Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? If in the future, all software will only run on servers, more and more control will be taken away from users. If Google shuts down the service, or bans your account with no recourse, as they like to do, everything you've purchased is gone.

That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the purse.

Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them.

The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.

But... people ARE willing to pay for software; RE Village sold 6.1 million units worldwide and the RE series is good for 100 million units sold [0].

What companies want however is recurring income. Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of previous investments again. Movies are remade, leading to things like the Lion King CGI film selling more than the original cartoon (somehow). And everything is moving to subscriptions and other forms of recurring income.

Another one to remember is that software products like MS Windows and Office and Adobe's products HAD to basically add features or redesign themselves every year, because why else would people buy new versions of the software? I think those companies started to see that, people stopped buying newer versions of their software because the previous versions worked just fine. Microsoft saw that with e.g. Windows XP and Office 97, so many people didn't see the added value - or feared the changes - in the newer versions.

Adobe is a subscription model. Microsoft gave out their OS for free (effectively) or OEM only, in favor of pushing the office365 subscription model. I'm sure the break even point - where the O365 subscription income overtakes that of loose sales of licenses - is somewhere like 2-3 years, especially since there's no retailers in between that take their cut anymore.

And finally, why pay $600 for a new console + game + a subscription for the online services if you can also pay a $15 or whatever a month subscription fee? From a consumer's point of view, the break even point is years, and given there are newer versions of consoles every 5-10 years as well, it does start to make more sense, especially if you don't play games that often.

(disclaimer: I dislike subscriptions and prefer to own games + consoles, just saying I get where they're coming from).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_Village#Sales

> Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of previous investments again.

Seems a bit disingenuous. The RE2 remake was fantastic and significantly different from the original in terms of gameplay. Remaking a game seems very different from remaking a movie. I've got high hopes for RE4's upcoming remake. I can't imagine being excited for a remade movie barring some reason to think it will differ. The lion king is the weirdest remake of them all, being mostly shot for shot but with weird CGI.

Yeah a better point would be all the times they have re-released RE4.

Originally released for the gamecube and then ported to:

PS2, PC, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Mobile, PC again, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, VR

Are there any details on how different re4 remake will be from the original?

After hearing it announced I just kinda rolled my eyes since it's not all that old (maybe because playing it feels like yesterday) and a remake of an existing title. But then, to your point, remembered the re2 remake and thought, "eh they'll probably make re4 worthwhile/even better".

RE4 will be 18 years and 3+ console generations old when the remake comes out. It just feels like less because it's been re-released a ton in the intervening time, and because it was such a high point for the series it was still the main point of comparison for 5-Village.

Details are very light at this point. There was some noise about capcom moving heads around because they wanted to make sure it felt like it was doing things differently but who knows. There's a barebones teaser trailer that doesn't show anything unfamiliar at this point. I feel like they've been on a roll since revelations 2 / RE7 so I'm optimistic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ic2z3_xp0

The RE4 remake for Oculus is truly an amazing experience.

> What companies want however is recurring income.

You can't blame them for trying. Especially in Google's case, when they have more servers than they know what to do with. Why not offer customers something new? Freedom from expensive hardware purchases, and interesting capabilities like playing on a phone or in a browser.

That said, it's not a deal that interests me. Especially in Stadia's case when they were trying to make you pay full retail price for a game (are they still doing that?), creating an ever-present threat of losing everything when the service shuts down.

Not everyone, they get zero money on resold used games, a dorn in the eye of the gaming industry.

> Not everyone, they get zero money on resold used games

I'm not sure how to parse that. The people buying those used games _are_ paying for them; they're just not paying the original publisher. Just like they wouldn't for a used book, or cd, or whatever.

Also, in theory if everything is efficient, the publisher can still extract value from used game sales as that supports higher initial prices.

(Of course in practice platform owners are assholes and gamers are dumbasses so it's not even close to efficient.)

You parsed it just fine. Just like books, CDs or whatever, publishers don't like that. Hence you get frequent "revisions" of textbooks, online registration codes etc..

Relatedly reselling steam games or windows licenses have quite a few news stories to them.

To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect use case for timesharing.

Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility from because they have other interests besides playing video games all the time - why not switch the model to be using those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of the time if it saves money and hassle for everyone involved.

I haven't run the numbers on game consoles or PCs, but in my day job of machine learning it absolutely makes sense to buy expensive hardware. Even accounting for the costs of electricity, full time system administration and hardware depreciation.

AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows that startups don't want to get distracted by system administration and they're squeezing it like hell.

Not just startups, established companies as well. My employer (technically not itself large but a wholly owned subsidiary of a high-ranking Fortune 500 company) has been undergoing a long process of moving almost everything into the cloud and deprecating on-prem resources.

The way they've done this was almost comically silly at first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day, without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to how to control costs. At some point they decided this was too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though the cloud provider wasn't the problem.

Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I need a decent amount of compute for something ... it pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?) they've spent moving to "the cloud".

Right... but this is a thread about a video game running on a video game service running in a web browser?

Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price is increased to what the market will bear.

I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games on the browser.

I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of only paying for the timeshare of compute resources actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually increase due to fragmentation in the space.

For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own hardware my options are (basically):

1). Gaming PC

2). Xbox Series

3). Playstation 5

With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH):

1). Google Stadia

2). Microsoft xCloud

3). PlayStation Now

4). Amazon Luna

5). GeForce Now

6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g. Shadow)

7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic

8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along in the future

I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for competition.

Agreed.

But also we need to accept that this is also happening because software startups (SaaS or otherwise) are functioning more and more like predators than value providers these days.

At this point, it's not just the aggressive subscription/upselling models, but the various dark patterns in their design, the abusive immediate various newsletter subscriptions, the constant emailing, the popups, the little help widget thing at the bottom right corner of every startup that's there to supposedly help you, the hostile data collection, and many many other insulting and abusive patterns that's more or less a standard now.

And yes, FAANGs do this, but people are comfortable with the abuser they know and already are prey to than the one they don't.

There's nothing wrong with "the cloud", it's all the same tech behind the scenes whether you own it and run it or not, but it's the mercilessly hostile, incredibly ruthless and vicious attitude that these startups display that makes people not want to pay for them.

>That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the purse.

No, this is what happens when lazy developers prioritize their own convenience over what's best for everyone.

They want to write JS once and have it run everywhere, so we end up with abominations like wasm and node.

People are perfectly willing to pay for games, just look at Steam.

Stadia is running the actual game (which is probably a native binary generated from C++ code) on Google's servers, then streams the video/audio/input to/from the browser.

So, wasm is not an abomination but has a very interesting future which built upon many years of previous experiments.

Multiple languages including rust already compile directly to wasm. This would be your own best pro-wasm argument if you're such a js hater.

I had that in 2005, well after it should have been phased out. I got sick of it and just... installed Netbeans on my PowerPC MacBook Pro. My professor was shocked it was even possible.

For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices.

If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech?

There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often gets ridiculed because of how new the model is.

The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam or any other games store. Very few people have all their games on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates. The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap.

In reality, all you really need to backup for single player games are your save games because if you get banned, you can just download a cracked copy of the games you like.

> For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the only way they'll be able to play games on their devices.

Only way to play state of the art graphics-focused games at the limit of what personal computers can do, sure. But not the only way to play games period.

Laptops and even phones these days are quite powerful and can achieve a lot. Due to diminisshing returns with even more powerful hardware, the gap in graphical fidelity between what a top end PC can run and what a cheap laptop can run will only get smaller.

Similar to the web has evolved to eat RAM and CPU because of ever faster browsers and machines, games have become harder to run even for similar graphic fidelity. The close to the metal, often hacky, super complicated performance trickery that was necessary years ago isn't relevant anymore. Like the rest of modern software, improved base specs are allowing for more developer comfort at the cost of some performance, bringing out more features quicker rather than running simple games at incredible frame rates.

There are titles that will run on pretty much anything with a moderately powerful GPU (league of legends, rocket league) but you'll have a hard time running Cyberpunk on integrated GPUs, no matter how much you crank the settings down. On my laptop I've tried running Skyrim (the latest rerelease) on my 10th gen Intel integrated GPU and the results were choppy and nearly unplayable.

It all depends on the games you want to play and how well they've been designed to operate in restricted performance environments. For sure a laptop made five years from now will run current high-end titles at decent frame rates if you set them up right, but that doesn't solve the problems of wanting to play a game now, or wanting more than the minimum graphical spectacle at playable frame rates.

A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could run Windows, and that's the performance level many people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that.

Both AMD and Nvidia are still finding ways to squeeze more performance out of their chips and even Intel is joining in with competent dedicated GPUs from what the leaked specs seem to indicate.

> A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could run Windows, and that's the performance level many people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that.

Yeah, a $500 chromebook won't, but a $500 gaming laptop will. Gaming laptops are far cheaper and more capable than people expect. They just aren't super thin, are heavier, and they tend to need a beefy power supply. My laptop is like 4 years old or so, has a 2080RTX, and cost I think $800 at the time. It's been able to run everything I've thrown at it at max settings, save VR.

Including RE Village

A 2080 in a laptop for $800 must've been quite the deal, even with GPU prices dropping I can't find anything similar to that in price/performance ranges right now. Even right now the price for a new laptop with that chip in it seem at least 1.5x to 2x higher. $1200-$1500 seems to be the bare minimum for a laptop with that chip, and the cheaper ones tend to come with worse cooling and power caps that will significantly hinder its performance. Are you sure you're not forgetting a 1 in front of that 800 dollar price tag?

I can't find any new laptops with dedicated graphics for $500. You can find laptops with an AMD 5500U for that price, but I doubt you'll be playing RE Village on that.

Not advocating for this laptop in any form, and I would encourage waiting for good sales, but first result on amazon looking for an RTX laptop gives https://www.amazon.com/Acer-AN515-55-53E5-i5-10300H-GeForce-...

$749 for an RTX3050. probably fine for pretty much everything but vr

It'll depend on the types of games you play, but the 2080 will blow the 3050 out of the water, it's no close comparison. Nvidia's budget spec GPUs, especially for laptops, isn't as impressive as the similarity to its bigger siblings might suggest. You can probably play plenty of games on it, but they definitely won't be as smooth and beautiful as playing games through streaming services.

The extra $250 spend on a laptop puts it at 1.5x the price of a decent 500 dollar Chromebook. That's over two years worth of Stadia subscription at the current price.

I realize I'm adopting the language of trolling here, but a laptop 3050 is basically trash tier. I can't imagine playing more graphically intensive games on it; I doubt it could get 30fps on something like Cyberpunk even with settings on low.

I have seen a laptop with a 3060 for $800, but it's rare. A laptop that can actually play AAA games at decent frame rates will run you $1k or more.

Setting the bar as Cyberpunk is pretty hyperbolic. It's the most demanding game in existence that I know of right now.

Regardless of much 3D API hate Apple gets around here, small reminder that game consoles never cared for Khronos APIs either, any junior engine dev is quite capable to write a pluggable 3D engine, and it isn't even what is more relevant on a full blown game engine.

There's a difference between consoles and macOS, though. Anyone buying a console is in the market for games, but the same cannot be said about anyone buying a Mac. It's worth dealing with the proprietary API for PlayStation because the PS5 can sell games at huge quantities, and with DirectX you not only get the Xbox market, you get the PC market practically for free. You'll need to do some fine tuning to get PC levels of compatibility, but that's less work than writing against an entirely different graphics API.

Mac users generally don't tend to game on Mac. This also means there are fewer experts on writing game engines for metal than there are for alternative platforms. I don't see why that would change any time soon, and that's why I don't think programming for Metal will be worth the extra effort and cost.

I definitely believe that this can be done. It all boils down to drawing triangles real quick and Metal is just a new way of specifying how to make those triangles appear. I just think it's economically unfeasible to invest much time into Mac gaming.

I think it's much easier and probably cheaper to just throw the game on Stadia/GeForce Now to reach Mac/ChromeOS/Android gamers. All they need is a browser and a decent internet connection.

I don't disagree with you generally about developers making native macOS games, but "all they need is [...] a decent internet connection" gets dicy. My purportedly 400mbps connection doesn't do a stunning job at cloud gaming, and most people (around here anyway) don't even have that. Add in the fact that almost all devices to be used for cloud gaming connect via wifi and the experience has the potential to be less than superb.

I don't really see that changing in the very near future, which makes me think that the jump to cloud gaming won't be as quick as some companies want it to be. Whether this changes the calculus WRT making native macOS games I guess I can't say, but even without cloud gaming picking up the porting slack I don't expect to see much happening here unless Apple decides to throw a bunch of money around to make it so.

Games for iDevices aren't created out of thin air.

All relevant AAA tooling already do Metal for a while now.

As of Metal 3, Khronos APIs are now the only ones left without any kind of support for mesh shaders or optimized API for texture IO.

No worries, they will probably get a few more extensions to load per GPU vendor, making it no different than having a proper plugin infrastructure in place.

AAA publishers will 100% push for this as soon as it's technologically viable, even if it's a "worse experience".

It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.

Would be nice for someone to keep and publish a list of exclusives so we can track this.

Nah, it will never happen. Cloud gaming might become more popular, but will never fully replace local gaming.

First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full of GPUs 10ms away from every person.

And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more noticeable.

You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing each year.

People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are.

PC Gaming is a big initial investment for some people so making it more accesible will maybe also attract some of the mobile market who want to play AAA titles but dont want a console or a PC.

That being said I dont think we'll be saying goodbye to the desktop gaming PC anytime soon.

What did people say about mobile gaming?

But anyway it's probably minimal the amount of PC gamers that migrated to mobile gaming. And cloud gaming will probably be similar. In fact I think it's doing pretty poorly already in terms of adoption.

Remember I'm not arguing that cloud gaming will never become popular. I'm arguing that we shouldn't worry about gaming becoming cloud only.

Mobile gaming is ultimately nothing like PC gaming. It's become a weird offshot of monetization and different mechanics. Very very few games are the same between the two and I double that anyone who plays PC games would be satisfied with mobile as a replacement.

>People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we are.

... With whales subsiding the industry due to gambling addiction?

I for one expected mobile gaming to revitalize story-driven, turn-based traditional RPGs like 2d Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, etc...

Boy was I wrong :|

Not a new thing. SEGA had a service that let you play games through a coax cable for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel. It loaded everything into RAM and got deleted as soon as you reset the console.

Sooo, I take it you have 0 games purchased in your Steam account then?

Far easier to crack in the worst case of service shutdown. At least if you have downloaded the game. Of course also not an ideal solution.

You think people have their entire Stam lib on disk... at most they have 4-5 games.

Depends, I have a couble of TiB of Steam games installed right now but not my entire library. At least with Steam you have that option preserve the games and perhaps more importantly, pirates^Warchivists have the option to backup the game for those of us that did not have the foresight/care to do so. A potential future game that is streaming only will be gone for good once shut down.

I know 5 torrent sites I could go to right now and download the cracked versions of every single game I own, though. That would be impossible if the binaries never existed on my machine.

Not impossible ( as movies have shown ), but definitely a lot harder. Not to mention, cracked games deal with their own issues that make people like me hesitate ( malware and so on ).

There are significant fundemental differences between copying a video being streamed and a game being streamed. The former is just capturing the bits sent to the screen and doing some math, the latter is trying to reverse engineer code for an application when all you have access to is the UI. The only practical way to do the latter is to find an exploit in the game that gives you control over the server where the game is running.

So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder, and requires breaking more laws.

"So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder, and requires breaking more laws. "

This is not what I intended to mean ( although clearly I left too much to interpretation ). What I thought I was saying was 'Even if there is a perfect digital lock, there is always the human component.'

edit: laws part; i misread the comment

I have my entire Steam library installed to disc. Over 160 games. It’s less than two terabytes. I also have my entire PS4 library (purchased games only, since there’s no point in archiving F2P or PS+ games with always-on DRM) archived to a 2TB external drive.

I have a large steam library and it's all locally installed (and backed up) for precisely this reason.

while cracking is an option, legitimately purchased games on steam don't need to be cracked, offline mode is designed to work indefinitely - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/8649699535721...

Many steam games don't even have DRM to crack.

At least there you could crack it and keep it running if the service shuts down. But I agree, the dependence on Steam is concerning too.

I like how the OP and your account both created in 2018.

what does that tell you?

I think they are implying you two are the same person? I am not sure.

I'm with you, but I'm pretty impressed by this demo, too. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this concept took over gaming the same way F2P games did.

In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at least) a single instance of the server-side game platform available open source, or freely available. Even if the game itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd align incentives for that, though.

I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering, cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in the future.

What do you mean "in the future"? On Xbox One Series S/X, most games don't boot without internet check anymore and can't be modified or copied.

This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you see?

The difference is the scale of the effort required to preserve the game. For DRM (whose complexity and invasiveness remains limited by how much it is allowed ot impact performance) this a lot more feasible than for something where the code was never available to run locally at all and you would have to essentially recreate the entire thing from scratch.

In the case I mention, the game data doesn't even exist on disk anymore (just old, partial version). It needs to be pulled from the server and it's encrypted at rest.

I think it's scary in the conventional drm sense. You are correct that Google has not been known to support it's products sufficiently so it's far less likely that this will remain available than, say, a similar cloud streaming product from Microsoft.

I honestly think it's amazing for online games that don't work without an online service anyway.

EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in London is particular roles because they were more likely to lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command arrive" issue.)

For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better than installing their kernel mode anticheat.

Or they lose your saves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920

Sure, that fear was there since OnLive first demoed this technology a decade ago, but it still hasn't come true.

Stadia is just one service out of many, like Xbox, Playstation, GeForce, Luna, etc. Some of those operate off your existing libraries (Steam, Epic, etc.), others tie into publisher subscriptions (Uplay, EA).

Most games really aren't archival quality anyway. You play them for a few weeks/months and then forget about it, and maybe come back to it years later when it's either 10% of its original launch price or abandonware that can be easily pirated anyway. And for the games you really really want to keep forever, there's still GOG.com. But really, Steam does a much better job at keeping my games safe than I ever have.

When you think about it, the Web itself is similarly ephemeral. Most services are just subscriptions we use, dependent on the company that provides them. But they are still tremendously useful. Or Netflix, for that matter.

These online gaming services offer convenience and usability, which are way more important to most people than whether their purchases/rentals will still be there 20 years from now. It's just entertainment.

> Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff?

I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important in VR), but it would be perfect for me.

Basically what's going on on steam for years now.

I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine) on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam existed.

Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games.

On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.

Both GOG and humble bundle sell some DRM free games. I do dislike the push to DRMs and online platforms but at least there are still some alternatives and I try to only buy from DRM free sources.

Steam sells some DRM free games. Steam leaves the DRM question up to the developer\publisher of the game.

You can play loads of games on Linux, it's way easier than it has ever been. You just refuse to do so, on principle.

Eh, the expectation of going back to play games doesn't usually meet the reality. For the most part it's play for 1-2 months and then never pick it up again. Out of the couple dozen games I've bought on steam only 3 games really get significant repeat play. If that library went poof I'd only be out $50 or so. Compared with the cost of replacing a gaming computer it's insignificant.

I have a hard enough time actually finishing games, I rarely if ever go back to repeat them. The only games I've ever played more than once (IIRC) are Dead Space I & II and Hollow Knight.

I would be much more comfortable with their service if they offered the ability to migrate out purchases, though there would need to be limitations in place to prevent abuse.

I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service, but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.

You can already stream your current steam library from your home computer. It works best on LAN, but not limited to it.

There will always the mainstream consumer side and the open source side.

Am I scared? No.

And let's see if games are becoming only available through the cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc.

Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no bank around anymore ;)

yes, i agree. Its the same reason I still buy vinyl w/ music downloads and even 4k blu-rays of my favorite movies. Call me crazy, but I want the media in my possession!

It serves a niche but I hope it doesn’t become the standard for everyone.

Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.

Been buying games for cheap on Epic games store and playing them on Geforce Now in my browsers for 2 years now.

IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store in my browser.

"you'll own nothing and be happy"

!

No, it isn't scary. These are just additional options. Personally I prefer Geforce Now which lets me use my own Steam catalog versus buying specifically for a niche service, but people make their own choices.

Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand asset pile.

I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it years down the road.

> I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever.

Just because you don't care about preserving our culture does not make those that do hoarders or fear mongerers.

Don't purchase DRM'ed or hosted bits.

There's the solution.

I haven't bought software or games in years.

Telling people to just stop participating in society seems an extreme approach. Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society.

Laws for consumer protection seem a better time tested way of aligning consumer and companies goals.

> Playing games with friends use part of growing in current society.

Young people are broke where I live, they either pirate or just outright not have game consoles (most do not have consoles).,

They're managing just fine, they play stuff on their phones or hang out and talk and eat some ice cream, or have parties/get togethers.

Where did they say that? You can get lots of drm-free games and software. Going out of you way to do that is like only getting fairtrade whatever, a bit unusual and restrictive but hardly "stop participating in society".

Yeah, but my friends may not care. Unless I select my friends based on free software views or enforce my dogma on my friends, participating in society will often require compromises.

True that compromises of some sort are always necessary, but I think you folks are overstating the degree to which refraining from DRM would be tantamount to withdrawing from society. All sorts of people could in principle almost entirely limit themselves to DRM-free software and media with minimal withdrawal from society. You happen to have friends you want to play online games with, but my brother doesn't, and neither does my girlfriend, or other people I know.

There are other challenges (maybe they work with companies that require them to use Office 365), but they could limit their contact with SaaS or DRM in their personal lives. They won't -- they frankly have no particularly good reason to from their perspective -- but they could.

Sure, just like going for a non-fair coffee with friends.

> will often require compromises.

That is true for everything and hence an incredibly boring argument.

This is where I thought Stadia would shine - they could bring back game demos that are accessible through a link.

It's like the magazines with demo CDs times all over again, where I actually tried games instead of experiencing them through the eyes of a influencer.

Even better, imagine the opportunities this opens up. I could see a group of friends all playing the same first person game, taking turns directly from their own browsers. Or a streamer getting frustrated with a game, and letting one of their viewers take over to help them out.

Pretty cool possibilities.

It's better than that, for developers at least. Instead of having to provide a custom build for the demo, they can ship the full game to a service like Stadia, and then Stadia can enforce a time limit on that demo.

That seems like a very small value proposition. I doubt the reason we see many demos nowadays has to due with the burden of creating a custom build for the demo.

It's region locked to some countries:

   SORRY. CAN'T DELIVER.
   Which area can I play in?

   You can access this streaming demo from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary.

Those are the countries that Stadia is available in. [1]

You really need servers to be close by for game streaming to work.

[1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9566513?hl=en

Annoying for me (NZ) as well, but understandable. If they don't have servers close enough it'll be a bad experience.

So better not get bad press and directly deny access.

They really oughta alphabetize that list.

it's in order of importance

Still, should it not be sorted by "easiness to move in"? After all, if one is crazy enough to emigrate just to be able to play Stadia, that's probably the most relevant metric by which one would chose the destination country.

Also, there is something intrinsically hilarious about the denials of end-user service statements of "sorry, your IP address is in the blacklist; please consider changing your Internet provider and/or country of residence" kind.

It's not funny anymore. Countries are their own domains, with their own laws, including copyright laws, and each legal system has (mostly) decided what the Internet is and is not. Gone are the days of 1997 when the Internet was utterly lawless. (DMCA was 1998). Now, we're lucky ISPs don't charge long distance fees for accessing foreign websites.

What ranking of importance? Germany is twice as big as Canada, and is also bigger than France or Italy.

Ranked in order of importance for the international but still largely US-based company.

US, next to US; UK; list of countries in Europe.

Sort by shithole rank

Compared to the steamed games we saw back in the day (~2012) this is hugely impressive. Felt smooth and responsive enough on a mobile connection. In fact, it played better than in home steam streaming over wifi did.

Granted, I still hate the idea of not owning anything anymore, but technically this is very impressive. Kinda like a really well executed prank by a school bully.

I'm still unsure exactly who the market is for Stadia/streaming games.

People with a console/PC are going to just buy it outright. I could see it used by someone who travels a lot, but hotels aren't going to like the massive bandwidth hit, nor will mobile carriers. The most obvious candidate is people who cannot afford a console or PC, but having just played through this demo, the graphics look like last-gen consoles anyway. I'm sure there is a use-case for this somewhere, but I can't think of it.

For a very casual gamer like me, that likes to try a game or two once a year or so, Stadia is perfect. No need to buy (nor upgrade) consoles or other hardware. Works flawlessy on Mac and a Chrome browser. Or on TV with a Chromecast.

I'm also totally ok with the ephemeral nature because I'm just looking for a few hours of fun.

Really don't know if this niche is enough for keeping the lights on. I hope so but at the end, at least for Stadia, it's Google, so people should enjoy it while it lasts.

It's not that niche. I grew up playing games but got relegated to the casual gamer category because life brings other responsibilities and interests. I know that much of my friend circle is in the same boat as well.

Wouldn't it make more sense then to buy a console? If you only play a few times a year, it doesn't make sense to be paying a subscription. Sure, you could start/cancel it whenever you want, but you still have to buy the game you want to play on top of managing the subscription. And if the sub fee is cheap enough that you don't care about paying it every month, it would still be cheaper to buy a console, since that purchase will be good for many years. In that case, it'd only make sense if you specifically don't want to deal with having a physical console.

Also, starting/stopping the subscription to play a few games every now and then seems to be counter to Stadia's business model, so that type of customer is probably not who they're targeting.

Stadia "Pro" is something like the PlayStation "Plus" subscription - I think. Every month you get new free-to-play games, some discounts plus some perks like 4k and surround.

But that's totally optional, so you can just buy a title and play it whenever you want, without any running subscription.

Besides, even if a subscription was needed to play, maybe I'd still feel that as a better option than buying a physical console that is mostly gathering dust, also considering it will be obsolete within a few years.

But - again - this is from a very casual gamer POV. Once someone spends more time playing, and/or any fetishistic/collectible desire kicks in, then buying your own hardware makes much more sense.

Subscription is not needed. One can just purchase single titles.

AT&T, a mobile carrier, explicitly asked their customers to stream a game. They brought online a game from the Warner Brothers catalog just for that, using the same technology. So I am not sure of the bandwidth argument holds for all mobile carriers.

https://more.att.com/playnow/

Disclaimer: I work on Stadia.

Hilarious. The same company that aggressively caps their "unlimited" plan, and justifies it with the "limited bandwidth" argument encourages all of their customers to waste incredible amounts of bandwidth on an advertising scheme.

Just because they asked you doesn't mean it'll run well. What it will do well is burn through their data cap in a heartbeat so obviously they want this to happen.

The incentives here are great for AT&T right? If the push towards cloud gaming is successful they get to upcharge for bandwidth/bandwidth limits

as someone who travels a lot, i just keep my ps4 in a travel case. the whole gaming setup ends up being smaller than my laptop bag or work bag. ps5 looks less portable but ''''next gen'''' hardware like the switch & steam deck are both incredibly travel friendly.

>people who cannot afford a console or PC

used hardware tends to run incredibly cheap and i doubt someone who can't scratch up 150-300 dollars over the course of a few months has access to reliable high speed internet. the best use case i have found so far for game streaming is fishing in ff xiv while cooking dinner.

Right now, I am a little ambivalent on the market as well.

I think if you can get the latency situation more under control, then I see an opportunity for extremely high-end competitive gaming experiences to unfold. When your gameplay is streamed to you as x264, it becomes far more impractical to cheat at the game. If you never played a competitive shooter, the psychology of this may seem alien to you. There is a substantial impact on the amount of fun many players experience in high-stakes gaming situations when there is even the remotest sense that someone isn't playing by the rules.

> I think if you can get the latency situation more under control, then I see an opportunity for extremely high-end competitive gaming experiences to unfold

This is basically never going to happen. Really competitive gamers complain about the most minimal lags in response time that are to most eyes completely imperceptible, will crank down settings to get there, and pay for high-end equipment where necessary. On the other hand, streaming over my local network from my gaming PC to my phone introduces lag that's noticeable to me, very much a non-competitive gamer.

There's a hard limit to how much the lag can be reduced here. Unless it can be essentially eliminated through some kind of AI magic competitive gamers will care.

This person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31693294

There are many significant benefits to streaming games. There's enormous flexibility to streaming, and it strongly lends itself to massively multiplayer online games. Stadia's problem was that Google's management worked out a platform and pricing model that undermined all of the benefits and conferred none of the advantages.

There's certainly a use case for publishers to demo their games to prospective customers. Hell, google is probably quite capable of having you watch a game trailer on youtube and the last frame of the video transitioning to a playable demo.

Currently sitting in a hotel with 282/170 mbps internet connection. I've never streamed a game before, but the demo runs beautifully, better than you'd expect possible.

laptop users

Amusingly bad experience when compared with "local" copy. In Stadia it loads for ~3 minutes and then it fails with a "The game couldn't start, but try opening it again now."

With my PC copy, i'm playing in around 15 seconds.

I was playing in Chrome within about 30 seconds, with graphics looking better than my integrated-graphics-only Macbook can manage. It's quite impressive when it works.

I was impressed at first too, but after playing for 20 minutes, I hit multiple instances of lag and the slight delay in controls was annoying.

You're glossing over the 30 gig download and install.

If your internet connection is fast enough to use Stadia, downloading a 30gb game probably isn't a big deal.

Out of curiosity, I opened up Steam and downloaded the game to see how long it would take. I started the download at 12:36PM and it completed at 12:43PM, so it took ~7 minutes, with Steam reporting peak speeds of 83.2MB/s download (fast.com reported 960mbps before I started the download). I think the download might have even been limited by my hard drive since my Steam library is on a regular old HDD rather than an SSD.

You can stream games on a 25 Mbps connection if your latency is low enough. Now imagine downloading not a 30GB, but a 90GB game, and on this 25Mbps connection instead of your 960Mbps one.

I've seen this kind of issue with people who have a custom firewall setup. You probably need to configure your firewall to allow playing.

Then what the heck is that error message? I’d expect that error message from a junior developer.

It's not the kind of thing Google's internal metrics for job performance cares about. It's a generic/useless error message because there's no incentive for their developers to improve UX. It's probably been there since the first MVP they made.

Worked great for me on a Macbook. The game binary doesn't even run on macOS.

Of course it's shit

> The game had to close Sorry about that. Reopen the game to keep playing

(in reality it never opened)

You can also play Fortnite permanently free in Xbox Cloud (no Gamepass sub needed). Honestly it's pretty good as far streaming goes. https://www.xbox.com/play/games/fortnite/BT5P2X999VH2

This is a good demo for the game, but I personally wouldn't play it like this. I tried it on a 27 inch 1080p monitor, and it looked really bad. The compression artifacts were clearly visible in dark areas, and there was a lot of aliasing. I think it may have been running at sub-1080p with upscaling.

The camera felt sluggish, but tbf that's probably from the game itself. I own this game on Steam, but haven't played it in a while so I don't remember exactly how it feels.

For a high fidelity cinematic AAA game like this, the latency isn't a big deal, but the low quality visuals are hard to accept. The "load" time was also worse than launching my local copy. Sure, I didn't have to download it, but considering you need a pretty fast internet connection to use Stadia at all, you probably shouldn't have a hard time downloading the game anyways.

I don't have the greatest internet ever (50 down, 5 up I think?) but it's well within what they claim to be acceptable.

I hate everything about the idea of purchasing games that you can only stream, but when they were offloading free Stadia Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) to Google Play Music subscribers I grabbed one and committed myself to playing through a game entirely just to say I gave it a fair shot. I chose Superhot: Mind Control Delete which is a game where you go around a kill a bunch of mannequins that are trying to kill you, but time only moves forward when you do (meaning you can stand still and the game is nearly paused).

I managed to make it through the whole game, but there wasn't a single play session where I didn't have multiple spikes of lag, or a several seconds of frozen frames that take a bit to catch up. Thankfully because of the nature of the game I was able to just stop moving and I'd usually be safe by the time the game was working again, but it wasn't a good experience. If it was any other game that required constant twitch-reaction throughout the gameplay, those lag spikes wouldn't be acceptable.

Even if it works well 99.9999% of the time, that 0.0001% where it's not working is frustrating, and not something you have to deal with playing locally. The idea that someone else in your house could kick off a giant download that suddenly makes your game unplayable feels like we've regressed to the days of dial-up where your mom kicks you off the internet because she needs to make a phone call.

> compression artifacts

It's bad enough having to accept this from streaming services... Now video games as well? It's like we're going backwards.

I just ran a AAA title game at, let's call it 90% quality, on a laptop with an onboard intel GPU.

This is unequivocally moving forwards.

The whole cloud streaming games thing is weird to me. It seems to be something that only appeals to people who don't have any gaming devices at home. If I'm at home, where I have the best connection and it's okay to use, I have consoles and my desktop PC. If I'm not at home and I'm on my phone with a very good 5G connection (300Mbps) and fairly low latency, it feels awful. If I'm visiting a friend or at an office (in Germany), where I don't have any of my gaming devices, it's likely the internet there will be awfully slow too.

Any amount of jitter will ruin it, and mobile networks without jitter are hard to impossible. You can probably find an in between of these two extremes playing on WiFi.

Most services also recommend to be connected to Ethernet outright.

Some mobile networks are pretty low latency compared to old copper ones. LTE here has 14ms to one of my servers, while the wired connection has 22ms. Most of this is probably owed to more modern hardware.

Small amounts of jitter could be compensated for by adding some artificial latency, ad-hoc, when a connection with jitter is detected.

I have an ISP in the SF Bay Area (Monkeybrains) with very good throughput for the price (I get 700 up and down, static IP, no data cap for $35/mo), but Stadia / XCloud is basically unusable due to jitter since it uses a mesh microwave network.

I don't think I was having issues with jitter. It was just noticeable latency for inputs. If it had been a turn-based game, it would've been fine.

I suppose kids with parents that don't want to buy a whole console or devote the space could maybe fit into this category. Maybe Google expects gamers to be wowed away from console hardware? I don't really see it, though.

I mean it's super impressive but there is still a noticeable lag.

I don't fully get the vision behind it. GPUs - even mobile ones - can power these kind of graphics for comparable or less power consumption. And the future is even brighter with M1/M2 chips and progress in the like. But the lag issue to have server side rendered graphics will never be solved. As it's a physics constraint.

Maybe for a new kind of massive multiplayer games made possible by having everyone on server side graphics? But it doesn't seem to be the way these services try to work on.

It seems like Google really underestimates the experience of lag. It's a deal breaker for many gamers. Yes, this is a super impressive demo, but having your screen glitch and lag frequently is infuriating enough to quit.

The latency is only really an issue for twitchy shooters and action games. For a lot of titles it's low enough to be entirely usable, and is often times LESS laggy than trying to play the same game on a low-end computer.

Only high-end mobile GPUs can play recent AAA games. The average laptop still ships with integrated GPUs that don't really work very well, especially with hidpi resolutions that many now come with. Most computer users just aren't gamers, so it doesn't make sense to invest a dedicated GPU (especially when Xbox and Playstation offer similar graphics for MUCH cheaper).

But Stadia, GeForce Now, etc., let you play on any web browser with a reasonably fast connection (10 Mbps? sometimes less), doesn't heat up your laptop or drain the battery, doesn't require semi-annual hardware upgrades, etc.

M1 chips still can't really keep up with the latest games, especially at Retina resolutions. I tried many games and could not run most of them past 720p or so. Nevermind trying to play on a 4k or ultrawide screen. And on M1, you can't emulate Windows games and only precious few Mac titles were/will be ported to M1; the rest will be emulated through Rosetta. It's just a far more complex, and inferior, setup to a good streaming solution.

> I don't fully get the vision behind it. GPUs - even mobile ones - can power these kind of graphics for comparable or less power consumption. And the future is even brighter with M1/M2 chips and progress in the like.

From a cynical point-of-view, I actually kinda see the thinking. Aside from latency, this is actually a pretty good demo. If you look at games like gacha games and more recently Diablo Immortal as not video-games, but value extraction systems, getting it in the hands of as many people as possible is the thing you want. If you can deliver a compelling experience without needing the user to invest upfront in hardware, you can immediately start charging them and getting them in the funnel.

Honestly, the chip shortage is a pretty compelling argument for Stadia, on its own. The catch is that Stadia didn't invest heavily in GPU power, so it doesn't deliver quite the compelling vision that's needed to compete with latest generation GPUs. If Stadia was the equivalent of a datacenter of 3090 Ti cards though, I think it would've actually done quite well when GPUs were extraordinarily expensive for people who just wanted to play a couple hours of games every week.

The latency is so low that a lot of gamers don't notice it, which is low enough.

There's also a free demo on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541780/Resident_Evil_Vil...

Respectfully to all the devs that poured their soul into this tech. Maybe physics and reality just make this an impossibility.

I've played this game on a great PC and my PS5 and it looks incredibly good. Almost fake how good it is.

On this, it's blurry and makes my eyes hurt because it's like they are trying to compensate for being out of focus. I'm in a metro area, Miami, with a gigabit fiber connection. I'm the poster child for this service but it's not good.

Game streaming may just not be possible to do.

It is entirely possible to do, and even surpass the quality of a local Xbox Series X: https://youtu.be/oSMt43BOyeU

Stadia ports/limits games on top of underpowered hardware and limits the bitrate to ~44Mbit/s with a “4K” stream, ~30 with 1080p.

It was amazing 2 years ago or so, it’s quite far behind competing services like GeForce Now nowadays with double the bitrate, true 4K streaming, ray tracing, Steam/Epic support etc.

You were correct. Geforce Now feels like a generation ahead of Stadia oh my god.

It’s incredible, happy to spread the good word. Highly recommend the 3080 tier and playing with the GFN app streaming settings & any in-game visual settings as well, the default configs can be a little conservative!

You are missing a large segment. A lot of people don't care about things you care about. Most spend lots of time looking at a tiny screen and playing games there that have graphics quality of a 90s game.

That's the segment you could target with more interesting games.

I sometimes get bored at work, and want to do something different during lunch. This could be it. I sometimes open quakejs to play for fun. I can't install a 30G game onto my corp laptop...

Of course it doesn't seem to work on Firefox :(

Hey! It's not antitrust because Google is not a monopoly. Just go demo Resident Evil Village in your Firefox browser through a different provider. /s

Firefox should shut themselves down so Google can be sued.

I don't know about Stadia but changing your user-agent to Chrome with something like User-Agent Switcher makes Nvidia Geforce Now work on firefox.

It doesn't seem to load on both Firefox and Chrome so I'm not sure the browser is the problem. Their servers are probably overloaded.

It worked in Chrome for me, but not Firefox.

It doesn't seem to work in the latest version of Edge either, works for a few minutes and closes.

My experience was it not working in Firefox, but working in Edge.

Firefox itself is a failure and it is not early days. We've given it enough time to be better than Chrome and it is still declining.

You mean web standards are a failure, because Google keeps creating products that only work in Google Chrome.

I see. It's something else's fault. Mozilla Firefox had more market share than the declining IE and the opportunity to get further ahead at one point and it still lost. Even the CEO was confident in competing against Google if they were to release their own browser at the time and believed that they would not be >80% dependent on the companies revenue. [0]

The inability to recognise responsibility of past failures is perhaps the reason why Firefox has failed and the parent Mozilla is still totally reliant on Google's money.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

When Google develops a product (Stadia) and does not adhere to web standards in developing that product, I do not know who else to blame for Stadia not working on browsers that support web standards, which was the criticism here.

If only it was just google that equated the web with Chrome :|

Very impressive! The one-click demo works like a dream compared to the old PC Gamer demo disk. I did have some stuttering and one moment where my character kept walking for a second after I let go of the button, but not a deal breaker for a demo.

The biggest technical problem I saw is that right clicks aren't fully captured (I'm using Safari 15 on Catalina) and they open a context menu over the game.

If I were to keep playing this game, it wouldn't be through Stadia, for the reasons listed above. But I am much more likely to buy a copy for my PS5 than I was before. Good Job, Capcom Marketing Team!

It’s geoblocked. At least they tell you where to go. But the dream of a border less internet seemed a lot closer in the 90s than today

> SORRY. CAN'T DELIVER.

> Which area can I play in? You can access this streaming demo from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary.

It is due to the location of the servers. Outside of these regions there are no local servers so the lag would be unfavourable.

Money ruins everything.

"Connecting" for minutes, with no visible progression feedback, then "Loading" for minutes, with no visible progression feedback.

Exactly what I expected.

Honestly, playable.

1. Input lag for this doesn't matter 2. Lower resolution hides the lower texture fidelity as well

Clearly though very game dependent.

I tried the initial walkabout segment in 720p, IMO the image quality was decent but the lag was quite jarring. This is especially true since this is a first-person title and the screen was taking time to react to my mouse moments. You could probably get used to it but I would not find this enjoyable especially once you begin combat segments.

This is on DSL with around 7ms to a major city exchange (there is Google infra there but not sure if it has Stadia servers). Likely performance will be improved if you are on fiber and are in the same city as the game server.

To you it doesn't matter, sure.

I meant "for this game" - RE is not reaction based.

It may not "matter" per se because it's not a MP shooter, but input lag of any kind feels sluggish and bad to play.

I think the situation is not so black and white. I've not used Stadia before, but I played a lot of God of War streamed from my gaming PC to my phone using a controller accessory. In GoW I essentially didn't notice any lag after a few moments. But in other games that are more reaction-based I absolutely did notice, and that never got better. So it does seem to depend on what kind of game you're playing and how much lag there actually is ... I'm sure I would've noticed 200ms of lag, but 15-30ms? Not really.

That said, I don't know how much lag there is using Stadia (I launched the demo here but didn't play beyond seeing that it worked). Maybe the lag from streaming over the internet is too large for good experiences in general.

"of any kind" is not really true. My old large LCD TV had terrible input lag, but your brain eventually adjusts. I eventually replaced it with a quality large LCD TV because the lag really mattered when combining controller + online play + fast FPS. Otherwise, I was able to beat all the Dark Souls with what I'd say is input lag equivalent to that demo.

How come Google hasn't shut down Stadia yet? Serious question, no rant. Early adopter here. Service has a terrible pricing model and business numbers since the start.

This might be what that looks like.

(1) Kill the subscription

(2) Immediate Priority: Biz-dev deals, make sure every major release's early demo is available on Stadia. Expose people to platform without requiring them to switch from a console.

(3) Secondary Priority: Focus SDK development on indie developers. Offer generous streamed minutes for all developer accounts. Charge per streamed minute after that. Let developers pass on the cost however they want.

With open pricing, open enrollment, open SDK, developers could do really amazing things with Stadia: and would figure out the business model.

Google could focus on driving down the cost per streamed minute as low as humanly possible, with the broadest possible access.

Amazon certainly will.

> Focus SDK development on indie developers. Offer generous streamed minutes for all developer accounts. Charge per streamed minute after that.

This would be horrible for everyone involved. First you're focusing on games that wouldn't need the high-end hardware in the datacenter to begin with, and second your revenue model incentivizes the worst possible mobile game style grind.

Google would burn through players as fast as possible most of whom would eventually turn to just playing on their iPad directly, developers would have to deal with yet another middleman, and players would get addicted to the shittiest games imaginable.

Maybe they believe the tech itself can play an important role in the future, perhaps in AR/VR so it's worth keeping stadia alive as a testing ground.

But most likely they're fully aware of the reputation Google has and they'd rather put stadia on life support for a few years.

SaaS is an efficient way to force ppl and companies to pay a monthly rent.

They will change file formats to work with only SaaS then slowly kill standalone apps.

But some of the SaaS mafia will not want to depend on the client software from google and will have to code their own. Chrome is google lock-in by complexity and size, SDK included.

Yep, this makes me feel very uncomfortable, this is a significant loss of control.

I've used Nvidia GeForce Now recently, and turned out that the lag issue can be pretty much mitigated by buying the 19.99$ subscription and switching to 120FPS. Games render at that framerate internally, and somehow it's much, much more responsive than the default 60FPS, even with V-Sync off. Highly recommend to anyone.

Pro: I couldn't tell that it wasn't native.

Con: On Linux, it pegged my CPU worse than native.

I guess this is more of a revenue-guarding technology than a practical one.

For people who care about truth and posterity, having a disconnected "final" copy is an indispensable testament--even for toys like video games. Without that, "creators" will make "adjustments"--for not-so-altruistic purposes--and act as though they had never expressed such things in the first place. The number of internet articles I have seen "disappeared" in the past 10 years is chilling. It is no comfort that technology has made real-time editing of history economical for interactive media as well.

I've been using Xbox Cloud for months on my Macbook, Android TV, and iPhone with an Xbox controller and it's been amazing. I never experience lag on my fiber connection.

I'm happy I didn't bother buying an Xbox. For everything else I have a remote Windows box on https://paperspace.com which even lets you stream VR games to my Oculus Quest via Parsec.

Stadia works fine but the Xbox is way more affordable, Stadia's 'pro' game selection is weak, while Xbox has had far more games with one single price and new ones come on multiple times a month.

Agreed - Microsoft's ability to stream anything that runs on XBox vs Stadia's Linux requirement means XBox Cloud's selection is miles ahead.

I have a powerful gaming PC, but use streaming as a console replacement for games not on PC. I've used Stadia and XBox for streaming and while I prefer Stadia's tech, I spend 99% of my time on XBox due to game library (particularly MLB the Show).

Oof. What a bad experience. The video quality is pretty bad for smaller details. And the latency while looking around is nauseating for me. All this while on a wired gigabit connection that is reported as excellent. Only games I see having a good experience is slow paced games were immediate feedback is not required. Think turn-based combat games, or card games.

One on hand I'm sad this technology still is unuseable after years of research. But on the other hand a future where everything is running remote on BigCo servers is very bleak.

Very cool. Script a bit awkward though judging by the intro - 'Daughter?... Oh yes my daughter who I have travelled to this remote village to find, now I remember.'

I tried Stadia and really wanted to like it but I cannot get over the input lag. I play a lot of FPS so it really matters. Even in this demo I feel my aim is way off because of the input lag. I also get motion sickness with this input lag.

I also experienced a good amount of motion sickness, likely attributed to the input lag but also due to the narrow field of view which I couldn't find an option to change.

When I played RE Village I used a trainer ("cheat software") to increase the FOV, because it was giving me motion sickness. And I have never in my entire life felt motion sickness when playing a game (and I play all the time).

Yea but there are virtually no cheaters on streamed games so might be a worthy tradeoff?

If I'm playing Risk of Rain 2 on Stadia, why do I want to restrict myself from modding?

Not every FPS is competitively multiplayer.

Well, I never really played any AA or AAA game, but even though it is janky and slow, barely playable really, I think it would help me to decide if I want to buy this game or not. Slightly better than watching playthrough on youtube.

I'm gaming using the excellent shadow tech service.

I have fiber, and playing nervous games like hades work great.

But I would not play lol, dota, falling guy or call of duty with it. The latency, no matter small, is a handicap when timing win or break a game.

It seemed to work well, but then my MacBook crashed for some reason.

I wonder how many of us got sidetracked into playing at work today.

>SORRY. CAN'T DELIVER.

Can I just say that I adore Jenglish? These silly translations have become less common though with better translation apps available.

Slightly off topic but:

It is in money’s interest to turn everything into service based model?

Read some news recently that, big corps are buying up houses shooting up their prices enough that common man can’t afford them.

I guess once the acquisition is large enough, they can force you to pay more money for shelter.

everybody loves to earn rent.

unplayable, the lag makes me dizzy, and the poor quality of the image is ugly and I have a 300mbit connexion.

dang, that is slick! (Apple M1 Macbook Air)

Crashed but the intro was responsive

Just played on my phone. Impressive.

is it me or the official stadia controller is not listed as an option in the controller section?

Impressive, but still not really playable on Safari on M1

Right-click in Safari brings up the context menu (so you must play in Chrome) but I'm not sure it's an M1 Safari thing.