At least in the united states, the majority of people are in urban centers. Additionally the market for games skews young, just like the populations of urban centers. The vast majority of people in the united states are within 2 light-milliseconds (372 miles) of some urban area, and data centers are generally located in places with good connectivity to urban areas.

I don't think latency is as big an issue for streaming gaming as you think.

Right but if your games only work great in urban centers, don't launch your games outside of that. Part of the problem with Stadia was the hubris they had at launch as shown through their marketing and pricing of the product. They came out like this was an A+ product when it was in fact a C product.

If Stadia had come out slowly with a few key indie games, closed beta, natural growth, and humility, they wouldn't have an ounce of the vitriol they've received.

Having used my PS4's remote play a handful of times to stream play games while I'm on the other side of town using my own unremarkable consumer grade networking on both ends, it can work surprisingly well for many types of games. How many people notice the difference in input lag between playing on a monitor vs TV's game mode vs TV's normal mode? Those tend to increase latency more than the latency of streaming from one side of the city to the other.

That being said, Google picked quite possibly the worst lineup of games for showcasing streaming play. They were mostly action/adventure and fighting games, which are extremely sensitive to input lag. They should've gone with RPGs, strategy, and sim games which really don't mind the latency. But I guess that's just classic Google not understanding the market they're trying to enter.

This has nothing to do with latency and everything to do with price.

I have a gaming PC but it's stationary. I'd much rather use stadia on my Android TV device or whatever to grab a controller and go. I got the trial and it does work.

But having to pay full price for games I already own? Forget it. If the subscription had higher quality content I would use that, but it's just mostly old titles.

It's stupid because Google could have thrown money at this thing to subsidize subscription titles, or worked out some way for me to play stuff I already bought for another platform without paying MSRP again, and in either case I would have used it.

Stadia has no selling point. Pay MSRP and get the rights to stream a game from Google (only for as long as the service lasts?) No thanks!

If you live in a major city (i.e. close to a datacenter) the latency is perfectly playable. Especially when you consider that the market for Stadia is not counterstrike pros who care about every millisecond.

I really believe that the reason Stadia hasn't taken off yet is the limited game selection, and non-existent marketing. Technically it's really good, but there's only like 3 games on there that I have even a vague interest in playing.

Everyone hates epic for buying out exclusive rights for a bunch of games, but it's certainly a strategy that has worked out for them. The Epic store is now a genuine competitor to Steam.

One thing google does pretty well is performance monitoring. They have loads and loads of clients connected to their services and they know exactly the performance they’re getting.

Another thing google is good at is building data centers. They have them all over the place and they’re building more.

Stadia works acceptably even on low tier consumer cable internet connections. The biggest issue is usually weak or noisy wifi but even then it's surprisingly robust.

I don't know what it's costing them to do that, but in terms of technical capability it's there.

>Streaming games is not going to reach mainstream adoption because the latency of the Internet is too large

Im not sure i agree with that. We already deal with latency while playing games like CS:GO and others. They are already making the roundtrip and are playable. I think it's more of a bandwidth issue of being able to send enough "raw" screen data instead of game scenario deltas.