> 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.

Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen.

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

You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating the game world.

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.

> the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen

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

Is download time a significant factor for people with the types of connections that will have a good experience on Stadia? It’s my understanding that downloading a large game in a timely fashion and streaming it are both bandwidth-intensive. As for “terabyte-sized games” are there any of those on the market, or even on the horizon? At some point it’s either outside of the budget of most games to produce that many assets, or the 1080p/upscaled to 4K experiences that Stadia provides won’t make use of extremely high resolution textures.

We're not at terabyte yet, but 80-100gb is becoming increasingly common. Even the crash remakes are coming in at 30gb, and that wasn't that High budget a title.

Google recommends a 35mbit/sec connection for 4K Stadia streaming and they say it uses 20GB/hr of data[1]. Even at your high example of 100GB, that’s just 5 hours of streaming. I understand that the idea is to optimise for instant play but it seems silly to download enough data to cover the entire contents of the game potentially multiple times over a play through. Platforms like Steam, Battle.net, and consoles already allow developers to post staged installs where players can start playing a game before all assets have been downloaded. Stadia continues to look like a solution in search of a problem, where that solution comes with a lot of tradeoffs that I find hard to swallow. 100GB is also only 10% of 1TB, and I find it hard to come up with a concrete use for the other 900GB.

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

I do not fail to imagine the positive potential, i just consider it totally insignificant to the negative potential it has. None of those you mentioned is worth giving up control over the games you are paying for and your computing environment.

Instead you have TB sized streaming.

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.

>Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

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.

>no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games)

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.

All that plus an extra 20ms of input lag on top of whatever your tv already gives you because speed of light is a thing....

Or not.

There are lots of fun games and other activities.

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