This week’s DF Direct Weekly is what you might call a ‘come down’ episode. After the highs of the Sony State of Play, Summer Games Fest and the best Xbox Showcase in years, we take things a little more slowly – though we do spend a fair amount of time looking at Ubisoft Forward. While the gaming content gets plenty of commentary, it’s actually the quality of the live streaming presentation itself that we take issue with. Why did it look so bad?
For years now, digital showcases have had a problem: the state of live streaming technology on YouTube. Low bit-rates, low resolutions, inconsistent frame-rates, terrible macroblocking. It got to the point where we’d need to watch the content twice – first to get the news via the live stream, then secondly to check out the individually uploaded trailers which looked an order of magnitude better from a quality perspective. The good news is that things are improving. Streaming 4K at 60fps with decent bit-rate is now possible. We saw it with the Xbox Showcase. Even Summer Games Fest streamed at 4K, even though it looked like nearest neighbour upscaling of 1080p content. In both cases, we’re seeing genuine improvement over their 2023 presentations.
However, Ubisoft Forward was a retrograde step. In fact, it featured just about every poor practice we’ve seen when it comes to live streaming new games. The first time I watched it I was shocked and when we consider the amount of money it takes to make a game like Star Wars Outlaws or Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the concept that these titles should look so bad during a major live streaming event is almost inconceivable, so what happened and how can things improve?
0:00:31 Introduction0:02:29 News 01: Star Wars Outlaws demo reaction!0:28:42 News 02: Assassin’s Creed Shadows unveiled0:46:55 News 03: Clarifying the Gears of War cinematic trailer0:55:05 News 04: Epic Games Store leaks upcoming games1:01:05 News 05: Riven demo released1:08:59 Supporter Q1: Has any console generation been more boring than this one?1:13:43 Supporter Q2: Was Microsoft showing Series X or PC footage at their games showcase?1:20:20 Supporter Q3: Is delaying a physical release the best option for modern games?1:27:06 Supporter Q4: Will you make an updated PC Gaming on a Budget video?1:34:32 Supporter Q5: Do you have ambitions for growing your audience?
First of all, live streaming revolves around real-time video encoding. The source computer talking to YouTube is encoding video in a fast, none-too-efficient manner. Then YouTube needs to decode that content and encode it – again, in real-time, with minimal latency. Real-time encoding diminishes video quality in a way that offline encoding does not. Secondly, Ubisoft streamed at 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second. YouTube is notoriously stingy with bandwidth at full HD resolution, resulting in awful artefacting. There is now 4K functionality, which doesn’t fully solve the real-time encoding issue but certainly mitigates it, thanks to much higher levels of bandwidth, which translates into superior image quality.