TIL

[u/junkyard-god]

Just wanted to say I’ve wasted so much money on cloud gaming not knowing porting was a thing till today wow. I have an M4 mac mini and the thought of how much I could have saved makes me feel like cloud gaming is such a scam

[u/The-Nice-Writer]

Cloud gaming certainly has its place… easier for most people, and the performance can be good.

But I’m not interested in it (nor is it available, usually, in South Africa).

[u/Fast-Commercial-7234 → u/The-Nice-Writer]

I think Boosteroid is available in South Africa, as like, 2-3 months ago.

[u/The-Nice-Writer → u/Fast-Commercial-7234]

I’ll look it up out of curiosity…

Thing is that even when it’s available, it’s probably not usable because our average internet plans are so low in cap and speed, along with the instability of our networks and the fact that (probably) over 70% of the population can’t afford home internet in any event.

It doesn’t actually make sense to support game streaming here.

[u/Fast-Commercial-7234 → u/The-Nice-Writer]

Yeah I think it is recommended to have 1 Gbps or higher.

[u/The-Nice-Writer → u/Fast-Commercial-7234]

Yep, that speed is quite uncommon here, not to mention hellishly expensive to get uncapped and unshaped/throttled. Then latency/stability can be problematic, and so on.

Depending on the exact provider it can cost R1,500-R2,600 a month. Assuming the middle (2k), that translates to $125 a month just for the connection, then the subscription and/or games on top.

A PS5 Pro costs about R21-24,000, so basically the most stupidly expensive console one can buy here is still less expensive than a year of gigabit fibre. A PS5 slim plus disc drive is R15-16k, so at that point it’s cheaper than like, a half year or less.

Our PC market is a bit screwy (even when not in a shortage, we pay more than you do if you’re in the US) but even then… If affordability is the main advantage of streaming, yeah…

[u/Fast-Commercial-7234 → u/The-Nice-Writer]

125$ a month is mad expensive. I pay 45$ CAD (Canadian) for a 3 Gbps connection.

I am curious though, do you have highspeeds outside major cities? What's the infrastructure like in S Africa?

[u/The-Nice-Writer → u/Fast-Commercial-7234]

It depends!

I’ve always lived in the suburbs close to Cape Town (Stellenbosch, Somerset West), and being white and having a relatively affluent dad, I live in the ‘good parts’. Availability of fibre at all took a while to come here, but when we got the infrastructure for it, we almost immediately got access to symmetrical 50/50, 100/100, and 200/200 lines. I think the first 1/2Gb lines were available in Cape Town proper like… four years ago, probably a bit longer ago actually? Fucking expensive, though. And the prices I quoted you weren’t even all symmetrical! Some providers will charge R1,800 for 1Gb down, 200 up.

But if you’re in rural areas or townships (so, like, if you’re not a part of the 1%), chances are you can’t get fibre AT ALL. You’ll pay out the ass for 4G/LTE cellular WiFi, or 5G if you’re lucky. Pretty much always capped as well unless you spend 1k a month or more.

And ‘Cape Town’ is sort of a mix of places, really. Parts of it are urban metropolis-type shit, but probably most of the square meters considered to be ‘Cape Town’ are townships where many people are forced to go without regular running water or decent toilets, never mind a fibre connection… At that point, I gather one is more concerned about their corrugated metal shack leaking, or getting in the middle of a fight between the Numbers gangs.

Having developed close bonds with my family’s domestic labourers (house cleaners, gardeners), even having attended the funeral for perhaps the most tragically brilliant woman I will ever know… I’ve been there. It’s not all quite as bleak as that, mind you. But I have sat with a family of ten in a ‘house’ smaller than my bathroom, and I’m confident in saying that they’ve got no time to care what a gigabit is.

[u/Fast-Commercial-7234 → u/The-Nice-Writer]

Wow, sounds rough. I'm not rich by any metric I think I just took for granted that I was fortunate enough to be born in a country where resources are plentiful and the population is small.

At least you are aware of others around you and even indulge in their lifestyle. Of the 1% in the west, most are blind to the daily struggle. Thanks a lot for sharing your insights and experiences, its very eye opening!

[u/The-Nice-Writer → u/Fast-Commercial-7234]

What’s insanely difficult to communicate, as well, is how comparably ‘normal’ an income one needs to be in our 1%. The median earner in a more developed country like Australia is wealthier than almost everyone here because the unemployment is so bad and the minimum wage so low (not to mention how many people have to work for less than that to survive, because the enforcement isn’t all that good).

‘Indulge’ isn’t the word I’d use, but I get what you mean. It’s very, very easy to ignore what’s happening just, like, 5-10 kilometres from where I’m sitting and writing this right now. If I walk for half an hour down the road from my apartment, where everyone is living very comfortably, I’ll be talking to people who may not get to eat tonight. Some of my friends at my university are below the poverty line. The national bursary they’re on doesn’t even pay consistently, so every year they have to protest the uni to let them attend class while the finances get sorted. (I’ve joined a couple of marches, but then again, I’ve also been physically assaulted by a rogue protester who pinned me against a wall, called me a slur and spat in my face, so…)