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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#211

Post by ehsankia »

ubercore wrote: post #70
b_tterc_p wrote: post #39

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…

I'm not so sure. To play devil's advocate, this may make games cheaper even without ads. Developers want to not worry about disparate hardware, Google wants you in their ecosystem. Buying google devices, using google services, etc. Content creators want this for better interaction with fans.

I don't understand the arguments being made above.

Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.

Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#212

Post by markdog12 »

justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

> Lag was still a rare thing during my experience

Anything more specific than that, i.e. lag would occur every 10 mins on avg?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#213

Post by b_tterc_p »

jfindley wrote: post #101
b_tterc_p wrote: post #39

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…

I'm struggling to understand how fewer casual gamers buying consoles would impact indie developers. Could you expand on your point? Indie developers don't get a cut of console sales, but they do care about how many people buy/play their games, and if this widens the market it seems like it'd be a win for them to me.

Most indie games are short. If money is allocated to content producers based on play time, I would bet that most would earn less than a typical indie game purchase price per user.

That’s just speculation mind you. Things like Stardew Valley would probably do even better.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#214

Post by puzzle »

kllrnohj wrote: post #136
tcd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone copied Apple when they removed the headphone jack, whose to say consoles in the traditional sense will still be around in 20 years? Microsoft/Sony are NOT going to sit back and let Google win here. Expect replies from them (especially with Microsoft's Azure). The streaming services of gaming is coming.

> The streaming services of gaming is coming. It's already failed multiple times. OnLive tried & failed. Nvidia's has been in beta for years. Sony has one. Everyone in this area has tried this. Nobody has seen what could be described as "success", and the cost models so far have been ludicrous. Turns out renting Xeons and Radeon MI Instincts in a professionally staffed, maintained datacenter is way, way more expensiv…

Yeah, if you know where to look, they left clues about using MI25 hardware. (I haven't been an employee for years, this all unfolded afterwards and, ironically, it is just one search away.)

I'm sure they got bulk/promotional pricing from AMD, plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#215

Post by b_tterc_p »

ehsankia wrote: post #211
ubercore wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. To play devil's advocate, this may make games cheaper even without ads. Developers want to not worry about disparate hardware, Google wants you in their ecosystem. Buying google devices, using google services, etc. Content creators want this for better interaction with fans.

I don't understand the arguments being made above. Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones. Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.

I don’t think this is true. It assumes people are economically rational and trying to optimize fun per dollar. But people already should be valuing their time and yet they don’t. If developers must now guarantee players not just try their game but play it for x hours to make a profit, I don’t think they will be pushing for shorter better games.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#216

Post by gsich »

Scramblejams wrote: post #112
vvanders wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, ex networking+tools gamedev here and have almost the exact same thoughts. They haven't fundamentally solved the latency issue, 50-100ms of ping is brutal and the people who could be a target for this generally won't have a fiber internet connection. Network gameplay works via misdirection, predictable simulations and knowing how to converge a divergent state(including rewinding in time to re-play hittraces and th…

And when all the clients and the server are sitting in the same DC? Now you can program your clients and server like they’re all on a LAN. And now you can trust the client. (The client, not the inputs.) Those are huge reductions in complexity. This makes delivering good multiplayer easier, not harder. But I do agree that input/display latency is going to be a thing. Results may be highly variable and you’ll probably…

>And when all the clients and the server are sitting in the same DC?

But what do you do when they don't? This can happen in multiplayer games with low population or during "bad times".

You might have less trouble because latency is more predictable, but you still need the whole rewind stuff.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#217

Post by diminoten »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #203
diminoten wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you sky-is-falling this announcement? Where in their release did they say anything about per-MB or ad based business models? Did they say anything at all about personalized costs in general? No, they didn't, and every single thing you've suggested about their gaming platform is also true about every other streaming platform, and yet none, literally none , of those platforms have tried any of the things you're…

I mean, I’ll give you that nothing is confirmed, but nobody has made this work yet. It’s mostly tech testing, so current business models aren’t a good metric. I’m open to debate about how this could be priced, but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent. I would invite you to come up with an alternative business model for serving people who like…

> but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent.

Why are you this comfortable? Netflix, YouTube TV, Twitch, Sling, Amazon Prime Video -- basically all streaming services offer flat rates, not per-MB ones.

Further, all existing game library services tout unlimited gaming as a primary selling point! That's the primary reason you opt into Gamefly or Nvidia Shield, at least according to their own marketing.

And this offering is not for high-end gamers. It's taking the benefits high-end gamers get for their investment into their hardware, and making it available to the millions of more casual gamers. This isn't for high-end gamers, so creating a business model for them using Stadia makes no sense.

Finally, you're not thinking of this at the right layer if you're thinking in terms of things like s3, ec2, lambda, etc.. This is the product that's built on top of those, and the single price problem has been present for hundreds of years. It's a solved one, just ask any current MMO or hell, any clothing manufacturer. You're basically saying that an XL t-shirt is going to cost the same as a S t-shirt, despite tens of thousands of examples to the contrary.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#218

Post by kec »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #159
gsich wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google operates tiny little datacenters in every ISP POP in America. That is why the video I just watched on Youtube in Oakland came from some place 2ms away even though Google's nearest real datacenter is in Oregon.

How do you edge cache games though? Edge caching youtube requires a giant pile of hard drives, Edge caching games requires a giant pile of hard drives and a giant pile of compute power.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#219

Post by holoduke »

The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a real problem or issue. The average Joe doesn't need another subscription just to play some games. Having a console where you buy games is more than enough. I also silently hope that Google will fail hard with this one. Since they are the worst publisher on earth with absolutely no compassion towards its developers relationships.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#220

Post by eikenberry »

legohead wrote: post #66
jpambrun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew someone would mention those.. I have two since they launched. However, they don't do 4k or HDR and I still need the 95%-of-the-time idle 1,500$ graphics card.

the latency is also terrible. even with a single player platformer game I couldn't make do with it.

Were you using old wifi? I've only ever heard of latency issues when using wifi and then only when using older than N. Latency when using Ethernet is less than the HDMI latency on consoles.
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