I want this to work.
Unless you have unlimited budget I find that buying cheaper cards more often will give you better average performance.
You still have an idle graphics card, but you can enjoy the benefits of it from any laptop in your home network. My gaming desktop is wired, my Linux laptop is wifi, and I get 4K @ 60FPS flawlessly.
However, I would prefer not to have to upgrade in the future and offloading the intensive parts to Google would be highly preferable.
No matter how good Google's CDN network is, you can't compete with sub-1ms in-network round trips. There's not really any clever "latency compensation" you can do here.
Even if you rewind state to apply input, which games probably won't support anyway, that still only helps you close the gap added by internet latency. A gap that in-home doesn't even have in the first place.
This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.
Of course, the hardware you have to throw at it to do that quickly becomes ridiculous, unless you can come up with a way of efficiently rendering the multiple versions.
[1] https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-2%E2%80%8A-...
That said, I had my Bootcamped MBP with a XB1 controller connected over Bluetooth and any input lag was negligible with the Assassin's Creed Odyssey Project Stream demo.
What makes you think games would just be included in Stadia?
Competing streaming services here are around $10-20/month without any games included. Origin's game access is $15/month without any game playing hardware included.
So... what will stradia end up being, and at what price? Would you pay $30/month for this? When a PS4/Xbox is only $300-400 in the first place, and has a lifespan of ~5 years?
Origin isn't relevant to this conversation.
$15/month for a streaming service + $15/month for game access service equals, drum roll, $30/month.
What are you not getting here? Origin is relevant as a reference point for what the games themselves cost on a subscription.
Stadia still needs to actually pay for games, after all. Either as a subscription (reference origin's pricing), or you straight up buy them at the normal $60/pop.
So instead of spending $1500 on that piece of gaming equipment spend $250-300 instead. That's what you're actually getting here. A very slow CPU with a mid-range GPU. It's a budget build that's not going to drive 4k@60fps with the bells and whistles. Not remotely close. It'll be fine for 1080p gaming, though, but that's realistically it.
They haven't fundamentally solved the latency issue, 50-100ms of ping is brutal and the people who could be a target for this generally won't have a fiber internet connection.
Network gameplay works via misdirection, predictable simulations and knowing how to converge a divergent state(including rewinding in time to re-play hittraces and the like). Streaming gets you none of that.
It'll work for high-latency sensitive singleplayer games but not seeing it scaling out wider.
That level of lag definitely makes some games implausible. (Part of why I bought a big-ass OLED is that newer TVs, but particularly OLEDs, seem to have generally consistent display lag; being able to play Tekken 7 on a 55" screen with only 21ms of lag is nice, but to do it on my old LCD is like playing underwater.) But I think it's going to be more practical for more games than the current conventional wisdom suggests.
When you're stuffing the pipe w/ 4k encoded content that puts a lot more pressure on the connection and added packet loss or delay is brutal in that case.
All of this stuff is subtle but it compounds in the same way that the average gamer won't be able to immediately spot 30 vs 60 fps but they'll know that the game "feels" better at 60.
Now you can program your clients and server like they’re all on a LAN. And now you can trust the client. (The client, not the inputs.) Those are huge reductions in complexity. This makes delivering good multiplayer easier, not harder.
But I do agree that input/display latency is going to be a thing. Results may be highly variable and you’ll probably know two people in the same city who have very different experiences with it.
At my day job I'm working on a AAA multiplayer game, and making a properly server-authoritative game with significant client-to-server latency mitigation imposes serious costs in dev time and complexity and security review process. And now, at least in theory, they mostly disappear.
The input/display lag problem is different from what we have now. It's new. We don't, of course, compensate for lag from input to client. (Between client and server, yes, but that's actually a different beast.) And yes, you won't be able to do much about it. You'll be relying on Google to keep your latencies down. They said they're deploying to 7500 nodes, so there's hope. Time will tell. I'm hopeful a lot of people will be reporting single-to-low-double-digit latencies.
But this is much, much more than just moving around the same problem.
I'm used to designing systems and games that work in 100ms+ latent environments since that's what you see in production(or try mobile where it can be 2-5x that).
We were doing 250ms ping times back in '99 with games like SubSpace and the like where you had a predictive game model/design. Yes you lose the overhead of designing for latency because it just won't fundamentally work in those scenarios.
This does, however, leave VR high and dry. Wonder if they have any ideas about that angle.
Wifi for instance is completely out. All it takes is someone turning on the wrong blender/micowave/power adapter and just the smallest bit of RF pollution will put you into unusable territory. Gets harder as your population density rises.
You can already see this with in-house streaming today. I can stream Netflix but my local LAN XBOne streaming is pretty unusable for things like Monster Hunter.
As your population density lowers the chance of you having the sub-30ms latency w/ 0% loss decreases significantly.
Like I said in the root, they'll able to get this to work for non-action(~200ms window) singleplayer titles, the idea that you could use this for multiplayer is laughable.
Will it be a worse experience than a 2080 Ti on your desktop? Sure. But will Stadia be good enough to win over the expense and hassle of the alternative? Maybe!
Regarding your last point, I'm not sure Id would stake their reputation on delivering a game that is going to be "laughable" on Stadia. They might know something we don't.
We'll see how it works out.
But what do you do when they don't? This can happen in multiplayer games with low population or during "bad times".
You might have less trouble because latency is more predictable, but you still need the whole rewind stuff.
I also don't like the idea of games-as-a-service in the sense that I only own a license to the game for as long as I pay a monthly fee. I'm okay with licensing content within the game (i.e. DLC), but I shy away from subscription games services like Xbox Games Pass or EA's Origin subscription.
A streaming game product like this doesn't solve that issue. Additionally, the latency issue, like you pointed out, is too much for me to consider _not_ owning my own gaming hardware.
EDIT: A "Stadia store" was briefly mentioned shortly after my comment, it looked like it was tied into Google Play.
I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)
I'm very curious about the expenses game developers will face too, which definitely wasn't brought up. Id Software bragged about just using one Stadia instance, but then later demonstrations showing split screen gaming "without compromise" was shown running each screen on a different Stadia instance. While Google suggests this makes split screen gaming possible again, my guess is that split screen gaming costs the developers twice as much to implement as a service cost, since it uses twice as much hardware. Making it probably mostly a nonstarter anyways.
Totally a concern. When OnLive closed people lost all their games, no refunds. While if you went to the store and bought a physical disk. It'd still be yours.
The average console quality game is about 50 or 60 bucks nowadays. If you are an active gamer, you could lockup and lose hundreds or even a thousand dollars when they decide to close it.
Most of Google's services are free, but paid ones I'd hope they wouldn't as easily abandon too.
I haven't bought a game on physical disk for a long time. My impression is that in many cases, you're still going to be downloading a big release day patch upon installation. And for multiplayer-heavy games, it doesn't matter if you have a physical disk when the servers are shut off.
Also Microsoft or Sony weren't companies known for gaming when they entered this space and now they are the leaders.
Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.
Even for people that don't have gaming computers or consoles, you can put a decent one together that costs less than one of Google's phones
Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive.
With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers.
All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.
To have the data of every choice and move in every second of every game would be quite useful to calculate the model of the particular user with the level of accuracy barely existed before.
Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release.
Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.
I would definitely try this on some quirky little games that I love to watch the streamers play, but too lazy to download. If the play could start in minutes, I would try it.
At this point I see comments like yours in here (from "games industry" insiders) and I see horse breeders decrying the car. "It takes gas instead of grass, it'll never work!"
Please.
- drastically lower power requirements
- no worries about hardware refreshes
- no waiting to download a 50gb game
- can play anywhere (steam link is getting there, but it's not as easy as opening a new chrome tab)
> hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency
cool, they don't have to.
Google isn't a name that people associate with gaming or gamers, buit they do have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two. I wouldn't trust Google to still be supporting "Stadia" in 5 years time, whereas I do know Steam will still be there.
Also, Google's reputation for "do no evil" has been rapidly eroded in recent times and people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data than they already do. Contrast this with Steam, a private company that gamers trust with their data.
I think Google is once again reaching here into a space too late and without anything really compelling to make people switch away from existing Xbox/Windows/Steam ecosystems.
Edit: One other additional aspect to this: it doesn't really matter how fast Google's servers can stream the data, most people's ISPs do not have great consistent connections. Hell, I have Google Fibre at home and occasionally I get issues streaming 1080p Netflix (stuttering etc). Most people have services with bandwidth caps and do not get consistent enough speeds to support streaming games. At my parent's house in the UK, the situation is even worse with lower caps and very often there are disruptions in the connection and so the Netflix stream will turn into a blocky mess for 10 seconds or so.