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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"

#451

Post by ahartmetz »

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 see most SaaS the same way. Often (I'd go as far as saying usually) it is not what customers want, it is what vendors can push on them to get recurring revenue.

Also it's not gonna work for fast-paced games without turning those games into the stupidest skinnerboxes at some level behind the scenes. In order to make it possible to send precalculated results for latency hiding, a lot of freedom needs to go.

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

#452

Post by balls187 »

This is a hell of an article.

The talk about sunray is intereting with another HN article about FB/MSFT Remote Development.

I use Cloud9, after using sublime for nearly 8 years. My dream scenario is my iphone is my computer, and monitors and keyboards are dumb terminals that can stream I/O from my iphone wirelessly/dock.

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

#453

Post by jfim »

vvanders wrote: post #394
vel0city wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100-200ms latency seems a little extreme to me. Its an 8ms ping from my home to the nearest Google edge node (supposedly where Stadia nodes will live), 9-11ms on my WiFi. Compression and decompression of the video stream with hardware acceleration and tuned for speed over quality should only add maybe another ms or two. Where is the extra 80+ms coming from?

All it takes is someone turning on a microwave down the block from you to drop 4-5 packets in a row and you get close to the 100ms number. Channel congestion in dense urban areas approaches the same limit, heck Ars was just talking about a technique today[1] that because it doesn't respect channel slots drops throughput of any router within 60m by 20%. 100-200ms is an upper bound, however they were reliably doing cli…

To be fair, network connections have significantly improved since the 90s.

Your point still stands though, on a wireless network, it only takes some interference from other devices to cause latency spikes that make latency sensitive games frustrating to play, even if the actual upstream connection is of high quality. I've had quite a bit of issues with playing games on wireless networks in urban areas that go away magically by using an ethernet cable; the stuttering that happens when ping spikes from 30ms to 400ms is very jarring.

If Stadia is used for games that are not latency sensitive, such as deckbuilding games or turn based strategy games, it's fine. Using it for competitive first person shooters is likely to be very frustrating on anything but a wired network with good upstream connectivity or a wireless network with no major noise sources.

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

#454

Post by balls187 »

balls187 wrote: post #452

This is a hell of an article. The talk about sunray is intereting with another HN article about FB/MSFT Remote Development. I use Cloud9, after using sublime for nearly 8 years. My dream scenario is my iphone is my computer, and monitors and keyboards are dumb terminals that can stream I/O from my iphone wirelessly/dock.

I'll offer a counter--if we never had the Apple Newton, would we ever have the ipod,Iphone,Ipad?

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

#455

Post by autoexec »

shinteao wrote: post #298
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…

>all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs. I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes. So, they might have opinions on what a good gaming experience is. And, if they have issues with Stadia (incl latency, graphical fidelity, and library), then it might be coming from an informed place.

I think anyone who has interest in video games should be concerned with what we give up by games a service model. It means all of your games can now be censored or deleted at any time without any notice to you. It means you can't mod your games as you please. It means you can't resell the games you've bought or share them with friends and family. It means you can't play without internet access.

Beyond the overpriced hardware and monthly fee there's a lot being sacrificed for the ability to game anywhere. Another thing you give up is your privacy as this will simply be one more way to track you, your location, what you're playing, when and how long you play, who you're talking with online and what you're saying. All of that will be tracked and logged and analyzed by google.

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

#456

Post by __david__ »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #326
Crinus wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are not movies though many making this connection is probably why many games are awful nowadays as they try to be something they are not. It doesn't surprise me that executives who have no idea about gaming see flashy graphics and associate them with movies. Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months befo…

What percentage of your games do you play more than a year after purchase? If you could have rented most of your games at a lower price, and then bought the ones you really liked on sale, would you have paid more money total?

If you approach games this way there are much better deals than Stadia. Microsoft's Game Pass and Sony's PS+ both get you free games for roughly $60 a year (so if you get one full price game out of it you're "breaking even"). They're cheap, but ephemeral (you lose the games when you unsubscribe). Stadia seems expensive and also ephemeral—not the best combo.

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

#457

Post by imtringued »

lovich wrote: post #192
zaarn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that cloud gaming already exists and many providers did a better job than Google. Even the latency shouldn't be an issue, I've cloudgamed to a DC in the netherlands with 2ms of latency but apparently somehow Google manages to fuck that up somehow. I doubt Google will continue Stadia, the press is already bad, the product is bad, it'll likely be dusted in a few years, leaving the product owners out of a…

wouldn't 2ms be <400 miles of travel? Youd have to be pretty close to the datacenter to get 2ms of latency when the computer needs time to do calculations as well

400 miles is pretty Pretty close? That's more than the distance between Paris and Amsterdam but yes you are right. Encoding a video and decoding it introduces additional latency even on the same machine.

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

#458

Post by ekianjo »

ben_jones wrote: post #206
ekianjo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gamers should own the games they buy Agree with the sentiment, but almost every digital purchase nowadays does not tie with ownership, but a license to use whatever you pay for - and it can be nullified at any point in time. If Steam were to go bankrupt tomorrow (unlikely, but for the sake of the argument let's imagine it), you would probably lose complete access to your library of games you "bought". One exception…

Is that true though? When I buy (and install) a game on steam it gets put into a downloads folder with an executable I can use outside of Steam to start the game. Are you saying that Steam would be legally obligated to delete this directory should they go out of business?

You can't use most games outside of Steam to launch them. Most games (but not all) have DRM's and require Steam to be running to launch. You can look it up.

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

#459

Post by jotm »

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.…

Yeah,they will just disappear. You may be able to get save games, maybe. OnLive (which was great, btw) just went poof, gone.

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

#460

Post by kossTKR »

Slightly off topic but weird to not see Shadow.tech mentioned.

It's a smaller French streaming company where you get a complete VM you can do anything with for an unlimited amount of time.

It's not as easy because you will end up spending a little bit of time setting things up compared to a game-only system though.

I have used their service and was absolutely blown away _as a casual gamer_. I stream in 1440p 60fps+ with no hiccups and a latency of about 18ms from my laptops.

You need a solid connection, no low caps, and a good wireless router but other than that it's pretty amazing how well it works - also i would rather not use Google after their turn towards monopoly in the last years.

They are coming out with support for up to Nvidia Titan Tiers so you can have a crazy 3D rendering workstation on the go.

On the downside i guess it's not very green to be streaming several terabytes of data each month, also it's beginning of a pretty horrible slippery slope privacy wise.

But for "just gaming" or other non privacy/important stuff the "terminal" concept is pretty cool.

On a side note does anyone have any CO2/Megabyte calculator? I have had a hard time figuring out how impactful the move to constant HD streaming in a lot of homes is?

I slightly remember reading that the internet could use upwards of 1/3 of total power consumption in X amounts of years.

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