Ask HN: What do you think of the Google Stadia?

Netflix streaming actually has a huge latency, it buffers several seconds of the video before actually starting playback, that buffer is what makes it seem like the video is "smooth as silk" as it has time to wait for slow packs and to re-request dropped ones.

This is very exciting, as it opens up a lot of opportunities.

Firstly, gaming hardware is expensive, especially if you want the latest stuff. My desktop computer is quite powerful, but I haven't had time to turn it on even once these past couple weeks. Making a big pool of hardware available to anyone on a time-sharing or seat-sharing basis makes gaming a lot more affordable. Of course, this only scales to hardware, not licenses. This is a big plus for just about everything, from environmental consideration to GPU demand. Except maybe investment in consumer-oriented hardware.

Then, there are the new possibilities offered by both, more powerful hardware, and centralized servers. As well as anti-cheat measures, and new financial models that can be explored. Bigger servers, fair latency, better splitscreen, etc. Are just a couple.

Since it runs on Linux+Vulkan, this combination will get a lot of favourable treatment over the next months, which might mean more native games, and at the very least better engine support for those open technologies (which is great for future-proofing, portability, etc).

AMD will likely benefit a lot from this, and virtualisation tech can be improved further as a byproduct.

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On the other hand, it comes with a lot of disadvantages, and endangers the status quo:

Dematerialization is very dangerous for game preservation: cloud-exclusive games or features, games that can no longer be played after the license expired, or they became unprofitable to maintain, etc. This is a very powerful form of DRM.

Modding community will also likely suffer from this, as there is no way to modify a game that runs on a remote server (ideally).

Of course, you will need a decent internet connection to play.

This will increase user monetization (and tracking). I am afraid that with google's reach, we could see a lot of Stadia exclusives.

And of course, Google gets to say what's allowed on their platform and what's not.

Gaming might actually be one of the reasons why we still regularly see powerful computers around us, and not just smartphones/tablets/mass consumption devices. It's a limiting factor in the migration to an "all-cloud" life, anyway. So google wins on every front with this move, and could see the "desktop marketshare" start dipping again, and/or make powerful hardware harder to come by for a consumer.

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On the bright side, VR might be the redeeming actor, as Stadia will never be able to play those games, which will maintain a baseline of Gamer PCs and traditional game publishing. On a less bright take, it looks like VR is going to be mostly used in professional environments in the next few years, and might end up confined in VR arcades.

For now, I personally think the possible drawbacks outweigh the advantages, and will refrain from using it. I think it would globally beneficial if it finds itself a niche, with no exclusives. I would even be willing to pay for that. But the prospect of another Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics is way to dangerous, so I would try not to add myself to the number of customers they can leverage.

As an aside, I would really like to be able to share my untapped computing power within my circles, and have my friends do so as well. We would likely need far less powerful hardware if we could pool this together, as a federated cloud. I guess the blocker here is trust, and algorithms to distribute workloads. Working on idempotent encryption algorithms and proof-of-work-like verifiable computing (check that the output is a valid compilation result, without recompiling ought to be doable) could alleviate some of the trust issues, and the second part will likely come naturally anyway.

These are great points. My two cents: I think there's potentially a lot more behind this product than just the face value of game streaming. Amazon is growing their compute power with aws, and other people are paying for this. Google needs something similar to grow their compute resources, and to lower risk by also having others pay for it. It's an arms race for compute power. With stadia Google will have an advantage over Amazon in gpu resources. Amazon could grow gpu resources by getting into the video rendering business with massive shows like Lord of The Rings to finance it. The other big win for Google imo is having this be a passion project for good engineers to pour their energy into

I'd disagree that AAA has to do with mass appeal, as the industry uses that term to distinguish games in terms of development and marketing budgeting, not target audience. Many AAA games are specifically targeted at only the hardcore "gamer" demographic, because while that's a smaller group they are usually willing to pay much more for a game then a casual gamer will. I would of course agree that AAA can be targeted at, and appeal to, a much larger and somewhat more casual demographics as well.

My point was less about demographic and more about the network-latency concerns for specific common game-types. You cite correctly that they want to commoditize high performance hardware for a mass market, and note games like Halo/COD/Fortnight seem to have a very broad appeal. My question then becomes, can their solution commoditize high performance for the masses for these kinds of games? I'm curious to see how their solutions pan out, but there are a lot of road-blocks to achieving their goals. Graphical quality is only part of what qualifies as high performance in a game. In any FPS games like these game-play/graphical latency is a huge issue for play-ability. Developers go as far to take specific monitor hardware into consideration to shave down the latency. Stadia effectively adds a network loop connection between the keyboard and screen -- that's A LOT of a extra latency. Also, if this is going to target the mass market, then it has to work for the mass market and I think (in the US at least) there is going to be a large percentage of the population who's internet will lack either the necessary bandwidth, or network latency to Stadia's servers, in order to achieve a playable/desirable experience.

to me, AAA is budget, and for the most part, you get budget by delivering sales. As a series goes on, they expect more sales, or budget gets cut.

Can you think of a AAA, "hardcore gamer only" game that is significantly more expensive, precisely because they know sales will be lower?

Latency can be fixed by moving the processing closer to the edge, like a CDN. Cloudflare and Netflix have boxes everywhere, google just needs to pop some mammoth consoles colocated inside isp data centers, and group people together connected to the same console. They can get there with 5G faster than itll make sense to keep adding gfx power to phones (battery life.)

Google is looking towards the future, where half the population lives in a city with cheap 5G.