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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"

#271

Post by mantap »

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…

Stadia is a product designed for people who live in big cities and there's nothing wrong with that. It will work in not just SF, but any city large enough to support a datacenter, e.g. London, Paris, Singapore, etc.

Anybody who doesn't live in a big city is going to suffer a degraded experience and if you live in the middle of Nunavut it's not going to work at all. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea, it's just not a universal idea.

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

#272

Post by dorgo »

skohan wrote: post #243
jcranberry wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Game developers would have more to gain from a streaming-only model: 1. It's expensive to develop for multiple platforms. If you can get people to buy into streaming, you theoretically have only one hardware target. 2. Streaming is more effective at enforcing DRM for games. You can make a recording of a movie you're playing on Netflix, but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.

>but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.

Next HN headline: Machine Learning algorithm reverse engineers a Stadia game.

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

#273

Post by dwild »

touchpadder wrote: post #249
Someone1234 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear the XBox One S for $150/$200 listed above also included a controller, it isn't just a bare console with no way to play on it. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

As an author of a browser game https://bad.city I noticed that over the last 5 years browser performance became 10x faster. The game currently works at 60fps, even on 2 year old Galaxy Note and has 0ms lag. With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device. No need to download 50gb game when you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing and it will…

> With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device.

I heard something similar to that for the past 10 years at least.

> you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing

People were amazed of the speed at which models loaded using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive... and that was when games were in the 5 GB range. Loading time is latency too.

> I see Stadia working for casual games on smart TVs but not for any competitive gaming.

Competitive gaming go toward more expensive gear... they won't care about buying an expensive graphic card if that give them an edge, or lower latency screen.

If they are forced to play on cloud, they'll just pay for a better connection to do it. This is just like the stock market where they build datacenter just beside the exchange.

I don't know if you would call me a "casual gamer", I'm certainly not a competitive gamer, but I get quite a bit of fun playing Borderland 3 on Nvidia Geforce Now. The latency isn't that bad, nothing I can really notice at least.

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

#275

Post by mantap »

evervevdww221 wrote: post #154
akvadrako wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it make sense that a computer at home, with 5% utilization and retail power prices, can be less per hour than a computer with 50% utilization and wholesale power? Even if all you do is host single-user machines with retail games installed and some kind of imaging solution, it seems like it should pay off.

$2 per hour per machine is not a made-up number, just check how much Amazon charges for a GPU vm. Again, we were a small company, we had to use other cloud providers. I don't know why amazon or alike are so expensive. We tried colocation too, not any cheaper to be honest. Also, when buying a computer or a console, you don't pay by usage. you pay one time to own the hardware and the remaining 5 year usage is free, plu…

Amazon is a bad fit for this use case. Amazon's value proposition is: "you are making money, pay us a big chunk of it and we will help you scale up with less effort and fewer staff.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that making a cloud gaming service would necessitate assembling your own servers. Games just have different hardware requirements to everything else, it's well known that "pro" graphics cards are not meant for gaming.

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

#276

Post by Bartweiss »

JohnFen wrote: post #255
Bartweiss wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

> 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. Considering that I still play games that I bought over 20 years ago, it would take at least 20 years for a streaming service to be able to convince me of this.

That's true for me too, I dug out Starship Titanic not long ago, but it raises another concern. If streaming games catch on widely enough, the holdouts become a niche market. I don't foresee that happening to games in general, but certain genres could see streaming-only releases.

In particular, online FPS games have high requirements and many already have "fixed" lifespans because matchmaking relies on the publisher's servers. Given how many excellent games have switched to community hosting after they were abandoned by the publisher, that'd be a real shame.

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

#277

Post by alpaca128 »

pnutjam wrote: post #241
alpaca128 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a Netflix for games if you still have to buy every game individually. It's like every other console except you always have more input delay in exchange for not paying any hardware. For me the important question is: will the game pricing be comparable with Steam or more with PSN etc.? Considering Sony still asks almost full price for some 8 year old games the pricing can make a huge difference.

Have you checked out the Xbox plus subscription, it includes PC games now.

Do you mean the Xbox Game Pass? That doesn't offer streaming it seems.

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

#278

Post by aembleton »

perennate wrote: post #12
tiborsaas wrote: post #5

Offtopic, but why someone bothers to type a proper blogpost in Twitter? It's such a crap experience read something there that multiple thread reader projects exists. I can only think of the simplicity to publish content makes it too easy for lazy authors.

I scroll with my mouse to read pages, and the very slow scrolling amount on this "threader.app" was very frustrating.

Worked fine for me on Firefox 70.0.1 on Ubuntu. Have you tried turning off Javascript? That might help.

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

#279

Post by devit »

iMark wrote: post #38
devit wrote: post #15

Seems to me that it would be very good for people who have fiber connections at home and are close to a Google datacenter (or just don't care about latency), and want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU without having to pay for it and own a physical desktop computer (perhaps because they don't have the budget, or play games rarely, or buying a desktop computer is hard or uncomfortable for them).

If you want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU, you almost certainly care about latency.

Not necessarily, you might like sophisticated graphics but not play games where latency is particularly important, or just not be annoyed by latency and not interested in competitive play.

Also as an anecdote right now I have 5ms ping to google.com and 1gbps downlink (fiber at home in major city), so it seems like 60fps or maybe even 120fps zero-extra-frames-latency gaming would be achievable there, for instance.

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

#280

Post by pnutjam »

alpaca128 wrote: post #277
pnutjam wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked out the Xbox plus subscription, it includes PC games now.

Do you mean the Xbox Game Pass? That doesn't offer streaming it seems.

no streaming, but works on Xbox and PC.
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