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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#401

Post by stcredzero »

eanzenberg wrote: post #394
zarriak wrote: post #229

I 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…

What you smoking foo? >>The entire reason this is happening is because Google has successfully captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks. Care to share how this tidbit is true? >>The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of Windows 7…

> doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks.

Care to share how this tidbit is true?

Lots of filthy casuals just care that they can game. If they can, somehow, why shouldn't they buy the Chromebook? Hell, if that's what they had in school, they might have grown up to like precisely the genres of games that are easy to design around the lag.

Most legit gamers care about input lag

The majority of people don't notice 40ms roundtrip lag for most of the world seems pretty achievable to me.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#402

Post by daemonk »

I wonder how much of the gaming market consist of games that requires good latency.

I would be perfectly fine playing Civilization or turn based games on this infrastructure as sub-100ms latency probably isn't that big of a deal here. Perhaps google is going after that niche?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#403

Post by meruru »

Scramblejams wrote: post #315
meruru wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between this and Valve's push for gaming on Linux, another of Linux' Achilles heels is solved. What else is missing before the Linux desktop is adequate for pretty much everyone?

Developing a game that runs on Stadia and one that runs on the customer's local Linux box are probably going to be two different things, unfortunately. :-(

It's running on Linux servers and using Linux tech like Vulkan though. Getting a game to run well on Stadia will probably involve a lot of the same steps that are needed to make them run well on Linux natively.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#404

Post by b_tterc_p »

diminoten wrote: post #391
b_tterc_p wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of variable cost to stream music or video to a user is significantly less than the the variable cost to render high end graphics. The high end hardware costs money and depreciates. Why would it cost less to rent a gpu hour for generic purposes than it would to rent a gpu hour to play video games?

> The amount of variable cost to stream music or video to a user is significantly less than the the variable cost to render high end graphics. I don't agree. Anything is scalable.

... no, not everything is scalable, nor does everything benefit from economies of scale.

This does benefit from economies of scale, but it’s not something you can just solve with infrastructure and fixed cost. No matter how many computers you have, you’re still going to do multiple orders of magnitude more calculations to render high end games than stream a song. And you’re going to deal with difficult load balances because every twelve year old gets home from school at the same time (exaggeration but point stands). GPU time costs money.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#405

Post by programd »

on_and_off wrote: post #279
markdog12 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lag was still a rare thing during my experience Anything more specific than that, i.e. lag would occur every 10 mins on avg?

fwiw No lag at all on my end. I am in the USA, so I have a solid but not amazing connection. I should note that I have only played for half an hour because AssCreed was extremely boring. The tech itself was very solid in my experience. I tried to catch some streaming artifacts, like parts of the screen not updating or a visible lag, but I could not see anything. In a blind test, I doubt I would have been able to diff…

I'll second that. Standard Xfinity cable connection, decent PC, and wired ethernet to the router. Occasionally in the evening during prime time when I assume everybody in my building was watching Netflix the stream would kick into lower quality graphics, but would recover quickly. No control input lag that I could detect. I put about 30 hours into the game and enjoyed myself (Awsome environment design and a vast, vast map to explore. All that fighting is repetitive and tedious, but story mode and running around exploring, taking in the views and the history is quite fun).

In any event I think that if you are a casual gamer and want to get off the graphics card upgrade train every couple of years, then this is a no brainer. It probably would not be a good match for multiplayer shooters, but for solo games, even AAA titles, it's a great option.

My feedback was that if they paired up with Steam they'd have a killer product. They might still have a killer product if they convince all those developers on Steam to also put their games on this service.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#406

Post by kerng »

jedieaston wrote: post #376
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.

They specifically said they are looking into making the client browser/platform-agnostic, which they'll have to do anyway if they want it on iOS since you aren't allowed to run anything but the Safari engine for web browsers (of course, they could build a native client).

When they say agnostic it will mean proposing and implementing web standards that they push through and other browsers dont support yet and have to catch up on - look at all the browser extensions they came up at light speed. Like WebUSB, not to say that they had very serious security flaws also.

Google uses open standards and business practices to appear like the good guys, but make no mistake they are abusing their market power.

I mean when will you see ads of Stadia on the Google homepage? What happens when you will search for Assasins Creed in future? Oh, look we have it right here at Google, no need to leave our ad platform.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#407

Post by kerng »

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…

Google could show ads during the lags - that might help increase revenue numbers.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#408

Post by ajacksified »

fhood wrote: post #305
jdhn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some people, the grind is the main attraction, especially if it's well balanced. Look at Path of Exile, that's one hell of a grindy game and people absolutely adore it.

Is the grind an integral part of the gameplay, flow and pacing of the game? Fine. Is the grind a way to slow progression in order to make micro-payments more desirable? Fuck. That.

Or worse, a hybrid like Assassin's Creed Odyssey: a $60+ game that gets super grindy, but reminds you that you can opt into micro-payments to get a little experience or coin boost...

I really enjoyed it for the first 20 hours or so.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#409

Post by ajacksified »

013a wrote: post #395
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…

There's so much that this will hurt in the gaming industry. Some of my thoughts: 1. As subscription services take over, the upfront revenue game studios see will drop. This is just simple math: Xbox Game Pass costs $10/month, which means its the total cost of a AAA game over 6 months. In a traditional model, many gamers would expect to buy, lets say, 2 AAA games per year. In this new model, I can play as many as I wa…

You hit every single point I tried to make to my friend about half an hour ago. On one hand, I'm terrified that all of this will come to pass; on the other, if this is like any of Google's other projects, it's going to evaporate in two years anyways. Whatever happened to OnLive?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#410

Post by aylmao »

noir_lord wrote: post #385
fastball wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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).

I think this can be read in two ways:

1. You're the only product, therefore you're the best (and the worst too, at the same time I guess). In which case I want to point out you can be a monopoly without controlling 100% of the market. There are usually always smaller competitors around— you just happen to have a share large enough or the assets necessary to control what happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. De Beers, for example, was considered a monopoly when it controlled 90% of the world's diamond production.

2. You're the one that came on top in a market with other competitors. Therefore, you must be the best.

This is assuming the only way to eliminate players off the market is by being "better" than them, but that is sadly not the case. For example— in Mexico there's a monopoly over the telecommunications business, and part of the reason it happened and stayed that way was due to support from the federal government and political corruption. Microsoft has had monopolies over several software markets— not because they were "better", but because if a better product came to be, they'd either buy it or build one that was built-in to Windows. IE was pretty bad, in many ways worse than FF, but also came built-in.

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