I was in the beta for their Assassins Creed test. For single-player AAA RPG titles it wasn't noticeable. I doubt twitch / competitive games will ever be the target audience.

Was it full streaming? Or did you have to download something to your own computer? Having to download only part of the game to stream it would be a bit better than the way things are now, but not much. I guess I'd have to try it to tell?

If it was full streaming, just go to the webpage and start playing, that would be cool. (Though, I suspect, a full streaming system would make playing multiplayer games nearly intolerable from a latency perspective.)

Full streaming right from Chrome. No plugin or downloads needed. Loaded the game in a few seconds. It was cool.

Yeah, then it's likely gonna have some latency problems. But latency will decrease with time. I'd imagine in maybe 2 to 5 years most US consumers might have the latency profile to use a system like that comfortably. Probably not now though. Especially if you're playing, say, Fortnite, against 95 other people who have their game loaded locally on a fast network. You're just asking for a frustrating day.

> But latency will decrease with time.

Only to a point.

For these streaming services to work, you really gotta have the data center within 1000 miles of you. If they only have a service in say, California, and you're on the east coast, well...even a round trip at the speed of light is about 30-35 ms. Add in the fact that electricity doesn't actually travel at the speed of light, processing time for routers, and delays for video compression/decompression, and you're looking at at least 60 ms delay on inputs that probably can't possibly be reduced.

I think even 1000 miles is a bit generous, since you likely don't get networking in a straight line between your house in the data center.

In Utah I get traffic routed through Denver and a few other states east of me before hitting certain servers hosted in California.

Unless Google has figured out a way to increase the speed of light, I don't think this new service is really going to change my mind about buying dedicated hardware to play games.

Google has racks full of equipment at every ISP in America, even the minor ones. They can bring this latency down to 5ms or less.

I wonder if a multiplayer shooter would be playable if the game was both hosted and rendered for all players within the same data center. You still have latency to the server when playing multiplayer, so if you eliminate that by hosting the game next to the computer rendering it, it might work well?

It was in the browser, although it only worked with Chrome so I assume they're doing some stuff that goes beyond/outside of web standards

I'm not sure how Google achieved it, but Parsec said they got usable browser game streaming working using WebRTC.

https://blog.parsecgaming.com/game-streaming-tech-in-the-bro...

They dont, instead streaming companies are counting on people not knowing any better. From my competitive experience maybe top couple of percent (or even less) of player base is aware of such minutia as additional tens of milliseconds, influence of good mouse/keyboard, fast monitors, framerates. Most people are perfectly fine playing on a laptop(!), or FPS using controller on a console - those people wont feel any difference.

In the Assassin's Creed beta, the input lag was barely noticeable most of the time.

For competitive games it's likely unuseable, but for a game like Assassin's Creed, where super-quick input isn't very important, it's perfectly fine.

Additionally you can expect deals with game publishers for next gen games to include latency tolerant AI, aka easy easy mode, hidden from users, like autoaim in all console games today.

I was in the project stream beta and the latency was never noticeable for me. I have seen noticeable latency on TVs not set to game mode when playing on xbox, but did not see any streaming latency for the beta.

I was on a cable internet connection and the display occasionally pixelated during network slowdowns, but there was still no latency noticeable.

I assume that Google has enough data center locations that they can render you at the nearest one.

They are banking on a large segment of players just not noticing the lag.

It scares me because I absolutely do notice the lag, and I can see publishers wanting to move to something like this exclusively in the not too distant future.

There will always be a market for "non-streaming" games. Fighting games for example would be unplayable with streaming latency. I don't see games moving primarily to streaming for a long time.

I've long since moved on from competitive multiplayer games and I never measured it directly. But that said, I haven't noticed a lot of issues with Nvidia's game streaming service with casual use.

I'm not sure how good it would be for first person shooters, but it worked great for me when I played assassins creed on it. Note, I do have a 100 Mb fiber connection in my apartment.

I played a couple of hours of some Lego 3D game with game streaming and latency wasn't an issue at all. There are many games out there that don't require twitch reactions.

Many years ago, when the Netflix CEO said that they'd switch to video streaming sometime in the future, I thought it was a crazy idea: how could you possibly have so much bandwidth? (I'm not the worlds greatest visionary.)

I think things may go the same way for streaming. If it's cheap enough with no installation hassle, why not?

I don't think they get around it. For most genres except FPS the round trip delay doesn't cause any issues in gameplay. What's an extra 60ms roundtrip when most people have reaction times around 300ms?

Here we go again, someone is conflating reaction time with latency sensitivity...

Try the following: write a simple snake game in JS or whatever your preferred language is. However, instead of turning the snake in the keyDown/keyUp event handlers, start a 60ms timer and change direction only when the timer fires. Experiment with various time intervals and snake speeds to find out what’s the acceptable latency/speed region.

Have you by any chance done this? Care to share the results?

>What's an extra 60ms roundtrip when most people have reaction times around 300ms?

20% more.

You offer single player games.