> Gamestreaming (Stadia etc) shows that this absolutely is possible. It might not be feasible due to players on bad connections and hardware cost (in fact, the reason that games do so few checks serverside is hardware cost), but it's not something impossible anymore.
That's a fair point, and maybe we're closer than I think, but I don't think that fully-streamed games demonstrate that we're there yet. At the risk of sounding too elitist, those games aren't "hardcore". The things that streamed game players expect and will put up with are a far cry from the things that hardcore gamers expect.
A serious Counter-Strike player wants things to operate as close to the limits of human reaction time as possible. People can typically react (as in press a button) in response to visual stimuli in something like 150ms, and to audio stimuli in something like 50ms (I don't have good links for these, so don't hold me to the numbers; there are studies out there).
While this may seem like it's slow enough that processing and network delays don't matter too much, when you add those in, you're well into the territory of perceptable delays. Advanced/pro gamers (especially younger ones) are even faster. I don't know that it's possible for fully server-side systems to compensate for this. Anecdotally, I can't tell the difference between 20ms and 70ms latency while gaming (at least not now that I'm old), but I can tell the difference between 20ms and 120ms. If everything had to happen server side, I think it'd be noticeable.
Well, to be fair, simply throwing Stadia at you was a bit of a strawman without further explanation.
I fully agree with you that game streaming platforms, as of now, are not usable for pro FPS players (or any players where tens of ms of latency are important). You're not elitist, that is the truth of it :-) But, if a developer would really want to, there would be options:
1. You could go for datacenters in all major cities. With this, you could probably get <10ms roundtrips for a lot of people. It would still be bad compared to local, but if you control the stack, you could easily get those ms back on other fronts. Bad keyboards and mice, for example, might add a lot of latency. Same for USB hubs and non-gaming monitors. If you supply your own optimized hardware you can easily save quite a few ms compared to a "normal" setup to counter out the network latency.
2. Stadia is the concept driven to its maximum - the client is just a video player, everything is done server-side. For cheat safety, this is actually not necessary - by just sending render instructions (i.e. which object is where), you can let the client do the actual rendering, with only culling being done server side. This would not only reduce the server hardware requirements, but also drastically reduce the required bandwidth (especially at 4K) and latency (since you can skip video en-/decoding and a bit of compression). If cheat safety is the only goal (instead of not requiring hardware, which game streaming optimizes for) this would probably be a superior solution.
Stadia (and NVidia Now and the other ones) prove that the technology is close enough that this would be doable, even though they themself optimize towards other things. However, the reality of it is that this would cost an insane amount of money and still not catch everyone [0]. Cheaters do cost games something, but as long as there are reasonably few (and they're kept out of tournaments), it's fine with developers. This is far cheaper to do with client side anti-cheat right now. So you are probably even right with the prediction that we won't see this for a long time - it's just not for a technological reason.
[0] You could do [Game Console of Choice] -> HDCP Stripper -> Cheat-PC w/ HDMI capture card -> Faked gaming mouse/keyboard via USB host -> [Game Console]. This setup works with everything available on the market right now and is virtually undetectable on the client and the server, at least without analyzing user behavior.
That's a fair point, and maybe we're closer than I think, but I don't think that fully-streamed games demonstrate that we're there yet. At the risk of sounding too elitist, those games aren't "hardcore". The things that streamed game players expect and will put up with are a far cry from the things that hardcore gamers expect.
A serious Counter-Strike player wants things to operate as close to the limits of human reaction time as possible. People can typically react (as in press a button) in response to visual stimuli in something like 150ms, and to audio stimuli in something like 50ms (I don't have good links for these, so don't hold me to the numbers; there are studies out there).
While this may seem like it's slow enough that processing and network delays don't matter too much, when you add those in, you're well into the territory of perceptable delays. Advanced/pro gamers (especially younger ones) are even faster. I don't know that it's possible for fully server-side systems to compensate for this. Anecdotally, I can't tell the difference between 20ms and 70ms latency while gaming (at least not now that I'm old), but I can tell the difference between 20ms and 120ms. If everything had to happen server side, I think it'd be noticeable.