Utomik: The Netflix for PC gaming?

[mmntech]

IGN had an article on this new PC streaming service, Utomik. They're claiming that for $10 a month, you can stream unlimited games to your PC.

It's not a traditional streaming service exactly. Rather, it downloads a small chunk of the game and silently grabs only the files it needs from the background. So all the processing work is being done on the client PC, rather than at the server like PlayStation Now. Sounds like you'll need a very fast internet connection if you want the lag free experience they're promising.

It's in closed beta right now. Be interesting to see where this goes, and how Steam responds.

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2015/03/...ium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ign/all+(IGN+All)
http://www.utomik.com/about-utomik/

 

[ImpulsE69]

Nothing wrong with them trying. I just imagine the areas you could actually do such a thing reliably for many games would be small.

 

[cbrunny]

Sheesh. Need a fast connection to make this work. Could be very cool though. Not sure how a big-map sandbox game would work with this model due to huge file sizes. Personally I'd rather just download the entire game while sleeping than have to deal with lag, stutter, and long load times.

 

[Red Hawk]

Huh, so, unlike stuff like OnLive or Gaikai, this service has your PC do the rendering, giving you just enough files at a time for the rendering? That's interesting. It gets around input lag and video compression issues inherent in those services. I'd actually be more interested in this service because of that. I imagine the loading times are pretty long, though.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

Looks like GameTap in that you have a bunch of freebie games at the $9.99 level but have to buy anything decent? Just guessing from the FAQ and video. Plus looks like it still downloads the entire game, just lets you play before it finishes downloading?

 

[xantub]

Not sure how they can make this work. Unless game makers code things specifically for this service, I don't see how it can know what files the game needs to be playable at any particular moment. A 20GB game my need only some files for a specific area, and other files for another area, so you wouldn't need to download the whole 20GB at once, but the developers would have to specify this somewhere, so I don't think this would work retroactively?

 

[darkswordsman17]

Sounds like this would be perfect for episodic games, too bad those basically have largely been failures (other than some Telltale Games ones).

I actually don't know why Steam couldn't offer rentals, and I think it would benefit both the gamers and the creators. I think it would help so that gamers wouldn't be so reliant on the cheap sales as they could offer rentals for similar prices earlier. Then if you want the full game you can unlock it by upgrading (buying it) or wait for a better sale. It would also alleviate the problem with demos or rather the lack thereof (and you could get a better idea of how the game is by having access to the full release version). To me it'd basically even things out, as there's games I would not have bought if I'd gotten to rent them first, but there's games I would have bought sooner if I'd been able to as well.