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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"

#531

"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 get it, everyone vacations differently

> You are there to not-home

Some people take multi-month long vacations. To expect them to give up video games is a bit much.

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why won’t people just use the devices they have today to play such a game? I don’t even know how many physical CPU cores Google will give each machine, but imagine running Civ on some server grade processors with tons of cores. That could actually be a good experience but I doubt Google could make money if they were generous in this way.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm playing Stadia on my non-fiber cable internet, and there's no perceptible lag. I previously tried Geforce Now, under the same conditions, same pc - and it was unplayable.

Impressive! Which games have you played on Stadia? What input devices did you use?

I've only tried destiny and samurai showdown so far (but bought gylt). Used kb/m for the former and an xbox elite controller for the latter.

I had my activation code, but my stadia founders kit hasn't arrived yet, so I haven't been able to try the Stadia controller, or play on a tv.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "$130 does not really shock me for controller + chromecast, it sounds in the right ballpark if I bought both of these separately." A chromecast and a PS4 controller purchased separately today would be closer to half that much.

dualshock 4 = 66 dollars (I know you can find it for cheaper, but that's the price on playstation.com) chromecast ultra = 70 dollars so I am going to stand by my original comment ;)

I think most people would just buy it at walmart who's selling it for $44, or amazon where it's also being sold for $44 ("by Playstation".) 3rd gen chromecast (is that not sufficient to stream video?) is $35.

So $79 vs $130/136. That's quite a lot to many people. You can pick the more expensive options to make a point I guess, though I'm not sure what that point would be.

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

#535
post #420
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run Linux and LineageOS because I care about controlling my computers and data. But I don't care about games. They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.

When I play a game, I sink hours of my finite life into it without any possibility of ever getting that time back. When I "preserve" a game, what does that cost me? Less space on my bookshelf than a typical mass-market paperback novel. Virtually nothing. The cost of preserving a game is far less than the cost of playing it.

Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, also if you look at people who write or have written netcode for a living, it's been pretty obvious where Stadia was heading for a while. You need to be able to reliably hide ~100-200ms of latency for any number of reasons. If you're talking about something that runs over wifi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you. The way you do that is with client side…

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?

> Compression and decompression of the video stream with hardware acceleration and tuned for speed over quality should only add maybe another ms or two.

This estimate is waaaaay off. Nobody has been shipping video encoders or decoders setup to pull 1000fps nor tuned for latency.

Realistically it's 8-14ms to decode if you're lucky (low latency hardware+firmware), and comparable to encode. And these streams are made entirely of key-frames, which is a hyper unusual scenario for video systems.

That all adds up to maybe something like +30ms over baseline. Which is a lot. If you have a console try playing it on a TV with and without game mode enabled. That's about a 20-30ms latency difference in general.

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

#537
post #522
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually neither bandwidth nor latency (alone). Its variability - the reason you can play a 4k video on YouTube smoothly is because of buffering, which smooths out dips in mbps. Stadia can't buffer for obvious reasons, meaning every frame has to be delivered with minimal latency.

I don't know what Stadia does, but it could * downsample when connection is poor * extrapolate future frames from past frames, either locally or by sending bonus frames from server.

What about latency to inputting some command on your controller? Like "move to here".

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

#538
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?

Almost all of those that I paid for.

I only pirated (it's the 21st century "Demo" for me) the rest. You may see why I wouldn't be interested in Stadia at all.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post makes sense if the only travel you do is your 2-week vacation you get every year while always returning to a permanent living fixture, like a house you own. Or if you just don't mind owning a bunch of appliances. I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a si…

> I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver. But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about you…

you hit the nail on the head. I'm a digital nomad who can't afford lugging a heavy gaming PC around. I have a nice 15 inch mbp (descent at running cities skylines) and an ipad (my notebook replacement) and would love to use stadia!

only problem is it only works in north america and I'm in southeast asia right now.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.

I think there's a potential for how games are made to make a huge change. One possibility is a "thin-client" that sends input events separate from the rendering machine. A drastic improvement to input/rendering delay for "cloud gaming" ( It's exciting what the future might hold.

That type of thing is alright for action inputs like shooting, running, etc. I've yet to use a game streaming service, including Steam Link inside my own house, that doesn't make first-person camera movement nauseating.
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