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.

Wow, fuck, I seriously scared myself just now.

You can remove it by going premium (tracking not included) for only $RTX3080Ti/year.

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.

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.

Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.

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.

If you could have rented most of your games at a lower price, and then bought the ones you really liked on sale, would you have paid more money total?

You probably need to check out the whole "gaming backlog" meme :-P

And pretend I asked what percent you continue to play more than a year after starting them.

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.

I only pirated (it's the 21st century "Demo" for me) the rest. You may see why I wouldn't be interested in Stadia at all.

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.

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?

I'm betting I could print it and hack something together from some hobby electronics kit if I really wanted to.

But you are absolutely correct. There is a category of games for which the complete experience is unseparably attached to the original substrate.

On the other hand, keyboard and mouse driven games are fairly maintainable accross platform generations.

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.

That is not representative of most games.

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.

Further reading: Latency Compensating Methods in Client/Server In-game Protocol Design and Optimization by Yahn W. Bernier: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...

Edit: Okay I really need someone to explain why this particular comment got downvoted, I'm baffled.

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.

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.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/26/hackers-c...

I just think that's pretty uncommon among games.

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.

And something like Eve is single threaded.

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.

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.

Is this not possible with Stadia?

Also how does it compared price wise to a brand new but leased console?

It’s going to have to be pretty cheap to be competitive I think.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 '/')

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).

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.

Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.

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.

They're not, unless you're willing to pay extra for them to be.

Netflix is not preservable, DVDs are.

Spotify is not preservable, CDs/MP3s are.

Most of the stuff we watch/listen to is on non-preservable media, and for the most part, we don't care.

If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

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.

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.

Due to this I'm actually kind of hoping for this service to fail to catch on.

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).

You're comparing apples to oranges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What if it depends on the page it was originally hosted on? https://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e...

This is exactly the problem with making games rely on external servers in order to start, as Stadia does (for entirely different reasons).

I obviously can't say about every game out there, but in my limited experience it's really quite decent.

This is an excellent effort to preserve old browser plugin games.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personally I played games for Mac OS 9 without any problem in standard QEMU+libvirt and performance was decent on my i7 4771.

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 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.

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.

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 :-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.

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.

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.

Next HN headline: Machine Learning algorithm reverse engineers a Stadia game.

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.

Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

So, so wrong.

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.

These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.

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.

If that happens it will just be another big negative impact of Stadia.

1: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9607891?hl=en&ref_t...

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.

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.

There are lots of fun games and other activities.

That's what I have ended up doing as gaming continues to get more hostile.

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?

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.

I sure hope you don't use Steam!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/rip-og-pixel-google-...

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).

- I don't like streaming services, because content can disappear/the quality is lower/...

- Streaming doesn't prevent you from owning your own DVDs/BDs, nor will it

And now in 2019, there are so many films and tv shows only released through streaming services, and never sold on disks.

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.

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).

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.

(I'm a googler, opinions are my own)

This past weekend I played Outlaw on my Atari 2600. Assuming I paid $40 when it came out, that means I paid 8¢/month for that game.

Talk about value!

Just like I don't pay for my gym membership when I'm not using it ;-)

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

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.

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)

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Nearly every review I've seen mentions that there's just enough latency for it to not feel good, with some visual stuttering occasionally.

Mine gets here tomorrow though, so I guess I'll wait and see for myself.

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.

No, stadia founder’s edition costs $129. The regular 1080p stadia is free

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.

> 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.

Will be free, somewhere in 2020

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.

Imagine buying that and only getting 22 Games total.......Good call on waiting on the Oculus Rift

I haven’t tried Stadia but just wanting to make the larger point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is pretty much it. Google is fundamentally an advertisement company and that scares me.

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.

[1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946

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.

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

IF you want to play on a windows pc/chromebook/... you can use most controllers, e.g. dualshock, xbox etc, or choose to not use a controller.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-play-games-on-google-stad...

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.

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).

No, the beta was last year with assassins creed and that was free and they gave everyone a free copy of the game afterwords.

If that were Stadia, I’d be more bullish.

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.

I think even the Steam mods work, but you have to wait for them to install every time you launch the game.

If you're playing on a Phone or in a browser window, then you can use most third party gamepads (8bitdo, Xbox, PS4)

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.

> 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.

"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.

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".

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.

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.

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo

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.

No it will not be, because latency exists. It will be the opposite of enjoyable unless you like feeling motion sick.

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.

Hugely hugely impacts the complexity.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

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.

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.

Having said that, when reviewing it, there is a balance between recognizing the future and taking into account present realities.

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.

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.

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.

PS4 supports streaming to computers on the same network eg you mac.

I always assumed the Xbox offered that too.

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.

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.

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.

Bandwidth test only though; latency not reported.

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.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4XsvdDN.png

I had my activation code, but my stadia founders kit hasn't arrived yet, so I haven't been able to try the Stadia controller, or play on a tv.

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?

DISCLAIMER: Did not check out Stadia, i prefer to play on my own hardware.

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.

>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?

But it won't, because if 'gamers' and teenagers don't want it, people like you won't be enough to support it.

It is by far not the first (Onlive, Gakai, etc.) and it is not a subscription like Netflix but monthly fee + buying games.

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.

Not to mention heavy-handed data caps in many places, unpredictable latency, etc.

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.

and no linux support

stadia has a clear revenue model (% of games purchased). Maybe it will also have subscription model too.

And stadia will have first party titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Raymond

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.

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.

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.