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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"

#211

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

londons_explore wrote: post #79
danielrpa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it running many games in "very good" frame rates and quality. But the economics don't make sense for Google if it tries to match the true high end PC configs. Once RDR2 is at 60fps, there will be other games pushing the envelope that won't be at 60fps on Stadia. Same applies to other consoles, of course... I'm saying that PC Gaming will still allow premium experiences for a while.

I don't see this cost argument. Either you buy a decent gaming PC and use it personally a few hours a week, or Google buys a decent gaming PC and uses it ~50 hours per week across ~10 users on average. Google can probably also utilize that gaming PC during the other 118 hours of the week with batch jobs, indexing, etc. Your PC will just be idle and depreciating at 3am. Google's costs are clearly lower.

Not necessarily if you factor in some sort of impact for the slightly degraded experience they'll be offering you. You and Google may buy the same gaming pc and clearly they'll have lower costs, but that doesn't mean that your experience playing locally on that machine is the same as the experience of a streamed game on that machine. To compare apples to apples you'd have to compare the kind of machine you'd need to replicate the streamed experience, and that would very likely be a cheaper computer, so it's really an empirical question.

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

#212

Post by Traster »

jasonkester wrote: post #95

This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work. There is evidently a small area centered around the San Francisco Bay Area where internet connectivity is ubiquitous and perfect. You get unlimited 5G coverage with 2ms ping times and hundred gigabit fibre into every habitable structure. And Google, Apple, etc. all have their offices…

In this case it's not even about people not having good internet. It's about people not being physically near a data centre with the GPU that is playing your game. Come home from school, turn on Stadia? Bad news, everyone in your time zone just turned on stadia too and so the nearest slot is in NY, congratulations, you've got >100ms latency.

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

#213

Post by boardwaalk »

javajosh wrote: post #156
raxxorrax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not so sure. Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved. It just isn't really a hassle today for people with good connections. Maybe it will capture the casual market, but there are disadvantages to the platform. Just think of modding as an example. It might capture some console players, but I am not sure if they pull off even that, since the service is actually…

> Downloading, updating, installing are certainly no issues if the bandwidth problem is solved. No. The problem's of proper system administration go far beyond issues of bandwidth. To apply a positive change you have to know about it, find it, download it, install it, and configure it. Not to mention it helps to understand the content of the patch, how it applies, and the social/technical context of the patch. And wi…

Consoles solved the sysadmin problem decades ago.

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

#214

Post by odessacubbage »

Iv wrote: post #120
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…

I could see playing RTS or tactical RPGs, but it is a very poor idea to propose FPS. It is already hard to have a reactive system locally, proposing remotely is. You need to react in 16ms if you want a snappy 60Hz. 1000 km from the server is adding 6 ms of ping. At one point, proposing this kind of service has the speed of light as a "technical constraint".

i played through most of srw t on ps4 remote play while house sitting & it worked well enough for the most part. unfortunately games like ff tactics and disgaea aren't big ticket AAA blockbusters that require a supercomputer to run smoothly.

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

#215

Post by Marsymars »

birdyrooster wrote: post #66
bobviolier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compress…

Somehow even Steam in-home streaming between two wired PCs is a mess of distracting artifacts for me when playing a turn-based game from 2005 at 1080p. Is it really that hard?

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

#216

Post by xemdetia »

jcranberry wrote: post #195
Crinus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will b…

Movies still come out on disc even though netflix and streaming services in general have been very successful. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same with games.

Movies are an easy example: Do you want to watch the original ending of Return of the Jedi, the special edition ending, the revised ending post-prequels, the 4:3 edition or the widescreen edition? There are plenty of reasons to want to keep a copy of the version of the experience you enjoyed and want to experience again.

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

#217

Post by Bartweiss »

Crinus wrote: post #113
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…

> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will b…

I suppose the importance of "lost when the project closes" depends on the lifespan of the project.

Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play. Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running, and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible. Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds. When it comes to something like a music library, "buy don't rent" makes a lot of sense to me, but the lifespan of software and particularly games tends to be finite even when you do own them.

Now, I totally grant that Stadia will probably have 10% the lifespan of Flash or PowerPC architecture. But lots of people avoided a string of ephemeral music-streaming services and finally bought in with Spotify or Google Play Music. Lots of people avoided ebooks, but are finally starting to come around. So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does. (Along with picking up all the users who are only interested in one or two AAA titles to begin with.)

I share the rest of your concerns though, so that sort of worries me more. Streaming games may be what finally enables the death of free/independent modding, DRM-cracking, tracker disabling, and offline play after years of battles with publishers trying to push them directly.

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

#218

Post by JohnFen »

skybrian wrote: post #188
Crinus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will b…

Okay but why? When you walk out of a movie theater you don't have anything. Was it still a good movie? Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price. Rental services make this explicit.

> Was it still a good movie?

Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.

> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price

It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.

I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.

You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.

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

#219

Post by sangnoir »

Crinus wrote: post #175
developerdylan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a lot of assumptions with a clear bias there. Just because you don't want this model for games, doesn't mean nobody does. I tried Stadia with Assassin's Creed in the Alpha and it was a wonderfully low bar to entry. I was able to play the new Assassin's Creed on my Macbook. There's a lot of value to that.

Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine. I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.

> Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with

I share your sentiments, but this battle was already lost a decade ago when Steam won - Apple is just twisting the dagger with it's App Store and their unceasing march to turn OS X into an appliance (limiting 'root', and with catalina, what you can put in '/')

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

jcranberry wrote: post #195
Crinus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will b…

Movies still come out on disc even though netflix and streaming services in general have been very successful. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same with games.

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