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
