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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#111

Post by fixermark »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #39

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…

Probably a subscription service like Google's other media-content-house offerings (Play Music and YouTube).

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#112

Post by Scramblejams »

vvanders wrote: post #47
saberience wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful. This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency associated with playing on remote ser…

+1, ex networking+tools gamedev here and have almost the exact same thoughts. They haven't fundamentally solved the latency issue, 50-100ms of ping is brutal and the people who could be a target for this generally won't have a fiber internet connection. Network gameplay works via misdirection, predictable simulations and knowing how to converge a divergent state(including rewinding in time to re-play hittraces and th…

And when all the clients and the server are sitting in the same DC?

Now you can program your clients and server like they’re all on a LAN. And now you can trust the client. (The client, not the inputs.) Those are huge reductions in complexity. This makes delivering good multiplayer easier, not harder.

But I do agree that input/display latency is going to be a thing. Results may be highly variable and you’ll probably know two people in the same city who have very different experiences with it.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#113

Post by anth_anm »

ssully wrote: post #86
saberience wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful. This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency associated with playing on remote ser…

Just FYI, but no one outside the tech scene knows about Google's reputation for dropping support of their products or their eroded reputation in regards to do no evil. I have tried talking to people about it and they really just don't give a shit. Also Microsoft or Sony weren't companies known for gaming when they entered this space and now they are the leaders.

Gamers do.

Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#114

Post by jsgo »

ssully wrote: post #74
b_tterc_p wrote: post #39

Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…

I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games). The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past wi…

Game Pass works because you're essentially temporarily unlocking a library of games to be downloaded to your device. It really isn't an indicator they're moving in the same direction as Stadia.

It is kind of another beast altogether for Google, Shadow, Microsoft (xCloud), etc. to dedicate actual hardware for your usage. Shadow and others like it are essentially remote VM w/ GPU that you rent by the hour. Stadia, xCloud, etc. we don't know what the business model is going to look like. The only positive here is that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all cloud infrastructure companies so in theory, they could price their offerings cheaper than a company that is a tenant on their systems.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#115

Post by danso »

Keverw wrote: post #53
saberience wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful. This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency associated with playing on remote ser…

> they do have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two Totally a concern. When OnLive closed people lost all their games, no refunds. While if you went to the store and bought a physical disk. It'd still be yours. The average console quality game is about 50 or 60 bucks nowadays. If you are an active gamer, you could lockup and lose hundreds or even a thousand dollars when they decide to close it…

Would you be buying games for $50-$60 through Stadia? What if they follow a model like Playstation Now or Origin Access, where you pay a monthly fee to have access to the entire library (a la Netflix)?

I haven't bought a game on physical disk for a long time. My impression is that in many cases, you're still going to be downloading a big release day patch upon installation. And for multiplayer-heavy games, it doesn't matter if you have a physical disk when the servers are shut off.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#117

Post by jakamau »

I played with Project Stream during the technical beta and I would say it cleared the hurdle of "good enough." The resolution was good and the input lag was normally small enough to be compensated for or go unnoticed.

Since the majority of this venture's hardware appears to be in-house and, I assume, easily re-purposed for other core services I'm less cynical about the half-life of this product.

I have no intention of buying the controller but if this let's me stream to my existing hardware with minimal friction I would be interested. If they structure it as a monthly subscription with a robust catalog they would probably get my money.

I'm curious to see what happens.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#118

Post by steeleduncan »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #78
Ronsenshi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is following: you have a character standing in a world. You click "w" - at which point character has to move. Right? On local machine that's what you will get. Not so much with the streaming - first you input goes to the google, being processed there, returns to you and only now you see that character is moving.

But the server knows which frame you pressed the 'w' on. So when it gets the 'w', it rewinds it's state machine X frames (hopefully X==1), applies your input, moves the state machine forward X+1 frames and displays that state. So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.

> So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.

There will be a visual glitch every time you press a key.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#119

Post by snaky »

saberience wrote: post #22
sidcool wrote: post #11

The computer scientist in me is giddy with excitement. If it is as good as it sounds, we are in a new age of gaming. Kudos Google.

So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful. This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency associated with playing on remote ser…

> people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data

To have the data of every choice and move in every second of every game would be quite useful to calculate the model of the particular user with the level of accuracy barely existed before.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#120

Post by anth_anm »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #78
Ronsenshi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is following: you have a character standing in a world. You click "w" - at which point character has to move. Right? On local machine that's what you will get. Not so much with the streaming - first you input goes to the google, being processed there, returns to you and only now you see that character is moving.

But the server knows which frame you pressed the 'w' on. So when it gets the 'w', it rewinds it's state machine X frames (hopefully X==1), applies your input, moves the state machine forward X+1 frames and displays that state. So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.

That just results in weird laggy gameplay.

Actually I don't even think this will work properly at all. You can do some prediction, but latency still kills you.

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