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"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

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Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#51

Post by perennate »

gambiting wrote: post #33
perennate wrote: post #22

With smaller devices like laptops and netbooks (along with smartphones) becoming increasingly popular, Stadia caters to people who don't want to invest in a second device just for gaming. I know several people who only own a laptop and are interested in this service; I'm sure the market is there. The main challenge, though, is that they are late to the competition -- NVIDIA GeForce NOW seems much more mature (the afo…

The biggest advantage that GeForce NOW has is that it just runs regular PC executables. Games for Stadia need to be compiled specifically for Stadia, and I have no idea why developers would spend the time and money building yet another version of their games, unless Stadia turns out to be incredibly popular or Google throws a lot of money at them.

Wow, I didn't know that. I thought it'd be like GeForce NOW, and somehow let you play your Steam games from your computer in Chrome. Starting to agree with the author, I no longer get what the point of Stadia is.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#53

Post by ansible »

nerdjon wrote: post #9
ryandvm wrote: post #6

Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine. Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so... here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years. That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The upshot of c…

Stadia is unique though that there are people buying digital games locked to the platform. So its entirely possible when the inevitably kill it those games could just be lost. So I hope for the people's sake that buy into it that Google won't shut it down (or at least have a way to add your purchases to steam or something), but its a different risk this time.

There have been exclusives for other platforms that have eventually made their way to the PC ecosystem. I just saw Halo Reach advertised for the PC. I played the heck out of it when it came out, so I don't have a desire to buy it again, but it is nice to see it.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#54

Post by bobviolier »

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #36

I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense. I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the ch…

Yeah this ^

I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. That might have been due to Google promoting it as such of course (and asking the price for it).

What I also see happening is that as soon as they have a free tier, people are gonna try to play a game for 5 minutes because they saw something on Youtube or somewhere else and then 1 in X will just buy the game on Stadia.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#55

Post by ben_jones »

ryandvm wrote: post #6

Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine. Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so... here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years. That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The upshot of c…

Stadia is marketing the platform as if the technology is rock solid and reliable when there are a lot of indicators that it may not be. If it was marketed for what it is, I'd probably be rooting for it. But my gut says this is going to disappoint a lot of kids and college students who are attracted to the bottom barrel pricing. Also if game studios buy in and build key infrastructure and it disappears, a lot of human hours are going to evaporate into oblivion.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#56

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #35
eternalny1 wrote: post #14

Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is how we will be gaming. Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no brainer. Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS? No…

If bandwidth is good enough to handle 4K 60 FPS game streaming, downloading or patching a 150 GB game will be breezy enough it won't bother you much anyways. Bear in mind, the Washington Post reviewer who was showing how bad Stadia was on the office's gigabit connection was speedtesting at 291 Mbps down at the time.

That still doesn't cover the cost of a high-end gaming machine. GPU alone can be north of $1k. Imagine not having to re-buy all those components every 2-3 years.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#57

Post by Drew_ »

Causality1 wrote: post #29
eternalny1 wrote: post #14

Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is how we will be gaming. Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no brainer. Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS? No…

Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.

You are severely underestimating Google's infrastructure if you think the latency to your nearest datacenter is going to be 500 ms.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#58

Post by danShumway »

Somewhat of an aside, but I see mcc come up on Hackernews fairly often, and whenever that happens I usually find myself enjoying her technical commentary a lot -- even when I disagree with it.

In this case, I think the analysis is pretty spot-on.

I can think of a world where Stadia is solving real problems and presenting a really attractive use-case. I don't think that's the world we live in.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#59

Post by Jonnax »

Despegar wrote: post #4

I think it exists because they've got plenty of infrastructure assets all around the world because of GCP (and are investing in more) and they're probably trying to dream up ideas to drive up utilization and gain some operating leverage on it. A consumer subscription business that depends on all your data centers would do that. That's not a really good reason to make a product though.

This is what they said of their specs:

"CPU: Custom 2.7GHz hyper-threaded x86 CPU with AVX2 SIMD and 9.5MB L2+L3 cache.

GPU: Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units, capable of 10.7 teraflops.

RAM: 16GB of RAM with up to 484GB/s of performance."

That's not really a spare capacity machine but what sounds like Custom SoCs.

But perhaps if it goes to crap, there'll be a new GCP instance type.

Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

#60

Post by tikkabhuna »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #45
Causality1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.

With such latency we would have 0 online shooters. But we have a lot of them.

There is a bunch of tricks that go into the netcode though. A slight delay on hit recognition is noticeable and sometimes annoying, but movement can be silky smooth. With Stadia, wouldn't that latency open you up to input lag?
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