I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense.
I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the cheapest option - again. It will be the most enjoyable option too: no installation, no upgrade, I can just play. Last but not least: apart from the Switch, consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom.
As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work.
How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will be filled with anti-consumer garbage that you wont be able to do anything about - not even the files that make up the game are under your control.
I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has.
I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.
I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client. Games of the future will require more powerful hardware than what you are using now, but even your typical gaming computer of today will be not affordable in the future, simply because it won't be produced for mass market anymore. In effect, all your computations will be run on the platforms owned by someone else. And may be it even will be considered by society and the government to be an obviously sensible safety measure: the same way citizens shouldn't be able to possess nuclear weapons, they shouldn't be able to produce dangerously powerful software on their own, without government monitoring and approval.
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High quality graphics aren't that important to make good games. And any graphical improvement is having diminished returns. The jumps between PS1->PS2 and PS2->PS3 (using console because it's static comparison points, but it applies to PC game too) were noticeable and huge, but now each new generation bring smaller and smaller diminishing returns. And then there's all the games that don't go for cutting-edge graphics.
> I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client.
Compute power has become cheaper and cheaper over time. If you just look at the ridiculous powerhouses smartphones have become in a very short time, it is apparent that will not happen.
Also, consoles are pretty damn affordable - certainly compared to how expensive console/pc games are. Major game technology updates are mainly driven by new console generations. You might get some extra resolution or niche technologies on an ultra-highend PC, but the main underlying tech of modern games is still tailored to the current generation of consoles. I own a i7 with a 2080ti - and sure, games might look a bit better than their console versions (if available at all) - the game on my 4k+ desktop PC is still essentially the same that I could run on a $300 PS4.
I had similar reaction when initially thinking through such a centralized architecture - and made me understand that a decentralized computational infrastructure ("personal computers") is a necessary failsafe to prevent against pitfalls of such centralization; similar reason as to why I think mesh network technology should potentially be everywhere, however not used as a default network.
These are the systems and failsafes, along with canaries we build into systems, that we need to educate everyone about - so the public can clearly understand and have a document available for them be able to refer to.
Childhood nostalgia absolutely plays a role, but in my experience game developers tended to trade quality for graphics as the years advanced. In the 1980s games like Ultima 4 couldn't use graphics as a crutch and thus had to make the games really engrossing. My other grips is the ever-decreasing difficulty of the games. Back in the 1980s most games were difficult (if not very difficult/nearly impossible) to finish. You could play a game back then for months or years and never finish it. There was no internet to search for the answers to problems or riddles you couldn't solve. Games were not designed to be easily completed by virtually anyone who played. I can't remember how many hours I spent playing Zork before I was able to solve all the puzzles and beat that game (let alone Zork II and Zork III).
I'd say that in the 80s most game concepts were invented, but many suffered from the technical limitations of the time. In the 90s, most of these limitations were gradually lifted. The high point is probably different from game category to game category.
For instance Pac-Man, Tetris, or Galaga are still good fun today. Ditto Super Mario Bros. Flight Simulator II? Sorcery? not so much. There are plenty of 3D games from the early 90s perfectly fun to play, and some IMO like "Thief" haven't been bested in gameplay.
Yeah, that is basically the end game i was thinking at with my last moment. I just didn't want to start with this because it'd sound too tinfoil-hatty :-P (and some already told me i am assuming too much :-P).
Games are not movies though many making this connection is probably why many games are awful nowadays as they try to be something they are not. It doesn't surprise me that executives who have no idea about gaming see flashy graphics and associate them with movies.
Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.
Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).
None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.
With a few exceptions, pretty much all of them are games i buy at some sale or at recommendation of someone i trust but i find time for actually playing them much later. Many of those games (e.g. VtMB that i mentioned elsewhere) are games i've bought (let alone played) way after their developers ceased to exist.
You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P
> What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase?
Admittedly a very low percentage.
I will say that I definitely spend more than 90% of my time playing games on games that I've bought more than 10 years ago.
To me, games are a way to experience a different life in a different universe that is full with other friends and acquaintances. They are fun worlds that I can visit whenever I want.
That's why stadia (and games that require online connections) are things I can never see myself accepting.
If you approach games this way there are much better deals than Stadia. Microsoft's Game Pass and Sony's PS+ both get you free games for roughly $60 a year (so if you get one full price game out of it you're "breaking even"). They're cheap, but ephemeral (you lose the games when you unsubscribe). Stadia seems expensive and also ephemeral—not the best combo.
This is actually the perfect comparison. I can still watch movies from the 1950s on various media. Good luck playing a Stadia exclusive in 2090 in any format. Treating games like a disposable commodity is short-sighted and undermines any claim the medium might have to being an art form.
I still need to have a big ass corp to maintain the film library. Movies don't just remain watchable automatically. Without fairly large capital investment to storage they would rot away. Actually the analogue to movies is pretty good in this sense - if we had a 'universal game binary' that would 'just work' on the generic 'cloud based game platform' of the future.
But anyway, our future entertainment might be completely hallucinated by AI in an on demand fashion before we get the 'general storage game binary' thingy.
Even if we imagine some 'universal game binary', games are never going to be portable the way other media is. A movie is basically just a rectangle with some moving pictures accompanying some audio -- it's really easy to create a standard format that any movie can be shoved into. Video games, however, are much more dynamic. Video games require all sorts of complicated input devices – gamepads, joysticks, touchscreens, mice, keyboards, microphones, cameras, accelerometers, infrared sensors, etc etc etc.
You can still play old video games in emulators, but you are usually using an approximation of the original input device. This isn't such a big deal with older, simpler games – playing a SNES game with an Xbox controller is a good enough approximation of the original experience. But newer innovations like the Wiimote, Kinect, VR headsets, etc will make it a lot harder to play games made for them in the future. In 50 years, you'll still be able to boot up Wii Sports in an emulator, sure, but will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?
This seems like a good argument against buying Stadia exclusives, but also against playing any MMO.
It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?
MMOs are a case where the game itself inherently requires a serious server in order to work. I don't play MMOs myself, but if I did, I would not be bothered by their server-based nature as there's an obviously inescapable reason for it.
What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.
> Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread.
This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have.
It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a trusted copy of the game state.
Keep in mind MMOs have a persistent world. In CoD, meeting a cheater can ruin a 20min (? haven't played in a while) game session. In an MMO, it might screw up the entire economy. Thus off-loading authoritative work to clients is pretty much a no go.
To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory management. As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
Pretending all this to be no big deal might be right for some specific (kind of) games, but generalizing it that much is... unrealistic at best.
Btw, dev time is valuable as well, so an overly engineered solution probably isn't a realistic option for many online games either.
Having a persistent world does not need a 'serious' server.
And I mentioned trust in my first post. It's a reason to use a server, but it's not a reason to use a 'serious' server.
None of these are reasons you couldn't use 40 tiny weak throwaway servers in place of 5 big serious servers.
> As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
That sounds more like a shooter than an MMO. And a shooter instance definitely fits into a tiny 2-4 core server.
> dev time is valuable as well
Which is why so much software is single-threaded. And single-threaded software only needs one core.
(And the dev time for what I was talking about would be tiny, and it would save money overall. There are good reasons not to do it, but I don't think dev time is one of those good reasons.)
Either you’re not making your point correctly or you’re just wrong.
I made two AAA games with online components, the game servers are “serious” (40cores, 256GiB ram, 10G network) because they have to be to emulate physics, to run AI and to do raycasting of bullets (to detect shooting through walls which the clients tell us they can do if you’re cheating) etc. And /even our/ game worlds offloaded too much in the first game leading to huge issues with cheaters.[0]
And our gameserver is written in C++ with a lot of optimisation work.
Maybe I'm wrong, but keep in mind that something like "an MMO" managed to work on the hardware that existed 15+ years ago and the underlying computational details have barely changed for many of them.
I mean a server that can handle clients at scale. Certainly, it's possible to do this sort of thing in a more decentralized fashion, but the games that I'm aware of don't do this.
Plenty of MMO code is single threaded. And almost none of it needs much RAM. They may happen to put it on big servers because it's slightly cheaper to use big servers, but that could easily be configured to use tiny servers.
Handling a thousand people in the same spot can be done on any size of server, and most of the time you're looking at under a hundred.
It is indeed sad to see MMOs go though they are a bit special in that they are inherently about their communities. Meridian 59 - the first MMO, at least over the Internet - was opensourced a while ago yet if you connect to it now, it is a shell of its former 90s shelf since most people have moved on.
quite a number of 'dead' mmos still have active and dedicated communities on private servers, smt imagine comes to mind. no stadia exclusive will have that longevity.
Plenty of platform exclusive games from decades ago are readily available on new platforms today. I'm not sure your argument makes sense, unless you're saying you bought a movie IN the 1950s and are still watching it today.
Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.
> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price
It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.
I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.
You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.
When buying a game on Stadia is the same price as buying it on other platforms but with the downside of a total loss of control or ability to play offline it becomes less attractive.
I'll go a step farther, it only makes sense as part of a "PS Now" like service, where you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a catalog of games. Nobody is paying for locked-in games that only run on Stadia given Google's track record of goldfish-like attentions span on these projects.
If you are just renting hardware then you need to run a local Steam cache (this exists), and allow players to use their existing game catalog. This is basically the "GeForce Now" model.
And yes, you may note that I am referencing other game streaming services. Google is late to this party, and they have nothing unique to offer, nor a particularly compelling business model, nor the trust of their userbase. Stadia is DOA.
If Google wants it to be not-DOA with their current business model, nothing short of a guarantee that if they fold within the next 10 years then they will issue a full and unconditional refund is going to do it. Nobody is going to pay full price for locked-in games on a platform with a track record like Google's.
Sure, if you are the kind of person to sell and buy used games, that will probably be pretty cheap. But that's becoming more niche by the day, even without Stadia. Most game sales are digital downloads from a storefront.
I have an experienced software engineer's salary, few expenses, and yet... the cost of a whole console to simply play a couple of exclusives (when the vast majority of games are available cross platform and you already own another console or pc) is still too high, even though it doesn't hurt much financially, overall. It isn't an impulse purchase. And it makes you feel like a mark/sucker if you go for it - ~$400 for a video game or two or three is a rip off. And these days, they all have a subscription service you need to buy if you want multiplayer or game updates.
At the same time, I never feel compelled to penny pinch by selling/buying used games. And I like to keep them, as I'm sure many other people do. Time, effort and inconvenience is involved with used buying and selling, and for many of us, that offsets the value of actual dollar savings.
You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU. It should support VR, but I imagine when that tech has matured I'll want to pick up another $120 GPU.
You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.
Nobody said anything about the CPU, I've gone from two cores to quad to now... I dunno, whatever the hell an i7 is. 16? My screens have also gone from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080 to 2560x1080. I just took umbrage with the idea that you need to spend hundreds on your GPU to get good performance. People see the 3-monitor setups and RGB lights and streaming equipment and think that's PC gaming, but it's not.
Games are more efficient than ever today. The worst era was definitely the really lazy Xbox 360 ports at the end of the 00s/early 10s. Those games would turn my GPU into a space heater.
Might have left a couple of steps out of your upgrade path then:
> I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU.
If you've also upgraded your CPU to a relatively recent one, upgraded motherboard to suit, dropped some more RAM in it, maybe added an SSD, and your "4 year old $120 GPU" was actually a high end one that you got cheap, then sure. Your 15 year old PC case can play modern games because it's actually got a modern computer inside it.
I run VR with an i5 4440 and an RX 580 8gb. The CPU is 6(!) years old and the GPU is about 3. I have no trouble running VR games at 90fps consistently and 1.5-2.0 supersampling. Games like H3VR, VTOL VR, and I still have headroom to transcode video using OBS studio and stream to twitch and save locally. I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.
While a 15 year old CPU is definitely hyperbole, if you bought the most expensive intel cpu 10 years ago, you could probably run VR on it.
A 10 year old CPU might barely work, depending on the game. But you're describing a 2.5 year old $230 (but more in practice) GPU, which is massively ahead of a 4 year old $120 GPU. And every year past 5 for the CPU loses you more performance at an increasing rate, since things weren't stagnant then.
> I also run Windows 7 meaning I am missing about a 10-20% performance bump from advanced features of the Windows 10 drivers.
Where did you get those numbers? Also you'd be avoiding a lot of the microcode security-mitigation slowdowns that way.
Specifically I am talking about advanced features for my AMD GPU in the context of SteamVR. I was also under the impression that Windows 7 still got intel microcode updates.
Also, an RX 580 8GB is massive overkill for VR. An RX 480 8GB goes for about $80 on ebay and will have 90% of the performance of the 580
> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games.
If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.
Being worse than an Xbox One _X_ doesn't mean you could run it on an old cheap GPU.
Also the PC version of Stadia seems extra broken compared to the chromecast version right now, and there's a tweet in there saying it looks a lot better on chromecast.
I think it really comes down to the kinds of games you play, and the way you like to play them.
If you tend towards single-player, story-based games, like Red Dead etc., then maybe playing through it once and moving on is enough for you. Then again, maybe you'll want to come back to it in 3, 4, 5 years, and hopefully you'll be able to with Stadia, but with a disc/download you definitely should be able to.
On the other hand, if you play multiplayer, "live-service" games, as many are pushing to be these days, then you're already at the mercy of the dev/publisher to keep supporting the game so you can play it in the future. In that case, it become a question of who will give up support first, Google or the developer?
In either case, I think the Xbox Pass-style "all-you-can-eat" model is a better solution. No big, upfront cost for any single game, and you can still go back to something older, as long as it remains supported.
I'm the kind of consumer who uses games as disposable entertainment. I don't want to come back to witcher 3 in 3,4,5 years. I want to play the game that is the best that year.
When I was a youngling and had time and most critically - there weren't that many games - I liked to return to good games like Baldurs Gate 2 or Fallout from time to time.
Now - pushing 40, have family and career and and an acute sense of mortality (i.e. time has value) - I still like to play games from time to time, but I really have to struggle to complete any game even once.
I sample the latest AAA games and hottest indie things when they come out and are cheap on Steam but I don't really have time to complete them, except only rarely. The only game I've completed after Witcher 3 is In to the breach. I have a huge list of unplayed games in Steam from the last holiday sale waiting to be even installed.
Given this, I find a disposable cloud game library with reasonable pricing quite enticing. It would be exactly how I use steam - except sans having to download hundreds of gigabytes before I can even go to the main screen.
When those delivered a sufficiently good quality experience, I stopped going to a theatre.
Control is one part of that. "Let's pause..."
Replay is another. Maybe watch it a few times for whatever reason.
Sharing is another. I still like physical media for this reason.
Games are similar.
Renting a game should cost less than one that can be replayed, shared, etc...
Keeping history is another good reason. I have media and games from times past, and I have the ability to share that experience today. High value.
Gaming and movies today? Definitely moving away from the higher value things, yet pricing often seems the same, or not in line with the lower value proposition.
You're making a lot of assumptions with a clear bias there. Just because you don't want this model for games, doesn't mean nobody does. I tried Stadia with Assassin's Creed in the Alpha and it was a wonderfully low bar to entry. I was able to play the new Assassin's Creed on my Macbook. There's a lot of value to that.
Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine.
I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.
> Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with
I share your sentiments, but this battle was already lost a decade ago when Steam won - Apple is just twisting the dagger with it's App Store and their unceasing march to turn OS X into an appliance (limiting 'root', and with catalina, what you can put in '/')
While i'm not a fan of Steam, with it you can still keep the files around and some games are DRM free or rely on a DLL that you can easily replace. See Scott Ross' recent video about Trackmania 2 Nation for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulp99wSUNgk
But personally i prefer GOG where i have hundreds of games (though it isn't the only store i use - any that give me DRM-free games, like Humble Store or GamersGate - is fine) and i keep my own offline copies (including games from stores that have long gone - another reason i dislike DRM schemes and prefer to have control over my files).
I run Linux and LineageOS because I care about controlling my computers and data. But I don't care about games.
They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.
When I play a game, I sink hours of my finite life into it without any possibility of ever getting that time back. When I "preserve" a game, what does that cost me? Less space on my bookshelf than a typical mass-market paperback novel. Virtually nothing. The cost of preserving a game is far less than the cost of playing it.
Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.
I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as you, but I very much disagree.
If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc. I don't see how one can claim those mediums are art but games are somehow not.
You're aware that DVDs are older than Netflix and MP3s are older than Spotify?
They absolutely used to be preservable until an enormous technological effort was made to make them non-preservable. The amount of people curating their CD (or later MP3) collections showed they cared very much.
> If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?
Because it's not clear at all that this option would still exist. From a publisher's perspective, it's vastly preferable to just sell access to your game and keep the actual binary under wraps. So if there is a way how they could realistically do that, I don't think there will be much motivation to also offer the game as standalone software.
Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.
> Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.
Which, to be fair, is also the desired effect of something like Steam. If Valve turns off your account, you lose access to all the games you've bought.
The last resort of tricking the DRM to retain access to the stuff you "own" is only possible due to the technical limitations that mandate distribution of the files to a user's local system. I'm sure publishers would love to be able to just stream blobs, making this type of thing much more difficult.
My worry is that some games will be distributed exclusively through these streaming services and people will be unable to even obtain a local copy. There's certainly incentive for publishers to do so since it'd eliminate piracy, and perhaps Google will give exclusivity deals to various titles.
Due to this I'm actually kind of hoping for this service to fail to catch on.
The issue with this is that Netflix/Spotify are pay once monthly, and consume whatever you want whenever you want.
With Stadia, you pay once monthly, and then you pay for the game on top of that cost. The same price you'd pay if you bought the game for any other platform, which also has the benefit of letting you own the game (physical copies, files downloaded to hardware you own).
That's just the current payment model, but that is orthogonal to the underlying technology. I can imagine a Spotify Free version of Stadia (yes, with ads or other limits) and a Premium all-you-can-play version. Game demos can be replaced by "Play now" buttons on YouTube, literally dropping you into the game in seconds.
What the platform promises is to match the ease of use of YouTube or Netflix. If it can actually deliver on that, I'm sure we'll see a lot of different business takes on the same technology. As someone who started gaming on an Atari and still maintains a top-of-the-line PC, I see a streaming model as inevitable since games need to compete with the Netflixes of the world for your attention. As a new dad, the barrier (timewise) to actually playing something these days is prohibitive, so Netflix wins by default for me when I have an hour.
> They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.
The people for eho games were a major part of their childhood as well as the profession of game designers would like a word with you.
I also tested Project Stream, and the vision then made a lot more sense, that you were playing a game with cloud saves that could then be continued on your own hardware. This is the model Microsoft is creating with their xCloud while Stadia is forcing you to pay full price for a game for a diminished experience.
I pay for Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime. I have no illusions about content being there long term. Something similar for games is missing though arguably it is content that you consume and then discard.
Maybe, consider that it's not about you but about everyone else. I don't have a water cooled led blinking monstrosity hiding under my desk pretending it's a industrial vacuum cleaner. So, any game I play, I'm dealing with lousy framerates, and endless tweaking, etc. I never really invested in owning consoles. And I stopped buying games years ago. But I'd probably play Red Redemption and similar games out of curiosity if only I had something to play it on at a reasonable price.
In other words, Stadia potentially solves a problem for casual gamers like me already used to subscribing to content that might like to try out a few high end games but are not willing to spend gazillions on the latest gear.
Of course Google's execution here is worth criticizing. It looks like they got a giant meh from the gaming industry and are showing off another empty room problem. They need a catalogue and a marketing story around it. Neither is something Google has ever done well. They just don't do the content game very well. Youtube premium/red/or whatever it is called is pretty much dead in the water for the same reason. It's the same failed strategy: build it and they will come.
Unless I misunderstand their model is not like the companies you mention since you still have to buy the games. Imagine paying monthly for Netflix and still having to pay full price for every movie you watch without owning it.
The problem is that it is about "me" (and others who think like me) because what everyone else does also affects what i get to experience myself thanks to market forces. In other words, if everyone goes Stadia (or a Stadia-lookalike) then the market (both for software but also - and most importantly - for hardware) will vanish. At best it will only be available for very high prices, just for the rich few, but i'm not rich so that wouldn't mean anything to me.
Don't get region blindness, here. Also, never forget the power of open source and self hosting. If a model like Stadia works for other, there's no reason not to put it work for yourself.
I can already stream my Windows gaming container on my KVM Linux host with VFIO to my smartphone with BT connected controller. I could also do the same with just a RasPi running the SteamLink service. This isn't new or novel (I remember Stadia's concept being done multiple times before), but it is possible.
The only real danger to this is proprietary platform dependence. More people being able to game when and where they want isn't bad, but we can't rely on Valve forever to make sure there's not another GFWL-type uprising.
I am not talking about technical matters here (and FWIW Stadia is based on Linux), i am talking about control. Games that i stream from my own PC to my own handheld (or whatever) are still under my control, so that is perfectly fine. Games that i - wont, but just for the sake of argument - stream from Stadia are under Google's control which is not fine.
Proprietary platform dependence isn't much of an issue when you can hack around that platform. A win32 game using directx on my own PC is way more preferable than a Linux game using Vulkan on someone else's cloud server.
I suppose the importance of "lost when the project closes" depends on the lifespan of the project.
Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play. Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running, and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible. Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds. When it comes to something like a music library, "buy don't rent" makes a lot of sense to me, but the lifespan of software and particularly games tends to be finite even when you do own them.
Now, I totally grant that Stadia will probably have 10% the lifespan of Flash or PowerPC architecture. But lots of people avoided a string of ephemeral music-streaming services and finally bought in with Spotify or Google Play Music. Lots of people avoided ebooks, but are finally starting to come around. So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does. (Along with picking up all the users who are only interested in one or two AAA titles to begin with.)
I share the rest of your concerns though, so that sort of worries me more. Streaming games may be what finally enables the death of free/independent modding, DRM-cracking, tracker disabling, and offline play after years of battles with publishers trying to push them directly.
> Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play.
If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!
> Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running
What doesn't work in Virtualbox? Luckily, games from the 90's generally don't need GPU acceleration. I'm also continuously amazed by how much just works in modern Windows.
> games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible.
There you have a point. Although even then, you can use VMWare + some unlocker tools to install Snow Leopard, and from there use Rosetta. Qemu is also supposed to be pretty good these days, although I've never tried it. Alternately, it's not that difficult to track down old Mac hardware.
> Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds.
Huh?
The Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, and all Gameboy models have damn-near perfect emulators. Identical to console down to the pixel, for every game.
Dolphin isn't quite take-a-microscope-to-the-screen accurate, but it will run the vast majority of the Gamecube and Wii's library such that you won't notice a difference.
The N64 and PS2 lack great emulators, but what's available is still very good. Some niche titles will exhibit glitches or refuse to run, but most stuff works well enough.
The Wii U and PS360 don't have such good emulators yet, but that's because those consoles are relatively recent. RPCS3 and Cemu are making great progress, and can already run a handful of large titles without problems, such as Persona 5 and BotW.
The original Xbox lacks a usable emulator, which sucks. Luckily, this isn't the norm.
Emulator developers have done amazing work, and the result is that most of gaming history is fully open to your exploration. Games will never be quite as plug and play as music files, but they aren't that labor-intensive to get working either.
If your game depends on an online component, and the online component disappears, yeah, you won't be able to run the game unless that missing piece can be recreated somehow (as Flashpoint is doing).
This is exactly the problem with making games rely on external servers in order to start, as Stadia does (for entirely different reasons).
AFAIK Flashpoint (or some other Flash preservation project) use an embedded server with an embedder browser to make these games work. Most of them were single player or relied on simple common (among game hosters) APIs that are easy to replicate.
There are people who try to archive Flash and Shockwave games and if anything, this is a good example of trying to fix something after the bad situation has already happened: the best time was when things were new. But better now than never.
PowerPC and 86k macs can be run under emulation so not everything is lost. Similar for games for DOS and ancient Windows versions, though from my personal experience 99.9% of old games will work on Windows 10 with some tweaks and/or wrappers (like dgVoodoo2, dxwnd, otvdm, etc and of course user made patches). It is extremely rare that i find an old game i cannot get to run.
Yes, this is all true. I didn't mean to imply those things can't be salvaged, or that I think the lifespan of frameworks and hardware justifies switching to a system of "you lose all your games forever as soon as we aren't profitable". Outside of Flash games with no remaining hosts and console games with no known cartridges, there isn't much which is 100% lost. And the best works in an environment are most likely to endure, so most notable games are at least playable for somebody.
Rather, my concern is that lots of people already view games as having a "lifespan", and if they trust a streaming service to endure for a decade that might be accepted as "how long games last anyway".
> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.
Which means your (full price) "rental(s)" and the subscription fees for Stadia are gone right out the window.
Then when you want to play one of those games again you'll have to subscribe to the next GaaS and most likely buy... sorry rent that game again probably for full retail price. Rinse and repeat.
GaaS to me is an utterly nonsensical cash grab and as others ITT have mentioned a solution looking for a problem.
> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.
Considering that I still play games that I bought over 20 years ago, it would take at least 20 years for a streaming service to be able to convince me of this.
That's true for me too, I dug out Starship Titanic not long ago, but it raises another concern. If streaming games catch on widely enough, the holdouts become a niche market. I don't foresee that happening to games in general, but certain genres could see streaming-only releases.
In particular, online FPS games have high requirements and many already have "fixed" lifespans because matchmaking relies on the publisher's servers. Given how many excellent games have switched to community hosting after they were abandoned by the publisher, that'd be a real shame.
> I don't foresee that happening to games in general
To be honest, I feel like this has already happened to computer games in general. Online and/or phone-home requirements pushed me out of large segments of the games market years ago.
> How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term")
But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_. With their Project Stream beta they gave everyone a free copy of the game directly from the developer.
This assumption just doesn't make sense to me, especially for such a larger company.
> when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time)
Does it happen all the time? Granted they shut down _free_ things quite a lot but things you pay for? It's significantly rarer and even in those cases they give you a large amount of time before it gets shut down.
> I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has.
Do you want PS Now to fail? xCloud? I really don't understand the polarization here. It seems like so many _want_ it to fail because of _theoretical_ issues. It's so bizarre.
Why not, you know, just let it compete on its own merits?
> I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.
You already do not have this freedom. Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.
> You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.
You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.
> Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.
Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.
Even for heavily DRM-d content, it's just a matter of technical skill and people with the will to crack a game to catch up to the techniques used to keep it locked. With streaming there wouldn't be anything to crack. You simply don't have the game, period.
> You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.
I'm not banking on anything here I'm just saying, because of their history, it's a more likely scenario. Both cases are complete guesses either way.
> Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.
It's just theoretical. I don't know if it's happened to many, if any, physical games. But the issue does exist today with digital games and most of the complaints are regarding theoretical Stadia downsides.
Digital game purchasing is huge; I don't think there is much if any distinction between what Stadia is able to do and what all the other game companies are able to do.
> I don't think there is much if any distinction between what Stadia is able to do and what all the other game companies are able to do.
Stadia is able to make a game completely change and/or disappear whereas other game companies that put the game executable and data on your computer (either by some automated method like Steam or by you manually downloading it like GOG/Humble Store/GamersGate/etc) cannot do that because you can copy the files and preserve the game. Even if you specifically cannot do it, someone else will do it.
As i mentioned above, see Konami and P.T. for an example.
> But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.
But you don't actually know that :-P. You are assuming goodwill, i am assuming badwill. Between the two, the former is nice to have, but the latter is something i'd really want to avoid. So i am focusing on the latter one as i'd rather avoid the negative.
(and all that ignoring other issues, e.g. the version that they may decide to give out is inferior to the original version)
> Does it happen all the time?
Yes, even successful services get shut down all the time - even for reasons that would logically make no sense to an outsider (e.g. internal politics). I have seen way too many software stores (for games mostly) disappear to trust any (and not just indie stuff, e.g. Stardock developed Impulse - where i used to have an account - which was later bought by GameStop only to be shut down a few years later - losing my stuff with it).
Google's services even more so, they still do shut down paid stuff.
> Do you want PS Now to fail? xCloud? I really don't understand the polarization here.
AFAIK PS Now (i don't know about xCloud but i guess the same) are about games that you can also play in the console itself, it doesn't replace the console. My issue is with not having control over the game files so that i can keep my own copy in case things disappear.
Though FWIW i am not into consoles at all, exactly because of those restrictions they have. But, at least AFAIK, despite the restrictions it still is possible to preserve console games (see Konami's P.T. which if it was done with Stadia now it'd be gone forever).
> It seems like so many _want_ it to fail because of _theoretical_ issues. It's so bizarre.
The problem here is that you can only stop something while it is being at a theoretical level because after that it'd be too late.
> Why not, you know, just let it compete on its own merits?
Because its own merits are
> You already do not have this freedom. Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely.
...no? The majority of the games i have are DRM free from GOG, Itch.io, Humble Store, GamersGate and i have manually downloaded them on my own storage and update them if i deem the update necessary (at least GOG does publish changelogs after each update). They are completely under my control. Though even with my Steam library (which is also large mainly because at the past i wasn't thinking too much about these issues, though i do try to keep offline copies whenever possible) i still have control over the files themselves - it is how i install mods and custom patches for otherwise broken (yet entertaining - see VtMB before it was released on GOG) games.
Doesn’t sound that bad. Most of the games I’ve ever bought, I theoretically could but practically couldn’t play right now if I felt like it — I might still have the disc/cartridge somewhere but the old console won’t plug into a new TV or else I’d need to find some ancient computer hardware.
Movies still come out on disc even though netflix and streaming services in general have been very successful. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same with games.
Movies are an easy example: Do you want to watch the original ending of Return of the Jedi, the special edition ending, the revised ending post-prequels, the 4:3 edition or the widescreen edition? There are plenty of reasons to want to keep a copy of the version of the experience you enjoyed and want to experience again.
Movies still come out on disc because they're good stocking stuffers for the holidays, and you can carve out a pretty good margin selling box sets of film anthologies.
Plus Blu-rays can be sold globally. What's available in one country's Netflix often doesn't line up with what's available in a different country. Plus, a good chunk of the US movie-watching population does not have reliable broadband access.
Game developers would have more to gain from a streaming-only model:
1. It's expensive to develop for multiple platforms. If you can get people to buy into streaming, you theoretically have only one hardware target.
2. Streaming is more effective at enforcing DRM for games. You can make a recording of a movie you're playing on Netflix, but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.
But you fail to imagine all the positive potential.
Terabyte-sized games with 0 download time, more interactions between players, better graphics, no more cheating, no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games), and better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment), and obviously you can play wherever you want.
1. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly.
2. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly unpredictable latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games. And at that point, why not just run it browser-based and be done with it?
3. Packet loss. Packet loss doesn't matter on streaming video because you can just wait for the server to re-send it, or just buffer till you get far enough ahead. On games, real-time response is critical, and there's no tolerance for waiting to "catch up on the stream."
The Internet will never be a good streaming platform for real-time gaming, not without some serious protocol upgrades. Everyone focuses on Netflix like it's remotely the same; it's not. Netflix is one-way, loss-is-okay, and latency (round-trip time for the packets, NOT the same as bandwidth) doesn't matter. Gaming is exactly opposite.
Without proper end-to-end QoS or dedicated circuits ($$$) Google Stadia will fail just like every other games streaming platform before it.
Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen.
These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.
You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating the game world.
If you could solve the latency problem, multiplayer games wouldn't suck so much. Even super local servers with 22ms ping are one and a half frames of game rendering late for the round trip.
> the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen
If that happens it will just be another big negative impact of Stadia.
Is download time a significant factor for people with the types of connections that will have a good experience on Stadia? It’s my understanding that downloading a large game in a timely fashion and streaming it are both bandwidth-intensive. As for “terabyte-sized games” are there any of those on the market, or even on the horizon? At some point it’s either outside of the budget of most games to produce that many assets, or the 1080p/upscaled to 4K experiences that Stadia provides won’t make use of extremely high resolution textures.
We're not at terabyte yet, but 80-100gb is becoming increasingly common. Even the crash remakes are coming in at 30gb, and that wasn't that High budget a title.
Google recommends a 35mbit/sec connection for 4K Stadia streaming and they say it uses 20GB/hr of data[1]. Even at your high example of 100GB, that’s just 5 hours of streaming. I understand that the idea is to optimise for instant play but it seems silly to download enough data to cover the entire contents of the game potentially multiple times over a play through. Platforms like Steam, Battle.net, and consoles already allow developers to post staged installs where players can start playing a game before all assets have been downloaded. Stadia continues to look like a solution in search of a problem, where that solution comes with a lot of tradeoffs that I find hard to swallow. 100GB is also only 10% of 1TB, and I find it hard to come up with a concrete use for the other 900GB.
I do not fail to imagine the positive potential, i just consider it totally insignificant to the negative potential it has. None of those you mentioned is worth giving up control over the games you are paying for and your computing environment.
Instead, you have carefully controlled and moderated interactions between players. LAN parties and internet cafe's would just not be possible.
Cheating will still occur, just at different levels. And I have to ask, why is cheating in a single player offline game bad in the first place? Cheating was built into many past games.
Piracy I'll give you, but I firmly disagree that it will lead to more or better games. It will just pad the pockets of the gaming studios more.
Instead you get to play on wifi only. No cell phones (not fast enough). Nowhere with data caps. Nowhere that isn't near to a Google data center.
Modding keeps many PC games going for years. This just means most games will be dead after a few months of launch.
>better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment)
What koolaid are you drinking? Subscription services can cost you more over the long term than just buying. Tech isn't changing so fast anymore and the same goes for gaming. You can absolutely use the same setup for the last 6 years without any change other than wanting something new to get off on having.
>better graphics,
Why? Google is right now hardfocused on removing all visual fidelity because they need to compress fames as much as possible. The US has near permanent third world grade internet and it's not going to change anytime soon as long as 3 ISPs own most of the residential service. Wireless offering such as "5G" and Elon's pixie dust are only going to be make slight dents in the lack of high speed service.
>no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games)
That doesn't make any sense. Where is that money supposed to come from? People who aren't buying your games are not your customers so denying service to them does nothing for your bottom line.
>I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device
It's almost like you fully ignored the previous comments.. A lot of people may want to do exactly that, and are less bothered by other aspects, which you may appreciate and prioritise?
>when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time)
What service has Google shut down that you paid for?
>deactivate your account (which also happens all the time)
When has Google randomly deactivated your account without compensation for something that you paid for?
You are making some gigantic leaps of internet logic here to be honest.. no one is going to deny they have an interesting record on projects, but I find it astounding you are comparing 100% freely created google products to a service which you are paying for.
>I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.
Chromecast Audio, Nexus, Nest? Even the Pixel, their "flagship" phone, has only gotten 3 years of updates, ending this year [0]. That, and just look at the YouTube debacle and how they treat creators. Fool me once...
> What service has Google shut down that you paid for?
Google Play Music will soon get replaced by the arguably worse YouTube Music, so that. I paid for GPM for years and when the YT Music switch happened and they announced my uploads and library won't get migrated for a while (with uploads maybe not at all), I left for Spotify. Not to mention how much worse YT Music is compared to GP Music.
> I sure hope you don't use Steam!
Steam has existed for the past 17 years, and Gabe Newell has gone on record saying that if Steam ever shut down they would look into unlocking all protected games. Even if that turns out to be impossible I still trust Valve in their industry way more than I trust Google in an industry they just entered.
Nowadays a great deal of Steam games don't even use Steam's DRM features and will run happily without Steam, or with a stub "steam_api.dll".
Steam doesn't take away any control over its games from me. You can mod any part of your game and still run it. Hell, you can turn off updates for any game and still run it via Steam (not breaking DRM if it uses it).
Those are products that only exist on streaming platforms, though - as far as I know, Netflix hasn't negotiated any deals to have movies go from cinemas to Netflix and not get a physical release at all. Even some of Netflix's properties have physical releases, such as Stranger Things. So there's still just as much or more physical media available as there would be without streaming platforms.
This is patently false. Most "streaming only" tv shows do get dvd/blue-ray releases. But this is a bad-faith argument anyway, imagine all the times this has been said about new formats of any kind. Streaming is an option and does not prevent people from owning things and it isn't hurting you so maybe just let the people who want to stream things...stream them?
The films and shows that are "streaming-only" in 2019 are the equivalent of "straight-to-DVD" in the 00s.
Besides marquee projects like House of Cards, Fleabag etc, the vast majority of original programming on these networks are badly made formulaic pap with actors no-one's ever heard of. Were it not for the recommendation algorithm (and the removal of the user reviews), I doubt anybody would bother watching them.
> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers.
In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for.
For example I recently purchased an Oculus Rift. I waited until enough games released so that I couldn't be disappointed by the experience/value, and I haven't been. Anything else added after this is just value add.
> I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia.
Stadia costs $129 with no games. An XBox One S (Digital) on Black Friday, including a game, costs $200 or $150 with no game (e.g. NewEgg). So while your point is accurate, there isn't as much in "cost" as you'd think, and I'd argue that you get far more value with an XBox One S than a Stadia (even the digital one that cannot play BluRays).
The $129 starting bundle gives you a controller ($69), and a Chromecast Ultra ($69), which is... $138. Plus the bundle gives 3 months of "Stadia Pro" which is the 4k streaming support (plus other goodies). So the $129 is more of a starter bundle.
If you just want to play on your phone or PC, it's free (outside the cost of buying games). You can plug a PS4 or XBox controller into your PC, or pair them with your phone via bluetooth and use those. I believe there is also Nintendo Switch controller support.
Of course if you buy the XBox bundle, you pay once and you can play Red Dead Redemption 2 as long as you want in 4k. If I get Stadia and want to keep playing my game in 4k a year from now, I have to sign on to a monthly fee.
I would assume you wouldn't have been paying $0.08/month since 1976 (just like you wouldn't be paying monthly on Stadia when you weren't using it), so the monthly cost for the game would actually be significantly higher if you want to amortize its cost over months you've actually played. :P
Just to be clear the XBox One S for $150/$200 listed above also included a controller, it isn't just a bare console with no way to play on it. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
As an author of a browser game https://bad.city I noticed that over the last 5 years browser performance became 10x faster. The game currently works at 60fps, even on 2 year old Galaxy Note and has 0ms lag. With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device. No need to download 50gb game when you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing and it will not depend on latency. It's already possible to run local wifi game servers on the phones.
I see Stadia working for casual games on smart TVs but not for any competitive gaming.
This process creates too much lag:
send controller input over the wire, render on server, compress 4k video, send over the wire to the client, decompress 4k video, display in the device
> With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device.
I heard something similar to that for the past 10 years at least.
> you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing
People were amazed of the speed at which models loaded using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive... and that was when games were in the 5 GB range. Loading time is latency too.
> I see Stadia working for casual games on smart TVs but not for any competitive gaming.
Competitive gaming go toward more expensive gear... they won't care about buying an expensive graphic card if that give them an edge, or lower latency screen.
If they are forced to play on cloud, they'll just pay for a better connection to do it. This is just like the stock market where they build datacenter just beside the exchange.
I don't know if you would call me a "casual gamer", I'm certainly not a competitive gamer, but I get quite a bit of fun playing Borderland 3 on Nvidia Geforce Now. The latency isn't that bad, nothing I can really notice at least.
Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there. You already have people optimizing their display & input latency, not to mention GPU buffering tweaks, to shave anywhere from 5-20ms off the final result, and that's in _local_ gaming. Windows 10 1803 introduced a "fake fullscreen" mode to cut around the window compositor lag.
Assuming Stadia really does all these render path micro-optimizations perfectly, you then have the issue of datacenter location and speed of light creating more latency. And because in this case the end user needs to react in real time rather than offload operations or create autonomous behaviour (the stock market example), at some point they'll have to move closer to their nearest datacenter. (assuming the US ISP landscape is fixed by then)
> Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there.
If they are forced to, I have no doubt they will. It's not because there's more constraint that competitive game play won't happen. A mouse is so much more powerful than a gamepad that crossplay between console and PC on FPS is pretty rare. Yet you'll find competitive fields in console FPS too.
They'll definitely takes any advantage they can, that's including "fake fullscreen" to cut out lag, better display, mouse, etc... but I have no doubt if a competitive game happens on the cloud, the gamer will be there just as much.
Turbofan optimisations, SharedArrayBuffer, Web Assembly really impacted performance of my game engine. With enough assets it's already possible to make GTA V complexity and quality game running in the browser. The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago. It already happened and is possible NOW, even on phones.
"Loading time is latency too" no it isn't. It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay. But in streaming game as a video when the whole gameplay is delayed by 300ms it already makes entire competitive game unplayable.
> The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago.
There has been some amazing progress in the past 10 years too ...
> It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay.
If it fades in 484ms for the other guy, he just saw you a full frame earlier than you (and that's excluding the potential 484 ms remaining ;)). That sound much more like gamebreaking than my 50 ms over Nvidia Geforce Now, but I'm also just a casual gamer.
I'm talking about extreme delay of the object fading in, too far in the distance to be interactive(that's why I also mentioned LOD for objects close enough to be interactive). Your 50ms is 50ms of info provided by nvidia and a fan of game streaming wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 50ms and 150ms of pressing a button and actual reaction on the screen lol
I strongly suspect that if I bought a current-gen console today I’d probably be stuck waiting overnight for it to download and install whatever new updates it thinks it needs, and then if I didn’t use it for a few months it would be downloady-installs again.
Consoles used to be nice and easy, plug and play, but the last couple of generations they’ve started to become almost as much trouble as gaming PCs, and I can’t be bothered dealing with that, so I’ve pretty much given up playing games.
If there was a decent subscription service (Netflix priced) which let me play new games without having to deal with all that crap, I might take it.
Stadia is a service which Google says will be free in 2020.
The $129 "Stadia FE" is a controller ($79 a la carte) and a Chromecast Ultra ($69 a la carte). "Stadia FE" also comes with two games: Destiny 2 and Samurai Showdown.
the fact that google is trying to to use a fighting game to showcase their product should tell you everything you need to know about their understanding of the market.
I feel like they're giving a free fighting game because they understand their market. The biggest worry people have before they try it is latency, but almost everyone that's sat down to play it so far has talked about how it feels nearly indistinguishable from a console latency-wise.
A game that demands low latency (like a fighting game) is a great way to demo how noticable (or not) the latency is on your setup before you buy any other games that need little to no latency to enjoy.
I think I've seen one or two reviews from people that have actually tried it and say they noticed latency/lag, with dozens of reviews from people who haven't tried it saying that would probably be the case. The other reviews so far (that I've seen, I guess) have all been from people effectively saying they might not even realize they were streaming from the cloud if they didn't know otherwise.
Mine gets here tomorrow though, so I guess I'll wait and see for myself.
Now that people are actually playing it instead of speculating, we're probably going to see a lot more of those versus reviews saying there will "probably" be a lot of lag.
I've had 1 lag spike (that resolved itself almost immediately) in almost 2 days of playing on my home network, with zero problems so far. It's honestly pretty mind-blowing.
Fighting games are highly latency-sensitive, to the extent that many fighting game tournaments are played on CRTs (because image processing on flatscreen TVs introduces additional frames of latency). They're practically a worst case for a streaming video game service.
Fighting games are also a best-case scenario for Stadia's latency-mitigation tech, since they often already have a rollback system implemented for online multiplayer.
not only that, but the audience for fighting games and in particular one as niche as a legacy snk title, are people who will buy a 200 dollar arcade stick just to have slightly more consistent inputs & execution. this is not exactly a group of people that will accept latency that ranges from okayish to semi-unplayable. the samsho community is fucking livid right now that snk went through with this deal before releasing a proper pc port.
I get where you're coming from, but go to Stadia's page. Click "Buy Now". You land at $130 plus $10/month with no other options. This isn't a future product or preorder, this is launch. The hardware and service are live right now. If you want to play: $130 plus $10/month.
I think this release structure is pretty daring. They're getting a lot of bad press, it's expensive, it's not a smooth experience. Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.
They don't have to say on their website that it's three-ish months of paid beta access to make that the reality.
> Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.
Google can very easily afford to pay 50 developers to optimize for it. I only see this dying from Google's direct failures, not from that kind of death spiral.
> In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for.
This seems apropos to Kickstarter as well. I've had some successes, but I also funded Animusic 3 and Star Citizen.
EDIT: I've been somewhat disappointed about Star Citizen, but my mistake was telling my kids (unconditionally) that we'd be getting Animusic 3. Back then, that was a big deal for them.
The Xbox One S for $150 is 7 year old hardware. I would hands down pay $130 if I don’t need to be concerned with hardware and can play with the latest and greatest graphics.
I haven’t tried Stadia but just wanting to make the larger point.
Only if you assume Stadia will be around seven years from now. You're essentially talking about spending $60 on game licenses, plus $130 on hardware, that may ultimately no longest exist in a few years.
At least I can reasonably assume an XBox One S digital purchased today will still "basically work" five-seven years from now. I won't assume that about Stadia.
If it’s not around, for me thats okay. I bought a PS3 just before the PS4 came out. I’ve had it since 2012 - about 7 years. I haven’t touched it in quite a while.
> I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense.
I disagree that the reviewers lacked long term vision. Nearly all of seem to have been burned by the promise of videogame streaming before, and the current state of Stadia only inspires cautious optimism at best.
You're right that everybody wants to live in a world where videogames stream anywhere at 4k+ and 60+fps with minimal latency. But OnLive was 2010. Gaikai was 2012, followed by Playstation Now in 2014. This space isn't a greenfield for lack of trying.
Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for.
> Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for.
Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently.
> Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently.
That's been the norm of the gaming industry for ages. Mario, Sonic, Halo, etc - its always been fragmented. You have to pay for an expensive console to get at the exclusives.
Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation - assuming most are easy to subscribe/unsubscribe as video streaming services.
> Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation
That was also the case with video streaming.
Unfortunately once the publishers/broadcasters got the faintest whiff they could force customers into paying them a subscription fee for their content (and after that some services have the audacity to still put ads in/on/around the content) it was every publisher for themselves pulling their content from competing services' catalogs (like IIRC Disney pulling all their stuff from Netflix).
I can already see this coming once the competing publishers have all set up their own GaaS solutions.
Well, we're safe for a while in that game streaming is orders of magnitude more difficult/costly than video streaming, which is still very hard at scale.
But even so, with the fragmentation in video streaming, its far better than it was to be locked into a single cable provider. Likewise, game streaming will be better than our present situation, where to get that one exclusive you really want to play, you have to buy the whole console. In the streaming world, you subscribe for a month or two, then suspend the subscription.
The battle in the streaming era is going to be over reducing churn, rather than finding the right combo of exclusives to entice enough people to buy the console, even though they might only buy a couple of games for it.
I think we'll start seeing episodic style exclusive content.
Its not identical to a game stream but don't pretend Google doesn't already have the biggest video stream service in YouTube. There are clearly arguments to be made that Google is in a unique position.
Google has one thing that previous actors didn't have. A lot of machine learning to schedule on idle cpu & gpu. Because of that they can potentially provide the service at lower cost.
It's not a Netflix for games if you still have to buy every game individually. It's like every other console except you always have more input delay in exchange for not paying any hardware.
For me the important question is: will the game pricing be comparable with Steam or more with PSN etc.? Considering Sony still asks almost full price for some 8 year old games the pricing can make a huge difference.
Plus, according to their FAQ [1], "you will need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play". So apparently you have to drop $170 CAD just to get started, and that's in addition to the subscription cost (but it comes with 3 months of subscription).
From this FAQ page:
> Do I need to use your Controller? (Stadia Controller)
> No, you can use many popular HID compliant controllers when playing via USB cable on Chrome or mobile. To play on your TV you will need to use the Stadia Controller and Google Chromecast Ultra.
It is under "Which Chromecast devices are compatible with Stadia?". I refreshed and still see the quote.
Is there a difference between playing in Chromecast vs playing in Chrome browser? And why do you need a controller at all if you're just playing desktop games?
> Is there a difference between playing in Chromecast vs playing in Chrome browser? And why do you need a controller at all if you're just playing desktop games?
Playing on Chromecast is for playing on TV. Chrome is for playing on PC.
You need a controller presumably because you need a way to provide input if you're playing on TV. On PC you can use keyboard and mouse but Chromecast doesn't have a way to connect to keyboard and mouse as far as I know
Pretty sure you won't need that when the free 1080p base version comes out next year. I played 30 hours of assassins creed during the beta last year on my macbook pro with a xbox 360 controller.
Is Stadia only targeting console games? Maybe I'm confused by this controller requirement because I'm assuming that I should be able to play e.g. Cities: Skylines on my Chromebook without a controller. (something which you can already do on NVIDIA GeForce NOW in the beta)
I don't get why the marketing has to be so confusing for these platforms. Stadia in Google Store focuses on these physical products instead of the digital subscription, and NVIDIA decided to reuse their name for a previous cloud gaming product that can also be confused with their GPUs. It's like they all want their products to fail.
I'm not sure, but I think it's targeting only console games. It feels like a gigantic value-add for Chromecasts first (which generally live in living rooms with more controllers than keyboard/mice), which also happens to be capable of working on phones/pcs using the same streaming technology so it's also available there.
Here's the list of the launch day games [1] -- I'm not familiar with them all, but even ones like Farming Simulator say they have full controller support on their Steam page. I wouldn't be surprised if Stadia required a controller at least for a while, but eventually got PC-only games that could use a mouse/keyboard.
There will almost certainly be some tie-in with Microsoft's impending xCloud-based streaming service. Given that they will be starting from a position where people already own games on their platform plus the addition of Xbox Game Pass, I expect that service to really eat into any potential Stadia users.
Long term vision is that Stadia exclusive games would permanently disappear as soon as Google or the publisher remove them from the servers. Obvious ownership implications aside, this also makes archiving games impossible and destroys a significant chunk of gaming history.
Always online DRM and moving a portion of game code to the company servers already contributed to this. But unlike DRM that could theoretically be broken, there's nothing that could be done to preserve streaming-only games.
I think it depends on the standards you judge it by. If lack of installation is the standard, then sure. If image quality is the standard, at least with this iteration of Stadia, it seems so far like you'd get better results with any modern console and significantly better results with a PC.
For Stadia to take off, it's going to need to penetrate the existing gaming market to at least some degree. I don't think it can survive solely off people who haven't played any game in 10+ years but suddenly want to play the most complex AAA games like RDR2 (which was a bit hard to figure out in its entirety even for me as a seasoned gamer). These games aren't Candy Crush; the soccer mom crowd isn't going to be buying here. And for that penetration into existing markets to happen, it can't perform noticeably worse in all ways than consoles.
"Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games"
These services have existed for a while. OnLive failed because it was ahead of it's time, and lagged.
GeForce Now is free, while it's still in beta.
Project xCloud is free, while it's still in beta.
Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta.
"If Google doesn't drop the ball"
Google already dropped the ball here by asking for money for a beta test, and being the only big player to do so.
I like Google, but this was just the wrong way to go about bringing this product to market.
Microsoft have experience working with players and game developers. Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players, but the Shield has done well.
The optics here are just bad. To see both of those companies put their services through prolonged public testing periods without charge makes Stadia look either naive (in that they thought this would be easy to build) or cynical ("hey the customers have to bear the sunk costs if it fails").
I don't for a second think Google is being cynical - but Stadia should have had a free public beta before taking a cent from paying customers.
>Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players
True to an extent, but people with gaming as a hobby have been using Nvidia or Radeon products for a long time, and there's a certain level of trust regarding Nvidia and gaming.
GeForce as a gaming card brand has now existed for longer than a third of all gamers have been alive for now (and that's for those who don't remember Riva TNT).
Back when computers didn't come with graphics accelerators, you surely knew who made your graphics chip if you wanted to play games.
So a company like Nvidia would exist from interacting directly with the gamers (who would build their PCs and buy graphics cards).
GeForce Now was the first time I saw game streaming as feasible. Unlike Stadia you can simply login with your steam account and get started in seconds using games you already own.
> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers.
Maybe it's because most reviewer are jaded because it's industry standard for gaming companies to promise the world and deliver on only a small part of that.
In general when a gaming company says "and we're going to do..." that's generally qualified with "if there's enough user adoption and demand".
To believe in Stadia, you have to trust Google will deliver on promised features, trust that Google will convince publishers to develop for it's platform, and trust your internet connection. Google really only has control over one of those things.
Also, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T are holding a grudge after Google Fiber and might take steps to degrade the Stadia experience as a little fk you to Google.
to believe in stadia, you need to engage in magical thinking that allows you to believe that google has somehow managed to solve network latency and america's laughable internet infrastructure and just forgot to tell everyone.
I mean... Google has metrics, presumably. They can measure these things. They know what proportion of their traffic has adequate bandwidth and latency for their services.
Well, knowing Google, there might have been no requirements in the design doc, measurements are politically risky to bring up at a late stage of the project and perfecting code quality, rewriting, renaming and rebasing is a much safer occupation.
Bandwidth has nothing to do with latency. A low-Earth orbit satellite connection could have 20 Mb/s bandwidth, but the latency on the round-trip for the packets could be 800ms, technically still under a second...but completely unplayable.
What is the advantage of Stadia over NVIDIA GeForce NOW? I just learned today that Stadia requires games to be specifically developed for the platform, and you need to purchase a controller in order for the system to function. On the other hand, AFAIK, NVIDIA's product allows you to play most major Steam games that you own without requiring you to purchase a second physical device.
I think even the Steam mods work, but you have to wait for them to install every time you launch the game.
The cheapest way to do it is buying a secondhand XBox/PS4/Switch + games for very little on Craigslist, and putting it back on there when you get bored (if that's within 6 months, I'd be surprised if you lost much). Or just keeping it and enjoying no input lag, no requirement for a subscription, no chance of the manufacturer bricking the device in future, and a huge secondhand market for games. Unless I really want to play games on something other than my TV or a handheld device (Switch), can't see why I'd take the more expensive and laggy Stadia option.
> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games.
Perhaps I misunderstand what Stadia is actually offering, but it doesn't look like a "Netflix for games" to me. Netflix's model is you pay a monthly fee and you get to watch anything in their catalog. With Stadia, you still have to buy each game separately, correct?
>I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it
I am neither a gamer nor a teenager, and I don't want it. In fact, the only reason that I have any feelings about its existence at all is that if it's successful, that would mean more of the games industry will do this sort of thing, which will further reduce the amount of games available to me.
I'm pretty sure the $10 a month gives you a service similar to Xbox Game Pass. You can play the games in their catalog, just like Netflix. You also have the option to purchase a game and own if even if it's rotated out of the catalog.
I couldn't find anything on Google's sites that clarify this point either way. But this is in Wikipedia's entry for Stadia (for whatever that's worth):
> Stadia is not similar to Netflix, in that it requires users to purchase games to stream via Stadia rather than pay for access to a library of games. While the base service will be free, a Pro tier monthly subscription allows users to stream at higher rates for larger resolutions, and the offer to add free games to their library.
I think cost is what people are missing: Stadia hardware is much cheaper than consoles now, and when the next generation of consoles come out, they will be even more expensive, but Stadia will be the same cheap price.
"Gamers" might not care about this, but parents buying their kids consoles definitely will.
Obviously this is predicated on Google sorting out the content situation, but if you look at the Education/Chromebook market you can clearly see the vision of cheap hardware with most of the processing on servers already succeeding in a market that cares about cost.
assuming we don't run into another
>599 us dollars
situation, 120 + blowing the bandwith cap every weekend is not going to be much cheaper than even a full price console and will bring far more headaches. beyond that, who is gonna want to play with the kid on the lagmachine? that's not gonna go over well at the lunch table.
I could see playing RTS or tactical RPGs, but it is a very poor idea to propose FPS.
It is already hard to have a reactive system locally, proposing remotely is. You need to react in 16ms if you want a snappy 60Hz. 1000 km from the server is adding 6 ms of ping. At one point, proposing this kind of service has the speed of light as a "technical constraint".
Stadia is going to fail hard in any place which isn't San Francisco I think or some other cities where internet is both mega fast and no bandwidth caps.
I'm in London here and the internet is so crap you wouldn't believe. I have a 300GB bandwidth cap and am lucky if I get 20MBit. And this is the best it gets at my place which is 20 mins from center of London.
Last I saw, Google had something like 7,000 edge nodes in ISPs running Stadia servers specifically for this problem. Instead of running the games in big G's big datacenters, they'd be more likely running significantly closer, more like your nearest ISP.
Some people have recommended using GCPing to estimate a worst-case latency (since that pings one of their ~20 data centers instead of the edge nodes they set up), but even then I'm seeing avg ~20ms on refresh. I'd expect a Stadia server significantly closer than one a full state away (Missouri to Iowa) would run faster than that.
I don't think this will make things any better for anyone living in the Last Mile, but those of us in the city (especially big cities) should see huge improvements over previous services like OnLive that didn't implement something like this.
i played through most of srw t on ps4 remote play while house sitting & it worked well enough for the most part. unfortunately games like ff tactics and disgaea aren't big ticket AAA blockbusters that require a supercomputer to run smoothly.
Nvidia can say they're going to break the laws of physics all they want. They're not going to though. It could be feasible for certain classes of games where the options for "what thing can the player do next" are very limited, but literally anything with analog controls just can't work like that.
im still very skeptical that predictive rollback is gonna feel very good to play with, ggpo is still probably the best existing version of rollback netcode and it still gets pretty fucky when it has to roll back
Well it won't work on games that are designed around the reflex of players. Unless they somehow provide an EEG on the primal motor cortex, which I would be very happy to see :-)
It's going to look and feel like shit, so it's not the cheapest way to get an optimal experience at all, because an optimal experience isn't possible on stadia. If you're fine with a poorer experience then ok, but you are part of a weirdly small market. "People who play a game that can take hundreds of hours, but are not willing to spend money for the experience to be good, but also have enough money to happily early adopt subscription services."
Doesn't sound like a group that can support a massive ecosystem.
Also, it's 2019. Downloading games only takes a few minutes, and installation takes seconds.
You can buy a pc for like 500-600$ that will beat stadia, and you get to keep it. Probably even cheaper actually.
Latency is of course the biggest concern. Recent videos I saw do not indicate they have a good solution to latency. I'd absolutely love if they used some sort of 'asynchronous reprojection' like you see in VR.
Essentially, send a depth buffer along with video data, and let the client reproject frames before it gets the next keyframe from the server. It can help solve input lag for movement and turning. Not so much for things like shooting.
Not too much for reprojection. That's a very specialized task that can be optimized for in hardware, without having to support all the typical operations of GPUs. That's not to say it's easy. It requires a large amount of engine integration and the client has to now know what amount of reprojection to apply when you turn, which may vary per game or context.
People used to (still?) say people wouldn't enjoy VR because they'd feel motion sick also.
There are games that do make me feel nauseous occasionally, but that hasn't stopped me from putting over 1,200 hours into the games that don't. Even if latency is an issue on Stadia (contrary to what people who've tried it so far have said), there's gonna be plenty of games that don't need the lowest of latencies to enjoy.
I'm with you. I'm a gamer, but I'm also a software engineer that travels 75% of my time for work. When I travel I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Extreme Gen2 running Ubuntu.
For me the idea of being able to grab a smaller form factor ultrabook but still be able to do a little gaming in the evening during the work week is massively appealing. Of course the performance would have to be "good enough".
When I am actually at home and have my full rig available I would not use Stadia...but I do see a use case for Stadia (for me).
I mean, if it's truly an ultrabook it should probably be able to handle a game or two.
Or at least, the new ones coming out now and in the next few years that're based on AMD mobile APU's will, because most of them have actually decent integrated gpu's.
Well hardware for ultrabooks is still a bit anemic when it comes to gaming...but there are some 1650 equipped ultrabooks which look somewhat promising (Razer Stealth and MSI Prestige). As you point out there, are also some new AMD chips that might be make a splash in the space...
But with Linux gaming is a bit of a two fold problem since Linux support for the games you want to play is also a question. Between Steam, Proton (via Steam), and Lutris (Wine) there is pretty good coverage...but there is still a lot of ground to go. This is where something like Stadia has some appeal (at least for me).
If Google starts renting games it's competition for other mass market paradigms. Buying digital downloads will be niche. I have a balls to the wall gaming PC and plenty of consoles, however, I don't want to spend 90$ every other week to see the hot new game everyone is talking about. $5 for a weekend rental is great for me (matches blockbusters old $4.75 weekend rental fee). A little lag won't be an issues especially considering most new games are story driven cakewalks anyway.
>As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work.
I had some qualms about the rest of your post but this is where you really lost me. You just described a DOA business model.
This. Stadia is about convenience and price not about bringing a 'new' gaming experience with exclusive titles and what not. This will be the first time in over 10 years I will be able to play up to date games as it just doesn't make sense to me to buy hardware dedicated for gaming if it costs more than a chrome cast and a controller.
IMHO if you assume it'll be ephemeral but will still benefit then this is the service for you. I'm in the same place you are: I don't have the time, energy, interest or space to invest in a powerful gaming computer. Investing in a machine that'll take up space and power for the few times I can spend playing a game just doesn't make sense for me. At present I can either chose to go without or go with Stadia.
To be honest I think Nintendo has the low power, low end gaming market locked up with the Switch and people who love to game will have a mix of consoles and possibly PCs. Even so I think there's a swath of people in the middle who aren't interested in buying a console but want something more powerful than a Switch. I don't understand complaints about the cost of using Stadia since the Xbox and PS4 also require subscriptions to make the most of the devices.
What's interesting to me is if actual 5g (not marketing 5g) becomes a reality then it becomes easier to be untethered from an ISP. I doubt Google considers it much of a market but think of minimalists: van campers, small house types and people who simply want to reduce clutter.
Completely agree. I want to play new AAA games on high settings but I have very little time to do so, so I can't really justify buying an expensive gaming computer. But if I only have to buy the games it's a different matter.
This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.
But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
> You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream.
Only if you want 4K. For 1080P, you just buy a game as a product.
> It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
I agree that for the 4K Chromecast option to make any sense, it must be much cheaper than a conventional console. They would have done well to find a way to support existing (and cheaper) Chromecasts too.
There's also the PC gaming market though. Stadia will reach PC gamers on all desktop OSs, no additional hardware needed. There could be a market for people with laptops, for instance.
Incidentally, we've seen all this before with OnLive and PlayStation Now, which people seem to have largely forgotten about - nothing Google is doing here is new. OnLive functioned as both a microconsole, and an application on Windows/Mac/Android.
You can also buy a business laptop with an embedded Quaddro and have the same sit in the chair experience at that moderate graphics level without much difficulty. In a lot of ways some of the recent generations for Intel embedded graphics have been baseline requirements for many games (mostly driven by F2P and MMO games) and you don't even need a real GPU just to play vs. having a AAA ultrahigh setting experience. I mean if I can beat Dark Souls on a $300 staples laptop and enjoy the ride I don't see where these grandiose requirements are coming from.
If there were more PC exclusive games that were truly GPU required monsters I could see the point of Stadia, but as time has progressed most AAA games that end up targeting PC usually have a generous minimum requirement threshold, and often its so generous that most things can actually do the job. The only place where the GPUs have been really required in the last few years is the VR stuff which because of general latency of input/response for Stadia would probably cause a lot more motion sickness in people than a local system. Stadia's benefit is capturing the kind of user that doesn't care about quality (because if you did you'd just buy that tower), but those are the kind of users that would make do with what they already had anyway for cheap.
In my opinion this feels like the same slow death as OnLive, with even less benefit in knowing that OnLive's entire focus was on streaming gaming rather than Google who would put this product on ice in 3 years.
Doesn’t it make more sense if google buys this gpu and shares it among, say, 50 users who have maximum an hour of gaming every week? It almost certainly has to be cheaper sharing hardware among users instead of having each single user owning a piece of hardware which is idle almost all of the time. Unless of course hardware price is neglect-able with respect to game price.
The equilibrium cost of sharing the hardware vs owning will probably be similar... the main difference here is that you're also playing with noticeable latency for fast action games which, even if you play infrequently, will impact the game play of certain games.
i'm interested how this will work at peak times, when everybody gets back from work and wants to play? or for new releases. are they just going to throw money at it and be massively over-provisioned most of the time?
Sure, there are lot of scenarios how this could fail and I might be a bit optimistic, but the idea just makes sense. If stadia doesn’t work out sooner or later there will be a platform that will work.
I have three HDTVs on my house, none of which are 4K and I don't plan on upgrading unless one of them bites the dust. I imagine that I'll do most of my playing on my phone or at the office during lunchtime (in the browser), but it's nice to quickly "deploy" Stadia to each TV I have by attaching a $69 Chromecast Ultra.
I don't want "stuff" in my house in the form of game discs and consoles. I'm not a collector. I don't engage in a second-hand market. And I can't imagine myself in 10 years being nostalgic about games that i played in my 30s. I don't really care that I'm just "licensing" digital copies of games and that it might go away at some point.
Over the years I've occasionally seen a game that I might be interested in—I just want to be able to drop $50 on it and play half-way through until I lose interest.
Stadia gives me all of that. Maybe some day I'll get "serious" about gaming again and want a full-fledged console. In the mean time though, I'm happy to pay $80 for a controller and $10/month (until it's free) for Stadia.
If you consider yourself a "gamer", then there are definitely better options for you than Stadia. But for me, this is perfect.
I agree that there is something to cloud gaming that is highly attractive. For example, it would be great to throw a controller into your backpack and have full access to your AAA games to play (though hotel wifi isn't exactly super great)
Having said that, when reviewing it, there is a balance between recognizing the future and taking into account present realities.
Netflix streams consumable media. Sure, it is nice if it starts playing the movie the moment you click play, but having it buffer a few seconds at the start isn't a complete disaster preventing you to enjoy the evening. And once you are watching, the network can be pretty unreliable as long as on average it can succeed in downloading enough in advance to cover glitches. You can even use a TV to watch Netflix in total comfort, blissfully unaware some of these tale up to seconds to render the screen on the reception of a new frame. So you're watching a frame that was send out by the Netflix edge cache server at your ISP 5 seconds ago, so what?
Gaming is different.
You will have noticed gaming equipment like monitors, keyboards, mice, network-cards, routers, ... all advertising and competing on latency, in the x ms range.
This is because for many games, the reaction speed by which your actions are delivered to the game server and update the game world and that new world-state is delivered to the players, that round trip, is crucial. It is very hard to upgrade your reflexes, and you have no control over what the game server or the ISP/Internet does, but you can shave of crucial milliseconds through equipment choices under your control.
Now imaging getting the most kick-ass gaming PC, but you can only play on it to through the slowest and most unreliable keyboard, mouse and monitor connection (by an order of magnitude) ever, because that PC is across the country from you.
Now Google could in theory move the PC closer to you, like curbside or even in your basement. But the closer to you, the less optimal it becomes for other gamers as it moves further away from them and the business model needs those others to timeshare that PC to make it affordable.
The latency problem is not the same for all games or genres. Competitive FPS or MOBA's will be very sensitive to latency, while e.g. older MMO's or turn based strategy games can be far more forgiving.
Netflix is a good comparison because google will need to secure rights for AAA games, and some games don't appear in all platforms.
Fortunately, a user can install Steam/GOG/Origin whatever and just pay for a single game, unlike video streaming platforms.
In terms of pricing, 9$99 for 4K/60Hz games is 120$/y; if you buy two AAA games (around 59$) it's already the same price, so in the end the appeal is NOT having a beefy computer to play whatever game you'd like. My guess is that hardcore games will have their own PCs, console gamers prefer TVs but the "casual" gamer may be attracted depending on the catalog of games.
edit: it seems you have to buy most of the games too? So google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency.
> google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency
In a way, it's like renting DVDs/VHS tapes in the past. They quality wasn't always the best, but that was usually a fair trade off considering the price of owning everything.
In this case, you don't need to own a really high end graphics card to get the best visual quality, but the overall quality of the experience still takes a hit due to latency.
The problem is that cloud gaming already exists and many providers did a better job than Google. Even the latency shouldn't be an issue, I've cloudgamed to a DC in the netherlands with 2ms of latency but apparently somehow Google manages to fuck that up somehow.
I doubt Google will continue Stadia, the press is already bad, the product is bad, it'll likely be dusted in a few years, leaving the product owners out of a product and their money.
wouldn't 2ms be <400 miles of travel? Youd have to be pretty close to the datacenter to get 2ms of latency when the computer needs time to do calculations as well
400 miles is pretty Pretty close? That's more than the distance between Paris and Amsterdam but yes you are right. Encoding a video and decoding it introduces additional latency even on the same machine.
I'm an American so maybe it's different. 400 miles max, reduced by however long it takes for the computations, doesn't seem like a large distance for me. My VPN provider's closest datacenter is 200 miles from me
I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. That might have been due to Google promoting it as such of course (and asking the price for it).
What I also see happening is that as soon as they have a free tier, people are gonna try to play a game for 5 minutes because they saw something on Youtube or somewhere else and then 1 in X will just buy the game on Stadia.
Except if any of this was true, then OnLive would still be alive and well. And Stadia is far more difficult to support for developers as it requires custom builds for the platform, so I have no idea what their plan is to keep developers publishing for it unless they start seeing serious sales numbers very soon.
It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compression artifacts. With computers cheaper than ever and games hitting a ceiling on how much power it takes to render them, Stadia makes less and less sense. What does make sense is Google is so hungry for revenue they don’t care about user experience. What also makes sense is that those downvoting me have become blinded by optimism.
It depends on where you're located. With FiOS in NYC I can get to AWS Virginia in 18ms. I don't have any Google Cloud servers to test with.
When I use Steam/NVidia in home streaming with my GTX 1080 card, I can render a 1080p frame in about 10-12ms and decode it in 10ms on my 4K FireTV. (I beat Witcher 3, TombRaider, and Hitman with it over a 50Mbit powerline ethernet setup and they all looked fine BTW.)
Even if the Google data center is twice as far as AWS, that's 58ms lag, or 4 frames at 60fps. You can emulate the same lag by turning off Game Mode on your HDTV, it's fine for most games.
However, it is bullshit that the Stadia website doesn't have something like fast.com that tells you if your internet connection has enough bandwidth/latency to actually work with the service.
It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
>It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
At the very least, they send an email full of tips to everyone that buys one, where the top-most/first block mentions a wired connection makes a big difference over wireless.
I don’t know what games you play, but in home streaming is too much lag for me on basically any game. For myself, 144hz is a requirement because 60fps is a slide show. The resolution would need to be increased as 1080p looks terrible, so that is unacceptable too.
I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full price for the games. People can finance a console purchase over a couple years for a little more money and enjoy their experience more while having a structured monthly payment.
But why won’t people just use the devices they have today to play such a game? I don’t even know how many physical CPU cores Google will give each machine, but imagine running Civ on some server grade processors with tons of cores. That could actually be a good experience but I doubt Google could make money if they were generous in this way.
I'm playing Stadia on my non-fiber cable internet, and there's no perceptible lag. I previously tried Geforce Now, under the same conditions, same pc - and it was unplayable.
Somehow even Steam in-home streaming between two wired PCs is a mess of distracting artifacts for me when playing a turn-based game from 2005 at 1080p. Is it really that hard?
>I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already.
If you charge $60 for the games, and $130 for the hardware (and associated $10/mo subscription for the premium option) - people will have certain expectations. For $300 you can get yourself a Switch and have latency-free mobile gaming experience. Obviously cloud-gaming is a slightly different use-case, but is it different enough for most?
MVPs are a great concept, but at least for me Google is way beyond the point to afford a MVP launch. they are Google, with that budget launched products should be a little bit better than that.
DISCLAIMER: Did not check out Stadia, i prefer to play on my own hardware.
I want to like Stadia but I can't, not in its current form.
I'm a bit weary to shell out $60 for a game that I may or may not have access to a few years from now when the service is shut down or something.
Now, if the Stadia license came with a Steam key for the same price, that would be really different. I would have a fallback to play games I bought in a "traditional" way.
you could get red dead + a used ps4 for probably less than 150 and resell it when you're done without much of a loss, or just give it away as a gift. you could even rent both the game and the console for probably less than the cost of playing a degraded version with stadia (9.99 + the cost of the game+ bandwith caps)
>Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom
steam and ps4 both support remote play, i assume xbox has something similar as well.
and besides all of that, once you beat red dead and cyberpunk, how many similar big ticket games are being pumped out at a fast enough rate for you to justify maintaining a subscription? assuming it takes you maybe one month to slowplay through a game, is the AAA machine even putting out enough(computationally intensive but not greatly affected by poor latency) titles to keep people around?
My local library not only has a huge game selection, they will ship games from within the library network to a library closest to me. It's basically Blockbuster for games, but free. New games too, it's how I've played any PS or Switch exclusives for the past few years.
I think it would be helpful to broaden your horizons a bit. Everyone is talking about Stadia; whether it will be good or not, whether it will eventually see long-term success. These are very boring questions. The more interesting question is whether cloud gaming will see success over the long term.
Every major player, minus Nintendo, is entering or already in this market. Most notably, Microsoft is releasing xCloud very soon, and PSNow already exists. You can go play God of War, a PS4 game, on your PC, literally today (unfortunately, no Mac support yet). Its $10/month. No one talks about this!
Realistically, the cloud gaming market will become a utility, just like the cloud itself. Who can provide the most datacenters as close as possible to large customer bases? Who's technology provides the best user experience? Who is available on the most screens? These are all questions that multiple major players can have great answers to. Stadia was "early" (though, Playstation was the earliest, and its not even close; they purchased Gaikai in 2012 and OnLive in 2015, they're so far ahead that Google wasn't even thinking about this when Sony was actually selling it). But a player being early means nothing if this thing that Stadia released today is in the state that its in; they need years to iterate on it.
So, what will differentiate? The Games! This is the Hard Problem in this space. Not networking. Not DC locations. Games!
The choice isn't just "do I want to play RDR2 for super cheap with decent quality on Stadia, or in great quality but a $500 upfront fee on my X1X". There's a third choice there: Should I play it on PSNow? xCloud?
And, realistically, yeah its a very fluid market. I could play on any of them. But Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are destroying the third-party AAA game development space. Their first party studios are insanely good, seeing billions in investment and new acquisitions. They have proprietary world-class technology that they only share internally (example: the Decima engine used in Horizon: Zero Dawn was used for Death Stranding, and is widely considered to be among the most technically advanced engines in the world right now (though, Kojima isn't an SIE Studio, so maybe its a bad example)). Point being: if I pay for Game Pass on Xbox, and I'm a big fan of their exclusives, then RDR3 comes out and I can play it on xCloud, I'm going to buy that on Xbox. There's gravity to these platforms, and that gravity comes from the titles where I have to go to xCloud to play.
Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has the most measured and strongest position in cloud gaming. At E3, he said that he sees it as just one avenue where people will play games. In some situations, it makes sense. For some people, it makes sense (though, those people like you will never play games as much as people who have consoles/gaming PCs). So, they will build it. They have the technology and DC footprint. But, Stadia's downfall will be in their all-in approach, combined with their lack of revenue strategy and lack of first-party exclusives to build gravity.
Unfortunately there's still the cold hard reality of latency (NOT bandwidth; not the same thing) and barring some sort of quantum breakthrough, latency is unavoidable and that's what renders the streaming gaming experience unpleasant.
Not to mention heavy-handed data caps in many places, unpredictable latency, etc.
I like MS's positioning here not just for cloud, but overall. I'd love a world where I can cross-play, cross-own, and cross-save across a console, desktop, and streaming. They are in the best position to profit regardless of how players prefer to play their games, unlike Stadia, which has an interest in muscling out other forms of AAA gaming because they don't have fingers in those other pies.
The only thing MS doesn't have a strong position in is Mobile/Tablets. Sure streaming can reach it, but mobile devices are now effectively pushing last-gen console level graphics. With wide spread support for PS4/Xbox controllers (iOS 13 supports them natively now), this is a pretty legit platform. If you're Apple, you're probably chuckling at the idea of streaming as the solution to mobile gaming when you're putting world-class silicon into users hands, most of which is underutilized.
Microsoft is hedging, because they're behind the two leaders (Sony, then Nintendo. Lets not get ahead of ourselves here). Whether they're genuine or have ulterior motives is irrelevant, but you should watch some of Phil Spencer's interviews; it feels very genuine.
Stadia's business model is identical to every other game platform's business model; percent of sale. So, to be clear about this; you're suggesting that Stadia can support a global DC footprint with massively expensive silicon and networking, off of the same revenue stream that Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, EA Origin, etc all already utilize, these companies who don't have infrastructure investments of the same magnitude or clearly plan to have a more distinct subscription category to support it? The economics don't make sense. They have options: sell ads, get rid of the free tier, create a pay-as-you-go paid tier based on time played, shut down, etc; but none of these look like the Stadia people are excited about today.
Microsoft also has first party titles. They own some of the strongest IPs in the history of gaming (Halo, Gears, Forza, Minecraft). They have the most powerful consoles. They run sales all the time. Doesn't matter; the X1 was the poorest performing console this generation.
Creating new gaming studios is difficult. Creating games is difficult. Creating great games consistently is a feat only a half-dozen studios in the world have figured out. Games that sell consoles generally come from creative teams with VAST cohesive industry and technical experience, not from new studios.
Halo 1, 2, and 3 were fantastic; then, Microsoft formed 343 Industries to build Halo 4 and 5, threw a billion dollars at them, and they were a shadow of the former games. Stardew Valley was made by ONE GUY with no money, and some estimates put his revenue between $50-$100M. Anthem was made by an insanely experienced studio (Bioware) with massive amounts of cash, a deadline 6 years out, and a proven history of successful titles; it sucks. God of War (2018) was made by an insanely experienced studio (Santa Monica Studio), with massive amounts of cash, a deadline 6 years out, and a proven history of successful titles, and it is widely considered among the best games released in the past decade.
There's no pattern to why a game will be successful. Its not about manpower, or money, or talent, or anything. Stadia Game Studios probably won't make anything capable of driving meaningful revenue in the next 5 years. Maybe they'll get lucky. They probably won't.
Exactly, they have other motivations to make this work. Imagine only needing a ChromeOS laptop or Android phone to play the latest exciting games. I feel like Stadia might be the tipping point to make general computing a 100% streamed experience.
People would no longer need to buy expensive devices to: 1) browse the web 2) do basic office work 3) watch TV/video 4) edit/store images and, 5) gaming... leaving traditional desktops and laptops marginalized for only those people that need special custom software.
It’s cool to have options. Hope Stadia works out and a lot of people enjoy it. There’s something really fun about building a pc and overclocking it and modding the games though :-) Also, having all your mods and saves on your own backups is great too.
That being said, it’s quite perplexing that a 1080ti can’t keep a stable 60fps in 1080p on a game built on unity on ultra settings reliably. For instance, The Outer Worlds. If Stadia can crack that, they’ll make a _lot_ of money.
I think Ultra settings aren't meant to be the "goto settings" to use. A lot of things ultra settings include usually eat up a ton of needless performance. The way some games deal with it is by just degrading the quality of ultra settings.
"Gamers" don't want Stadia. And all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs.
It's targeted for those that don't have either, like me. I carry my Pixelbook everywhere and would be nice to play games on it. I don't want another device to carry around and don't have the time or patience to wait for patches/updates or the ridiculous storage requirements games have nowadays.
The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?
I'm seeing this a lot and don't understand... where the hell are you people travelling where bringing a console/game system is a concern?
I travel for work or for vacation. If for work, I'm there hitting "Spit money out for me" at an ATM. Not gaming. I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan to enjoy home time more. End of days is visiting restaurants/bars and either socializing or schmoozing clients. If none of that, I read a book, do work on the laptop or enjoy a movie.
Vacation... I mean... seriously, I can game at home. I go somewhere to do NOT home stuff. Why would I travel somewhere and spend money to... play video games like I would at home? Even not vacation, I go to the beach on the weekend to... hear me out... walk on the sand, sun bathe and go in water.
These excuses for a subpar games as a service are pretty ridiculous. It's an obvious "We found a solution to a problem that doesn't exist". That and the controller looks so bottom barrel generic. It's like the knock-off to a knock-off of an Xbox controller until they realized it was for a ps3 instead and did a late night change to it.
Edit: I get it, everyone vacations differently. But playing video games while out on vacation is like bringing a Subway sandwich to a 3-star steakhouse restaurant. You are there to not-home. But I also don't get the japanese restaurants where they expect you to cook your own food. Mofo, if I'm going to cook, I'll cook at home. I go somewhere to pay a premium for food, it's so I don't have to cook it. I'm 32, stop making me feel like the old man yelling to stay off my lawn!
> If none of that, I read a book, do work on the laptop or enjoy a movie.
I'd rather play a game, most of the time. And similarly, when I've had enough of the sand, sun, and water for the day, why not wind down with an hour or so playing something fun? If I'm on vacation, I might even be with other people I don't see all that often otherwise, and get to play some multiplayer games. (Board games on family vacations work for this too.)
But I don't disagree with anything in the thread about this product really searching for a user. Nearly 100% of my gaming is on PC. If I had a gaming laptop, why wouldn't I just bring that along wherever I go? Not a big deal. And consoles + one controller aren't really that much more space either. There's also the Switch, and even the GPD Win if you want PC games in a very mobile form factor.
I've lately started bringing my Steam Link (which I got for $2.50) and a controller with me when I travel, since Valve opened it up to support remote play. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. It works better than I expected though. When I can access my full PC library remotely with no monthly subscription and the base hardware was only $2.50 (remote play also works with your phone, if it's powerful enough, so it can cost literally nothing), why would I ever pay Google money. Stadia is useless to me.
Your post makes sense if the only travel you do is your 2-week vacation you get every year while always returning to a permanent living fixture, like a house you own. Or if you just don't mind owning a bunch of appliances.
I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.
Also, even when you're at the beach all day every day, you still come back to a place to sleep where you might enjoy some gaming or Netflix. And if you are living there for weeks, you'll find that you don't need to visit the beach every single day to enjoy your time there. It's nice to merely do something you love in a place you love. :)
I'm generally happy with the few games I have on my Macbook Pro. But even on a $2000 two-year-old machine, I have to play almost everything at minimal gfx settings and I have limited SSD space. Even a game like Civilization 5 becomes a stuttering mess. I don't see the need to dismiss Stadia without trying it.
> I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.
But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about your experience with mobile internet, but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going. With remote gaming, you're now adding controller input to that datastream, outbound, and then rendering those actions and transmitting back to the device to enable anything remotely approaching a good gaming experience seems like science fiction.
The people who will be most interested in this are those without a "home" setup, and the less "home" you have, the more appealing, but also seems like it would in turn be the most frustrating experience to try and use. Which is sort of what this piece is getting at:
- Gamers don't want it, because we already have our libraries and such tuned to existing platforms and devices
- Casual gamers may want it, but they're already spoiled for choice in a massive mobile market, where games just happen on their already very powerful phones
This puts Stadia in an awkward position of in theory being the worst of both worlds: the limitations of console, with the network requirements only high tier residential internet can deliver, over devices with limited network capability.
Considering I couldn't even stream steam games from my PC to my tablet at enough of a speed to make games like Destiny playable, let alone enjoyable, you'll have to forgive my skepticism.
you hit the nail on the head. I'm a digital nomad who can't afford lugging a heavy gaming PC around. I have a nice 15 inch mbp (descent at running cities skylines) and an ipad (my notebook replacement) and would love to use stadia!
only problem is it only works in north america and I'm in southeast asia right now.
Because xyz-as-a-service is anti-consumer. Unless you've been under a rock the past decade, there are many flaws with the model when it comes to consumers. It's great for business. Terrible for the user. As-a-service puts the consumer at the mercy of a company. Along with their privacy data. Steam at least is setup in a way where if they were to end, the games you have can be downloaded and unlocked. Just make sure to back it up. Stadia isn't setup for anything like that at all. If google put Reader out to pasture, something that cost them jack-dick-all to keep running, something as expensive to maintain as Stadia when it flops... "Oh, sorry, it didn't work out. Sucks for all of you."
Just because you can't see how a trap will be sprung, doesn't mean the trap doesn't exist. This will bite people in the ass a year or two down the road. Then everyone will cry, "How could this happen? We need legislation to protect us!" No, you just need to be quit being a baby and start being an adult and understand that minor comfort and convenience can come at a heavy cost.
I'm torn. Xbox game pass for PC is one of the greatest things to happen to gaming. Ps now let me play red dead 1 before #2 came out. EA access is great if you just want to play battlefield or Fifa for a month (those games don't typically last longer than that for me). But I also love my 500+ steam games. If these services keep getting better they'll definitely take over, though. Outer Worlds on Xbox pass comes to mind. You can beat that in a month for $1 right now and never think about paying retail price.
Okay, but that's a little different. Stadia, you have to buy the game retail.
Ps now (I have a ps4), 10 bucks a month to play how many different games when the hell ever I want. It totally works out for me because I normally don't care about most games after 10 hours of gameplay. I don't want to buy a game for $60 bucks and not actually have it. Generally, I don't buy a game until it's down to like $30, because I don't have to play anything immediately. At 32, I'm over the whole "ER MY GOD, I have to play this game right meow!"
Stadia Pro for $10 a month gets you a selection of games I believe. But it really is in it's infancy, and not very good. We'll just have to see if google throttles it before it can mature like most other things they do.
Yea, like eating a salad and a Big Mac are the same class of food as well. Feels so weird since it's so obvious. A salad and a Big Mac. They're both food, thus they are both equally nutritious.
Maybe you don't view video games as being "as nutritious" as your personal preferred forms of entertainment, but that doesn't make those preferences universal. I've brought handheld gaming devices on virtually every trip I've made in the past decade, whether for work or pleasure, and I doubt I'm an outlier.
I know people that bring cigarettes to every trip they've had in more than 10 years. Doesn't make it right either.
Always having to rely on video games and the internet is a problem. You seriously can't mature through being alone in your own thoughts? People gladly, even smugly, say I'm a bad guy because on the weekends I treat myself to a cigar. Yea, I know it's bad and I don't push that habit off as some glorious thing to be protected. I have my vices. But I don't let my vice control me or become my identity. Everyone is on the kick the last 10 years like "video games define me". Y'all need to stop and go outside to hug a tree.
Yea, but I'm not dependent on them. Everyone here is just, "I need my games wherever I am at all times!" Learn to diversify. Learn to not need technology. Hug a fucking tree.
Ah yes the classic close minded fool. My hobbies are fine and great but those video games and the internet are bad mmmkay. I don't even play video games and find your opinion so backwards that I get tingles on my back.
No one said anything about needing to play video games all the time.
Some of us vacation to relax in our own way. I like to go to Vegas because I find it enjoyable to gamble, chill at the pools in Mandalay Bay, and day drink. If I've hit my cap for those things for the day and I'm still awake I'd much rather spend the remainder of my waking hours playing games than pretending I want to see yet another Cirque show.
This isn't a defense of Stadia, mind you. Just that vacation can mean different things to different people. Video games already let me escape reality on demand, I don't need vacation for that. Vacation can just be me wanting a change of weather.
Hey, when I first visited Vegas, landed at noon, drunk by 2, vomiting by 4, asleep by 5, woke up with a hangover at 10. First time I went from sober, to drunk to hungover in the same calendar day. Fat Tuesdays margaritas man... so good... but will knock you clean the fuck out like Tyson.
But... seriously though... I like video games too. But not that much. The whole escape reality, I get it. I enjoy it too. But, if you are escaping reality more often than you are in it... that's a problem.
> But, if you are escaping reality more often than you are in it... that's a problem.
I do spend quite a bit of time escaping from reality and I do agree it's a problem.
The greater SF Bay area suffers from a large amount of empty virtue signaling and shaming others into their morality while remaining apathetic to others plights. Work, while having the potential to be exhilarating, often descends into the myopic and uninspired. Passion projects I want to work on could potentially be wrenched from me by the company I work for via employment agreement which stifles creative desires outside of work. Friends and loved ones aren't available to me on-demand (and I respect that they have their own respective lives to live).
Meanwhile, there are virtual worlds that I can still explore. Mechanics I can break. People I can meet. Adventures I can have. And if I feel like slicing someone down as an seductive shade-lady on a magical battlefield I can do so with the comfort of knowing I'm not actually hurting anyone else in the process, ego notwithstanding. When life starts offering me these opportunities for near-free (or around $1500 for around 4000 hours of entertainment, I suppose) I'll take them gleefully. Until then, reality can stand to evolve a bit.
Don't live in San Fran then? Florida has prettier beaches and nicer people. I grew up in Florida, traveled the country in my 20s, and came back to Florida last year. Plenty of social gatherings and people who want to make friends here. The Space Coast (aka NASA county) is packed with engineers for obvious reasons. Colorado was the hardest place to make friends honestly... but the scenery in Colorado... you don't need people.
Anyways, there's more to life than San Fran and video games. To me, you're complaining about the smell when you live in a dumpster. San fran is the dumpster of humanity. I feel bad that you feel disconnected from humanity, because I know what that's like. Whether or not you want to believe me, I'm speaking from personal experience derived from the last 10 years, Cali sucks if you want to be a social, well rounded human being. I highly recommend changing your environment.
Oh, and the food is better in Florida too. Get a Cuban sub from the Tampa Bay area. Happy hour is always from 10am to 9am daily. Alligator tastes better than you think. Only eat Latin food in the small mom and pop places in the bad parts of town. Literally, the best ever and well worth the risk of getting shot in a gang related drive by. Seafood... you don't like seafood? You'll like Florida seafood.
Then there's the beach. I mean... do I need to get into why?
Am I going to get downvoted, sure. Florida man don't care.
I spent a year in florida. I'll agree to some extend. the food is fantastic, the weather is nice and the snorkeling and parks are wonderful. All that said, I spent way too much time trying refuting the idea that steven miller's kids in cages plan is good for america and among other very persistent conservative talking points. Also that I don't believe in jesus seems to be an open invite for people trying to "save" me. It is what it is and SF is a dumpster right now so I can't disagree.
I have never been asked to be saved by jesus in all my years in Florida. Cali, Oregon, washington, and obviously in Virginia and Utah. But never Florida. What's the religion where they say Jesus came to America? Whoever they are, they're really active in Seattle. Especially the bus stops.
> I get it, everyone vacations differently. But playing video games while out on vacation is like bringing a Subway sandwich to a 3-star steakhouse restaurant. You are there to not-home.
You say you get it, but...
I like home. When I'm on vacation, I mostly staycation, because that's the time I'm not out seeing people and doing activities to perform "happy" and "fun".
> I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan
I'm not sure business travel is the same for everyone, either...
I often take my personal laptop (as well as my corp laptop) on business travel, and if I were a gamer, I could totally see bringing a game system. It's not like my salary is higher when I'm traveling, so after the purpose-of-trip all-day meetings and catching up in the hotel on the normal work that still has to be done after that, I typically just want to veg for a couple hours before sleep.
When I traveled for work as a consultant, I would check the XBox more than a few times. Being alone in Sioux Falls, SD in the dead of winter leaves little to do outside the hotel.
If you need a comparison, the mobility of the Nintendo Switch is analogous, except needing an internet connection and rendering triple A games.
Or multi-month long business trips (I know a lot of people in this situation); if I was in that situation, you bet I would take some form of video game system with me. I already do when I travel alone, even if just for the 1-2 hours at the hotel between dinner and bed (I've always hated nightlife, the way most people understand it). In fact these hours usually become the most relaxing moments of the whole trip.
I don't have a console or a gaming pc but I have been using the nvidia shield and its Geforce streaming service for playing a few of my steam library of games. It is not the exact same experience as you would get from a console or a gaming pc but for me it is good enough. Specially considering me being in asia and all the nvidia servers I am usually connected to are in NA or Europe as no nvidia asian server available. With the google internet infrastructure worldwide I think they can improve on what nvidia is doing which for me is already usable if not perfect.
I bring a Nintendo Switch with me when I travel because it helps cut down the boredom on flights, especially international. Books are great, movies are great, but sometimes I just wanna play some indie game on a halfway decent screen with real thumbsticks.
Could I do that with my laptop? Maybe, but I'd rather carry just my work laptop (heavy XPS 15, has everything on it, but can't/shouldn't install games) or a personal ultraportable that might not be powerful enough
>But playing video games while out on vacation is like bringing a Subway sandwich to a 3-star steakhouse restaurant.
Fun fact: the Subway I had while vacationing in Reykjavik (where I brought my Xbox One) for 3 months was the best Subway I've ever had in my life. Sometimes having something familiar in a new location is just what you need to spice up your vacation. :)
I didn't care about latency on old tile based games, but now that everything is 3D with smooth scrolling and animations the latency makes a difference.
Given that plane Internet is generally satellite based with at minimum 300ms latency and at most 25MB/sec for all 150+ passengers on the plane, I’m guessing pretty bad. Even if it’s not terrible and unusable, I’m guessing it’ll be blocked fairly quickly like most streaming video providers are now.
I think I'm more shocked how incredibly addicted and dependent people are to the internet and gaming. The conversations here are just, "Oh my god, I can't be without high speed internet for more than thirty seconds! I might die! Planes need super fast internet! My car needs it! My fridge needs it! My dog's food bowl needs it!"
Stop. Go outside. Hug a tree or something. You need to realize, I'm a capitalist republican. I'm telling people to hug a tree and I mean it. You people need to hug a tree. Go out, with a book and sit underneath a tree for half an hour and collect some of them vitamin Ds. Leave your phone inside because no, the world will not end if you are without a phone for more than ten minutes. Chill, the fuck, out.
>all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs.
I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes.
So, they might have opinions on what a good gaming experience is. And, if they have issues with Stadia (incl latency, graphical fidelity, and library), then it might be coming from an informed place.
Yup, also if you look at people who write or have written netcode for a living, it's been pretty obvious where Stadia was heading for a while.
You need to be able to reliably hide ~100-200ms of latency for any number of reasons. If you're talking about something that runs over wifi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.
The way you do that is with client side dead-reckoning and/or lock-step simulation with a pre-shared seed. Streaming video eliminates any opportunity to do that and you don't get to buffer frames ahead like Netflix can.
There's a reason OnLive folded and I wouldn't be surprised if you see Stadia EoL'd in the next year or two.
I agree with your overall point but not so sure on this specific piece:
>If you're talking about something that runs over WiFi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.
Signal propagation speed (velocity factor) over air is only a bit slower than cat7 copper, and on-par with fiber optic. From memory:
In a vacuum: VF = 1 (equal to speed of light)
Over copper: VF = .75 (one quarter speed of light)
Over air or fiber: VF = .66 (one third speed of light)
Wi-Fi is measurably slower than wired copper cable for a few reasons but I don't understand physics to be one of them. With the distances relevant to last-mile connectivity like we're discussing here, that difference in VF appears to be immaterial.
Then again, you could argue that the air being a contended medium is by it's very nature a physics problem, and that does seem to be the root of most of the drawbacks of running low-latency workloads over wireless. Not necessarily an insurmountable physics limit though, with spectrum allocation, code division, and beam forming already doing a lot to mitigate the issue, there's the potential for further developments that might bring things to parity.
Still, you're not going to get past the VF limit I described above but again, if we're only talking about in-home WiFi rather than across the entire service-to-consumer run, it doesn't play a large part.
100-200ms latency seems a little extreme to me. Its an 8ms ping from my home to the nearest Google edge node (supposedly where Stadia nodes will live), 9-11ms on my WiFi. Compression and decompression of the video stream with hardware acceleration and tuned for speed over quality should only add maybe another ms or two. Where is the extra 80+ms coming from?
All it takes is someone turning on a microwave down the block from you to drop 4-5 packets in a row and you get close to the 100ms number.
Channel congestion in dense urban areas approaches the same limit, heck Ars was just talking about a technique today[1] that because it doesn't respect channel slots drops throughput of any router within 60m by 20%.
100-200ms is an upper bound, however they were reliably doing client-side latency prediction back in '96[2] over 300-400ms dial up connections with little fidelity loss including servers supporting 200+ concurrent players.
I'm sure there's a niche of people for which streaming is usable, however we would design games with latency in mind(and how we'd deal with it) as a part of fundamental mechanics of the game. Here they're just slapping them on a video stream and hoping it works.
To be fair, network connections have significantly improved since the 90s.
Your point still stands though, on a wireless network, it only takes some interference from other devices to cause latency spikes that make latency sensitive games frustrating to play, even if the actual upstream connection is of high quality. I've had quite a bit of issues with playing games on wireless networks in urban areas that go away magically by using an ethernet cable; the stuttering that happens when ping spikes from 30ms to 400ms is very jarring.
If Stadia is used for games that are not latency sensitive, such as deckbuilding games or turn based strategy games, it's fine. Using it for competitive first person shooters is likely to be very frustrating on anything but a wired network with good upstream connectivity or a wireless network with no major noise sources.
Yeah and wifi is already pulling out all the tricks like FEC, CSMA and the like just to scale with usage.
At the end of the day the internet is a packet switched and not circuit switched topology despite telecom pushing hard for circuit switched in the early days. Preference is given for throughput and not latency(although network-next is working to address some of that).
Serious question, what about the general increase of bandwidth usage?
In my mind things like Stadia will increase the amount of data traffic exponentially, even at a low market penetration rate. I think I saw one estimate that it's going to be 120gb on average per hour. Even at 100gb, the extra traffic at scale is going to be insane.
Regardless of if current infrastructure can handle x% market penetration of that kind of usage in a, what, 1 year time? Should the infrastructure even be required for that kind of insanity? We're not talking about life-saving data transportation. We're talking about god damn video games. Or am I way off my whiskey fueled rocker?
> Compression and decompression of the video stream with hardware acceleration and tuned for speed over quality should only add maybe another ms or two.
This estimate is waaaaay off. Nobody has been shipping video encoders or decoders setup to pull 1000fps nor tuned for latency.
Realistically it's 8-14ms to decode if you're lucky (low latency hardware+firmware), and comparable to encode. And these streams are made entirely of key-frames, which is a hyper unusual scenario for video systems.
That all adds up to maybe something like +30ms over baseline. Which is a lot. If you have a console try playing it on a TV with and without game mode enabled. That's about a 20-30ms latency difference in general.
It's worse than that. Assume you're at 60fps like the average non-serious gamer. Assume you're lucky enough that video encoding / decoding adds only 1 frame of latency. Assume Google's proprietary technologies can minimize rendering latency so much that that's lost in the noise (I don't believe it). You've still got network latency. How bad is that?
Well, I'm in one of the 10 largest cities in the United States. Pinging 8.8.8.8 shows an average of 20 ms RTT, which is just over one frame. So is the total a 2 frame delay? No. Think about how Youtube works: they choose to introduce more latency than exists in the raw connection for reliability. My ping time shows a std deviation of over 10ms to 8.8.8.8. So if Youtube ran at a 20 ms latency (the true network latency), just about every other frame would have to briefly pause to wait for the next frame to arrive over the network. So you introduce latency. Youtube introduces about 3 seconds of latency on my network (a very rough estimate).
With a video game, the situation can't be fixed like that. You can't just run your video game behind your inputs by 3 seconds to iron out network latency spikes. So you've got to pick a percentage of packets that are going to arrive late (briefly pausing the stream), and just hope that you never get huge latency spikes of a second or so. (This actually happens all the time on busy networks due to buffer bloat.)
If you pick 95%, 1 out of every 20 video segments are going to have to pause for the network to catch up. Given we're expecting 60fps video, I'm assuming that's considered unplayable. So lets make it 99%. Assuming latency follows a bell curve, that means you have to introduce 45 ms of latency to allow smooth playback. That rounds to 3 frames of latency.
So all together, the "ideal" experience in my major city is to play a video game with 4-5 frames of latency, and realistically my developers are probably asking for a 100ms input-to-paint window. That's TERRIBLE to the point that it's probably only really usable for "clicker" time-waste games and turn based stuff. And the thing is, latency doesn't follow a bell curve. In my test lasting less than 30 seconds, I saw ping times well over 60 ms, and hardware associated with gaming will have its own latency issues too. So I expect even a stream running at 100 ms latency will still have brief pauses and jumps every few seconds, and probably noticeable ones every few minutes.
I think Stadia could work in big cities. If Google has servers in the city and you're using a wired connection then it should work fine for a large portion of games. It probably won't give a good experience for first person shooters though.
> You need to be able to reliably hide ~100-200ms of latency for any number of reasons. If you're talking about something that runs over wifi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.
There's margin no? I mean, right now I get 3ms ping to Google from my wired computer, and 10~15ms from my phone on wifi. Wifi doesn't add that much.
And I'm in a large European city, not in Silicon Valley.
I think anyone who has interest in video games should be concerned with what we give up by games a service model. It means all of your games can now be censored or deleted at any time without any notice to you. It means you can't mod your games as you please. It means you can't resell the games you've bought or share them with friends and family. It means you can't play without internet access.
Beyond the overpriced hardware and monthly fee there's a lot being sacrificed for the ability to game anywhere. Another thing you give up is your privacy as this will simply be one more way to track you, your location, what you're playing, when and how long you play, who you're talking with online and what you're saying. All of that will be tracked and logged and analyzed by google.
>The fact is that Stadia makes it possible to play games on devices where it previously was impossible is pretty compelling. (even if it's at 720p).
It makes it possible to play modern AAA games on devices where it previously was impossible.
That's a dramatic difference. There are plenty of incredible gaming experiences you can have on low-powered hardware, without needing a clunky streaming-as-a-service infrastructure to back them up. They just won't be the latest FIFA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Battlefield: Modern Duty.
Honestly, I tend to think that having environments that don't have full fat AAA games available is good for the gaming market as a whole. It opens up markets for indie developers and new formats. I'm thinking of the Wii and Switch for comparison-- if they had been built with the same spec hardware as their competitors, they would have been flooded with ports of the big multi-platform franchises, rather than the unique experiences they're known for.
Sonme of my favourite gaming experiences include playing Zangband on an already-obsolete Pentium II in 2003, and Cave Story on a pre-Atom netbook starring a 900MHz Celeron-M.
I think this is truly the crux of the product's potential. Triple A FPS games are never going to hit it big on a streaming service, especially in any sort of competitive circle.
The real opportunity is for games where latency isn't really important. Beautiful turn based games, cinematic choose-your-own adventures.
The second path is for games to be developed with appropriate tolerances & latency-forgiving mechanics. Take a modern platformer like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, where you are given a window of frames in which you can jump/react before failure. Even modern games like Mario Odyssey accommodate input latency of wireless controllers/HDMI displays. Similar accomodations can and will be made for games targeting streaming services.
> I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes.
False. Almost everyone who owns a smartphone plays videogames now. The mobile game market is huge. A lot of people dont own hardware specifically for video games, but still like to game.
Its very possible stadia will work on android soon . Xbox has a similar service in brta that already works on phones.
The context here is obviously PC/console gamers. No one is clamouring for Candy Crush to be brought to Stadia. There may be overlap, but the mediums are completely different.
If this is true, I'm genuinely curious to see how big the cross section is of people who don't have a gaming-capable PC nor console and people who are willing to pay full value for AAA games.
I'm playing 4-5 games a year. Currently, I buy a few year old games from Steam that can run on my laptop. there is tons of great games out there for a less than $10 https://xkcd.com/606/
This would be a perfect solution for me if I didn't have to play full price
It's actually neither bandwidth nor latency (alone). Its variability - the reason you can play a 4k video on YouTube smoothly is because of buffering, which smooths out dips in mbps. Stadia can't buffer for obvious reasons, meaning every frame has to be delivered with minimal latency.
I guess I should have clarified. My only devices are a Pixelbook and my work MBP - no desktop. Playing at home (or work) are totally fine for me. Playing games like Hearthstone (where latency isn't breaking factor) is fine with me as well.
Why not play Hearthstone or similar games on MBP? They need to invent new class of games: latency-tolerant, but graphically intensive. Photorealistic turn-based massively multiplayer games?
A lot of older games are being re-released so they shouldn't be ignored, and even action based ones often have internal cooldowns and timers for a pseudo turn-based system.
I mean Persona 5 was a pretty big game that AFAIK has turn based combat. It would be nice to stream since I won't own a Playstation any time soon.
Regardless, they are definitely less latency intensive than FPS or other genres.
Apple computers with discrete GPUs (like the aforementioned MacBook Pro) are great at running DirectX-based games natively under Windows via Boot Camp.
They're also great at running Metal-based (e.g. Apple Arcade) games natively under macOS.
> The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?
That is for the premier founders edition. The free one is coming next year [0].
I still think they're not really getting to any sort of market fit. There's avid gamers who will buy a serious console or gaming PC and is likely spending quite a bit on games. Then there's casual gamers who getting their fix by playing Candy Crush on the subway. Google seems to be aiming for some middle ground of people willing to dedicate time and money, but just not that much. I'm not sure that market even exists or if their product is hitting it effectively. It seems like yet another technology-driven product launch.
Yes, but I can see myself considering streaming services when it's time to replace it.
I don't need a €2k+ machine most of the time. I could buy quite a few years of streaming service with the saved cash.
So the target market is people who want to play video games but don't have a gaming system?
Maybe their catalog should be more casual/indie oriented? It's hard to imagine too many people who want to play a loud shooty game like Red Dead Redemption 2 but don't have a console or PC already. On the other hand, the price point seems kind of high for someone who wants to play card games or Words With Friends style games.
I want to play RDR2 but don’t have a console, because dealing with consoles is just too much trouble these days.
Mind you I’ve also heard that RDR2 is about eight hours of slog before you even get to the point where you can just dick around, so I guess modern games just aren’t designed for people with any other time commitments these days.
I see most SaaS the same way. Often (I'd go as far as saying usually) it is not what customers want, it is what vendors can push on them to get recurring revenue.
Also it's not gonna work for fast-paced games without turning those games into the stupidest skinnerboxes at some level behind the scenes. In order to make it possible to send precalculated results for latency hiding, a lot of freedom needs to go.
Controller and chromecast is for console guys, we laptop owners can use mouse+keyboard + chrome browser to play.
But this will be available later, unless you want o throw $130 for just 3 months of Stadia Pro (and a controller+chromecast that will gather dust).
You need both to play at launch. Seems more like an early adopter tax - they could have just provided an update to the existing Chromecast Ultra and let you use a Bluetooth controller.
Heck, I'd shell out the $130 if was in the form of prepaid credit or something else. I don't want 2 more devices - and I'm not interested in playing on my TV.
I'm a gamer with a heavy Xbox One that I lugged across 15 countries over 2 years and I cannot wait to replace it with Stadia. 90% of the time my Xbox is just a YouTube/Netflix machine, but that means it wins out the TV's HDMI port over the Chromecast for the 10% of time someone wants to play a game. Adding "gaming" to Chromecast makes a $300 console vs a $60-70 controller a no-brainer, especially when you throw travel into the mix. If my Switch supported Netflix, it would have filled this niche but... it can't.
>The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?
I might be wrong on this, but $130 was for the controller and a Chromecast Ultra (which retails $70), so I'd assume controllers will run $60-70 after launch.
I think most people would just buy it at walmart who's selling it for $44, or amazon where it's also being sold for $44 ("by Playstation".) 3rd gen chromecast (is that not sufficient to stream video?) is $35.
So $79 vs $130/136. That's quite a lot to many people. You can pick the more expensive options to make a point I guess, though I'm not sure what that point would be.
What about it requires the more expensive option? If an entry level chromecast can stream from youtube, why can't it stream from stadia?
Maybe google is only willing to sell hardware equivalent to the ultra for use with stadia, but I don't see how that's a technical requirement. It seems like a business decision, and as such, is fair game for criticism.
Yeah, the status quo is a bit disappointing. In a technical point of view, it's pretty nice. But for UX, there are simply too many moving parts (Stadia App + Chromecast + Stadia Controller + monthly subscription), which defeats its own purpose.
Hopefully, most of this artificial requirements will be gone in a coming year, but it's still far from its true vision. Clicking a "Play now" on Youtube does make a lot of sense, but the important question is "when".
> The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?
It's only for early adopters. They said they want to limit availability until a wider release in early 2020 (where you won't have to pay for anything at all except the game if you want).
I know economics says "raise the price to lower demand when supply is limited", but marketing says "don't tarnish your brand by charging a high price and setting high expectations for an experimental prototype". Remember the $1200 Glass?
The additional hardware would also block me. For a 4 months trip in Europe I used a service similar to Stadia: Shadow.tech that runs on your regular pc. Made able to rank up on For Honor quite nicely, even if it was not as nice as my too expensive gaming PC. You definetly should have a look at it.
Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine.
Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so... here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years.
That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The upshot of course is that every now and then one of these "side projects" takes off into an enormously successful business unit (e.g. Android, Maps, GSuite). All of those programs could have just as easily died on the vine like Google Plus or Wave.
My main issue for Stadia has been that they are trying to rebadge existing games to work on Stadia instead of making a game that uses the cloud to provide a unique experience. It's one of the things that none of the other streaming companies I am aware of have tried to make an advantage of the proximity of the actual VMs/shared runtime to make it a Mainframe-style experience where you wouldn't have to compromise as heavily of number of tracked objects in concurrent simulations as the simulations are being run spatially closer so the base latency between sims are wildly different than the current distributed model.
Stadia is unique though that there are people buying digital games locked to the platform.
So its entirely possible when the inevitably kill it those games could just be lost.
So I hope for the people's sake that buy into it that Google won't shut it down (or at least have a way to add your purchases to steam or something), but its a different risk this time.
I think Stadia being shut down is a near certainty (and the GP comments' 3-4 years is very optimistic for how long it might survive), but I think that Stadia owners losing their games is fairly unlikely. When other digital services with purchases have shut down, there's often some attempt to offer a migration for user licenses. (I've watched Ultraviolet and Flixster's shutdowns and the like of late.) The game studios partnering with Google would be extremely upset for their customers to be dropped, and I'd especially expect games like Destiny 2 to cleanly migrate a user's data and progress to playing on another platform.
Even when Google shut down their Assassin's Creed demo of Stadia's technology, which was free, they gave everyone a game key to redeem on Steam at the end, so my guess is that's what would happen in a Stadia shutdown.
The most likely "loss" is from the hardware purchases, though Google has hedged here a bit on the fact that a Chromecast Ultra will still be useful post-Stadia. Even the controller might not go to waste if it works as a generic PC game controller.
There have been exclusives for other platforms that have eventually made their way to the PC ecosystem. I just saw Halo Reach advertised for the PC. I played the heck out of it when it came out, so I don't have a desire to buy it again, but it is nice to see it.
Their competition includes Nvidia, that is testing a streaming service that allows you to buy games through other platforms (Steam, Uplay, maybe others) and stream them from the cloud.
Hopefully they give you keys which can be redeemed in another platform like Steam. It’s unfortunate that so many people will have to migrate off of Stadia, but it’s inevitable.
If Google shuts it down, they will likely refund all games purchased. (But probably not any subscription fee)
They have done that previously with all discontinued products. Even hardware they tend to refund in full if it fails during the warranty and they don't have stock of that model anymore, or if they shut down the servers.
In my experience, it's difficult to get Google to hold up that warranty. When my Nexus 6P started to bootloop, Google refused to repair the product at all nor refund me the money (I purchased directly from Google and I did have copies of all receipts including pictures of the original package it was delivered in).
The bots don't care if they decide the warranty doesn't apply.
If Google decides to just not refund the game price or offer ownership in other ways, what are you going to do? You didn't buy a game, you bought a license to stream the game from Google's servers. You don't own anything and Google owes you squat.
As someone who uses Google Cloud, Azure, and used to work for Amazon, I am happy using GCP but find Azure to be lacking in a lot of ways.
Also Google support is usually absent but when I actually get to talk to a human, they're great. Microsoft support is usually present but often seems explicitly designed to waste my time.
Since you use to work for Amazon, I would suspect that your bar for acceptable support would be a lot higher. Even on the business support plan, opening up a ticket and starting a live chat is close to immediate with AWS. I’ve used them as the “easy button” plenty of times when I probably could have figured out the issue myself but didn’t want to waste time. They are batting close to 100.
The one exception was a weird ECS error I kept getting that they couldn’t figure out. I realized later on that I hosed the permissions trying to do something cross account.
I’m sure they would have eventually figured that out.
You don’t have to be a “9 figure customer” to get great live support from AWS. It’s 10% of your bill (declining over certain thresholds) with a minimum of $100/month.
Between Drive and Photos. Also it's only one way now, up, you can no longer sync photos between computers. It was major news for Photos users when it happened. I'll provide a link for more info. There was a large amount of functionality lost when this happened. Iirc it also dropped the ability to save Photos in native resolutions higher than the compressed Google format but I'm not 100% on that since I sync my family photos using Plex to my own server.
Google Fi, the Nexus and Pixel lines, Google Play Music, Google Home, Protobuf, Guava, ReCaptcha, TensorFlow, Google Assistant, Android Auto, Chromecast, Google Tag Manager, Google Chrome, Google Flights, Google Translate, Google Domains.
> Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years.
Probably a good reason not to invest in the controller/chromecast just use your laptop for now until it matures and we see if Google actually commits to it and the game library increases.
Stadia is marketing the platform as if the technology is rock solid and reliable when there are a lot of indicators that it may not be. If it was marketed for what it is, I'd probably be rooting for it. But my gut says this is going to disappoint a lot of kids and college students who are attracted to the bottom barrel pricing. Also if game studios buy in and build key infrastructure and it disappears, a lot of human hours are going to evaporate into oblivion.
I used to work on (the second generation) cloud gaming. It's very difficult to be profitable. Most people would think that the challenge is latency, streaming quality. But the real challenge is cost management. The cost can be easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a decent computer or a console. It doesn't make sense.
Plus, to make cloud gaming work, you have to own everything. From the video encoding hardware, operating system, virtualization, game content, distribution channel, cloud ...
For example, we tried to hack windows to support existing windows games. It was very difficult. Windows isn't a multi-user system. There is no proper user isolation. We have to monitor the hard drive to see what files are touched by games, and try to resolve conflicts caused by different users using the same machine. It's very hacky. An easier way is just discarding the VM and refreshing the hard drive, but it will result in long loading time of several minutes, very high cost and poor experience.
And then there is the game store problem. Game publishers won't share revenue. You basically sell the games at the same price and also charge users for the cloud gaming platform for a compromised experience. doesn't make sense.
There is only one company that owns the whole stack, Microsoft. They own the OS and APIs (so that includes all the drivers), virtualization, games (XBox store), data centers (Azure).
A few years ago, YC invested in a cloud app streaming company (they kinda used the same technology we used.). I was surprised. After working on it for a few years, I would not invest if I were an investor.
Google's stadia seems to be smarter. As it tries to avoid some of the dead-ends we went to, especially trying to hack windows to make it cloud gaming friendly. Google chose to use Linux and develop games tailored for cloud gaming. I think that's a better choice, but will face content issues.
How does it make sense that a computer at home, with 5% utilization and retail power prices, can be less per hour than a computer with 50% utilization and wholesale power?
Even if all you do is host single-user machines with retail games installed and some kind of imaging solution, it seems like it should pay off.
$2 per hour per machine is not a made-up number, just check how much Amazon charges for a GPU vm.
Again, we were a small company, we had to use other cloud providers. I don't know why amazon or alike are so expensive. We tried colocation too, not any cheaper to be honest.
Also, when buying a computer or a console, you don't pay by usage. you pay one time to own the hardware and the remaining 5 year usage is free, plus power bills no one really cares. 5% utilization times 5 year is still some decent hours, the cost is not necessarily more than a cloud vm.
For a cloud vm, you pay by usage. The more you use, the more you pay, the overall payment is not capped. Eventually the cost will surplus that of the hardware. And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.
Amazon is a bad fit for this use case. Amazon's value proposition is: "you are making money, pay us a big chunk of it and we will help you scale up with less effort and fewer staff.
It doesn't seem surprising to me that making a cloud gaming service would necessitate assembling your own servers. Games just have different hardware requirements to everything else, it's well known that "pro" graphics cards are not meant for gaming.
I know but I find it hard to believe that Colo provides no benefit. I'm guessing a large part of their AWS bill would be bandwidth since this kind of a pathological use case for AWS (streaming individual video with no possibility to use CDN).
> And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.
I was the technical lead on a project where I warned the product owner that implementing a certain feature the way they wanted in AWS would have astronomical costs. I was told "let me worry about the money".
A month later we were told to scale down our ECS and EMR usage as the bill was astronomical.
I assumed you were not using Amazon because it's obviously a bad choice for this use case. $2/hour is $87k over 5 years — not surprising you can't make money.
One can rent a rack for about $3k a year which comfortably fits 20 servers. Obviously, colocation is much cheaper.
You've also gotta get servers to put in there, and in a 42u rack with, say 9 4u servers, a 2u managed switch, and now you have 4 units left to handle power distribution, power backups, any kind of external remote management (say an out-of-band KVM, or a second network for IPMI traffic, or anything else).
ALSO, all those servers? Say the fancy, high-speed switch you need to route all that traffic is $2000.
You wind up needing spend $5000 on auxiliary equipment and installation. This includes IE power cables, network cables, Velcro, and that darn cable you forgot you needed.
Now we're up to $10,000 including the colo costs, and we haven't even gotten to servers yet.
We need 9 4u-tall servers. The reason for the 4u height is because that's the size you want to be the most space-efficient with your full-height GPU's.
You'll want good base servers to slap your graphics cards into. I'm a little out of the loop on the latest and greatest in the server world, but we'll assume it's around $7,500 for a fairly moderate AMD EPYC system (EPYC because A] they wind up being cheaper than their Intel counterparts and B] have many more PCIE lanes).
9 $7,500 servers is $67,500 without any GPU's.
You don't want nVidia's consumer GPU's, because they're hostile to virtualization, so it's either AMD's consumer or enterprise stuff Or nVidia's enterprise stuff.
For GPU's you want to use, you'll be paying at least ~$600 per, and there's around 8-10 slots per server. $600 * 8 * 9 = $43,200.
I'm sure I've missed stuff- haven't included data storage, for one- but we're already at $120,700 and you'll probably want some new GPU's in a couple of years, and the total cost of servers over their lifespan winds up being around double what the initial cost was.
I wasn’t suggesting doing it this way. I said to use the equivalent of having a system at home: no virtualization, consumer GPUs. That way it’s an apples to apples comparison - you just get higher utilization and cheaper power. The cost of the switch and rack are minor when divided over 20 systems.
I think the costs are higher for local gaming than cloud gaming. But the user views the costs differently -- with local gaming, they own a GPU after buying it, and the electricity charges are not really apparent; but with cloud gaming, they pay a clear monthly fee. So that fee can't be too high or users won't be interested. And on top of all this, you have to add the tradeoff of the latency and bandwidth usage versus local gaming where these are not a concern.
one more detail regarding cloud utilization. It might not be what you think it is.
Game playing activity peaks roughly at the same time during a day, mainly in the evening. Basically you need to launch one vm per user during that time. And those vms will be idle during the day time. Sure, due to time differences, those vms can be used by other people from a different time zone. But the further the data center is, the poorer the experience will be.
On top of all that, Google has said that they plan to roll out over 7500 edge computing clusters just for Stadia, all for tackling the latency problem. (Not clear if those clusters can be put in existing Google facilities or not.) Having so many edge clusters runs counter to the ability to amortize costs by ensuring fully subscribed hardware usage. Each edge cluster will be as costly as the required peak usage for each location. And I imagine Stadia will have a very distinct pattern of peaks and troughs of usage relative to local time.
The biggest benefit of cloud gaming to companies is that more people can access more video games. Under other cloud gaming services, the developers benefit more than the cloud gaming platform. But Stadia's closed platform means Stadia can take a cut of the real profits.
> The cost can be easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a decent compute
This goes against everything I learned in business finance/accounting class (that was oblivious to software/internet) and all modern SaaS business models.
Stadia exists because Google wants to create more opportunities to show video advertising. What better way to do this than to turn games into another type of streaming video. Pre-roll before the game starts, mid-roll in between levels. When players stream games to other views, more pre-roll before they watch.
This is absolutely true, but it doesn't mean the product doesn't have it's place. I for one don't particularly want to get involved with the "gaming PC" consumption game, but I sometimes would like to play a AAA game I read about. Playing a game through a stream on someone else's gaming rig seems like a good way for me to do this.
Of course, what would really be interesting would be to setup a city-wide pool of gaming PCs and pay your neighbor to remote-pilot games, with low latency and keeping the spend local (and distributed). Think of it like "AirBnB for Gaming PCs". You could cobble something together today with VNC.
There are no ads on Stadia nor have they announced that there would be. You currently have to pay full price for their games, I don't see how you can just shove ads into them.
Maybe in the future if they offer a subscription but right now your comment is just guessing at the future intent of a newly launched product.
As a consumer and a developer I don't really want Stadia to succeed because of the shift it represents in terms of ownership of media, as well as hack-ability of games. In general I want to have games locally so I can do whatever I want with them.
However, as an industry observer, it's hard to imagine that something like Stadia doesn't have the potential to be a huge success if they really could deliver on promise. With all the people watching people play games on Youtube and Twitch, it's hard to imagine you couldn't convert at least some small percentage of that massive audience into players if the barrier to entry was only a click of a button.
I agree. Right now the focus is on new capabilities this can bring, but if it succeeds it provides an even more invasive way for companies to insert themselves between people and their property. I would argue that the reason stadia is being developed is to further the trend of moving users' files and computation away from their control. Now everything people do in games can be third-party trackable. The computing industry has figured out they can double dip by pushing people into work flows that just happen to trequire a subscription. Expanding this conquest to gaming is happening now because the rationalization is just becoming believable.
I said this in another thread about Stadia, the market for Stadia is vanishingly small. The people who have high enough internet speeds that either can't or won't get a "traditional" console or PC is extremely small. Too small to signal to Google that this is worth maintaining (https://killedbygoogle.com/).
For Stadia to survive, Google needs to bring in new "gamers", because existing "gamers" already have their own in-house platforms to play on. OnLive tried streaming games a few years ago (granted, without the Google advertising budget and infrastructure) and it was too unstable to play.
On top of all this, Stadia is going to have to either pony up and pay an existing company to include Stadia players in their online servers (Steam, Epic Games, etc) or silo all the Stadia players together. The first time input lag causes you to lose a fight is the day you cancel your subscription. "Gamers" are not very forgiving.
It's a terrible idea that was built because Google can build it (as stated in article). It may live on with a cult following but I highly doubt it.
I think they are probably betting that for $10 a month, people who already have a playstation or xbox would check it out and subscribe from pure curiosity. When the next generation of consoles come out in a couple years, here's the choice users will be looking at:
$500 for a new playstation/xbox? Or just keep paying that $10 a month subscription that I forgot about two years ago?
Imagine you are a parent and your 13 year old kid wants to play whatever the new popular game is. You can spend a few hundred bucks on a console, or you can spend $10 a month for them to play the same game. It's an easy decision.
This is a very naive point of view. The whole reason to buy a console is exclusives. I'm not buying a PS5 to play the next crossplatform game, and 13 year old will want many of those same exclusives.
Also, the next gen of consoles is slated to drop next year.
Disagree, there are a ton of professionals that would love to play current games casually, but don't want to spend on extra hardware (or even having another device around), and waste time with game patches/updates.
For me, I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook just to play the occasional game or two.
I'm not sure what your most recent experience with games is, but this is not an issue on any modern game platform. That stuff happens behind the scenes while you sleep or go to work. I've never once gotten home from work and had to "waste time with game patches/updates" unless I felt like heavily modding my game.
> I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook
This is also completely untrue with modern devices. I have a $1700 Dell XPS 15 off the rack, dual booted windows/linux, and it can run almost every single game in my 250+ game steam library on high graphics with zero issues. It is also my one and only dev machine, and it weighs about 4 lbs or so (while the brand new MBP 16" weight 4.3 lbs)
You seem to be making arguments based off of experiences you might have had many years ago.
Also, to nip this in the bud: XUbuntu LTS installed onto my Dell with absolutely zero config issues, all hardware drivers supported. Literal plug-n-play. I spend more time installing Windows.
Edit: I just looked it up for size/weight:
Dell XPS 15: 0.45-0.66mm thick, 4.0 lbs for base configuration[1]
MBP 16": 0.64mm thick, 4.3 lbs for base configuration[2]
Edit 2: I am making an assumption based on demographic on HN that your primary dev machine is a MBP or similar Apple product -- If I am incorrect you are welcome to correct me, sorry.
My only issue with Stadia is that Google has no policy regarding what happens to the games you have purchased if/when they shut down the service. Well, I guess they have a policy - and that is "you don't own these games, you temporarily own the rights to use them while this service is running."
I take solace knowing that the $60+ games I buy for my PC or Switch are mine because I have local copies. I am not going to spend that same amount on a game that I don't control. And Google is now infamous for terminating services that people like and use with little notice.
I think the tech is fine. I think they'll get the latency issues worked out for most uses. Fighters, rythem games, or fast-paced shooters were never going to work well streaming from the cloud. The physics just don't work. But there are many games that would be enjoyable streaming and ~150ms of latency wouldn't matter much.
Sadly, I think the negative press from this launch is an early nail in the coffin. I don't know if Google cares enough about the product itself to turn it around.
That is true - but I can legally download and keep a copy of all games I own on Steam on my hard drive forever. If they are online games/have DRM the online/activation servers might shut down some day, but every single player game I have should be useable forever. Until my drive fails anyway. Most games have had the DRM cracked. In my mind it's perfectly legal for me to take advantage of that crack to bypass the DRM in a case like this since I have legally purchased and downloaded the product.
I have a number of DRM-free games (from Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, etc) that I have offline copies of. No one can take those away from me by shutting down a service.
I think if they dropped the purchase price that currently sits on top of the subscription price then it would become scary. I don't know if those financials would work out, but it would be compelling.
Note that I say scary. I'm not even a game developer, but I am terrified of the implications of centralized, ownership-less gaming. Independent game preservation would disappear overnight. Things that end up in licensing hell could be retroactively removed from the face of the earth. Indie developers would be even more at the mercy of publishers and gatekeepers than they already are.
Of course it would be twice as bad for Google to be that streaming company, given their general detachment from and lack of understanding of games culture. But I won't support even the streaming efforts of Microsoft and others. Having it become the de-facto distribution model would be a bad thing for developers, and a bad thing for people who like games.
Stadia is a mess of inconsistencies in strategy that I can't seem to resolve.
It provides the closest to an "awesome" experience when wired up on fast, reliable internet. But its also the most interesting in a mobile setting where I can't necessarily have dedicated gaming hardware, but where I'll also have inconsistent WiFi/LTE.
Its target market isn't really traditional gamers, instead, I guess, focusing on the untapped segment of casual "gamer-interested" people. But, these people are going to generate FAR less revenue. And, there's a free tier? Why would people who play very casually choose to pay for it? Cloud gaming is an insanely expensive infrastructure investment. What's their revenue plan?
In a couple months, xCloud will be out. XBL Gold gives me like three games per month. Game Pass has, like, 200 games including some awesome titles like Gears 5. Unclear how much xCloud will cost, but I'm certain Microsoft is willing to fight on competitive pricing. Why should I buy Cyberpunk on Stadia? Why should anyone? The incumbents have insanely good first-party studios churning out exclusives; they have brand recognition; they have consumer trust; they have the technology and DC footprint; there's no visible plan here to convince anyone that Stadia is the platform to be on, which means their customers won't be loyal. They're giving them no reason to be.
Cloud gaming, in general, is pretty cool. I love the tech, and I could see myself using it... but as a value-add to a home setup. I think that's where it'll shine, and that's what xCloud is targeting. My broader point isn't that there aren't people who will find Stadia as a good fit for them, but rather that Stadia isn't going to survive just on those people. Cloud gaming only makes sense as a value-add to a broader platform that can support it, both from a revenue and consumer experience perspective.
Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is how we will be gaming.
Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no brainer.
Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?
No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system. They are all there and you just "press start".
I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.
> No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system.
Downloads and updates also speed up as bandwidth improves.
Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.
The latency for a few people involved did actually exceed a second.
The problem is you need the latency for the nearest Google DC with graphic cards in servers which might not be your nearest Google DC at all. And Google probably fucked up other things too, considering the amount of fail in thsi product.
I think there's a potential for how games are made to make a huge change. One possibility is a "thin-client" that sends input events separate from the rendering machine.
A drastic improvement to input/rendering delay for "cloud gaming" (<10-30ms) and lots of bandwidth could even attract professional gamers. Having the your gaming machine in the same DC as the game servers is a huge advantage if everything else is optimized.
That type of thing is alright for action inputs like shooting, running, etc. I've yet to use a game streaming service, including Steam Link inside my own house, that doesn't make first-person camera movement nauseating.
I know about it. Trust me, NOBODY will play with a teammate with 500ms latency. On EU servers my usual latency is 43-47ms. It's really far from "half of a second".
I (EU) played regularly with someone in Australia on R6:S and it wasn't much of a problem. He's used to latency issues so he played as well as anyone else would.
It's not possible to get used to such huge latency (500ms). He is a burden for a team in competitive games. It is a fact (if that "friend from Australia" exist at all).
That friend certainly exists and he's not a burden on the team. Maybe you focus too much on the latency number and forget that some people play to have fun, while still playing very decently.
I think it's very rude you suggest I don't know people in Australia (do you even know someone from Australia?)
Still I don't believe you. I have experience of playing competitive shooter with 250ms latency and it was nearly impossible to aim. And you are talking about 500ms latency. Let's just agree to disagree.
Well, he plays with between 100 and 300ms latency on average, atleast whenever I check the player screen. They're perfectly capable of hitting targets reliably.
On a similar note, I used to play World of Tanks with around 400ms latency before I got a better internet uplink, while it's certainly bad for a month, you start to get used to it eventually and the brain compensates. Of course, if reaction time matters you loose, but you can adapt your playstyle in a lot of games so that pure reaction time doesn't matter as much.
There is a bunch of tricks that go into the netcode though. A slight delay on hit recognition is noticeable and sometimes annoying, but movement can be silky smooth. With Stadia, wouldn't that latency open you up to input lag?
I've used Parsec. It's not perfect, but better than a low to mid-range gaming machine.
The input delay isn't as much of a problem as bandwidth, but it could definitely be improved. The problems arise when setting it to 120+ FPS.
60FPS works surprisingly well, and for single player games you probably wouldn't even notice the input delay.
Of course there is, but there are some tricks also for it :) Modern software (and AI) can predict some user actions very precisely. Anyway, there will be input lag, without any doubts, even with the smartest AI, but for some games it's pretty acceptable. Especially for non-competitive ones.
> I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.
You mean when the PS5 is out and runs RDR3 at 8k at 120 FPS for $350 ?
Cloud computing is an ancient idea. Unisys was huge, before I was born (it destroyed itself just about when I filled my last diaper). Cloud computing has advantages: connectivity, content and interaction, both between players and between content providers, even then. It also has huge disadvantages: MUCH less capacity. Cpu, memory, display, speed, ... all are less on the cloud.
That can be a great trade for a number of applications, especially line of business apps, but I must say I don't see it working well for games.
I am not so sure. Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved. It just isn't really a hassle today for people with good connections. Maybe it will capture the casual market, but there are disadvantages to the platform.
Just think of modding as an example. It might capture some console players, but I am not sure if they pull off even that, since the service is actually more expensive. In that case they will also need to compete with exclusives like other systems and it is questionable if developers will commit.
> Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved.
No. The problem's of proper system administration go far beyond issues of bandwidth. To apply a positive change you have to know about it, find it, download it, install it, and configure it. Not to mention it helps to understand the content of the patch, how it applies, and the social/technical context of the patch. And with Windows, this is in the presence of a large amount of proprietary software at the operating system, device driver, and application level.
So, no, good bandwidth does not solve the sysadmin problem.
Er... Was 2001 the last time you gamed on a computer?
All those issues are solved in modern day pc gaming. Even GOG with its drm free games automatically updates and syncs your games, and even supports beta channels. Also, I don't recall the last time I had a OS related problem more complex than "update your graphic card driver".
Steam automatically updates your games. Windows 10 automatically installs updates for your system. Chocolatey automatically updates your apps. And your driver software automatically updates your drivers if you choose. Everything on my computer automatically updates without my intervention unless I choose to intervene right now. With GNU/linux it's even easier with package managers. Same with Mac.
>> you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?
Except that you can't, because even though the premium tier is advertised as 4K/60fps, the game actually runs in 1440p. The Stadia hardware as it is right now simply isn't powerful enough to run that game in 4K.
I can see it running many games in "very good" frame rates and quality. But the economics don't make sense for Google if it tries to match the true high end PC configs. Once RDR2 is at 60fps, there will be other games pushing the envelope that won't be at 60fps on Stadia. Same applies to other consoles, of course... I'm saying that PC Gaming will still allow premium experiences for a while.
Either you buy a decent gaming PC and use it personally a few hours a week, or Google buys a decent gaming PC and uses it ~50 hours per week across ~10 users on average.
Google can probably also utilize that gaming PC during the other 118 hours of the week with batch jobs, indexing, etc. Your PC will just be idle and depreciating at 3am.
Not necessarily if you factor in some sort of impact for the slightly degraded experience they'll be offering you. You and Google may buy the same gaming pc and clearly they'll have lower costs, but that doesn't mean that your experience playing locally on that machine is the same as the experience of a streamed game on that machine. To compare apples to apples you'd have to compare the kind of machine you'd need to replicate the streamed experience, and that would very likely be a cheaper computer, so it's really an empirical question.
The high end PC customer can keep upgrading frequently, while Google will need to upgrade their entire data center to offer the top experience every few months. They will settle for a reasonable good/great experience for their user base, while the High end PC owner will always be above the Stadia standard setup.
So it's not that Google's cost is higher than the high end PC owner, it's just that the high end PC owner is willing to throw more money at it to stay on top compare to what Google is willing to throw at its entire user base.
Console hardware is vastly underpowered compared to PCs and yet frequently competes with mid-tier graphics cards in terms of performance and graphics quality.
The reason is that game devs are able to optimize their games specifically for the GPUs in the console hardware. Google is presumably betting that if they get enough market share, devs will start to optimize for _their_ hardware, and reap similar rewards.
Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS?
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Think of it like the “free” phone you get with a contract. You will look back and realise you have spent more than you would have if you did buy it, and at the end you won’t have the hardware.
But then the question naturally becomes what could someone at that point be running in their own home? 8k at 120fps? Part of the argument needs to be that the cloud stack could eventually deliver an experience that would surpass what a "gamer" could cost-effectively create locally, and I'm not 100% that's necessarily the case.
"Back in 2020 I sometimes had to choose between playing video games at 1080p and going to play outside because my parents didn't want to subscribe to the 100 M net connection, you kids today don't know how tough we had it." "Really gramps? I know 1080p looks terrible but how could they threaten you with the outside?" "Well the outdoors was less of a scorched hellscape back then. "
If bandwidth is good enough to handle 4K 60 FPS game streaming, downloading or patching a 150 GB game will be breezy enough it won't bother you much anyways.
Bear in mind, the Washington Post reviewer who was showing how bad Stadia was on the office's gigabit connection was speedtesting at 291 Mbps down at the time.
That still doesn't cover the cost of a high-end gaming machine. GPU alone can be north of $1k.
Imagine not having to re-buy all those components every 2-3 years.
Stadia isn't going to give you the visual quality of a high-end gaming machine so that's a bad comparison. 4k at 60 FPS doesn't mean anything if there is lag and compression artifacting.
Stadia is like a 960 GTX equivalent quality for the free tier and a 1080 GTX for the 4k tier. Let's not kid ourselves about the level of hardware power that one gets from this service.
I read the article, but it feels like "don't build anything until you are sure users want X". The problem is that nobody knows what users actually want, especially when you build something new. And the market will keep throwing ideas in several directions until one day, an idea sticks and becomes successful.
Like, no gamer in pre-Wii times "wanted to play hours standing with a motion controller". Nintendo released the Wii and it was a huge success (for a while at least).
Maybe the author's point is that Stadia is not doing anything "new", and this may be a good point. But it's still early days, and Google has deep pockets. It's a little too early to discard Stadia.
> I read the article, but it feels like "don't build anything until you are sure users want X".
The article addresses that exact point:
> I think the answer's obvious. Because they designed the product backward. They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?".
Your issue is largely addressed by their second Apple example. They're talking about the thinking that ultimately results in the product, and how Google's (and Sun's) thinking is focused on themselves and e.g. Apple's thinking is still user-orientated even if they have to "sell" an original concept.
So absolutely try something new, but as the article says, it still has to be designed for an actual audience rather than just being created to further that company's own interests without offering enough value for their market.
> rather than just being created to further that company's own interests
I find the Apple example unconvincing, especially for "recent Apple" stuff. Removing ports on their laptops, making some models' keyboard worse (most Apple users dislike the touchbar), making them unserviceable, forcing the phone users to buy expensive peripherals (Airpods...), bug-ridden OS updates, all of this point to a disdain towards their users rather than the opposite. Am I missing something?
If you're a serial entrepreneur trying to get rich, or maybe a corporate product manager trying to get a juicy bonus, ya you'll have no clue what the users want because you'll be forcing it. But if you are one of the users you are very much aware of what your problems are and what might solve them - even if you don't have whatever domain experience is necessary to solve them.
I agree with your overall point, that things are worth trying even if they don't inherently scream success. But that doesn't mean we need to try everything and abandon common sense at the door. In this case I don't think Stadia defies common sense, I think it defies consumer benefit: gamers should own the games they buy, freemium services powered by ads are dubious, and products which need to be advertised dishonestly to sell well probably shouldn't be sold at all.
Agree with the sentiment, but almost every digital purchase nowadays does not tie with ownership, but a license to use whatever you pay for - and it can be nullified at any point in time. If Steam were to go bankrupt tomorrow (unlikely, but for the sake of the argument let's imagine it), you would probably lose complete access to your library of games you "bought".
One exception may be GOG with its DRM-free policy, but it's a very small part of the online reselling market.
Is that true though? When I buy (and install) a game on steam it gets put into a downloads folder with an executable I can use outside of Steam to start the game. Are you saying that Steam would be legally obligated to delete this directory should they go out of business?
You can't use most games outside of Steam to launch them. Most games (but not all) have DRM's and require Steam to be running to launch. You can look it up.
Stadia is and will remain laughable because it has absolutely no answer for VR content and is a laggy mess in the best conditions. If a partnership between AT&T and NVidia couldn’t crack this egg, why in the world would Google be able to? It’s a physics problem that cannot be overcome. The hubris of Google to tout this platform is incredibly annoying as a gamer.
Yes, on the one hand, traditional gaming (FPS, etc.) is most of the market now. Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. But we're on the cusp of VR/AR really taking off.
The current all-in-one VR systems are almost good enough for a lot of people to jump in. I can see the next-gen of those being very popular. Certainly, you're giving up a lot by wearing all the rendering silicon on your head, but the other side of that is that it shaves precious milliseconds off the end-to-end latency, which is critical for a good experience.
And there's no way to do any of that with streaming games.
Now, for an old man like me who's mostly playing turn-based strategy games, card games and such, Stadia might be an attractive offer. Of course, those sorts of games don't push the limits of my old system, so... yeah, I don't need it right now either.
While top-end PCs can render better than top-end consoles right now, I don't see that as being compelling enough, especially when you factor in the network bandwidth / low-latency needed.
We had Sunrays at SUNY Oswego when I was in college. I thought they were great. I didn't have to carry a laptop around, just a little smart card that fit into my wallet. Plug it in and I had access to 120 core servers.
Here's a take: I don't want Stadia; I want a modern and personal Sunray. I've described a computing model called PAO [1] on my blog that is Sunray-like in that you connect to your own personal computing environment from all devices concurrently. Singular instances of your applications are merely viewed on all of your devices, using view adaptation similar to today's responsive web apps (and Microsoft's UWP desktop app model).
The key differences from Stadia:
1. PAO would not be just for games but for all computing.
2. PAO would not be centralized by default, but broadly deployable, making it something you could self-host on a compute node anywhere (e.g., in your home with a static IP and VPN). PAO would work especially well with a network abstraction layer like ZeroTier, allowing all of your devices to coexist in a private virtual network. You could of course pay a service provider to host your compute node, but that would be one option among many.
3. PAO would expect multiple concurrent clients to applications. A single email app would exist and service views on your home laptop, work desktop, and mobile phone concurrently.
Offtopic, but why someone bothers to type a proper blogpost in Twitter? It's such a crap experience read something there that multiple thread reader projects exists.
I can only think of the simplicity to publish content makes it too easy for lazy authors.
I'm using Linux Mint and it scrolls super slow. I will never understand why companies insist on wasting resources on ruining a feature that works perfectly fine. What do they get out of it? Does it somehow lead to more profit? It really baffles me. It seems like nobody wins.
The designer of the project probably gets an anxiety attack each time they see how scrollbars wildly fluctuates in different platform. This had to stop so let's ruin the experience for everyone :)
(It scrolls just fine for me in Chrome, on a Macbook)
I don't get the "crap experience". Twitter displays it in a nice, chronological view, where you can read and treat every tweet as a paragraph (with some irrelevant meta information attached, but I can skim that).
So, for me, the experience is fine. I grew up with blogs and all the bells and whistles.
It was obvious from the start to me that Stadia was not going to succeed. Sure it's totally plausible tech, and it does work relatively well if you have a stable, fast, non data capped internet connection that's close to a data center. But the portion of the population that doesn't have all those things is way too high and the negative PR about Stadia being awful for those people is going to sink it.
Personally, it seems to fill a niche I'm in. I don't have any high graphics quality gaming systems. The closest I have is: a 5 year old macbook, a Switch, a Quest.
Stadia would let me play some of the hi-fi titles out there without buying a more serious console or a newer PC. Hell, even the Witcher novels were fun to read and I'd enjoy trying the games. I ordered a founder's edition Stadia, but haven't received it yet.
Biggest drawback to me is that it won't support a higher quality VR headset than my Quest, like the Index, and won't support the latest Half Life game. What if the next Portal is in VR? Then I'll have to buy a PC and Stadia was pointless...
Google Stadia belongs to yet another category: products that some people like and want and others hate and hope fail for social/political/economic reasons. AMP and Facebook Libra are other examples of products like this.
I hope Stadia fails because if PC gaming dies it will harm consumers broadly by further decimating the high-end PC market and reducing demand for high-end edge device CPUs, GPUs, etc.
We do not want a world where all compute belongs to someone else.
Seems to me that it would be very good for people who have fiber connections at home and are close to a Google datacenter (or just don't care about latency), and want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU without having to pay for it and own a physical desktop computer (perhaps because they don't have the budget, or play games rarely, or buying a desktop computer is hard or uncomfortable for them).
Not necessarily, you might like sophisticated graphics but not play games where latency is particularly important, or just not be annoyed by latency and not interested in competitive play.
Also as an anecdote right now I have 5ms ping to google.com and 1gbps downlink (fiber at home in major city), so it seems like 60fps or maybe even 120fps zero-extra-frames-latency gaming would be achievable there, for instance.
I'm not sure if I want a Stadia, but I think there is a product that could succeed doing something similar. Like, I occasionally play Starcraft and other PC games, but it's kind of a pain to plan out future desktop or laptop upgrades because I can only consider products with more powerful video cards and enough extra space to hold each 60+gb game to handle even moderate gaming.
There are plenty of high ping players on the ladder already. I myself have played on the NA server while physically in Asia. American pros train on Korean or European ladders too. It’s okay.
Also, StarCraft doesn’t have to be ultra-competitive. You can enjoy the campaign or coop, or just play some unranked multiplayer for fun. A bit more latency doesn’t ruin the experience, and many/most human beings aren’t twitchy enough anyway.
You must be talking about sc2, in remastered theres only one global ladder and when you do hit koreans, if the turn rate drops due to latency, many will just leave the game.
It's funny how often I have experienced 30 to 300 ms between a computer or game console and the display.
I have a Alienware "gaming" laptop where the built-in screen lags about 30 ms relative to most monitors I plug it into. I have a video to prove it where I am duplicating the screen and running a clock.
When I was playing League of Legends it seemed to me that I just couldn't win when I was using the built-in monitor but then the game got a lot easier when I used an external monitor.
I had a similar experience with much worse latency playing Titanfall on an XBox plugged into a Samsung TV. When I switched it to "Game Mode" I suddenly started moving up the ranks.
It's an issue that people are surprisingly oblivious to, but fast reaction doesn't matter much for single player games and when people lose at multi player games they just blame themselves.
I think it exists because they've got plenty of infrastructure assets all around the world because of GCP (and are investing in more) and they're probably trying to dream up ideas to drive up utilization and gain some operating leverage on it. A consumer subscription business that depends on all your data centers would do that.
That's not a really good reason to make a product though.
I would argue that, and it allows them to reuse idle resources. Instead of everyone having to buy their own game console or pc which sits idle most of the time, google only needs to buy enough for peak demand and then they can use the idle resources for their own purposes when not in demand.
Gheesh I would def want stadia ! I no longer have to fret over which bodypart to sell for the latest in graphics cards or wonder should I rather go the console route. Which version of WINE should I try to use today.
I think if the Stadia experience works(technically speaking) it might just be the "new way" and make the "old way" well feel old !
Like Uber(the concept not the cmpy). Prev I had to look up a taxi's company number... phone them and tried to tell a person what my address is (keep in mind in my country we have 11 official languages, can you imagine the accents and trying to correctly spell your address over the phone), after that I have to phone them a few times to ask "Where are you" etc...
I hope cloud gaming will be the new thing ! I can't keep up buying graphics cards and lugging my desktop to my gf's house.
There are rumours of a Steam Cloud [0]
IMO this would be the best of both worlds. I don't want to purchase games from Google that will only work on Stadia. The ideal solution is to purchase games on Steam that you can play either on a regular PC, or on Steam's Cloud Gaming Service. I'm fine to pay $5-10/mo for Steam Cloud, but I really, really don't want to re-purchase some games again (like I'd have to do with Google), or lose my cloud purchases if either a) Google cancels Stadia, or b) I want to switch to a different cloud.
>I do see two fighting games and two rhythm games (latency hell!)
Fighting games benefit greatly from low latency, but rhythm games do not. The important thing with rhythm games is consistent latency, and that can be achieved by adding artificial latency when network latency is low. You can adjust the input timing windows forward or backward to match the latency, and many rhythm games already allow that. High latency like you might get with Stadia will make the feedback the game gives you harder to associate with your performance, but when you're playing well you're primarily paying attention to the input cues, so the game is still perfectly fun and playable.
I'm a lifelong gamer (since 1996), currently have PC that only has weak integrated GPU so I cant play much, but super speedy 500mbs fiber internet connection and 80mbs LTE on the phone. I look like ideal Stadia client, right? Well, no. I'm not interested in slightest, I'm waiting passionately for PS5. Current internet technology (latency) is not enough to make cloud gaming possible, you can instantly feel this 140+ ms of delay. Other than that, Google don't know jack shit about games, you can clearly see it in Stadia announcment conference. Good luck, I give it 1.5 year and nobody will remember what "Stadia" is.
The interesting part is it could've worked if Google actually understood gaming. The PS4's remote play capability is more than usable for most games. That pretty much relies on your own uplink speed and hops over residential internet hosted on underpowered hardware.
Google is one of the few companies that could've had enough data centers geographically spread out enough where most people's latency is tolerable and game selection is curated to not be latency sensitive.
But instead they completely flub both the technical implementation and the pricing model.
I've been using Nvidia GeForce Now for over a year and it's been pretty good actually. Like there is a small delay but it only really impacts me if I play against other people. For RPGs for example, it's really good.
Same here, I use it on my Mac and it works great with a Steam account. I like that portability. Also the quality is pretty amazing. I only play games every now and then, so a piece of software instead of dedicated hardware is a good solution for me.
From a game developer point of view, it's terrifying. If you thought that dealing with Nintendo or Valve was tough, imagine dealing with Google.
"The biggest complaint most developers have with Stadia is the fear that Google is just going to cancel it"[1]
You don't even get to see the terms and conditions unless you apply to be a developer and are accepted. That's scary. Maybe the big guys get better terms.
Then there's the Google "I am altering the deal" approach to terms.
Google already has a cloud-hosted game product - Improbable's Spatial OS, a back-end system for large MMOs. Improbable raised about $2 billion to develop it, and it's used only by a few indy developers, two of whom launched, got some users, then shut down their game. Cost too much. Runs only on Google's servers. There are some games in development for it that might launch someday.
(I liked the Improbable technology concept, but they spent so much VC money developing it that it's now too expensive to use. The investors are going to have to take a haircut.)
As someone who used to make async multiplayer games I think Stadia is a good fit currently for that style of game. Using it for latency-sensitive AAA games seems like a decade or two too early for the tech.
Cloud gaming has huge multiplayer advantages because you can skip the whole network stack and build your game for couch multiplayer, yet it's still playable over the internet.
Combine that with the deep pockets of F2P gamers, and Google's existing relationship with these devs via Google Play; I have no idea how they missed this.
Slightly off topic but weird to not see Shadow.tech mentioned.
It's a smaller French streaming company where you get a complete VM you can do anything with for an unlimited amount of time.
It's not as easy because you will end up spending a little bit of time setting things up compared to a game-only system though.
I have used their service and was absolutely blown away _as a casual gamer_. I stream in 1440p 60fps+ with no hiccups and a latency of about 18ms from my laptops.
You need a solid connection, no low caps, and a good wireless router but other than that it's pretty amazing how well it works - also i would rather not use Google after their turn towards monopoly in the last years.
They are coming out with support for up to Nvidia Titan Tiers so you can have a crazy 3D rendering workstation on the go.
On the downside i guess it's not very green to be streaming several terabytes of data each month, also it's beginning of a pretty horrible slippery slope privacy wise.
But for "just gaming" or other non privacy/important stuff the "terminal" concept is pretty cool.
On a side note does anyone have any CO2/Megabyte calculator? I have had a hard time figuring out how impactful the move to constant HD streaming in a lot of homes is?
I slightly remember reading that the internet could use upwards of 1/3 of total power consumption in X amounts of years.
I genuinely just don't see how Google can possibly compete with the gaming catalogs of Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft is already testing xCloud with some positive (and negative) comments. Sony just signed a cloud deal with Microsoft to do better game streaming...I just don't see how Google competes. And given Google's track record in killing products before they can get off the ground, I don't know why users would invest in it.
I disagree with the reasons that this article put forward.
>I think the answer's obvious. Because they designed the product backward. They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?". Sun started with: "What can we build?"
Both the case study with Solaris and Stadia failure has nothing to do with wants or needs. I actually want Solaris features of Thin Client, and the magic it describe where its state lives on Big Computer. Along with Stadia's idea of streaming games. Both of them are perfect in concept, I want them!
The problem is the experience. Apple didn't start if it could or not, they ask if the User Experience will be great. And I cant think of a product or services where latency is not part of the User Experience. Both Solaris and Stadia's experience so far is simply not good enough, and for me it might never be good enough. Solaris might have nailed the Thin Client Desktop technology, but its UI along with no quality apps, no one wants it. These apps and ecosystem are all part of the experience.
Stadia are also good in concept, in practice the latency and graphics quality just put people off. And the trend is in Mobile Gaming, when was the last time you heard Mobile Network Operators said they have abundant of bandwidth?
And it is the same with VR Gaming. If VR Gaming failed now it is not because the build or want problem. We WANT VR Gaming, the problem is the technology we have right now doesn't bring the experience we want just yet. It is like Pre iPhone era Smartphone.
If the experience were good, people will buy it, if it is not, they wont. It will all sort itself out.
Stadia is a staple of what the open web should be for games. Just open a web browser and the game is available. Much in the same way that Photoshop should be available on the web.
Unfortunately it had to be Google that had to get their oar into this space and therefore it looks like just a toy demo for them.
I do wish engineers at Google should instead contribute to the technologies that advance the open web instead of vanishing Google products.
I for one would like to see more, better local software rather than web-everything. My laptop is more than capable of running photoshop locally, and I don't see the benefit of running a slower, high-latency version which is vulnerable to network conditions. It seems like that does much more for Adobe, their cloud provider, and my ISP than it does for me.
That's not to say there shouldn't be online options for things, but it seems inevitable that as those options become increasingly viable, software vendors will aggressively push consumers toward them so they can have an excuse to have a recurring revenue model.
$129 for the device,
$9.99 Per month,
$x.xx for the internet connection you require at all time due to no offline play,
$x.xx to buy titles that you can only play with said internet connection.
At least now you CAN buy games you can play offline with the other consoles and PC. If someone came up with Movies Anywhere for video games so i could buy it once and play on any console i would be cool with this, but 20 years from now when you get that nostalgia and want to pull the Stadia out and play that one game....well you can't (unless it is still around, but then they will pull games from stores due to licensing, maybe because it has that one song on it and it is copyright....). At least with a physical game and ps4 or xbox1 there are usually ways to play without internet on some games.
I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked).
I think the tech is cool and some people will love it. Not sure if it is what i would want to invest in.
>> I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked).
It's going to get interesting when they decide to start aggregating and storing in game behaviors, and then selling that data to third parties or using it to augment their incursions into health-care/insurance.
It'll get even more interesting when they cooperate with authoritarian states to identify 'problem' citizens based on in-game behaviors or limit the spectrum of possible in-game behaviours within ostensibly open world sandbox environments.
I'll leave the predictive policing branch of this prognostication as an exercise for the reader.
There's already a bunch of gaming computer providers like Parsec and Vortex, what does Stadia bring to the table? Personally I doubt the decision makers involved play games more twitch-based than Civilization. For fighting and rhythm games, being meters too far away from the game system makes latency annoying, let alone 200ms away! Even a game server at every residential zone and apartment block would not be better than a potato machine a foot away.
Cynically, it looks like they're trying to swallow that market whole, betting they have more money on hand to price themselves artificially low to carpet-bomb the small cloud gaming market.
EDIT: Something I forgot to mention, Parsec already works with the games you own anywhere else, and on a crappy Android tablet. What Stadia looks like its selling is increased latency, plus a walled garden store, plus necessary custom hardware.
Unless Google is giving away the hardware you need to play, I can't see this being price competitive next to a Nintendo Switch, and the latter needs no Internet connection at all.
> Sun started with: "What can we build?" "What would be good for US, if people wanted it?".
The author wasn't in the room when this idea came up, so I feel like this is a completely made up story.
These Sunblade were a great idea, and they still are. I'm sure we'll eventually get there again at one point.
Sun failed on the execution, but that's an other story.
Stadia interests me. I haven’t played games in a long time because dabbling back into them after decades I don’t want to make a major commitment to buy equipment and keep it up to cutting edge. Plus I really like my iPad form factor for games. At the end of a long work day sitting at a desk in front of a computer I really don’t want to be sitting at a desk in front of a computer.
I know you said you don't want to purchase equipment and keep it up to date, but the progression of CPU's and GPU's has slowed drastically in the last decade. I easily get 5-6 years out of my gaming rigs now, and build them fairly well specced for $800-1000. Keeping current is significantly less hassle or cost than it was ~10 years ago.
I actually think there's real potential for these services, especially among kids in the enthusiast gaming community. I don't necessarily think we'll be throwing out our PC's for stadia, but I think there is a market if someone can deliver a cost effective product.
A bit ago Fortnite went from requiring DX 10 to DX 11 support in Windows. Kids with old hardware were devastated. Out of nowhere they couldn't play their favorite game until they saved up for a new video card, or worse, an entire laptop. PC gaming is a really expensive hobby that's completely out of reach for many.
You can point to consoles as a lower cost answer, but $400 is still a lot of money for some people, and PC gaming is still preferred by many enthusiasts for the keyboard/mouse experience and the ability to multitask with Discord, Spotify, etc. Consoles are closing that gap in functionality, but they aren't quite there yet.
Some people were saved in the above fortnite situation by GeForce Now, a competing service to Stadia that's been around a while. You can pick at the technical problems with streaming games vs PC, but at the end of the day, kids with reasonable internet that signed up were able to play fortnite in their PC's again. It solved a real problem.
If you add to all this the fact that so many kids interact with the world through a Chromebook or iPad issued by their school, one can see a world where a stadia gaming app or a GeForce Now app is their most convenient gateway to big games.
Stadia could still flop if Google doesn't develop and promote it properly, or if people aren't willing to pay enough for the service. I do believe there are people that want stadia, though, and outside of slow internet connections, I don't see why the sharing economy can't extend to gaming PC's.
No matter how you look at it, Stadia is going to be an interesting business study in a couple years. It's clear publishers don't care about it. Fun fact: when I last checked, all the publishers that are launch partners all have Google Cloud accounts. I suspect game publishers are in this for the free servers, not because they believe in the platform.
With smaller devices like laptops and netbooks (along with smartphones) becoming increasingly popular, Stadia caters to people who don't want to invest in a second device just for gaming. I know several people who only own a laptop and are interested in this service; I'm sure the market is there.
The main challenge, though, is that they are late to the competition -- NVIDIA GeForce NOW seems much more mature (the aforementioned people are already using their beta) and it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that NVIDIA can't do better (since they make the consumer GPUs).
Also, I think Google messed up by focusing on the Stadia controller and other physical devices; that's exactly what people don't want, to purchase more devices. And I read through their FAQ and don't even understand whether you need the controller to use Stadia. If it's actually required, that's ridiculous.
The biggest advantage that GeForce NOW has is that it just runs regular PC executables. Games for Stadia need to be compiled specifically for Stadia, and I have no idea why developers would spend the time and money building yet another version of their games, unless Stadia turns out to be incredibly popular or Google throws a lot of money at them.
Wow, I didn't know that. I thought it'd be like GeForce NOW, and somehow let you play your Steam games from your computer in Chrome. Starting to agree with the author, I no longer get what the point of Stadia is.
> it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that NVIDIA can't do better
The price
Sure Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now, but that's because they test the market. They can't afford this forever. There's many service that tried this in the past with Nvidia Grid, for a pretty high price, and they all went away (OnLive, LiquidSky).
Stadia and GFN strike me as two very different products.
GFN works and it's a straightforward product: you play for access on powerful gaming rigs and you can run your games.
Stadia seems more like a platform play where they have their own game dev framework, they plan to integrate with youtube and will probably have exclusives in the future.
Sunray might have failed but there were tons of companies who used Windows thin client machines successfully...Oracle/Larry Ellison made a big deal about it.
Obviously they all switched back to fat clients but Sunray wasn't the only one who tried it and some made a lot of money while it lasted.
>and I've never heard of anyone other than Sun using it
Well, I happened to have used it. This entire post gave me flashbacks. I was studying in Moscow and was too poor to afford my own PC, and when I bought one I still didn't have an Internet connection, so I was mostly using a computer room in a certain educational organisation. And they had all those Sun thin clients, and that awful-looking UI and Opera browser (back when it had ads). There were some ancient computers with text-only displays as well. It was definitely an experience.
I loved the sunray description. In a lot of ways this reminds me of Firefox OS. It's really amazing technology but before finding product/market fit, we have to find product/solution fit. Super important to find even the core group of users who really need this. I like Stadia - and I'm a social casual gamer. I play games on my Fire TV lol, and it'd be a convincing argument for a device to bridge the gap to more beefy games, but positioned against Xbox and PS4, I'm not looking to do any sort of heavy gaming
I consider myself a "gamer" and would never ditch my PS4 or PC for Stadia but most of my friends who like to play games casually would love something like Stadia. One of them even purchased the founder edition. Most of them don't want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on consoles and high end PCs to play just for a few hours on every other weekend. It's just too costly for casual gamers. A service like Stadia makes total sense for such people.
I’m a grown up now. Booting my PS4 to play only to be greeted with “40G download required before online play is possible” is what makes me think stadia could take off. The on boarding of consoles is super crappy and the UX of pc gaming is also very inconvenient and is prone to weird issues.
Comparing Stadia to Sun Rays does not make sense. Companies buying Sun Rays did have to pay for the server in the basement. For me it solves an actual problem - I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, but don't have a gaming desktop computer or a TV, just a Macbook. I don't have to spend $2000 on a machine that will be obsolete in 2 years, takes up a ton of space in my house, even when not in use. Why isn't the use case obvious?
When considering selling points, everyone seems to be focusing on the advantages of being able to run traditional games without console hardware or delays for installation, but no-one seems to be talking about how something like this could fundamentally change the constraints on multiplayer game design. I wonder what the server side looks like, and whether anyone is working on MMO type products that are designed specifically for this setup..
Sun was ahead of its time in many ways. I used a Sunblade and never thought of it again until this article and its relation. Interesting.
I've thought a lot about zones and Docker. I remember booting a zone for the first time on Solaris (copies the kernel) and was amazed at how fast it booted. It had a lot of the same things (volumes that are mounted). I used to explain Docker as Solaris zones sometimes but no one knows what Solaris is.
The problem I see with Stadia: lack of ownership of games and bandwidth.
I guess lack of ownership of things, at least for media, is something that is just gonna happen. But, bandwidth, that is a big problem. Especially in the US, where internet is shit in most places. Can't see playing a game over the internet in most of the world.
Maybe in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, you could, but not many other places.
This too, though it's not necessarily true for some countries.
I enjoy unlimited bandwidth in Taiwan. I've played online games using my phone as a hot-spot (not ideal, but it's possible here).
Honestly, I hope Stadia fails partially due to this, and other potential issues that come with that service.
Stadia is like Audiobooks or E-Books managed by a central database. It's all well and good until someone decides to cancel those services forever (Microsoft actually did this recently)
I have colleagues who use Shadow[1] at work during lunch on their work macbook and they really like it, even the lag is very manageable.
So I guess many people want it. The real question is how long until this kind of gaming is imposed, like the need for a connection even for single player games today.
One positive result from Stadia can already be observed. More developers are starting to implement Vulkan renderer in their games and custom engines (common engines all have Vulkan renderer for a while already). And not only that, they finally are starting seeing Vulkan as the real common API:
> We realised that if we did a port to Vulkan, which is a
> renderer that is used on phones and various other stuff,
> we get Mac support, we get Linux support, we get support
> for things like Google Stadia and so on - it was just
> worthwhile to do a Vulkan port. So we started that,
> because it's going to be good for Path of Exile players.
I suppose they mean translation from Vulkan to Metal with MoltenVK when they mention "Mac support". But that line of thinking is going to become more and more widespread now, thanks to Google throwing their weight behind Vulkan for Stadia.
Optimistically, pressure on MS, Sony and Apple will increase to the point where they'll support Vulkan on their walled gardens that now enforce DX, GNM and Metal lock-ins, because developers will demand it. And even if they'll resist, projects like MoltenVK and gfx-rs will help break their lock-in despite such resistance. gfx-rs would need to add Vulkan to GNM translation though.
So while I'm not using Stadia due to its idea being basically DRM on steroids, the positive effects from it also exist.
The strange thing about Stadia is that not only is Google making an impractical product that people don't want, but so are Sony and Microsoft. It's like the "race" to 5G or the "race" to AI, but in this case there is no prize -- you expect any hardware from Google to be a lost cause, even Microsoft has had good luck selling mice, but Sony is serious about hardware so how did they get caught up in it?
The one real advantage I see is that if you want to livestream a game it is probably more efficient to stream the game down to the player and then pipe the stream into a CDN for everyone else than it is to upload the stream and then pipe it into a CDN.
Maybe you could make a game like Titanfall or Fortnite that runs on some monster server in the cloud and hypothetically eliminates the need to share state across a network, but I think you're trading one set of problems for another set of problems.
I used to have two Sunrays and a SPARC Solaris server in my cubicle, we were hoping to use them for kiosks at a large university library (might have bought 200+) but we couldn't compile Mozilla for Solaris and all of the other browsers available for Solaris were either too old or looked like somebody's science experiment.
Today there is a real market for desktop virtualization. The Bridgewater hedge fund has switched to desktop virtualization because they are paranoid MoFo's who (1) are worried about the physical destruction of their headquarters and (2) don't want employees walking out with a laptop full of secrets. So they RDS in to cloud servers and like it that way.
When I saw the domain (th(e) reader) next to this post, I for a while thought it was a Google reader clone that's going to be lamenting about it. As in Google Reader was a product people actually wanted but it no longer exists as opposed to Google Stadia. Ah, how much I miss Google Reader to make this weird connection.
The talk about sunray is intereting with another HN article about FB/MSFT Remote Development.
I use Cloud9, after using sublime for nearly 8 years. My dream scenario is my iphone is my computer, and monitors and keyboards are dumb terminals that can stream I/O from my iphone wirelessly/dock.
I work remotely. My computer is in New York and I live in Paris. It works very well. I don’t understand the long rant about explaining why people don’t want remote computers.
Then Stadia, as a casual gamer I’d be more than happy to pay $2 every now and then rather than paying 300 for a device I don’t buy $60 games for.
I don't think that's the pricing. The device itself is about $130, $10 a month for the service, and then you will likely pay $20 - $60 for each game. Yes, they will eventually have a catalogue of games like Netflix, but similar to Netflix, it may not have the game you want to play now. See https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-r...
Stadia isn't a device; it's a service. There is no "device itself", unless you count the bundle they sold that included a Chromecast, controller, and 3 months of the service + 3 months for a friend.
You can play Stadia on an Android phone, Chromecast, or a Chrome browser on a laptop or desktop.
The service is free; you pay for the game only.
The $10 per month is only for the Plus service or whatever it's called that gives you 4K resolution and 5.1 surround, and presumably some free games/deals based on the marketing.
The communication thus far has been shitty, that said.
It seems like stadia or something similar would be perfect for simulation games that are often CPU limited and could be pretty latency tolerant. Would love to play Factorio on a stadia like service. Reaction times are not important and frame rate is usually limited by cpu
Unfortunately his view of sunray misses the fact that that is a massive market with a significant use case in govt/healthcare. Sun may have been early and had crap for marketing, but the idea was good and there certainly is a market for it.
> And, of course, "run Solaris" just killed the whole thing instantly, so instantly it baffles me how they didn't stop the project on day one. In 2004 nobody could use Linux except programmers— you struggled to run office suites on Linux— and Solaris was one step harder than Linux.
I dunno about this. My dad was a research chemist and when I was a kid I would occasionally go into the office and check out the computer. They were all using Unix workstations (Solaris I believe) and seemed to get their work done fine. There was Lotus Notes, there was NCSA Mosaic... all the things you do with your computer today, they did with Unix 25 years ago. My dad wasn't a programmer and neither were his lab-mates. That was just how computers were then. This was not 2004, though, this was like 1995. But I was 10 and figured it out with 10 minutes of screwing around on "take your kid to work day", so maybe it wasn't so complicated that no mere mortal could ever hope to compute in that environment.
I agree that office suites circa 2004 were bad. I used Linux all throughout high school and never liked Abiword or the competition (I guess OpenOffice might have been a thing back then). I learned LaTeX and used that. Looking back, I don't think I would have liked Microsoft Word, either. WYSIWYG was a big deal back then, but I didn't really care what I got. (I ended up tweaking LaTeX to double-space and use thin margins to look like Word, since teachers demanded it. I personally didn't care; whatever Knuth decided looked good, I was fine with.)
Using Unix or Linux back then was really liberating. I remember that if you wanted to learn C or C++ on DOS/Windows/Mac at the time, you had to spend hundreds of dollars on an IDE (Borland C++? Visual C++? I don't really remember.) Or you could just install Linux, and it was all free. Sure, Emacs had some warts, and wasn't really integrated with GCC... but if you were willing to push through, you could do your homework at home, while your classmates had to stay in the computer lab and do it.
I dunno, I don't think it was all that bad. We ended up using the "software runs on a server" model anyway, with web apps. You open Google Docs to type something and if your computer blows up, no worries, you can just keep working from another computer. Very much like the Sun smartcard-based system the author describes, just with more "material design" instead of "some UNIX geeks were excited they figured out how to draw shadows efficiently." What's old is new. Not much has REALLY changed.
If Stadia will be free then why is Google charging money? Are they short on cash? No. They want to limit the majority of reviews to fanboys who buy into "what it can become" narrative. On top of that it will not become free.
Before that Sun tried the JavaStation, also an attempt to return to the mainframe/terminal paradigm. Management was stuck on the idea that such a paradigm was the only solution for Sun as a company.
What exactly is google doing that OnLive didn't do? I tried OnLive... it worked well. It was just pointless because it didn't really offer any benefits over running games locally.
This brings back memories. My college had a bunch of Sun Rays (or a similar Sun product) in the CS labs. I TAed for a classes that used them. Non-CS majors hated them. And vi.
This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work.
There is evidently a small area centered around the San Francisco Bay Area where internet connectivity is ubiquitous and perfect. You get unlimited 5G coverage with 2ms ping times and hundred gigabit fibre into every habitable structure. And Google, Apple, etc. all have their offices there where they design products that connect to the internet.
There's no reason for an engineer at one of these companies to consider a situation where somebody wouldn't be connected to good internet. Certainly it'll always at least be 4G speed (if the user is in a tunnel or something maybe), but it'll never not exist at all.
So you get things like Apple Music (and Google Play Music and every other streaming service) where you get in the car and it starts playing where it left off in your playlist, then you head off down the road in your little thousand person European village. The song ends when you get to the edge of town, and silence ensues.
Because it didn't occur to the app to buffer the next song.
And not because of bandwidth reasons. Bandwidth is free, remember. Apple will happily charge you 60mb of it to view their homepage, and your device can happily buffer 3mb worth of song (or the next 50 in the playlist) without breaking a sweat.
No, it's because nobody who worked on that product has ever been off of the Apple campus. So it never occurred to them that people might want to listen to music someplace where there was no internet.
So no, I can't imagine trying to stream a video game over the broadband in our house. I don't think there are that many places in the world where you could do so today.
TIL I actually have perfect 5G coverage and not incredibly flaky 4G that drops every time my BART train goes underground or when I ride my bike around a hill.
The SF Bay Area's internet infrastructure is much worse than you think, and I regularly find myself without a working mobile signal and I don't have the option of fiber at home.
In this case it's not even about people not having good internet. It's about people not being physically near a data centre with the GPU that is playing your game. Come home from school, turn on Stadia? Bad news, everyone in your time zone just turned on stadia too and so the nearest slot is in NY, congratulations, you've got >100ms latency.
Also, many Americans use an an inferior broadband infrastructure to get to the rest of the internet, which means you not only have high latency due to distance, but also slower speeds during peak usage for cable victims.
It depends on the country, I can compare when I was in SF 4 years ago and LTE/3G coverage in city was pretty poor in comparison with my 1+ thousand people village in Eastern Europe.
In the same village I have a 1Gbit up / 300 Mbit down fiber, I'm not sure if that is popular in homes in Bay Area.
Stadia is a product designed for people who live in big cities and there's nothing wrong with that. It will work in not just SF, but any city large enough to support a datacenter, e.g. London, Paris, Singapore, etc.
Anybody who doesn't live in a big city is going to suffer a degraded experience and if you live in the middle of Nunavut it's not going to work at all. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea, it's just not a universal idea.
Hopefully Stadia encourages more publishers to make games that work across platforms, especially multiplayer games. I think cross-platform play is one of the main reasons Fortnite is so popular.
I am skeptical about everything else, especially with the direction Google’s management has steering toward, but curious what will happen.
Are more ads and abusive user tracking in games the price of ”free”? Would all ads and tracking really be turned off if paying a monthly or yearly fee? What happens when the network goes down or the service is retired? What happens to modding? Who controls what can or cannot be said, and what can and cannot be criticized, or even mentioned, in a story?
i fear people will "want it" when it gets good enough
the combination of "dumb screen(TV?) as interface" with "any/all content* you want (cheaper with ads)" will be very attractive to the 99% of humans who dont want to think about computing
is widespread personal physical ownership and control of general purpose computing a feature of the future ?
what laws do we need to think about to prevent harm that may cause ?
I want Stadia. A couple of weekends ago I wanted to play games with my kids. We have 4 PS4s and we were going to play Destiny together.
The wonderful family time never happened. We spent 2 hours waiting for updates to the PS4 so we could connect to the playstation store to download Destiny. We then spent 3 hours waiting for Destiny to download (60GB IIRC). By the time everything had downloaded and updated the moment was gone.
We don't play games often, but when we try to, we spend all the time we had waiting for updates.
The original iPhone was not a product that existed because people "wanted it". It existed because Jobs had a vision - and he was effective at convincing people that they actually did want it.
Stadia unfortunately misses the mark on the second part due to sloppy implementation and just boneheaded PR. I think game streaming can be viable - but I doubt Google will be the one to crack this nut. My money is on Microsoft with xCloud, but even then that's still a wait and see for me.
That's an interesting look at history. The original iPhone was a synthesis of existing phones. People who wanted a touchscreen had a SE p900, people who wanted a decent camera got an N95, people who wanted a decent web browser installed Opera - and so on.
The iPhone succeeded (eventually) because it looked at what a diverse group of people wanted and (eventually) put the best features in one package.
Regarding Stadia - there are a huge number of gamers who buy fewer than 2 games per year. An expensive console is a turn-off for them. There are a huge number of gamers who want to play every single game - subscriptions are their saviour. Stadia could - eventually - bring together what a diverse group of gamers want.
I want Google Stadia.
My internet bandwidth is more than enough for 4k 60 FPS and price for their service is pretty good - better than $3k PC for 5 years - you need to upgrade GPU at least every 3 years and CPU every 2 years (and, therefore, motherboard) to keep "high-end PC" title and play new games on "ultra" settings. Here they promise the same for a price, comparable to what my high-end PC takes for electricity.
Where are you getting this data from? 2 years for a new CPU? My gaming pc from 2015 that cost just a little over $1k runs all recent games on ultra just fine.
Somewhat of an aside, but I see mcc come up on Hackernews fairly often, and whenever that happens I usually find myself enjoying her technical commentary a lot -- even when I disagree with it.
In this case, I think the analysis is pretty spot-on.
I can think of a world where Stadia is solving real problems and presenting a really attractive use-case. I don't think that's the world we live in.
I think the current version of Stadia is just the beginning. Eventually most big techs will offer cloud gaming. It's going to be glitchy for some time. I am very optimistic on the future of stadia. People giving negative reviews seem to be missing the long term vision. I hope the naysaying does not discourage Google, Microsoft or even Apple.
Stadia will clearly win, and people's stockholm syndrome about local consoles will melt away the way it did for other rejections of cloud. Local compute will become a niche.
Can please you calm down? You've been spamming this discussion while getting increasingly hostile. We get it, you don't think people should play as much videogames as they do. Good, we get it.
I'm fascinated by people's reactions. The identity to needing video games absolutely intrigues me. So yea, at this point, it's my vice to poke and prod and better understand how people relate to video games. So... yea, I'm identifying with trying to better understand the psyche of those that identify with needing video games every minute of their lives.
That, and I'm actually really curious how many downvotes it takes to get banned.
If you are really trying to understand the psyche, you would be more open, ask more questions, and be less judgy. Telling people to go hug a tree is not how you understand people, and it does make you look bad.
I'm in the same boat as you, tho. I'm in the video game streaming industry... I don't understand at all how people actually watch other people play video games, and I do think there's benefit to disconnect.
I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the cheapest option - again. It will be the most enjoyable option too: no installation, no upgrade, I can just play. Last but not least: apart from the Switch, consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom.
As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work.