Comment by somestag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somestag | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's cool people are finding value from these game streaming services. I remember when I first tried the Steam Link and thought there was some real potential there, and these services offer an even better convenience proposition.

Unfortunately, I've come around to the cynical mindset that I will never enjoy gaming over a streaming service, ever. I cannot stand the input lag, and I would rather play a game with shoddy graphics than with extra lag, or even just play a different game entirely. Maybe it's tolerable for games with zero real-time component, and even then I can feel the stickiness.

Back in the earlier days of large LCD TVs, I was always that guy who had to make a comment about lag on my friends' TVs. I knew I was being a dick but I couldn't handle being told there was "no lag" or "barely any lag" when there clearly was. I guess most people felt like my friends did because for a long time it was basically impossible to find a TV with reasonable input lag; then, LED TVs showed up, and basically by coincidence the gaming situation improved.

This is selfish, but I'm worried that as more people come around to cloud gaming (and the big players push it harder), the non-enthusiast gaming market will start drying up in favor of the streaming services. I can see a possible future where consoles die in favor of streaming apps; where some games start being released as exclusives to a cloud service; where mod support and community patches die off entirely because they're incompatible with streaming.

There must be differences in how people perceive lag, because it's rare that I notice any from LCDs. I have used a handful of TVs that were noticeably bad, but it was always solved by flipping them into game mode.

Given how much input lag can exist locally (well over 100ms) it should be entirely possible to eliminate perceivable lag in cloud gaming if the local hardware is low latency and the render farm is within a few hundred miles. I play Stadia from my laptop with a wired xbox controller, so I don't expect my hardware is adding a ton of lag, and anyway it's not perceivable to me. I just played through steamworld dig which has quite a few quick-reaction jumping puzzles and didn't have any issues whatsoever.

> There must be differences in how people perceive lag

Yeah, the only conclusion I've been able to come to is that some people are just more sensitive to lag than others.

If we're talking purely about enjoyment, then being sensitive to lag is nothing but a drawback. But from a performance standpoint, it's undeniable that lag has a heavy impact on gameplay. Your reaction time is constant from the time the light on the screen hits your eyes, so every millisecond you add to the pipeline from machine-to-screen (and from controller-to-machine) will strictly add to your reaction time. Sometimes even a very small increase in ms can change a challenge from "pretty doable" to "almost impossible" if the reaction time requirement was at the edge of your capabilities to begin with.

Whether or not this is "noticeable" depends on a lot of factors, including whether or not you've played the same game before on a less laggy setup. I think you're right that, given the same scenario (even the same skill level), some people just notice it more than others. Still, a part of me can't help but believe that it affects people's enjoyment whether they notice it or not.

I would love for a decent study to be done on this, because I think it has implications far outside gaming. Run an experiment where participants play a game in identical settings, except lag differs by small increments. At the end have participants rate their subjective experience, possibly along with their perception of responsiveness. My hunch is that even small differences in responsiveness would have a strong impact on experience, even if the participants don't notice anything "wrong."

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