> No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system.

Downloads and updates also speed up as bandwidth improves.

The problem is you need the latency for the nearest Google DC with graphic cards in servers which might not be your nearest Google DC at all. And Google probably fucked up other things too, considering the amount of fail in thsi product.

A drastic improvement to input/rendering delay for "cloud gaming" (<10-30ms) and lots of bandwidth could even attract professional gamers. Having the your gaming machine in the same DC as the game servers is a huge advantage if everything else is optimized.

It's exciting what the future might hold.

See also: https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_t... https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...

I think it's very rude you suggest I don't know people in Australia (do you even know someone from Australia?)

On a similar note, I used to play World of Tanks with around 400ms latency before I got a better internet uplink, while it's certainly bad for a month, you start to get used to it eventually and the brain compensates. Of course, if reaction time matters you loose, but you can adapt your playstyle in a lot of games so that pure reaction time doesn't matter as much.

60FPS works surprisingly well, and for single player games you probably wouldn't even notice the input delay.

Stadia is most likely much more optimized.

You mean when the PS5 is out and runs RDR3 at 8k at 120 FPS for $350 ?

Cloud computing is an ancient idea. Unisys was huge, before I was born (it destroyed itself just about when I filled my last diaper). Cloud computing has advantages: connectivity, content and interaction, both between players and between content providers, even then. It also has huge disadvantages: MUCH less capacity. Cpu, memory, display, speed, ... all are less on the cloud.

That can be a great trade for a number of applications, especially line of business apps, but I must say I don't see it working well for games.

Just think of modding as an example. It might capture some console players, but I am not sure if they pull off even that, since the service is actually more expensive. In that case they will also need to compete with exclusives like other systems and it is questionable if developers will commit.

No. The problem's of proper system administration go far beyond issues of bandwidth. To apply a positive change you have to know about it, find it, download it, install it, and configure it. Not to mention it helps to understand the content of the patch, how it applies, and the social/technical context of the patch. And with Windows, this is in the presence of a large amount of proprietary software at the operating system, device driver, and application level.

So, no, good bandwidth does not solve the sysadmin problem.

All those issues are solved in modern day pc gaming. Even GOG with its drm free games automatically updates and syncs your games, and even supports beta channels. Also, I don't recall the last time I had a OS related problem more complex than "update your graphic card driver".

On consoles this is even more of a non issue.

Except that you can't, because even though the premium tier is advertised as 4K/60fps, the game actually runs in 1440p. The Stadia hardware as it is right now simply isn't powerful enough to run that game in 4K.

Either you buy a decent gaming PC and use it personally a few hours a week, or Google buys a decent gaming PC and uses it ~50 hours per week across ~10 users on average.

Google can probably also utilize that gaming PC during the other 118 hours of the week with batch jobs, indexing, etc. Your PC will just be idle and depreciating at 3am.

Google's costs are clearly lower.

So it's not that Google's cost is higher than the high end PC owner, it's just that the high end PC owner is willing to throw more money at it to stay on top compare to what Google is willing to throw at its entire user base.

The reason is that game devs are able to optimize their games specifically for the GPUs in the console hardware. Google is presumably betting that if they get enough market share, devs will start to optimize for _their_ hardware, and reap similar rewards.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Think of it like the “free” phone you get with a contract. You will look back and realise you have spent more than you would have if you did buy it, and at the end you won’t have the hardware.

Imagine you suddenly have 3 kids. You would need to tell your least favorite kid that it needs to play outside because your connection is too slow.

Bear in mind, the Washington Post reviewer who was showing how bad Stadia was on the office's gigabit connection was speedtesting at 291 Mbps down at the time.