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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#121

Post by stillbourne »

bitpush wrote: post #26
stillbourne wrote: post #20

How many years until its canceled and our game libraries erased from all existence?

"Hey, I started this new workout routine". "LOL, how many weeks until you fail"?

https://gcemetery.co/

I've used most of these applications in the past and I'm pretty salty they died. So yeah. I don't have a lot of faith in google keeping services it doesn't find profitable, my guess is the cost of compute will exceed the profit from selling games/game streaming/whatever and then, yes, they will shut it down. Don't act like its not something they don't do or wouldn't do. It's certainly not like making fun of the fat kid at the gym. Or are we turning into hail corporate over here?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#122

Post by fixermark »

I'm concerned about how this will work for game libraries.

If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware target does not change.

Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine) of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built? And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more popular games?

This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-installed and run on my own new hardware.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#124

Post by ssully »

fileeditview wrote: post #94
ssully wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games). The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past wi…

F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.

While I am not a fan of many F2P games, their popularity and impact are undeniable.

The trap that you should avoid falling into is assuming that's the only way games can thrive. F2P games are huge and dominate the conversation, but I think indie games are the best they have ever been. My favorite game last year was Into The Breach, and by all accounts it sold well in the same market that Fortnite dominated in.

Games are evolving in weird ways, but it's in a multifacted and diverse way.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#125

Post by johnyzee »

Google is also launching a new Stadia Controller that [...] will work with the Stadia service by connecting directly through Wi-Fi to link it to a game session in the cloud. This will presumably help with latency and moving a game from one device to another.

Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?

Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout.

Sounds like another gimmick that nobody has ever, or will ever need. But "Machine Learning!"

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#126

Post by danso »

Thaxll wrote: post #25
sidcool wrote: post #11

The computer scientist in me is giddy with excitement. If it is as good as it sounds, we are in a new age of gaming. Kudos Google.

Problem is Google will never have high quality content from big publisher, it directly compete with their revenue so I'm not sure how they're going to get game on this platform.

Ubisoft's revenues are ~$2B. Google's is $130B+. Google already pays Apple $10B+ annually just to be the default search engine on iOS/macOS. You really think there's no room for negotiation here?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#127

Post by rasz »

Klathmon wrote: post #8
rc_hadoken wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).

I wouldn't be so sure. Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move where it happens. The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority). Sure…

Lets start by getting obvious out of the way - no such thing as competitive gaming on a gamepad. Then you have just encode/decode taking longer than some competitive players whole end-to-end latency.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#128

Post by jsgo »

gsich wrote: post #72
RIMR wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet speeds in North America have greatly increased since the OnLive launched. I suspect that Google will have better infrastructure than OnLive, and that their customers will have better Internet.

Speed is not the (main) problem. It's latency and jitter. With the last one especially bad on mobile networks. To get at most 1ms of additional delay you also need a datacenter every 300 km.

I used the precursor of Stadia, Project Stream. There were moments where the video went fuzzy, but for >95% of the time, it ran fantastic. My gaming PC setup is an i5/16GB RAM/GTX 1080 and it stutters more than the stream did (I assume that's on the CPU side). I'm sure Google has the compression algorithm chops to make this all work.

Unfortunately for me at least, what I want is more akin to a cloud VM where they can host my games and I stream them wherever, which this isn't it. I've already got games between Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc. I have zero interest in buying a game 2x just to be able to have more portable play.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#129

Post by fixermark »

snaky wrote: post #119
saberience wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful. This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency associated with playing on remote ser…

> people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data To have the data of every choice and move in every second of every game would be quite useful to calculate the model of the particular user with the level of accuracy barely existed before.

It'd be useful for game developers also.

Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release.

Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#130

Post by bryanlarsen »

Klathmon wrote: post #8
rc_hadoken wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).

I wouldn't be so sure. Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move where it happens. The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority). Sure…

Why wouldn't you be able to apply the same type of compensation for games like Super Smash Bros? The system (should) know what frame was being displayed when you press your button, and would use that to calculate whether it was a hit or not, rather than the current position.
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