Respawn Not Sold On Streaming For Apex Legends

With a release expected later this year for Google Stadia, the conversation is naturally turning towards which games would be better suited for “traditional” gaming via installation and which could be streamed. While we know that games like Destiny will be coming to Stadia, the executive producer for one of the fastest-moving games out there isn’t convinced that streaming is the way forward due to input latency.

In an interview with Game Informer, Respawn’s Drew McCoy had this to say about why he doesn’t feel like Apex would be a great fit for streaming:

We tested a lot of streaming solutions in the last five or six years. For the kinds of games we make, I don’t think they’re well suited.

On why ideal latency is already hard enough:

We’re already fighting TV manufacturers and their image processing that’s turned on when they pull it out of the box and everything and that adds like 80 milliseconds of input latency. And just because light moves at the speed of light, and not faster, it’s only adding more. We put an enormous amount of effort on the engineering side to reduce the amount of input processing we do in the engine and so that it’s only a couple frames behind what you’re actually doing. There’s no way to have it on the same frame.

And why streaming would only make it harder:

So things like streaming only exacerbate problems that we work really hard to eliminate, and it’s really tough having those problems being taken out of our hands. We can’t make whoever’s streaming service better. We want to make our game better and the more reliant on them and user’s internet connection and how many hops they’re going through and what kind of crappy Wi-Fi router they got from their internet provider eight years ago – there are so many problems.

Why streaming just generally won’t be great for FPS games:

I think for some games, it’s gonna be fine, but the really fast-paced precision games, it’s not going to be great for them. That’s only for the people who can feel it, there’s going to be a ton of people who are fine, and that’s okay, but it’s not like we want to target fast-paced FPS for streaming.

We’ve not really seen how well competitive FPS games hold up through Stadia just yet, so we may have to watch this space to see if McCoy has a point.

Meanwhile, Apex Legends’ second season is due to launch early in July.

From our Apex Legends review:

Even the most jaded of battle royale fans will be rejuvenated by Apex Legends thanks to Respawn’s attention to detail, superior gunplay, and fantastic innovations.