I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader. Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development. Stadia will require a substantia…
its initial purchase price is only slightly less than a full console, the games cost more, the visual quality is worse, it is way way more subject to packet loss, the input lag is orders of magnitude worse and it (along with my purchases) have a high probability of disappearing in 3 years time
Yup. OnLive tried it with similar results. There are many markets where 10ms - 20ms latency doesn't matter that much, but realtime gaming isn't one of them. It's extremely disorienting to play a game with even the slightest framebuffer lag.
I think Stadia could be super cool for simulation games like Cities: Skylines. The lag isn't nearly as much of a problem and the ability to have an extremely powerful computer simulate many more "agents" would be fantastic.
Surprisingly, OnLive found lag was an even greater problem for applications with a cursor than for games.
Plus your suggestion can be implemented with cloud compute (a backend behind the UI) - it doesn't need to be cloud streaming.
I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader. Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development. Stadia will require a substantia…
Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition. The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game. If I, conversely, buy the…
I don’t disagree with your main point about losing games, but the fee is strictly for Stadia Pro, which permits 4K and 5.1 surround sound. Stadia Base is free and will launch in February, but only permits up to 1080p and stereo sound. You still obviously also need to buy the games though (except F2P). They’re using the “Founder’s Edition” almost like Early Access. If you have Stadia Pro and you stop paying, you lose access to the free games that are included with Pro, which right now are Destiny 2 and Samurai Showdown. This is the same as Xbox Live Gold and the Free Games with Gold. You don’t lose access to the games you purchased if you stop paying for Pro.
Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition. The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game. If I, conversely, buy the…
> "...it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games." WHAT? I've been under a rock and I assumed that it was a service where you buy a controller, already own a streaming device (or maybe the controller has the device in it), and pay monthly for the whole service. You have to buy the games too? That is an immediate about-face for me. If they shut down the service then I j…
The OP is incorrect, but in the opposite direction than you are thinking. The monthly subscription is optional (it gets you 4k streaming, instead of 1080p, and discounts / free games similar to Playstation Plus or similar). You do have to buy the games.
So yeah, if they discontinue Stadia it is an open question what happens to the games you purchased on it. They have avoided questions on it, unsurprisingly.
FPS games have had this for a looong time. In Quake 3 it's called timenudge and you can have it set to a negative value which means that the client will predict the opponents movement before receiving the next packet from the server. The CPMA mod then came up with even better adaptive prediction in their netcode. Without some prediction opponent movement would be jerky depending on the other players ping. The downsid…
Fighting games too via things like GGPO. Not to mention even fighting games like Melee have a little local input lag, which you can then remove and use to hide network latency online.
This is laughably first world problems. I've been playing cod and other multiplayer games with >80 ping my entire life. It's fine. I was expecting people to be worried about stadia being 200 or more ms latency but 80? Come on.
"Google kills all their products" is a bit of an overused meme trotted out at any launch... But for Stadia it's a pretty legitimate concern, I'd say. The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible. The counterargument would be that they've d…
> The counterargument would be that they've deployed a ton of network capacity and GPU resources for cloud computing anyway, and so Stadia is just riding on those coattails... But it's certainly not a promising track record. Exactly, in fact, Stadia is really just a way for Google to subsidize their cloud GPU buildout. Do you think those expensive GPUs are sitting idle in the meantime? No way! They're crunching numbe…
And a way for them to key/voice/button log lots of gamers to collect training data for AIs and stuff of that nature.
This makes me shed a solitary tear for Google Reader :'( And another solitary tear from the other eye for Google Inbox :,(
Google Reader's shutdown was a true act of vandalism. Sure there are a handful alternatives, but Reader despite its somewhat basic UI worked really well. And despite Google's attempts to kill RSS, it hasn't gone away.
Feedly's quite good, and they have a business model that isn't driven by abuse of their users.
Google’s different brands remind me of MSFT of the early 2000s. No rhyme or reason. More chaos and throwing spaghetti at the wall. No issues changing or deprecating APIs and products like this on a whim. They certainly dont inspire trust in anything but their flagship brands like Gmail that have been with us for decades.
From what I hear, this is due to the promo driven culture at Google. You can good reviews/promos based on new products that get pushed to market, nobody cares about maintenance at Google.
The criticism of Google Stadia and the defense of its concept in this thread are correct. There is a successful future in cloud gaming and nobody denies that. However, it's extremely likely to be delivered by a company with both the technical chops and industry chops, including a deep existing library. Google only has one of those, and they didn't even nail the technical side convincingly. Look toward Microsoft or So…
Take MSFT game pass and back it on cloud servers. Almost all the games run on Windows, their own OS, and can be optimized for whatever datacenters are on the way out from enterprise apps but with some GPUs tossed in. I'm over simplifying but I'm sure MSFT has a plan out there if they wanted to move forward after seeing how Stadia works out.
Both platforms are at similar levels of maturity, actually, with similarly limited support for platforms, controllers, and games. Microsoft just hasn't had the audacity to charge for their beta test.