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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

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Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#371

Post by scottie_m »

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…

It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib, and especially when it’s something they made in-house. Add to that streaming games; problematic for the (by far) most popular two genres: huge multiplayer shooters, and sports. I see almost no chance of this succeeding long-term, and I’d put the odds of it going EOL within 5 years at over 80%.

These huge companies will keep throwing money at streaming because they see gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’ve seen no indication that they have a plan without giant question marks before the “profit” step. Look at YouTube, something Google acquired in 2006, is dominant in its space, and still doesn’t make them money. Yet somehow games, which are more finicky and reliant on universally good internet connections is going to work for them?

This is trend-chasing, once again without any real new ideas to overcome existing challenges.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#372

Post by wmf »

_wmd wrote: post #318
zarriak wrote: post #229

I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser. The entire reason this is happening i…

An alternative explanation might be that it's a buffer for overprovisioned GPUs for an undersold Cloud service

GCP uses Nvidia but Stadia uses AMD GPUs so they're not sharing hardware.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#373

Post by iandanforth »

derefr wrote: post #345
justfor1comment wrote: post #176

I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This…

How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it, but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution (for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an x86 emulator with save-state + rewind s…

When you're talking to someone on Skype and you notice the other person has stopped moving, you stop talking.

They may already be doing something similar (halt rendering on congestion) but when this kind of lag happened to me it felt like the rendering had continued without pause on their end.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#374

Post by bitxbit »

pier25 wrote: post #233

Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical. Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play). Heck, even streaming in your local network i…

Agreed. Enthusiast gamers fret/obsess over a small difference in FPS, refresh rate and lag especially when it comes to competitive gaming. Until Google can deliver a service that is indistinguishable, it’s DOA in my view.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#375

Post by iandanforth »

zarriak wrote: post #343
_wmd wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative explanation might be that it's a buffer for overprovisioned GPUs for an undersold Cloud service

It could also be a way for AMD to get a ton of GPUs sold after oversupply due to the mining boom/bust.

The GPUs are custom for Google.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#376

Post by jedieaston »

mtgx wrote: post #262
zarriak wrote: post #229

I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser. The entire reason this is happening i…

What worries me is that I read about this being "Chrome-only". Google is not just trying to win in console gaming space here - it's trying to establish itself as the browser monopolist and it seems to be doing it without much subtlety.

They specifically said they are looking into making the client browser/platform-agnostic, which they'll have to do anyway if they want it on iOS since you aren't allowed to run anything but the Safari engine for web browsers (of course, they could build a native client).

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#377

Post by dragonwriter »

scottie_m wrote: post #371
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…

It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib, and especially when it’s something they made in-house. Add to that streaming games; problematic for the (by far) most popular two genres: huge multiplayer shooters, and sports. I see almost no chance of this succeeding long-term, and I’d put the odds of it going EOL within 5 years at over 80%. These huge compan…

> It’s Google, which is notorious for smothering virtually everything unrelated to search or ads in the crib.

It's apparently deeply tied to YouTube, and particularly to help provide an onramp for more (often ad-opportunity-generating) gaming content on YouTube a service that is both an ad-platform and the venue for at least two distinct revenue generating premium services (the older of which is ad free) that Google has not strangled in the crib.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#378

Post by _ea1k »

gcbw2 wrote: post #335
dragontamer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for explaining your experience! There's a lot of us out here who are curious how this thing works and the design tradeoffs.

> tradeoffs lag is the least of your worries. Encoding artifacts will get to you and completely ruin the experience on anything that is not a simple puzzle game.

So basically the same issues as onlive then? I remember thinking that it was pretty good for a while. Then I tried the same game on a decent PC immediately after using the service.

It was night and day, both in terms of latency and graphics quality. I don't have high hopes for this service.

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#379

Post by puzzle »

iandanforth wrote: post #375
zarriak wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be a way for AMD to get a ton of GPUs sold after oversupply due to the mining boom/bust.

The GPUs are custom for Google.

Do we know custom how? It might be the same chips with different microcode or whatever GPUs' equivalent is. Is it a custom spin like Intel has been doing for years for Google and Amazon?

Re: Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

#380

Post by noir_lord »

ergo14 wrote: post #257
zarriak wrote: post #229

I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser. The entire reason this is happening i…

Unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS is only used in US schools on a wide scale.

The only Chromebook I've seen anywhere is the nice one I bought my mum for Christmas year before last, she loves it and I've had no issues supporting it (like not a single one, she uses it constantly as well).

I've got a school age stepson nothing there either.

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