"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it" • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by SmirkingRevenge » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:09 AM UTC

Lev1a wrote: post #543

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently. That's been the norm of the gaming industry for ages. Mario, Sonic, Halo, etc - its always been fragmented. You have to pay for an expensive console to get at the exclusiv…

> Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation That was also the case with video streaming. Unfortunately once the publishers/broadcasters got the faintest whiff they could force customers into paying them a subscription fee for their content (and after that some services have the audacity to still put ads in/on/around the content) it was every publisher for themselves pulling their content from co…

Well, we're safe for a while in that game streaming is orders of magnitude more difficult/costly than video streaming, which is still very hard at scale.

But even so, with the fragmentation in video streaming, its far better than it was to be locked into a single cable provider. Likewise, game streaming will be better than our present situation, where to get that one exclusive you really want to play, you have to buy the whole console. In the streaming world, you subscribe for a month or two, then suspend the subscription.

The battle in the streaming era is going to be over reducing churn, rather than finding the right combo of exclusives to entice enough people to buy the console, even though they might only buy a couple of games for it.

I think we'll start seeing episodic style exclusive content.

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

#552

Post by xyzzy_plugh » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

hakfoo wrote: post #495

turtlebits wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes. I disagree, in this age of phones/tablets, I'm pretty sure total amount of time played on these devices is greater than consoles/PCs. That said, I don't need 4K HDR 60fps The fact is that Stadia makes it possible to play games on devices where it previously was impossible is pretty compelling. (even if it's at…

>The fact is that Stadia makes it possible to play games on devices where it previously was impossible is pretty compelling. (even if it's at 720p). It makes it possible to play modern AAA games on devices where it previously was impossible. That's a dramatic difference. There are plenty of incredible gaming experiences you can have on low-powered hardware , without needing a clunky streaming-as-a-service infrastruct…

I think this is truly the crux of the product's potential. Triple A FPS games are never going to hit it big on a streaming service, especially in any sort of competitive circle.

The real opportunity is for games where latency isn't really important. Beautiful turn based games, cinematic choose-your-own adventures.

The second path is for games to be developed with appropriate tolerances & latency-forgiving mechanics. Take a modern platformer like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, where you are given a window of frames in which you can jump/react before failure. Even modern games like Mario Odyssey accommodate input latency of wireless controllers/HDMI displays. Similar accomodations can and will be made for games targeting streaming services.

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

#553

Post by xbmcuser » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

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 don't have a console or a gaming pc but I have been using the nvidia shield and its Geforce streaming service for playing a few of my steam library of games. It is not the exact same experience as you would get from a console or a gaming pc but for me it is good enough. Specially considering me being in asia and all the nvidia servers I am usually connected to are in NA or Europe as no nvidia asian server available. With the google internet infrastructure worldwide I think they can improve on what nvidia is doing which for me is already usable if not perfect.

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

#554

Post by magashna » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #358

odessacubbage wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact that google is trying to to use a fighting game to showcase their product should tell you everything you need to know about their understanding of the market.

I feel like they're giving a free fighting game because they understand their market. The biggest worry people have before they try it is latency, but almost everyone that's sat down to play it so far has talked about how it feels nearly indistinguishable from a console latency-wise. A game that demands low latency (like a fighting game) is a great way to demo how noticable (or not) the latency is on your setup befor…

> but almost everyone that's sat down to play it so far has talked about how it feels nearly indistinguishable from a console latency-wise.

Nearly every review I've seen mentions that there's just enough latency for it to not feel good, with some visual stuttering occasionally.

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

#555

Post by maktouch » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

corodra wrote: post #514

robteix wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can please you calm down? You've been spamming this discussion while getting increasingly hostile. We get it, you don't think people should play as much videogames as they do. Good, we get it.

I'm fascinated by people's reactions. The identity to needing video games absolutely intrigues me. So yea, at this point, it's my vice to poke and prod and better understand how people relate to video games. So... yea, I'm identifying with trying to better understand the psyche of those that identify with needing video games every minute of their lives. That, and I'm actually really curious how many downvotes it take…

If you are really trying to understand the psyche, you would be more open, ask more questions, and be less judgy. Telling people to go hug a tree is not how you understand people, and it does make you look bad.

I'm in the same boat as you, tho. I'm in the video game streaming industry... I don't understand at all how people actually watch other people play video games, and I do think there's benefit to disconnect.

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

#556

Post by bscphil » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #536

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?

> 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 en…

It's worse than that. Assume you're at 60fps like the average non-serious gamer. Assume you're lucky enough that video encoding / decoding adds only 1 frame of latency. Assume Google's proprietary technologies can minimize rendering latency so much that that's lost in the noise (I don't believe it). You've still got network latency. How bad is that?

Well, I'm in one of the 10 largest cities in the United States. Pinging 8.8.8.8 shows an average of 20 ms RTT, which is just over one frame. So is the total a 2 frame delay? No. Think about how Youtube works: they choose to introduce more latency than exists in the raw connection for reliability. My ping time shows a std deviation of over 10ms to 8.8.8.8. So if Youtube ran at a 20 ms latency (the true network latency), just about every other frame would have to briefly pause to wait for the next frame to arrive over the network. So you introduce latency. Youtube introduces about 3 seconds of latency on my network (a very rough estimate).

With a video game, the situation can't be fixed like that. You can't just run your video game behind your inputs by 3 seconds to iron out network latency spikes. So you've got to pick a percentage of packets that are going to arrive late (briefly pausing the stream), and just hope that you never get huge latency spikes of a second or so. (This actually happens all the time on busy networks due to buffer bloat.)

If you pick 95%, 1 out of every 20 video segments are going to have to pause for the network to catch up. Given we're expecting 60fps video, I'm assuming that's considered unplayable. So lets make it 99%. Assuming latency follows a bell curve, that means you have to introduce 45 ms of latency to allow smooth playback. That rounds to 3 frames of latency.

So all together, the "ideal" experience in my major city is to play a video game with 4-5 frames of latency, and realistically my developers are probably asking for a 100ms input-to-paint window. That's TERRIBLE to the point that it's probably only really usable for "clicker" time-waste games and turn based stuff. And the thing is, latency doesn't follow a bell curve. In my test lasting less than 30 seconds, I saw ping times well over 60 ms, and hardware associated with gaming will have its own latency issues too. So I expect even a stream running at 100 ms latency will still have brief pauses and jumps every few seconds, and probably noticeable ones every few minutes.

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

#557

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:26 AM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #263

evervevdww221 wrote: post #154

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…

I assumed you were not using Amazon because it's obviously a bad choice for this use case. $2/hour is $87k over 5 years — not surprising you can't make money. One can rent a rack for about $3k a year which comfortably fits 20 servers. Obviously, colocation is much cheaper.

You've also gotta get servers to put in there, and in a 42u rack with, say 9 4u servers, a 2u managed switch, and now you have 4 units left to handle power distribution, power backups, any kind of external remote management (say an out-of-band KVM, or a second network for IPMI traffic, or anything else).

ALSO, all those servers? Say the fancy, high-speed switch you need to route all that traffic is $2000.

You wind up needing spend $5000 on auxiliary equipment and installation. This includes IE power cables, network cables, Velcro, and that darn cable you forgot you needed.

Now we're up to $10,000 including the colo costs, and we haven't even gotten to servers yet.

We need 9 4u-tall servers. The reason for the 4u height is because that's the size you want to be the most space-efficient with your full-height GPU's.

You'll want good base servers to slap your graphics cards into. I'm a little out of the loop on the latest and greatest in the server world, but we'll assume it's around $7,500 for a fairly moderate AMD EPYC system (EPYC because A] they wind up being cheaper than their Intel counterparts and B] have many more PCIE lanes).

9 $7,500 servers is $67,500 without any GPU's.

You don't want nVidia's consumer GPU's, because they're hostile to virtualization, so it's either AMD's consumer or enterprise stuff Or nVidia's enterprise stuff.

For GPU's you want to use, you'll be paying at least ~$600 per, and there's around 8-10 slots per server. $600 * 8 * 9 = $43,200.

I'm sure I've missed stuff- haven't included data storage, for one- but we're already at $120,700 and you'll probably want some new GPU's in a couple of years, and the total cost of servers over their lifespan winds up being around double what the initial cost was.

-Summer Glau

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

#558

Post by choward » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #254

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…

> Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play. If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy! > Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running What doesn't work in Virtualbox? Luckily, games from the 90's generally don't need GPU acceleration. I'm also continuously amazed by how much just works in modern Windows. > games for Powe…

> If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!

What if it depends on the page it was originally hosted on? https://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e...

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

#559

Post by danielrpa » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #79

danielrpa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it running many games in "very good" frame rates and quality. But the economics don't make sense for Google if it tries to match the true high end PC configs. Once RDR2 is at 60fps, there will be other games pushing the envelope that won't be at 60fps on Stadia. Same applies to other consoles, of course... I'm saying that PC Gaming will still allow premium experiences for a while.

I don't see this cost argument. Either you buy a decent gaming PC and use it personally a few hours a week, or Google buys a decent gaming PC and uses it ~50 hours per week across ~10 users on average. Google can probably also utilize that gaming PC during the other 118 hours of the week with batch jobs, indexing, etc. Your PC will just be idle and depreciating at 3am. Google's costs are clearly lower.

The high end PC customer can keep upgrading frequently, while Google will need to upgrade their entire data center to offer the top experience every few months. They will settle for a reasonable good/great experience for their user base, while the High end PC owner will always be above the Stadia standard setup.

So it's not that Google's cost is higher than the high end PC owner, it's just that the high end PC owner is willing to throw more money at it to stay on top compare to what Google is willing to throw at its entire user base.

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

#560

Post by dmix » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 3:38 AM UTC

evervevdww221 wrote: post #47

I used to work on (the second generation) cloud gaming. It's very difficult to be profitable. Most people would think that the challenge is latency, streaming quality. But the real challenge is cost management. The cost can be easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a decent computer or a console. It doesn't make sense. Plus, to make cloud gaming work, you have to own everything. Fr…

> The cost can be easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a decent compute

This goes against everything I learned in business finance/accounting class (that was oblivious to software/internet) and all modern SaaS business models.