Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

threader.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 698 posts

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

#421

Post by daemonk »

corodra wrote: post #351
turtlebits wrote: post #293

"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…

I'm seeing this a lot and don't understand... where the hell are you people travelling where bringing a console/game system is a concern? I travel for work or for vacation. If for work, I'm there hitting "Spit money out for me" at an ATM. Not gaming. I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan to enjoy home time more. End of days is visiting restaurants/bars and either socializing or schmoozing c…

I like turn based games. I don't really care about latency when playing Civilization.

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

#422

Post by musicale »

gamblor956 wrote: post #417
hombre_fatal wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "calibre" is doing a lot of work in your sentence. There are all sorts of seemingly low-resource-intensive, low-latency, even old games of that "calibre" that stutter on my Macbook Pro.

That's more of an indictment of how bad Apple computers are at handling games.

Apple computers with discrete GPUs (like the aforementioned MacBook Pro) are great at running DirectX-based games natively under Windows via Boot Camp.

They're also great at running Metal-based (e.g. Apple Arcade) games natively under macOS.

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

#423

Post by Dylan16807 »

Shank wrote: post #404
Dylan16807 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.

> Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have. It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a t…

Yeah I said that. But cheating vs. not cheating has nothing to do with needing a 'serious' server.

Edit: Okay I really need someone to explain why this particular comment got downvoted, I'm baffled.

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

#424

Post by aylmao »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #405
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…

> How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_. With their Project Stream beta they gave everyone a free copy of the game directly from the developer.…

> You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.

You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.

> Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.

Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.

Even for heavily DRM-d content, it's just a matter of technical skill and people with the will to crack a game to catch up to the techniques used to keep it locked. With streaming there wouldn't be anything to crack. You simply don't have the game, period.

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

#425

Post by saberience »

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".

Stadia is going to fail hard in any place which isn't San Francisco I think or some other cities where internet is both mega fast and no bandwidth caps.

I'm in London here and the internet is so crap you wouldn't believe. I have a 300GB bandwidth cap and am lucky if I get 20MBit. And this is the best it gets at my place which is 20 mins from center of London.

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

#426

Post by Dylan16807 »

JohnFen wrote: post #366
Dylan16807 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.

I mean a server that can handle clients at scale. Certainly, it's possible to do this sort of thing in a more decentralized fashion, but the games that I'm aware of don't do this.

Plenty of MMO code is single threaded. And almost none of it needs much RAM. They may happen to put it on big servers because it's slightly cheaper to use big servers, but that could easily be configured to use tiny servers.

Handling a thousand people in the same spot can be done on any size of server, and most of the time you're looking at under a hundred.

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

#427

Post by scarejunba »

scarface74 wrote: post #40
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably their cloud offering and / or parts thereof, e.g. Firebase.

Their cloud offerings are a distant third to Microsoft and Amazon and support - especially enterprise support - is legendarily bad.

Hmm, for the retail options? Or the premium options? We were a nine-fig customer and it was quite nice.

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

#428

Post by on_and_off »

turtlebits wrote: post #293

"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…

$130 does not really shock me for controller + chromecast, it sounds in the right ballpark if I bought both of these separately.

I already own a ps4 and a switch so I guess I count as a gamer.

I still preordered Stadia because the tech demo was on point and it sounds like a good way to run games with high requirements.

It is probably not going to happen (at least not in the first years) but the ability to handle mods would be the killer feature for me.

It is currently not possible on consoles, and I just don't want to invest the time/space to build a pc.

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

#429

Post by BinaryIdiot »

aylmao wrote: post #424
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_. With their Project Stream beta they gave everyone a free copy of the game directly from the developer.…

> You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_. You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have. > Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you alread…

> You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.

I'm not banking on anything here I'm just saying, because of their history, it's a more likely scenario. Both cases are complete guesses either way.

> Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.

It's just theoretical. I don't know if it's happened to many, if any, physical games. But the issue does exist today with digital games and most of the complaints are regarding theoretical Stadia downsides.

Digital game purchasing is huge; I don't think there is much if any distinction between what Stadia is able to do and what all the other game companies are able to do.

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

#430

Post by jsjohnst »

executive wrote: post #418
corodra wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this a lot and don't understand... where the hell are you people travelling where bringing a console/game system is a concern? I travel for work or for vacation. If for work, I'm there hitting "Spit money out for me" at an ATM. Not gaming. I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan to enjoy home time more. End of days is visiting restaurants/bars and either socializing or schmoozing c…

Vacation is the only time I game. Wonder how Stadia plays on the plane.

Given that plane Internet is generally satellite based with at minimum 300ms latency and at most 25MB/sec for all 150+ passengers on the plane, I’m guessing pretty bad. Even if it’s not terrible and unusable, I’m guessing it’ll be blocked fairly quickly like most streaming video providers are now.
Post reply on HN