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'Angry Birds' Developer Rovio Seeks Backers For 5G 'Netflix of Games' Service (dailyherald.com) 46

Posted by EditorDavid from the flying-through-the-cloud dept.
"The next success for the company behind Angry Birds could be twofold: convincing the U.S. public they should buy a 5G mobile phone from Sprint Corp., and developing the world's biggest video game streaming platform in the process," reports Bloomberg: Rovio Entertainment is in talks with "several" investors to take a stake in its subsidiary Hatch -- a "Netflix for games" platform that Sprint will use to showcase what its high-speed 5G handsets can do when it opens its new network in May. But Rovio Chief Executive Officer Kati Levoranta also needs new investors to buy into her vision for three-year-old Hatch, on which Rovio has already spent about 17 million euros ($19 million), to help it build up its library of games from developers such as Ubisoft and Sega.

"The Hatch service is brilliant for use with 5G, and many of our strategic partners are looking for services that demonstrate how 5G works and the benefits it brings," Levoranta said in an interview at the company's seaside headquarters in Espoo, Finland.... "5G is a big opportunity for us," Vesa Jutila, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Hatch Entertainment Oy, said in an interview. "Everyone seems to think cloud gaming is the way to tell the 5G story to consumers."

The app offers a portfolio of pre-vetted games to consumers, streamed to their handsets via a monthly subscription. Once the initial account is set up, mobile games can be played straight from the cloud, without needing to be downloaded or installed. The advent of high speed, low latency 5G networks makes the model all the more attractive to carriers looking to sell their latest services.
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'Angry Birds' Developer Rovio Seeks Backers For 5G 'Netflix of Games' Service More

'Angry Birds' Developer Rovio Seeks Backers For 5G 'Netflix of Games' Service

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  • What kind of data caps will we be seeing on 5G networks? How quickly will it be (would it have been) better to download and install than stream?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      What kind of data caps will we be seeing on 5G networks? How quickly will it be (would it have been) better to download and install than stream?

      Let's assume for a moment that 5G pricing tiers will resemble those of 4G. The major U.S. carriers offer "unlimited", with about 30 GB per month of high-speed priority data, so long as the packets are sent or received by an application running on the phone. Packets sent or received by an application running on a different device connected through the phone's "mobile hotspot" or "USB tethering" feature are subject to a separate 10 GB per month quota, with overages on the order of $10 per GB for exceeding thi

    • ... because the mobile carriers already complain how expensive the 5G build-out will be, and they will certainly aim at increasing their profit margins, not lowering them.

      The idea to stream games to mobile devices is dead on arrival due to the volume prices that haven't really changed for years - not with "3G", not with "4G". Streaming a 60fps 1080p action game will cost so much traffic that this is not going to fly.

    • What kind of data caps will we be seeing on 5G networks?

      Assuming you live in a 1st world country, I'd imagine none at all.

    • separate 10 GB per month quota, with overages on the order of $10 per GB for exceeding this. (Carriers' way of detecting fee evasion include TTL/hop count field, SNI domains of OS update services, and User-agent on cleartext HTTP sites.) https://xender.pro/ [xender.pro] https://discord.software/ [discord.software] https://omegle.onl/ [omegle.onl]
  • As much as I await the promised low latency 5G, i do not believe it will enough for gaming. Games today already have about 100ms delay between controller and action on screen. Bluetooth controllers and whole stacks for HID devices etc all adds up. It's already near unacceptable. You put cloud between that, it's not gonna work. Home fiber already gets 1-6ms ping times, yet we don't see massive streaming happening. And a lot of companies have tried. Maybe if they did a complete end to end overhaul, from game

    • Mobile games are hardly known for their lightening fast reaction times, especially the light-hearted all-ages type games that Rovio produces. And taking the heavy duty computing to the cloud, leaving the handheld as little more than a video decoder, could even provide a far more consistent gaming experience across devices.

      It's the one platform I could actually see streaming games work well on in the near future.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        Well "light-hearted all-ages type games that Rovio produces" would not require any streaming from some remote server, anyway. Mobile devices are powerful enough to run them locally.

        • But you have to download & install each & every one. Streaming is just easier, and comes with none of the baggage. Netflix beat out Blockbuster for the same reasons.

          I'm far more adventurous & consume more on Netflix than I ever did at Blockbuster.
          It'd probably be the same story with gaming, if I had a huge library of games within a second's reach..

    • I've seen plenty of people playing PUBG on mobile on the train, so I am not really sure what they can add with 5G.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      100 ms input latency? Are you SURE about that number? I seem to recall old consoles like the NES and SNES had something like 16 ms latency, how did things get worse by almost an order of magnitude?

      • It all depends on the definition of input latency. The concept here is how much time it takes for a button press to show in image. 16ms equals 60Hz updates. Let me ignore the actual controller action to game logic latency. Most console games aim for 33ms updates. Add on top of that double or triple buffering or any modern sort of VSync. Add to that that most TVs include some postprocessing pipeline that takes around 100ms when you do not have game mode on.

        As a side note, I remember Forza Motorsport 1 or 2

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          "Add to that that most TVs include some postprocessing pipeline that takes around 100ms when you do not have game mode on."

          That would effectively drop the framerate to 10FPS which would be hugely fuckign detectable.

          So, NO.

          Also, I used to work as an LCD/(O)LED screen repair tech, so I'm just going to say you're full of shit. The latency in-monitor on the TCON and traces going to the screen is on the order of microseconds. The real lag-factor is the OS that your game hardware runs.

          • He's talking about interpolation and it does not slow things down, just adds another delay. We're talking about delay here, not throughput
    • Games are certainly a less helpful case(tighter latency demands, heavier GPU requirements on the server side, no corporate-IT-likes-the-centralization bonus); but much of the trouble seems to be the same sort of licensing/pricing issues that have dogged Terminal Services stuff since forever.

      Given what mobile games just don't cost (with the limited exception of mostly iPad ports of PC games, which still tend to be cheaper than the PC version but not 99cents+microtransactions) and how little back catalog P

  • ... about. Are any of them actually getting used to play games much?

    • Some of them already flopped. Sony is still insisting on Playstation Now and the PS4 allows you have somebody else to play the game you are playing through the internet. Steam, Playstation and Xbox allow to stream inside your local network and from what I gather it is OK.

      I do not get how Rovio can make remote gaming work over a mobile network that is used by mobile phones. Heck, most console games expect you to have a large TV so reading text might become a challenge.

      • Just seems so wasteful... they don't need high end graphics for their games. They run fine on pretty much any phone.

  • Rovio's way too small to be able to pull this off. Much bigger companies like Google are preparing to roll out the exact same thing, and are better-positioned to succeed. 5G will also make it much faster to download games; I'd much rather download that 200MB game than effectively stream a video of it, if I'm going to be playing it for more than an hour it'll take less data.

  • The article argues that the low latency of 5G networks allows for streaming of games. This model computes and renders in the data center, and streams the video back to the client. Low latency is required to avoid lag.

    In my case, most of the time I connect to WiFi networks. Latency on WiFi is typically very low. Speed is fast and most variability comes from MAC and retransmission due to collisions. Current WiFi generations rely on distributed medium access control protocols, but their delay is very low (some

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      I think the main idea is that you can stream the game while sitting in a bus, at a train station, etc. - away from your low latence WiFi network.

  • Sprint?? He said SPRINT! Hahahah. All you can eat buffet through a straw.
  • How about you just put Angry Birds back on Windows instead of coming up with yet another game service?

  • So, this has been done before. Many times. Didn’t Napster try to pivot to it a few years ago? Redbox does it (maybe not streaming). Steam is essentially this (maybe not mobile).

    If I thought that Rovio were a bunch of ignorant millennial upstarts, I might blame this move on sheer stupidity or failure to understand the market.

    But Rovio came from Future Crew and those guys are (a) amazing and (b) have been in the game long enough to know everybody and everything.

    Maybe some MBA got involved at a late stag

  • Investors are trying to cash out with some money from bigger fools. As a busiess model "streaming gaming" is right up there Cryptocurrency AI.

  • Failing games streaming company teams up with network offering uninspiring phone technology. They both say the combination will be AMAZING!
  • I don't need a 5G Steam but they'll do it anyways I'm sure, and Kongregate is perfect for the smaller "streaming" style games I like to play. Not sure where Hatch is supposed to be positioned to compete tbh.

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