Stadia will clearly win, and people's stockholm syndrome about local consoles will melt away the way it did for other rejections of cloud. Local compute will become a niche.
"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
641–650 of 698 posts
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
If your game depends on an online component, and the online component disappears, yeah, you won't be able to run the game unless that missing piece can be recreated somehow (as Flashpoint is doing).
This is exactly the problem with making games rely on external servers in order to start, as Stadia does (for entirely different reasons).
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
AMD consumer GPUs doesnt support SR-IOV probably something like this https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/workstation-virtual-graphics
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I read a book, ... or enjoy a movie. Right there. For lots and lots of people, gaming is in the same class of activity as reading a book or watching a movie. It genuinely feels really weird for me to write that, it feels so obvious.
Yea, like eating a salad and a Big Mac are the same class of food as well. Feels so weird since it's so obvious. A salad and a Big Mac. They're both food, thus they are both equally nutritious. Go out and get some sun.
Hey, you're the one who put "read a book" and "enjoy a movie" in the same breath.
If I had just quoted "or enjoy a movie" and left of the "read a book" part of what I quoted, would your "nutritious" argument still hold weight?
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#645I 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…
Netflix streams consumable media. Sure, it is nice if it starts playing the movie the moment you click play, but having it buffer a few seconds at the start isn't a complete disaster preventing you to enjoy the evening. And once you are watching, the network can be pretty unreliable as long as on average it can succeed in downloading enough in advance to cover glitches. You can even use a TV to watch Netflix in total comfort, blissfully unaware some of these tale up to seconds to render the screen on the reception of a new frame. So you're watching a frame that was send out by the Netflix edge cache server at your ISP 5 seconds ago, so what?
Gaming is different.
You will have noticed gaming equipment like monitors, keyboards, mice, network-cards, routers, ... all advertising and competing on latency, in the x ms range.
This is because for many games, the reaction speed by which your actions are delivered to the game server and update the game world and that new world-state is delivered to the players, that round trip, is crucial. It is very hard to upgrade your reflexes, and you have no control over what the game server or the ISP/Internet does, but you can shave of crucial milliseconds through equipment choices under your control.
Now imaging getting the most kick-ass gaming PC, but you can only play on it to through the slowest and most unreliable keyboard, mouse and monitor connection (by an order of magnitude) ever, because that PC is across the country from you.
Now Google could in theory move the PC closer to you, like curbside or even in your basement. But the closer to you, the less optimal it becomes for other gamers as it moves further away from them and the business model needs those others to timeshare that PC to make it affordable.
The latency problem is not the same for all games or genres. Competitive FPS or MOBA's will be very sensitive to latency, while e.g. older MMO's or turn based strategy games can be far more forgiving.
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
I pay for Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime. I have no illusions about content being there long term. Something similar for games is missing though arguably it is content that you consume and then discard. Maybe, consider that it's not about you but about everyone else. I don't have a water cooled led blinking monstrosity hiding under my desk pretending it's a industrial vacuum cleaner. So, any game I play, I'm deal…
The problem is that it is about "me" (and others who think like me) because what everyone else does also affects what i get to experience myself thanks to market forces. In other words, if everyone goes Stadia (or a Stadia-lookalike) then the market (both for software but also - and most importantly - for hardware) will vanish. At best it will only be available for very high prices, just for the rich few, but i'm not…
Don't get region blindness, here. Also, never forget the power of open source and self hosting. If a model like Stadia works for other, there's no reason not to put it work for yourself.
I can already stream my Windows gaming container on my KVM Linux host with VFIO to my smartphone with BT connected controller. I could also do the same with just a RasPi running the SteamLink service. This isn't new or novel (I remember Stadia's concept being done multiple times before), but it is possible.
The only real danger to this is proprietary platform dependence. More people being able to game when and where they want isn't bad, but we can't rely on Valve forever to make sure there's not another GFWL-type uprising.
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that it is about "me" (and others who think like me) because what everyone else does also affects what i get to experience myself thanks to market forces. In other words, if everyone goes Stadia (or a Stadia-lookalike) then the market (both for software but also - and most importantly - for hardware) will vanish. At best it will only be available for very high prices, just for the rich few, but i'm not…
Don't get region blindness, here. Also, never forget the power of open source and self hosting. If a model like Stadia works for other, there's no reason not to put it work for yourself. I can already stream my Windows gaming container on my KVM Linux host with VFIO to my smartphone with BT connected controller. I could also do the same with just a RasPi running the SteamLink service. This isn't new or novel (I remem…
I am not talking about technical matters here (and FWIW Stadia is based on Linux), i am talking about control. Games that i stream from my own PC to my own handheld (or whatever) are still under my control, so that is perfectly fine. Games that i - wont, but just for the sake of argument - stream from Stadia are under Google's control which is not fine.
Proprietary platform dependence isn't much of an issue when you can hack around that platform. A win32 game using directx on my own PC is way more preferable than a Linux game using Vulkan on someone else's cloud server.
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#648Earlier 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…
I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client. Games of the future will require more powerful hardware than what you are using now, but even your typical gaming computer of today will be not affordable in the future, simply because it won't be produced for mass market anymore. In effect, all your computations will be run on…
> I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client.
Compute power has become cheaper and cheaper over time. If you just look at the ridiculous powerhouses smartphones have become in a very short time, it is apparent that will not happen.
Also, consoles are pretty damn affordable - certainly compared to how expensive console/pc games are. Major game technology updates are mainly driven by new console generations. You might get some extra resolution or niche technologies on an ultra-highend PC, but the main underlying tech of modern games is still tailored to the current generation of consoles. I own a i7 with a 2080ti - and sure, games might look a bit better than their console versions (if available at all) - the game on my 4k+ desktop PC is still essentially the same that I could run on a $300 PS4.
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Streaming games is the future, deal with it. So, so wrong. 1. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly. 2. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly unpredictable latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games…
Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen. These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.
You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating the game world.
If you could solve the latency problem, multiplayer games wouldn't suck so much. Even super local servers with 22ms ping are one and a half frames of game rendering late for the round trip.
Re: "Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. I built my first computer 15 years ago for $500 using a $120 GPU. 10 years ago I upgraded it with a $120 GPU. 4 years ago I upgraded that with a $120 GPU. It should support VR, but I imagine when that tech has matured I'll want to pick up another $120 GPU.
> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games. If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.
If you read the article and the attached twitter threads, stadia's streamed content is not of high visual fidelity.