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.
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.