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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#381

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

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

Pay-per-hour means developers have an incentive to build addictive games that keep you just engaged enough to keep playing for an extended time.

> 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.

Monthly subscriptions mean that the platform has to choose what games to include and promote based on what is most likely to make users find value in the platform—which means focussing on those with widest appeal, unless their recommender engine can get enough signal to reliably predict niche interest.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#382

Post by wmf »

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…

Or to look at it the other way, it's a Vega 64 with double RAM so Google probably pays $600 or less. Google doesn't pay enterprisey gouge pricing.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#383

Post by lgregg »

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…

What were the frame rates like? I tried cloud gaming once but the frames being transmitted were low quality at best on a 70 mbps download.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#384

Post by fixermark »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #286
mtgx wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What worries me is that I read about this being "Chrome-only". Google is not just trying to win in console gaming space here - it's trying to establish itself as the browser monopolist and it seems to be doing it without much subtlety.

And of course, only Google can build it's game service into it's own browser, and into it's own video sharing site, and into the Play Store. Stadia is Google utilizing multiple of it's existing monopolies to enter into a new space. It's also a major shot at Twitch, not just traditional game platforms like PlayStation and Xbox, since streamers will need to be streaming on YouTube to take advantage of things like Crowd…

What would stop someone from building a Stadia competitor as a Native Client app?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#385

Post by noir_lord »

fastball wrote: post #334
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course, only Google can build it's game service into it's own browser, and into it's own video sharing site, and into the Play Store. Stadia is Google utilizing multiple of it's existing monopolies to enter into a new space. It's also a major shot at Twitch, not just traditional game platforms like PlayStation and Xbox, since streamers will need to be streaming on YouTube to take advantage of things like Crowd…

There's a difference between having a monopoly and being the best product in the market.

I'm not sure, if you drive everyone else out the market then you are by elimination the best product in the market (since at that point you are the only product left).

Monopoly laws exist for a reason and hard experience and I'm of the opinion that a single large player having complete domination even if they also have technical superiority is something that probably should be broken up.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#386

Post by jedieaston »

badpun wrote: post #366
kllrnohj wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Since not everybody is playing at the same time, a single GPU will service multiple players (each of whom would require a console).

On the other hand, everyone on the east coast (therefore using east coast edge nodes) will be playing from 8-11 EST when the new Wolfenstein game comes out, so how is stuff rationed? Do you make people queue until there is a node close enough to them available? Do you sell the spare GPUs to people in GCP to use for their compute on off times to make up the cash? Do you make it $40 per month?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#387

Post by dymk »

petra wrote: post #228
holoduke wrote: post #219

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.

It does solve some problems for game developers, like with style transfer. And gamers go where the content is.

Style transfer is something game developers want? Do popular games typically run style-transfer ML models today?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#388

Post by buro9 »

In London where the fastest internet available to me at my address in zone 2 is 12mb highly contended in the evening.

This isn't for everyone, clearly a bet for the future. But this is why Google Fiber should have gone wider and international, or governments should pressure telcos to build speeds massively in excess of demand.

So much is held back by a really bad last mile.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#389

Post by gwern »

> 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.

This is a fascinating testament to the rate at which deep learning can run. If you think back to 2014-2016 (less than 5 years ago), one of the common things people said was that style transfer would be really cool to apply to video games or video, and then the middlebrow dismissal was 'style-transferring a single frame Gatys et al 2014 style takes a Titan hours so [simple math] shows we can't style transfer in realtime for decades, duh'.

But, GPUs got better. Deep learning got better. Style transfer got better. Now, here in 2019, realtime style transfer is not just old hat (Facebook launched a realtime style transfer video app for smartphones years ago), but Google is announcing a service to stream countless hours of style-transferred video games to potentially millions of players.

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