Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think these things are not considered. There is an army of people at Google that try to figure out how to show us more relevant ads. It's the perfect scenario for upselling. Slow connection speed? Run these tests, etc. Or, switch to a faster more secure browser. Sound familiar?
HN is particularly Google friendly and criticizing usually gets downvotes. Google was just today fined 1.49 billion Euros for their ad strategy - this is reality: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228
Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
541–550 of 577 posts
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you've played the service ? It surely sucks when no reviews are out ? Look for people who have dogfooded and raved about it.
Unless they've solve the speed of light issue then we don't need to wait for reviews. Even using a remote desktop on the other side of the city isn't a pleasant thing to be doing full time and that's not remotely as twitch based as gaming.
Google Cloud has regional US DCs in western Iowa and central South Carolina. A midpoint between those two locations roughly lands on Nashville TN, which is ~600 miles away from either. Light could make a roundtrip of that distance in 6ms. Of course, the internet doesn't allow for latency at the speed of light, but that's the physical limit, and that's plenty; a typical internet browser alone has input lag of 10ms [1]. In order to achieve 60fps, frames have 16ms to be rendered.
But the regional DC is only the worst-case, because they've said they're deploying these things in 7500 locations around the world. That's unprecedented scale for a tier 1 cloud provider at the edge. They know that they have to be close to consumer populations.
Also consider this: Once cloud streaming takes off, we're going to see deeper integration into the frameworks and game engines themselves. Imagine a game engine which is built for streaming. It could do input prediction, doing a "light rendering pass" of frames for N possible inputs the input buffer might receive on the next frame, before it receives them. These custom chips they use have plenty of headroom to do this at 1080p, and most controllers have, what, 12 buttons + all of the joystick states? Depending on the game this might be possible (example, hard to do in multiplayer). Combine that with the natural advantage a cloud-hosted multiplayer game would have in networking with other clients to resolve game-state, and you can see that its not just a strict downgrade; it might be possible that we'll see improvements in the performance of games beyond just the typical "new year better graphics" cycle.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
i tried this and found it to be pretty satisfying. i played entirely on a macbook while traveling during my winter vacation. It worked surprisingly well even with mixed wifi, i would compare it to the experience you get from using PS4 Remote Play or Steam Link over ethernet. The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're cir…
I guess my question is; how would something like this scale ? With Netflix and Spotify, the media is the same every time you play it, and even stuff like the Black Mirror CYOA have a limited number of combinations, so it's very easy to cache. Every game has an extremely high number of potential combinations and outcomes, so it's effectively uncacheable. Fan that out to Steam level popularity and diversity of games an…
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm pretty sure you won't buy them (again). You will rent them. Anything but subscription-based pricing model for Google Stadia would be a surprise to me.
It'll probably be a mix of pay-once games, lots-of-games-for-a-subscription, and pay-once, play-until-Google-shuts-the-service-down games.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you've played the service ? It surely sucks when no reviews are out ? Look for people who have dogfooded and raved about it.
Unless they've solve the speed of light issue then we don't need to wait for reviews. Even using a remote desktop on the other side of the city isn't a pleasant thing to be doing full time and that's not remotely as twitch based as gaming.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh okay, in that case there's no real example you've given for the cost, so $30 may or may not be the cost, but considering a high-end rig approaches $3k and is relevant for 5 years, $30 is a great deal, especially if you get access to a large game library, which is what's happening. Origin isn't relevant to this conversation.
Er... What? $15/month for a streaming service + $15/month for game access service equals, drum roll, $30/month. What are you not getting here? Origin is relevant as a reference point for what the games themselves cost on a subscription. Stadia still needs to actually pay for games, after all. Either as a subscription (reference origin's pricing), or you straight up buy them at the normal $60/pop.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#547Earlier 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…
What about on a plane? I get quite a bit switch play in on flights.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
... 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…
This benefits massively from economies of scale, and yes it is very much something you can solve with infrastructure and fixed cost. Fundamentally it doesn't matter if you're streaming a song or streaming a game. GPU time costs money but it's a fixed cost, doesn't matter what the GPU time is being used for, therefore it won't be per-game. The end.
For similar reasons, you’re not just going to rake in the money mining bitcoin because you bought a bunch of computers.
Or maybe to make the point even stupider, you could make a game about training neural networks same as you would on a real cloud service provider. If you can understand why google doesn’t charge a simple monthly flat fee for cloud computing of neural nets, you can understand why they can’t charge a simple monthly fee for computing neural nets in a game.
Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
#549Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical. Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play). Heck, even streaming in your local network i…
Agreed. Enthusiast gamers fret/obsess over a small difference in FPS, refresh rate and lag especially when it comes to competitive gaming. Until Google can deliver a service that is indistinguishable, it’s DOA in my view.
It's a niche market overall, and each is a different segment you can target independently.