Samsung announces cloud gaming service for its smart TVs

[midian182]

What just happened? Samsung is joining the long list of companies offering game streaming services. The Korean tech giant will deliver the cloud product through its Linux-based Tizen smart TV platform, which is good news for current and future owners of its television sets.

Samsung made the announcement at its Developer Conference keynote. The company didn't spend very much time talking about the service, though Yongjae Kim, Samsung's Senior Vice President of Visual Display Software R&D, said, "To diversify your game selection on Samsung Smart TVs, we are developing a new Cloud Game Platform [...] This means that soon you will be able to enjoy games without purchasing high-end hardware, and developers can easily apply Samsung Smart TV's seamless, immersive experience to new games."

Samsung has been here before—kind of. Back in 2012, the company struck a deal with Gaikai to bring the latter's cloud gaming service to its televisions. There was a beta launch, but the whole thing fell apart when Sony bought Gaikai for $380 million to work on PlayStation Now.

The idea of a TV-based game streaming service often conjures images of mobile-quality titles. However, Kim's mention of high-end hardware suggests Samsung's offering could be something closer to Stadia.

Samsung will be entering an incredibly competitive market. In addition to the aforementioned Stadia, which has been struggling since Google closed its first-party game studio, Xbox is going to be building its services directly into TVs and streaming sticks. Elsewhere, Nvidia's GeForce Now just added a high-performance option that utilizes the RTX 3080, offering 1440p at 120 fps streaming. Will Samsung stand out from the crowd? We'll have to wait and see.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/91977-samsung-announces-cloud-gaming-service-smart-tvs.html

 

[Dimitriid]

They do have the advantage of just building it onto TVs people already very commonly buy. But I have a feeling you probably won't get much of an AAA experience at all: my guess is that they just want you to be able to launch and play something like Fortnite using your TV only. Maybe some other heavier mobile games that would be difficult for a modest CPU to run on a TV but would work fine online.

But well since it's cloud there's nothing technically stopping them from making a deal with some big time game devs and run actual games in there it's all done on their side on their data centers so they have the potential to expand.

 

[Carlos GarPov]

I've got 5 samsung tvs at home and after an updating process, Samsung disabled the wifi signal on all of them.

I'm not making this up!

 

[Sausagemeat]

I've got 5 samsung tvs at home and after an updating process, Samsung disabled the wifi signal on all of them.

I'm not making this up!

I believe you. My mate has ads he can’t get rid of on the OS of his latest £2000 Samsung QLED Smart Tv.

Samsung are a trash company. They have a monopoly in Korea and so their products cost more than they do abroad.

 

[TheBigT42]

I believe you. My mate has ads he can’t get rid of on the OS of his latest £2000 Samsung QLED Smart Tv.

Samsung are a trash company. They have a monopoly in Korea and so their products cost more than they do abroad.

Every device on my home network uses PIHole DNS. 70% of DNS requests are blocked.

https://pi-hole.net/

 

[merikafyeah]

Samsung can't even make a Zoom app for their smart TVs after they discontinued the Skype app making their bundled TV camera absolutely useless since it uses a proprietary driver. Being able to make video calls with your "smart" TV was one of the main selling points of this Samsung smart TV and they flat out just don't care that a bunch of their cameras (which are actually pretty decent) are now heading straight to landfill.

 

[Reehahs]

Smart TV OS are some of the worse written pieces of software out there. They make Windows Vista look good.