Wow why didn’t I think of this take Retro games and then provide them via a streaming service…?
You get around the modern AAA game bandwidth limitations* and get to release thousands of Retro games as quickly as you can buy the rights to them and port them to your cloud platform/app.
Will this work as a business, anyone can download an emulator and all of their platforms games, what do you think?
Will we need retro porting platforms in Unity if Antstream takes off?
One obvious issue with streaming retro games is that many of those games were designed to run with very low latency. A simple action game with super crisp controls would have been popular during those retro days. Adding streaming latency would kill the best part of many of those old games.
The other issue is their business model. There is a finite number of retro games. Some people would subscribe briefly to play some old titles, but there would not be any good reason to subscribe long term. It would be possible to play all of the titles you were interested in without any expectation for new titles getting added.
So it looks like some games may have had 17-34ms input latency built into the game.
Also it depends how the App works, it could just be a multi-emulator that downloads it’s content and this would reduce bandwidth and reduce latency. It would probably also be cheaper to run a download retro game service than a streaming retro game video service.