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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"

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to believe in stadia, you need to engage in magical thinking that allows you to believe that google has somehow managed to solve network latency and america's laughable internet infrastructure and just forgot to tell everyone.

The US is not the world. The average person in parts of Europe and Asia has a much better internet connection.

In Germany I have 8 Mbit/s

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t it make more sense if google buys this gpu and shares it among, say, 50 users who have maximum an hour of gaming every week? It almost certainly has to be cheaper sharing hardware among users instead of having each single user owning a piece of hardware which is idle almost all of the time. Unless of course hardware price is neglect-able with respect to game price.

i'm interested how this will work at peak times, when everybody gets back from work and wants to play? or for new releases. are they just going to throw money at it and be massively over-provisioned most of the time?

Presumably over provision and then when idle, they can reuse them for their own internal batch work.

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

#313

I said this in another thread about Stadia, the market for Stadia is vanishingly small. The people who have high enough internet speeds that either can't or won't get a "traditional" console or PC is extremely small. Too small to signal to Google that this is worth maintaining ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ ). For Stadia to survive, Google needs to bring in new "gamers", because existing "gamers" already have their ow…

Disagree, there are a ton of professionals that would love to play current games casually, but don't want to spend on extra hardware (or even having another device around), and waste time with game patches/updates. For me, I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook just to play the occasional game or two.

Then it has an uphill battle against... the Nintendo Switch.

Not the best position to be in.

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

#314

I said this in another thread about Stadia, the market for Stadia is vanishingly small. The people who have high enough internet speeds that either can't or won't get a "traditional" console or PC is extremely small. Too small to signal to Google that this is worth maintaining ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ ). For Stadia to survive, Google needs to bring in new "gamers", because existing "gamers" already have their ow…

Disagree, there are a ton of professionals that would love to play current games casually, but don't want to spend on extra hardware (or even having another device around), and waste time with game patches/updates. For me, I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook just to play the occasional game or two.

>[...] and waste time with game patches/updates

I'm not sure what your most recent experience with games is, but this is not an issue on any modern game platform. That stuff happens behind the scenes while you sleep or go to work. I've never once gotten home from work and had to "waste time with game patches/updates" unless I felt like heavily modding my game.

> I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook

This is also completely untrue with modern devices. I have a $1700 Dell XPS 15 off the rack, dual booted windows/linux, and it can run almost every single game in my 250+ game steam library on high graphics with zero issues. It is also my one and only dev machine, and it weighs about 4 lbs or so (while the brand new MBP 16" weight 4.3 lbs)

You seem to be making arguments based off of experiences you might have had many years ago.

Also, to nip this in the bud: XUbuntu LTS installed onto my Dell with absolutely zero config issues, all hardware drivers supported. Literal plug-n-play. I spend more time installing Windows.

Edit: I just looked it up for size/weight:

Dell XPS 15: 0.45-0.66mm thick, 4.0 lbs for base configuration[1]

MBP 16": 0.64mm thick, 4.3 lbs for base configuration[2]

Edit 2: I am making an assumption based on demographic on HN that your primary dev machine is a MBP or similar Apple product -- If I am incorrect you are welcome to correct me, sorry.

[1]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-15-7590...

[2]: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/specs/

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

#315
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this comment? I really don't understand what you are trying to say

Fighting games are highly latency-sensitive, to the extent that many fighting game tournaments are played on CRTs (because image processing on flatscreen TVs introduces additional frames of latency). They're practically a worst case for a streaming video game service.

Fighting games are also a best-case scenario for Stadia's latency-mitigation tech, since they often already have a rollback system implemented for online multiplayer.

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

#316
omg what is with the slow scroll on that site? When I roll the mousewheel or arrow down it moves so slow.

What could possibly cause a front-end designer to choose to slow down scrolling like that?

omg the whole text is a giant link that takes me to the less readable twitter feed.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. I want to play new AAA games on high settings but I have very little time to do so, so I can't really justify buying an expensive gaming computer. But if I only have to buy the games it's a different matter. This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.

But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.

> You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream.

Only if you want 4K. For 1080P, you just buy a game as a product.

> It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.

I agree that for the 4K Chromecast option to make any sense, it must be much cheaper than a conventional console. They would have done well to find a way to support existing (and cheaper) Chromecasts too.

There's also the PC gaming market though. Stadia will reach PC gamers on all desktop OSs, no additional hardware needed. There could be a market for people with laptops, for instance.

Incidentally, we've seen all this before with OnLive and PlayStation Now, which people seem to have largely forgotten about - nothing Google is doing here is new. OnLive functioned as both a microconsole, and an application on Windows/Mac/Android.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that you might not be the target audience for a $10/month game streaming service?

I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full pr…

It would probably work well for turn based games like Civilization

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

#319

"Gamers" don't want Stadia. And all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs. It's targeted for those that don't have either, like me. I carry my Pixelbook everywhere and would be nice to play games on it. I don't want another device to carry around and don't have the time or patience to wait for patches/updates or the ridiculous storage requirements games have nowadays. The on…

Good luck finding public WiFi with sufficient bandwidth and latency to let you play Stadia out and about...

I guess I should have clarified. My only devices are a Pixelbook and my work MBP - no desktop. Playing at home (or work) are totally fine for me. Playing games like Hearthstone (where latency isn't breaking factor) is fine with me as well.

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

#320
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

Not Op, but they specifically said the using a colocation (i.e. setting up your own servers) was not helpful in keeping down costs.
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