My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world. Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the infra, and extra capacity could be sold off to GCloud customers.
Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
341–350 of 577 posts
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#342I sometimes casually play Fortnite over nVidia Geforce Now via xDSL over wifi.
And while i do entertain myself lag is hindering overall experience, at least in FPS games.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#343I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser. The entire reason this is happening i…
An alternative explanation might be that it's a buffer for overprovisioned GPUs for an undersold Cloud service
It could also be a way for AMD to get a ton of GPUs sold after oversupply due to the mining boom/bust.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can already stream to a mobile device over 4G now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykFQW6Jtc0A The quality of this is only likely to improve with 5G coming in the next year or so. This technology consolidating in the hands of only two companies implies there aren't going to be any competitors. Nvidia is already establishing a foothold in this space, and I imagine AMD will also do so eventually. If the technology…
It's dystopian in the sense that nothing is actually owned anymore. I grew up collecting games and still collect them now, and for a ton of people (the average gamer is in their mid-30s, and that's a massive demographic) still likes to collect their games. They like a shelf of titles. Heck, even those who buy digital have little digital collections, and more power to 'em. But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming…
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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#345I 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…
How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind support, such that network stutter could be translated to micro-rewinds of the game's VM; and even that wouldn't work if the game was multiplayer.
I could see games being able to signal "there is no input during this cutscene, so it can be buffered at the client." But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#346I 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…
It’s the same experience in all other forerunners in the field.
In essence, you need a fat cable to a datacenter very nearby for shooters/fast action games.
Regular wi-fi is more or less sufficient for everything less (you might get video degradation from time to time).
OnLive was the first and it was just insanely awesome. Too bad it was shattered.
I also tried LiquidSky, and it was insanely awesome. At one point you ended up having a virtual PC where you could install and play any game from your Steam library. Too bad they’ve changed the service and monetisation a few times, and it’s unclear if yhey are alive.
Haven’t tried others.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life. Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
It's less about them killing products and more about them following the same frustrating sequence of steps (for products that people actually liked): 1. Release a product, make it decently good. 2. Kill it in a few years after it has gotten widely adopted. 3. Release an alternative product that does the same thing, but, a lot of times, worse than the original and/or with missing functionality from the old one that pe…
From developers point of view each Android release feels like a platform reboot.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#348My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world. Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the infra, and extra capacity could be sold…
I like this thought, but if google can't build edge nodes because of:
- GCP - AdSense - Gmail - Internal CDN Needs
Then I don't think that Stadia would be a big push for doing so.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#349So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.
With new consoles in 2020 and a stronger push from Microsoft for cloud gaming, I'd say 2022.
Cloud gaming needs a killer multiplayer game that requires massive parallel compute (thus it can't be run locally) to make a case for sticking around.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#350And the games will run on Linux using Vulkan. I find that pretty awesome.
Looks like Fuchsia is a year years too late to be used for this, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to switch it out later on. Still a great thing for Linux and Vulkan. Too bad Sony refuses to support them on its PS consoles.
Just like with OpenGL, Vulkan is not like Vulkan.
Plenty of extensions to choose from.