the average user consumes a relatively small amount but pays a flat fee then heavy users (lets say something like casual users playing less demanding games vs hardcore AAA players or something like that) on the same pricing structure will get a very good deal - imagine you bought a super expensive GPU but split the cost with your casual friends who only play peggle occasionally, allowing you to spend hours playing "real" games at a fraction of the cost of owning the hardware on your own. On the other hand if most users are heavy users or if the titles generally require tying up multiple instances to run then you could imagine that the overall cost of using the service will more quickly approach the cost of just buying equivalent local hardware and it might work out to be a much less appealing proposition.

Developers might start developing games with higher latency in mind. This already happened once to some extent with the shift from CRT to modern displays. This might change the sorts of games that get developed (and maybe won't matter for lots of mainstream AAA games where controls have been pretty loose for years) - some might say the traditional rhythm game never really recovered from the death of the CRT & mainstream fighting games seem to be getting more lenient with respect to input accuracy. This is a bit scary but if the trade-off is that game controls get looser in general and in return AI, graphical bells and whistles and resolution and frame-rates all improve I could see it happening. I suppose this will likely preserve a niche for local hardware for less demanding games with tight controls and high skill ceilings – though I wonder if over time this turns out to be a bit of a narrow niche.

As a few folk have already said – many massively popular online multiplayer games already have existing network latency baked into the experience and are doing just fine. It might be the case that even if Google aren’t able to magic the latency away they might manage to move it from one part of the pipeline to the other without making things worse and clear the “good-enough” bar.

Many of us care a lot about their hardware and maintain some sort of notion that we "physically" own our games (mostly now technically not the case) but I don't know that its obvious that the general public at large feel this way so again this might not be much of a show-stopper.

Also updates, configuration, performance tweaking, patching, modding etc - these are a source of "fun" for some number of us but a definite turn off for many folk. If google can actually deliver on their promise of this being a thing where you just click on a link on any device capable of running chrome and more or less immediately start playing that's potentially a strong selling point.

"Unless there is reason to believe a password has been compromised ..."

The problem is of course that even in the absence of data breaches users frequently find ways to compromise their own logins so you should probably always assume that some proportion of your users are using compromised credentials.

Frequent forced resets are obviously harmful but the mistake I think that we make nowadays is in assuming that if frequent forced resets (worst I've personally experienced was 30-day but I've heard of worse!) are bad for overall security then the ideal must be to never, ever force your users to reset their passwords.

I'm not 100% sure this is always true - particularly given that over time your users will tend to compromise their own credentials one way or another. Even if an infrequent forced reset isn't a perfect "refresh" - it seems like its better than just letting the proportion of compromised credentials grow over time.

If Citrix did indeed run a comparison of their sign-ins against publicly known compromised credentials it would be interesting to know if they did the same again after the reset - and whether or not and how much difference it made.