Make Illuvium Accessible to Mobile players without requiring any dev-time

[arctic stream]

Title is pretty self explanatory.
Google Cloud Gaming just partnered with Abyss World, opening the door to web3 Projects.
For those of you who don't know how Cloud Gaming works, it's like playing ANY game at ANY time as long as you have a smart screen available and connected to Internet.

Can be your TV, your bad laptop you use for work or...
Yes Mobile!
The way it works is that a server hosts and runs the game... and streams it for you. It's sort of the Gaming Netflix.

So the proposal is simple, Let's get Illuvium there too!

Pros:

• Makes the game accessible to a wider audience (Right now the required specs to run the game are pretty high and only ILZ is available on Mobile)
• One more step towards mass adoption
• Only dev time required is to add controller support, which is a super cool feature to have anyways. (To our knowledge as of now)

Cons:

• Need of a constant Internet connection for the user
• Tell me if you find any

Looking forward for your feedback, (I will keep updating this post accordingly)

And If you think that we should have our 2 main games available on mobile too for low cost/effort...
Make sure you hit that thumbs up to show the support!

[signal sonnet]

Cons. You need a constant good internet connection. A lot of people that don't have that.

But as a former Google stadia player since start till death i like the idea.
I asked Aaron about this in the past. But don't know the answer anymore.

[arctic stream]

👍 you're right, i plaied Stadia as well at some point. edited

[barren plaza]

Sounds great on paper but not sure how feasible it is. Would love to get inputs from the technical experts. If this is at all possible, it would be an interim solution for mobile users to experience overworld.

Realistically, can this be done X months after open beta? Definitely dont want to add more scope this close to open beta

[signal sonnet]

Not only Mobile. You could play on tv too. Would bring Mobil and console player too.

[arctic stream]

So all it requires is to find an agreement with Google Cloud Gaming, and upload our game there.

There is litterally no extra work needed on the devs end other than packaging and uploading on their platform.

There is no "compatibility issues" or works to be done to my knowledge so this can, i believe be done and asked for Open Beta Launch or a bit later, the big question mark for me being, how long does it take the entire process of discussing with them and agree on something.

Obviously i can be wrong, but from the Stadia days and the games there it's pretty safe to assume the game isn't edited before being uploaded.

[signal sonnet]

I guess because they use AWS it's better they use Luna or something like this.

[barren plaza]

I dont mind working with you on this, Zep. But if were to bring this up as an IIP, we need to do the research which also includes ballpark timelines, costs, requirements, etc. We also have the issue of which entity will be dealing with Google Cloud Gaming to get this done. Will we have to go through Labs or will they accept entering an agreement with the DAO.

[arctic stream]

yep sure! 👌

[hoary python]

Sounds really good on paper, would love to hear what the teams thoughts on this are.

I like that you could turn any screen you own into a place that can play illuvium as long as you have a connection (and if you dont have an internet connection you cant really play even if u have a PC up to spec)

Another point to consider is being able to run the game on mobile doesnt make it a mobile game, you’ll probably still have to at minimum connect a controller to really be able to move around the space (which i think is fine)

or maybe theres a way to add just basic in game controls for touch screen monitors and laptops that essentially translates over to the mobile experience

[arctic stream]

One thing to point out is that the internet connection needed for this is much more than to play Illuvium on your own PC. HD/4k Stream is a lot of resources while our game actually technically only communicates with the server to update information at some key moments, it's not communicating with the server non-stop.

You have a very good point there it seems, as actually that means there is a little bit of work to do on the Dev's side to actually make the game playable with controller. Which honestly? i'm personnally fine asking them to as well in the process as that's great quality of Life improvement even for PC Gamers who prefer controllers.

Touch screen options might be tricky to implement though i believe.

Edited the Original post to include that it requires from the team to make the Game playable with a controller, it's a bit sad that we can't edit the title 😦

[still coyote]

Seems like a very good quick and easy step before maybe going for something more optimized and longer term.

❤️

[sonic acorn]

Like Scruba said, lots of research required on this one.

Some preliminary research indicates that Google does not offer their Immersive Stream for Games service anymore.

It's likely Google is just providing normal cloud services to support Abyss World, which is different than streaming games to devices. They may also be providing some on-demand computing power to the network.

It looks like the streaming component they are referring to is being handled by Portalverse Network, which is a decentralized protocol for streaming games. More research would be required to get a complete view of their tokenomics, but there's a simple reality underlying this - Providing people computing power is not free. Stadia was expensive because computing power is not free, and it's likely that a relatively intensive game like Illuvium would not be cheap to stream.

We'd also be reliant on Portalverse's capacity for computing power - They have some proof of concept videos out, but a network capable of handling game launches requires MUCH more power than a proof of concept. Additionally, latency can be an issue. The premise they have is solid - In an ideal world, someone physically near to your location is providing computing power, thus resulting in lower latency than a handful of centralized locations. In practice, this relies heavily on the assumption that someone nearby to you is providing computer power.

Don't get me wrong, it's a really cool idea, and it likely would help with adoption to be able to have people stream directly to devices. We just need to do more research on what the costs would realistically be, the capacity of the network, etc. I suspect this could be something extremely interesting in a year or two, provided Portalverse continues building and growing their network.

As a pro - Illuvium's games mostly aren't as dependent on latency as games like FPS are. The autobattler in particular would be decent to play this way.

It's possible I've missed something - You said your research indicated that it's possible to "just upload the game", but I'm not seeing that service offered by Google at all. Feel free to DM me a link if I've missed the service you're referring to.

[near lynx]

DMs are scams

Mods and Team members will never DM you.
Never trust advice or links received in DMs.

Beta access, giveaways, and promotions are not given out via DM. Scams are designed to trick you into installing malicious software to gain access to your wallet or to convince you to enter your seed phrase into a website. Never give your private key (12 to 24-word seed phrase) to anyone.

Support is not provided via DMs

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Please follow the instructions pinned in #report-scammers to report bad actors so we can remove them from the server.

[barren plaza]

Dms are scams

[near lynx]

DMs are scams

Mods and Team members will never DM you.
Never trust advice or links received in DMs.

Beta access, giveaways, and promotions are not given out via DM. Scams are designed to trick you into installing malicious software to gain access to your wallet or to convince you to enter your seed phrase into a website. Never give your private key (12 to 24-word seed phrase) to anyone.

Support is not provided via DMs

Support is handled publicly, or in threads within the Illuvium Discord. People offering support via DM are scammers.

Please follow the instructions pinned in #report-scammers to report bad actors so we can remove them from the server.

[arctic stream]

Yeah you're right, i didn't make too much research on this before submitting the idea.
But even let's say we don't think the PortalVerse option is something adapted to our standards, which seems to be your concern there if i'm not mistaken. There are other mainstream options that could provide us that kind of services in a centralized and more reliable way:

I believe the "who is the partner we chose to work with" is not really the point of this idea. Could even be decided by more knowledgeable people like council or team members, obviously as the OP i'd still be at disposal if there's some extra work required from me, but in the end i'm just a community member.

What we could discuss here is if we WANT to offer this kind of service to our users in order to be more appealing to a wider variety of players.

Like always in this DAO, let's talk about What, and let knowledgeable people decide How.

[sonic acorn]

Definitely, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a true plug and play solution with Google. I do suspect this would take some dev time and a considerable amount of time setting up agreements, ensuring that the platforms available would accept Illuvium, etc.

The premise of a streamable game is very compelling, and I'm supportive of it. I'm just wary of presenting it in a way where we're assuming there's little or no dev time.

[arctic stream]

Yeah you might have noticed but i kept updating the OP as discussions went and will keep doing so.
@hoary python brang a point that to be able to have our game in a streaming service like PortalVerse or GeForce Now it would require our game to be controller ready. and it makes now part of the OP.

If extra work is pointed out it will accordingly be updated too.

[raven isle]

Good initiative
Few questions:

• is it a "partnership" as in develop together or abyss world just "use" their hosting services (IaaS)?
• how is the latency? esp on high graphic. remote app may introduce more latency.
  ILV games are resource hungry.
• local app is generally better than remote app. in terms of the overall feel.
• desktop game usually does not translate well into other screen format without porting
• it can be a good short term solution tho

[hoary python]

yh touch screen might be a bit tricky, but controller is already available right now and on game launch you will be able to change the input keys for different actions as well so not an issue there, controller playability is not added work, its already planned scope

if the barrier becomes good internet connection + a controller to connect to whatever screen your using thats defo a lower barrier than a PC gaming setup and also means anyone can set it up on their console if they already have one which is super cool

[hoary python]

sounds like the major con is: is this even actually possible?

but yh if it is then it'd be a no brainer but if the infrastructure isnt actually there yet then its not viable i guess

[meager mountain]

I believe we had already talked about this due to the input from @lime dew in the past when thinking about mobile options
There are likely some chats and also relevant responses somewhere in the recent past.

[lime dew]

Yeah we did, discussed with @teal sparrow informally also circa 4 months ago. You can do various things technically, the overheads and pricing for it would need to be explored as it would likely come at come additional admin and overhead that could be needed to be offered exclusively on paid trips or some sub type situation, so that they don't negatively impact revenue. Perhaps it can be absorbed to accommodate all players but fees and technicals around the hosting need exploring.