Google Stadia

Damn. That would be a great implementation of it, because then you can get up and walk about instead of sitting in one spot for hours on end.

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I agree with this. Google’s profit is in vast majority from selling advertisement space. The more services they create, the more space they have to sell. And they will.

Yes. Go hiking in VR instead.

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Waiting for Quest. :sunglasses:

/OT

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IKR? It’s a good game design to have clear stopping points in the gameplay, but that can be extra incentive and actual help with time management. I have about 2 hours free, let’s play this game and do this work…
But I doubt it. Maybe they will straight up charge 5$ and that will halve their potential customer base right there…

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@wendell @kreestuh @ryan Join in :slight_smile: What you think of STADIA, Oh you trinity of Nerdy geekness…

Cool concept. What GameFly and Blockbuster should have done.

Don’t know if I’ll ever do it. I’m really picky about games. Lol at the 50,000 on steam when 48,982 of them are trash.

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That’s not true… It’s over 49 000

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The good ol’days.

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Good old Games. It’s a platform that sells DRM-free games.

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A lot of the selling points they made during the presentation are the same points they use to sell their current Google Cloud offerings. Google has an INSANE internal network with high bandwidth and very low latency once you connect to one of their hundreds of connection points. When you host a server or service on the Google Cloud these low latency connections between different data centers are what really set them above other cloud providers. No competitor has as large of an internal network available to end customers. Its like having a racing team and then slapping some drivers in them to do a taxi service in their spare time. Google has the infrastructure to handle many other kinds of tasks and gaming at its core is just hardware and software that is hosted locally on a console or your computer .

Imho the selling point in Stadia have two large benefits.

  1. Low Latency: Access to their cloud will be quick and close to most people thanks to their extensive Direct Peering with a lot of ISPs and their large distribution of datacenters… Once a player connects to one of their servers they will have a very low ping and fast connection the gaming servers hosted on their network because they ahve spent a lot of time building our their network. They have a ton of google only cabling between datacenters and even own their own undersea cables.
    image
    Providers like Geforce Now and Playstation Now and newcomers like Shadow do not have the same level of infrastructure or expertise.
  1. World Wide Multplayer: I rolled my eyes at the netflix for gaming bit and playing console games with streaming video is nothing new but when they talked about the multiplayer benefits of an internal cloud network they have a good point. With their low latency, high bandwidth connections and the ability to scale computer resources to handle very high demand spikes they could have larger player counts and more players in server instances then current games. The only caviat is that the games will need to be written for it. At the last google cloud demonstration I went to they showed how they could scale computer resources to a sql query that sorted through petabytes of data from hours down to a few seconds. They then demonstrated a portion of that live and it was damn impressive.

The cloud isn’t really great at replacing existing technologies but when things are written for the cloud then there is an opportunity for innovation and scaling that the average local service just can’t provide. If they spend their time trying to replace the existing gaming industry and trying to outsource our computers/consoles for existing games then this service will not succeed. They need to innovate newer, larger games that take advantage of the strengths of cloud technology.

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Game streaming… Oh boy!

I am writing this while waiting for a 480p YouTube video to buffer the next 3 minutes. The internet here is THAT shit at times. My connection is average in Germany, 15Mbit/s (at good times, often less). List of avg. Internet speeds by country

“But 5G” - NO! First of all, that is called LTE 5th Gen. Secondly, the local wireless towers, I talked to the techs once, are hooked up with 2.5G ethernet. The next upgrade will be in 2030 (yes, that is in 11 years).
Google claimed 8k@120, HDMI 2.1, wich is the fastest display connect we currently have, only manages 50FPS at 8k, that is at nearly 50Gbit/s, now you need twice that. I don’t know about you, but I do not own a QSFP28 network card, or router, or even have access to 100Gbit/s internet connection. I call BS


Input lag
I get 300% mad when the cursor hangs when working on a website heavy with Javascript on a slow machine. That is 50ms INPUT lag, not ROUNDTRIP lag!
Stadia will have 50 to 100ms input lag, then another 50ms while waiting for the reaction. With 150ms roundtrip time (mouse click to fireing), you loose me in the main menu and get me royally pissed of in the first 30 seconds of “gameplay”.

Steam in home streaming is 50ms roundtrip time in my network (like a console on a slow-ish TV), and that only works for slow paced or turn based games. Racing games? FPSs? Competetive MOBAs?


Image quality


Price
Even if Google tries really hard (like they did with Google+, haha), they need to make this free to the consumer. Lots of people apparantly do not care about beeing the product or getting stuffed with ads like a turkey.



Slighty off-topic:
“Millions of gamers do not have access to high-end GPUs” - Nvidia leather jacket guy, 2018
Yeah, guess what! People do not have money for $350 “mid-range” GPUs! And a gpu purchase is a one off! How do you imagine people getting >30Mbit/s internet connections, in my case I do not even have the chance to one because there is none!
The internet infrastructure of the world outside of datacenters is crumbling, old or non-existant.

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I know I wouldn’t.
Haven’t really enjoyed the console experience since PS2.

Agreed, I also think there’s a market to tap into here.

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Agree. X360 was though good imo.

I was watching someone play the Witcher 3 the other day. 8mbps 1080p 60fps the grass made the whole image look terrible quality. Id imagine to remove that you would have to triple the bandwidth which is 24mbps… funnily 25mbps is the recommended DL speed for 1080p on Stadia so it looks great.

How many people have 25mbps.
How many households have more than one person using the internet at once let alone smart devices phoning home.
How many people have ISP’s that traffic shape and limit speeds.
How many people have ISP data caps.
How many people are using legacy 2.4ghz G radio 54mbps wifi with bad network interference and latency.

if you play 25mbps and after 20mins you start to saturate your connection down to 8mbps your grass is ass. It’s a great idea and if anyone can do it Google can. On-live was really cool to experiment with just a giant wall of games that you jump straight into, but it was just hideously awful in application.

1080p The Witcher3: Wild Hunt being streamed in a dark area when my connection went under 5mbps…

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I tend to agree that of the billions of potential gamers stadia is aimed at. Most will have sub par internet for the service and those that have the speed. Many likely bought that to game on.

I can see the service a being geared towards kids. It will most likely have a lot of free enticements. Like the church does. Get them young and keep them for life.

It will mean a lot more normies and kids gaming. That is most likely healthy for the PC gaming market and people looking for more performance than online gives. I hope.

that is why i encourage games to give demos after launch. ( not a beta build demo) or just pirate the damn thing get the better offline experience IMHO. and if you like it then buy it and keep using pirate version for offline play to avoid DRM.
personally i will not touch Stadia with a 10 ft pole. no rights, big latency, ( more likely than not no mod support for games) and the biggest drawback no offline support. if all things go to streaming i will just play old games and be happy cuz in the end i am still wasting time.

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My 2 most favourite games ever are Patapon 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon 1, so yeah, I can live on old titles no problems :smiley:

Anyone watch how OnePlus used 5g earlier this year to stream a game that ran at or above 60fps? That’s the future. Google has it right with Stadia. If I can sit behind my PC and play a game and then continue playing it on the bus via my laptop through a hotspot on my phone then that’s good enough for me. I will always prefer Steam as a platform as without having the game on the device I’m playing it on I can’t mod it, but expect more and more services like Stadia. Consoles are going the same route… God forbid Nintendo ever does though

Edit: anyone remember OnLive? Used to use them to play Dirt 3s demo 6-7 years ago on my phone. For the most part, it worked really well. Too bad the service failed though.

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Except the wireless towers with those fancy LTE antennas are worthless when they are hooked up with shit internet. Welcome to my world…