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Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service

• 01100011 8y ago
  How is this any better than GeForce Now from Nvidia? It seems odd that Google chose to create its own gaming studio. Doesn't that make them a competitor to the folks they support from?
• aasasd 8y ago
  Inb4 Google closes the Stadia cloud gaming service.
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  So, no AAA or famous indie games announced ?
  • alienreborn 8y ago
    No exclusive games but they revealed that Doom Eternal will come to the service with 4k, HDR and 60 FPS.
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  So, uh, the controller has a microphone, and connects directly to the Internet over Wi-Fi. I guess it's nice this time they told us upfront? Really curious what the network performance requirements would be for 4K or 8K game streaming. Haven't heard them admit to that.
  • rc_hadoken 8y ago
    ..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).
    • Klathmon 8y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move where it happens. The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority). Sure, some games where local timing is everything won't work as well (Super Smash Bros probably won't be able to be played on this system at the top tier), but the vast majority of players and games won't ever need that kind of millisecond precision.
      • dgritsko 8y ago
        It really doesn't take much input lag for things to feel sluggish and unresponsive. I've tried to play Rocket League on a Steam Link, and while it was technically _possible_ to do so, there was just enough sluggishness in the controls that it just felt _off_ - like I was at a disadvantage to every other player. Even something as simple as a 2D platforming game can require precise timing of button presses, and it seems unlikely to me that Stadia or any other similar service will be able to fully address this. I'd love to be proven wrong, however.
        • Klathmon 8y ago
          Yeah i've experienced it as well. I'd imagine a big part is that games which are written for a system like this can do some compensation if they know the latency is between controller and the system (vs games which expect the latency between the client and the server). I'm also curious if there is anything else going on here than just "streaming video to the user", like allowing some "smearing" to compensate like how VR headsets will do some fancy stuff to compensate for head movement faster than the round trip communication time between the sensors on the headset and the PC.
      • flohofwoe 8y ago
        Latency hiding in "traditional" multiplayer games basically works by doing computations for other players locally (even if it's as simple as dead reckoning and extrapolating a few milliseconds into the 'future'), and only apply corrections when this diverges too much from the server because of network hick-ups. Unless Google invented some new magic, that's not possible with a video stream (but hmm, who knows, maybe they have invented their own 'game-streaming video codec' with additional information for some sort of 2D-dead-reckoning for regions of the video frame... but my guess is they simply don't care about latency).
    • swebs 8y ago
      That's what everyone said about controllers for FPS games, yet there's still console tournaments for Call of Duty and the like. If everyone is playing with the same handicap, it's still a fair match. And sometimes mass appeal is better than playing at the top level.
      • TillE 8y ago
        Some people - strange people - actually prefer a gamepad as an FPS controller, probably because that's what they grew up with. Nobody prefers extra input lag.
      • rasz 8y ago
        Its special Olympics, average k&m players beat console FPS "champions" every single time.
• Ronsenshi 8y ago
  This is not a first service that tries to do that. And as before it all ends up with how close the gamer is to the server node, how stable user connection and whether connection is metered or not. I just pinged my google.com server node - and it's over 16ms. Which means no 60fps.
  • CountHackulus 8y ago
    No, it just means your input latency will be longer than 16ms.
    • Ronsenshi 8y ago
      60+ tick multiplayer servers are a thing. Besides - low input latency means you get response that is not exactly what you are doing in the moment.
    • jaimeyap 8y ago
      If that's round trip latency. Then input latency will be 8ms right? Input action to Frame update latencies are reliably 12-13ms+ with a local console routing through a TV. So if they can do something fancy with rendering frames to the network to sync with your monitor. We might see a minimal increase in actual overall latency.
  • briffle 8y ago
    If all the players are in this service, it means lag is much easier to deal with for developers, since its only input lag. All the players actual compute/rendering would be on a very low latency network. you no longer have to deal with all the other networking problems between the client software, and server software.
    • Ronsenshi 8y ago
      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.
• m_ke 8y ago
  Google is really flexing on people here. With 5G this will be the future of all computing and only google and amazon have the data centers to make it work. Sundar opened up the event talking about deep learning, I wouldn't be surprised if they used this platform as a way to train their RL models against humans or on data generated by the users. The youtube integration is also a shot at twitch.
  • eitally 8y ago
    I'd argue MSFT does, too, and they've already cleared a HUGE hurdle with XBOX (the hardware + game ecosystem) & XBOX Live (social engagement). The opportunity for Google is huge, but it will require sustained, strong, cross-functional execution that can be challenging for such an engineering driven, compartmentalized organization.
    • m_ke 8y ago
      Yeah, but they control all of the platforms to make this work. With Android, Chrome, Chromecast, Youtube and GCP they have all of the pieces in place.
      • anth_anm 8y ago
        I wish anti-trust was a thing.
        • m_ke 8y ago
          Elizabeth Warren is coming to shake things up ;)
        • diminoten 8y ago
          I don't, getting that many different companies on the same page would be basically impossible.
• ron0c 8y ago
  Google really promoting how it's better to develop for than anything else since they can constantly upgrade the hardware. How long before Stadia exclusive content?
  • Klathmon 8y ago
    They aren't the first or the only one doing this. Crackdown 3 already semi-famously uses Microsoft's cloud systems to do some physics processing in the cloud and not on the client. Stadia might be a lot easier for devs to code against since everything is in the "cloud", rather than having to split where the processing happens specifically, and so we might see more exclusives there because of that, but MS and friends aren't going to just fall over and give up if this ends up working.
    • djhworld 8y ago
      > Crackdown 3 already semi-famously uses Microsoft's cloud systems to do some physics processing in the cloud and not on the client. Is that true though? I remember in the early Don Mattrick days of Microsoft they were heavily pushing the whole cloud physics thing but ever since then that has been swept under the carpet or heavily downplayed.
      • Klathmon 8y ago
        I haven't played it myself nor have I done a ton of research, but Crackdown 3 just came out recently, and I heard them talking about how important the cloud aspect of it is to enable the dynamic destruction they have in their multiplayer stuff. The link below from late 2018 talks about it a bit https://www.windowscentral.com/inside-crackdown-3s-azure-cloud-powered-destruction https://www.windowscentral.com/inside-crackdown-3s-azure-clo...
        • mikewhy 8y ago
          From people who've actually played it, it's nothing like what they hyped up or demoed way back when.
• sidcool 8y ago
  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.
  • saberience 8y ago
    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 servers. Google isn't a name that people associate with gaming or gamers, buit they do have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two. I wouldn't trust Google to still be supporting "Stadia" in 5 years time, whereas I do know Steam will still be there. Also, Google's reputation for "do no evil" has been rapidly eroded in recent times and people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data than they already do. Contrast this with Steam, a private company that gamers trust with their data. I think Google is once again reaching here into a space too late and without anything really compelling to make people switch away from existing Xbox/Windows/Steam ecosystems. Edit: One other additional aspect to this: it doesn't really matter how fast Google's servers can stream the data, most people's ISPs do not have great consistent connections. Hell, I have Google Fibre at home and occasionally I get issues streaming 1080p Netflix (stuttering etc). Most people have services with bandwidth caps and do not get consistent enough speeds to support streaming games. At my parent's house in the UK, the situation is even worse with lower caps and very often there are disruptions in the connection and so the Netflix stream will turn into a blocky mess for 10 seconds or so.
    • Spartan-S63 8y ago
      Yeah, this is my opinion, too, almost right on the nose. Especially the part about only supporting a product for a few years. I also don't like the idea of games-as-a-service in the sense that I only own a license to the game for as long as I pay a monthly fee. I'm okay with licensing content within the game (i.e. DLC), but I shy away from subscription games services like Xbox Games Pass or EA's Origin subscription. A streaming game product like this doesn't solve that issue. Additionally, the latency issue, like you pointed out, is too much for me to consider _not_ owning my own gaming hardware.
• jpambrun 8y ago
  And the games will run on Linux using Vulkan. I find that pretty awesome.
  • mtgx 8y ago
    Looks like Fuchsia is a year years too late to be used for this, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to switch it out later on. Still a great thing for Linux and Vulkan. Too bad Sony refuses to support them on its PS consoles.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Just like with OpenGL, Vulkan is not like Vulkan. Plenty of extensions to choose from. https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
    • awill 8y ago
      I don't think Fuchsia would be used for this. Vulkan runs on Linux, Unreal/Unity run on Linux, and AMD has a good open source driver. Everything points to Linux being the right choice here.
  • jayd16 8y ago
    But its a custom AMD GPU. I wonder how much will make it back to trunk.
    • jpambrun 8y ago
      Vulkan is an open API. Sure it's not Ubuntu on commodity hardware, but it's closer than Windows.
    • kllrnohj 8y ago
      The only part about it that looks custom is that it's lower spec than what AMD otherwise sells. Stadia's specs per Google: Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units capable of 10.7 teraflops 16 GB of RAM with up to 484 GB/s of performance Radeon MI25's specs: 16GB of HBM2 memory at 484 GB/s with 64 compute units capable of 12.29 TFLOPs 12.29 * (56 / 64) = 10.7. So this is almost certainly just MI25 chips with 1 or 2 bad 'cores'. Aka, the reject pile. From last generation, at that, since the current gen MI50 & MI60 are both 1TB/s HBM2 memory. The multi-gpu part maaaaay be custom using the Instinct's extra interconnects instead of what used to be consumer Crossfire. But multi-gpu in consumer space is almost entirely dead, and nothing seems to suggest any developer would do anything for multi-gpu in this platform, either.
• bovermyer 8y ago
  If this isn't laggy as all hell, it could be a game-changer. ...sorry.
• djhworld 8y ago
  This is going to be so cool....if it works. I wonder where the instances will be? Will they put them in their regions, or will it be rolled out to their CDN POPs?
• th0ma5 8y ago
  Can I buy just the controller? Sure does seem the PS4 controller is about the best out there for most gaming, and I've been hesitant to buy anything else. This controller seems just as well made.
  • Dirlewanger 8y ago
    Have you tried the Xbox One controller? Hands-down the most comfortable and most well-engineered controller I've ever used.
    • vernie 8y ago
      They're both great.
• stillbourne 8y ago
  How many years until its canceled and our game libraries erased from all existence?
  • bitpush 8y ago
    "Hey, I started this new workout routine". "LOL, how many weeks until you fail"?
    • rarec 8y ago
      "Brah, you started a new workout routine nearly every other month and haven't stuck with it. What makes this time different?"
      • mav3rick 8y ago
        "Brah, I started, finished and WON many fitness competitions over 20 years. Doesn't matter if I try and fail. I will get better."
        • akhilcacharya 8y ago
          Meanwhile, I'm not even convinced Assistant is better than the Google Now voice search.
          • mav3rick 8y ago
            They use the same back end.
    • stillbourne 8y ago
      https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/ I've used most of these applications in the past and I'm pretty salty they died. So yeah. I don't have a lot of faith in google keeping services it doesn't find profitable, my guess is the cost of compute will exceed the profit from selling games/game streaming/whatever and then, yes, they will shut it down. Don't act like its not something they don't do or wouldn't do. It's certainly not like making fun of the fat kid at the gym. Or are we turning into hail corporate over here?
• bluthru 8y ago
  One of the biggest reasons to install windows is gaming. If this takes off (or enough games are released on linux as a byproduct) linux could gain a larger install share.
  • buboard 8y ago
    .. or macOS
• b_tterc_p 8y ago
  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 vary drastically by the amount they play and how computationally demanding it is. I just don’t see it being feasible without personalized cost. Looking forward to paying minimum cost for minimum graphics too.
  • mav3rick 8y ago
    "Serious" gamers can still buy consoles. This is not a zero sum market.
    • tcd 8y ago
      Everyone copied Apple when they removed the headphone jack, whose to say consoles in the traditional sense will still be around in 20 years? Microsoft/Sony are NOT going to sit back and let Google win here. Expect replies from them (especially with Microsoft's Azure). The streaming services of gaming is coming.
      • islanderfun 8y ago
        Microsoft already has project xCloud in the works. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-gaming-with-you-at-the-center/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-g...
      • steeleduncan 8y ago
        Sony launched Playstation Now 5 years ago. This is not a particularly new idea.
      • kllrnohj 8y ago
        > The streaming services of gaming is coming. It's already failed multiple times. OnLive tried & failed. Nvidia's has been in beta for years. Sony has one. Everyone in this area has tried this. Nobody has seen what could be described as "success", and the cost models so far have been ludicrous. Turns out renting Xeons and Radeon MI Instincts in a professionally staffed, maintained datacenter is way, way more expensive than a handful of consumer chips in a box in the living room with nobody on-call to monitor it. The GPU here looks to be basically a slightly cut-down AMD MI25. That'd make a single GPU in this stradia cloud gaming service costs more than 10 xbox one x's. How do you make that price-competitive here?
• djanogo 8y ago
  I give this 2 years before Google removes all references of "Stadia" from it's product lineup. They have never stuck with a product which, relative to rest of their products, has smaller but dedicated adoption. For example, Valve will keep updating/supporting/hosting events of CSGO even if it has <1Mil active users on PC, but I can totally see Google pulling plug on it and burn dedicated followers.
  • kllrnohj 8y ago
    > For example, Valve will keep updating/supporting/hosting events of CSGO even if it has <1Mil active users on PC, but I can totally see Google pulling plug on it and burn dedicated followers. Bad example because CSGO has been sitting at #2/#3 on steam's active player charts for years and years. Consistently ~10x the player count of, say, Rainbow Six Siege. Continuing to invest resources into a game with CSGO's player count is just all around solid business strategy, particularly since it has ~500k concurrent users at any given point. Active player count would be way, way over 1Mil. TF2 would be a better example, but I don't know how much (if anything?) Valve is still doing with the small TF2 community. It still has a respectable 50k concurrent user population, but has Valve been ignoring them? Are there still updates for it?
  • munificent 8y ago
    > They have never stuck with a product which, relative to rest of their products, has smaller but dedicated adoption. Google Books (14 years old), Google Finance (12), Google Scholar (14), Google Fonts (9), etc.
    • rasz 8y ago
      >Google Books broken and abandoned http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-is-google-books-search-broken.html http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-is-go... >Google Finance https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-know-it-is-going-away-here-is-what-will-remain-2017-09-27 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-know...
  • technofiend 8y ago
• ilamont 8y ago
  Some may remember an earlier streaming game service, OnLive, that crashed and burned spectacularly: https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report plus HN discussions here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefi... I saw the OnLive demo. It was very slick, and the concept seemed more than viable, it was inevitable.
  • RIMR 8y ago
    Internet speeds in North America have greatly increased since the OnLive launched. I suspect that Google will have better infrastructure than OnLive, and that their customers will have better Internet.
    • gsich 8y ago
      Speed is not the (main) problem. It's latency and jitter. With the last one especially bad on mobile networks. To get at most 1ms of additional delay you also need a datacenter every 300 km.
      • jsgo 8y ago
        I used the precursor of Stadia, Project Stream. There were moments where the video went fuzzy, but for >95% of the time, it ran fantastic. My gaming PC setup is an i5/16GB RAM/GTX 1080 and it stutters more than the stream did (I assume that's on the CPU side). I'm sure Google has the compression algorithm chops to make this all work. Unfortunately for me at least, what I want is more akin to a cloud VM where they can host my games and I stream them wherever, which this isn't it. I've already got games between Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc. I have zero interest in buying a game 2x just to be able to have more portable play.
        • thirdsun 8y ago
          I'm pretty sure you won't buy them (again). You will rent them. Anything but subscription-based pricing model for Google Stadia would be a surprise to me.
• kemonocode 8y ago
  So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I thought it was particularly ironic that Google is launching it's own game studio five days after closing it's own VR movie studio: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stories-shutting-down-1203163117/ https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/google-spotlight-stori...
    • themacguffinman 8y ago
      It's not ironic at all. VR movies were always experimental and it looks like they realized there isn't a substantial market there, video games on the other hand are a proven industry that they've just entered.
  • gipp 8y ago
    This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life. Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
    • _bxg1 8y ago
      The difference is they launch high-profile, promising-the-moon projects and put their full weight behind them, and then give up a couple short years later for inscrutable reasons ([cough] Google Fiber [cough])
      • gipp 8y ago
        I don't see how their reasons are any more "inscrutable" than any other company who cans failed products (all of them).
• gsich 8y ago
  Their live presentation already showed the input lag.
• fzeroracer 8y ago
  From a preservationist angle, this would be a terrible path for games to go down. Any exclusive games released using Stadia would be impossible to play once the servers shut down because users don't have any access to the software. Even if MMOs shut down, there is usually an opportunity to write a new server by reverse engineering the client. I can't really support anything about game streaming unless it was tied into an actual game you could install or play without relying on their servers to exist.
• jayd16 8y ago
  Did anyone catch the details on their private cloud offering? Are they selling server blades? Can you run apps on it like CAD or simply Unity itself?
• DanCarvajal 8y ago
  The key to me is that this is a console built for YouTube and that might be its biggest selling point to a lot of people.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• Bahamut 8y ago
  I wonder how the Google customer service experience here will be...
• wurst_case 8y ago
  This is what I've seen everything trending towards for almost ten years now. The next step is to build hardware that utilize the full benefits of data center gaming. Vr headsets can shrink and are only limited by the method of getting light into your retina. Same goes with any kind of haptic feedback or audio feedback.
• _bxg1 8y ago
  I'm skeptical they'll be able to overcome the latency problem. At some point there's a hard cap that only infrastructure can help with - not software - and Google's already given up on rolling out their own infrastructure.
  • shereadsthenews 8y ago
    Google has more of "their own infrastructure" than any ISP you could name or any of the transit networks that people think of as "tier 1".
    • _bxg1 8y ago
      But it's not an ISP. Presumably this gaming service's primary market isn't Google's own data center employees.
    • kkarakk 8y ago
      Bet you 100 dollars that ISPs start rolling out their own gaming services and start throttling google's
• bdz 8y ago
  Love this comment from earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388
• tareqak 8y ago
  Given the number products and services that Google has shuttered over the years and their focus on learning all there is about their users, I am going to sit this one out. There is definitely some cool work here though: being able to have access to a library of games without lugging around a console or computer is an interesting idea with both pros and cons. The pro that I can think of is not having to be responsible for upgrades. The con is that we continue to move towards a world where we rent more and own less.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    Probably worth noting: this project appears aligned with Google's Cloud and mobile initiatives. It's unproven, but it's originating from spaces where Google's products have stuck around.
• azinman2 8y ago
  Won’t latency be a giant problem?
  • wmf 8y ago
    If only Google had spent over ten years optimizing its network for low latency.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      Unfortunately, since Fiber didn't take off, they didn't spend ten years optimizing your network latency. ;)
      • azinman2 8y ago
        Not to mention they talk about this for phones as well...
• jakamau 8y ago
  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.
• fixermark 8y ago
  I'm concerned about how this will work for game libraries. If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware target does not change. Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine) of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built? And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more popular games? This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-installed and run on my own new hardware.
  • hex12648430 8y ago
    Not to mention the frequent horror stories of people having their account closed by google, often by mistake. There's even a link about a story like that right now on the front page. [1] Good luck getting in touch with a human and get your saved games back if that happens to you. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
• johnyzee 8y ago
  Google is also launching a new Stadia Controller that [...] will work with the Stadia service by connecting directly through Wi-Fi to link it to a game session in the cloud. This will presumably help with latency and moving a game from one device to another. Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV? Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout. Sounds like another gimmick that nobody has ever, or will ever need. But "Machine Learning!"
  • cma 8y ago
    >Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV? It also improves latency.
  • golfer 8y ago
    "so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?" Clearly the latency advantage is the main benefit. Just as stated in the quote you used. Can you explain why that is a horrible design choice?
    • johnyzee 8y ago
      How does it improve latency? The device it is connected to is already internet connected and there is no meaningful latency between the controller and the device. So how does the on-board wifi help? Adding wifi to a device for no reason is horrible, I don't suppose it needs explaining.
      • satysin 8y ago
        By directly connecting the controller to the service via WiFi it removes any potential issues with the device having to act as a proxy for the controller input. For their dedicated Stadia set top box it isn't a big deal (as they will control the hardware) but when used with phones, third party STBs and such it can be problematic. Google will have no control over the WiFi hardware in all these devices and many cheaper WiFi chipsets are buggy in a multi-device setup. Adding WiFi to the controller removes all those potential issues and allows them to tweak things to be as good as they can be for latency, power consumption, range, etc. (at least in theory anyway).
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• vernie 8y ago
  It's cool to imagine that you won't be able to go back and play old games anymore. That rocks.
• hex12648430 8y ago
  I really hope the latency we've seen in the live demo was due to the venue's poor internet connection because otherwise this will make some games unplayable. They mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available and that it would be a good benchmark for the service's latency but I'm waiting to see some independent reviews to believe it. Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices (of games or subscription) are extremely competitive. The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    Latency: Project Stream has been in beta since January, and there are a lot of testimonials out there. Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the latency seems to be imperceptible, assuming a good connection. Target audience: Probably people who used to own consoles/gaming rigs, but no longer do for a variety of reasons. The fact that you can play anywhere and on any device (chromecast, phone, laptop), makes it competitive with devices such as Nintendo Switch of Nvidia Shield.
    • dragontamer 8y ago
      > Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the latency seems to be imperceptible, assuming a good connection. There are certainly games out there which would respond poorly to latency and jitter. Play Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, but randomly jitter your inputs by 10ms to 20ms here and there, and that would make it far more frustrating experience. Its bad enough that those punishing games can kill you quickly with a single mistake. But when you're fighting the controller and the lag, its that much worse. I think streaming would be definitely fine for games like RPGs, or slower-paced adventure games (ex: Skyrim). But this will never be acceptable for Cuphead, Overcooked, Hollow Knight, or Touhou (or Jamestown). I'm willing to be proven wrong of course, but I've generally felt that even TV-lag is enough to make me rage-quit some setups when playing these games... And TV-lag is consistent. WiFi based internet lag is jittery by nature. The question of what to do with dropped packets or delayed packets is an important design choice, and I don't think there's a correct answer for these twitch games like Cuphead. --------- Fighting game players are so crazy about latency that they don't even use local Bluetooth controllers (!!) The serious fighting game community will likely never accept something like this solution. The more casual, but still relatively twitchy, "hard games" players (Cuphead) is what I'm curious about. Whether or not the latency is acceptable for that community.
• Angostura 8y ago
  Have they announced the closure date yet?
• synaesthesisx 8y ago
  Isn't this similar to Nvidia's GeForce Now service? I've been impressed with Nvidia's beta; with a good connection you can play a ton of games at maximum settings with just minor input lag.
  • karlding 8y ago
    Yeah, there's quite a few companies that are working on a similar product, including PlayStation Now (Sony) [0], GeForce Now (NVIDIA) [1], and Shadow [2]. [0] https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-now/ps-now-on-pc/ https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-now/ps... [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/ [2] https://shadow.tech/int https://shadow.tech/int
• minimaxir 8y ago
  Other comments have suggested this might fail like OnLive/Nvidia/PlayStation Now because the economics of streaming on the business end don't work out. This case is different. Stadia is the first video game streaming product made by a cloud computing company, and also a cloud computing company which developed a video codec (VP9) just for high quality/low latency streaming. The economics are much different on all sides; it all depends on how Google prices the service. (it'll be curious how Microsoft's xCloud competes. Maybe Amazon will get in on the fun too.)
  • holoduke 8y ago
    It will fail because developers will think twice before willing to depend on another evil ecosystem from Google.
    • hiccuphippo 8y ago
      Developers will put their games where the users are. Right now most developers deploy to PC, XBox and PlayStation (and some to Switch) what's the cost of one more platform to deploy to vs the extra sales it can produce?
  • pier25 8y ago
    > it all depends on how Google prices the service I doubt pricing can change the underlying fact that you need really good latency and being close to a Stadia server.
  • Svoka 8y ago
    Honestly, there're like 40+ Cloud Gaming services listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming I don't think google does something new here, and I don't think most of them failed because of financial side. Most just failed to acquire users, even giving games and subscriptions almost for free. Or, even for free, like GeForce Now. But I don't use it. For me gaming via cloud feels like a bad experience. May be Google would put pedal to the metal on its PR and advertisement, it would attract enough users. P.S. Just tried GeForce Now again. After playing on PC even if lag is barely detectable or noticeable, but it is very irritating. Like, there is delay between action and reaction.
• justfor1comment 8y ago
  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 was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the * lag * and meet * lag *" and then I had no idea what I had to do next. Lag was still a rare thing during my experience. It's just that when it occurred the timing was unfortunate.
  • dragontamer 8y ago
    Thanks for explaining your experience! There's a lot of us out here who are curious how this thing works and the design tradeoffs.
    • molecules 8y ago
      I also was a participant. It was pretty cool. I did a wireshark and they are using Google's QUIC protocol. In my experience the game would drop graphics before I would experience input lag. There were a handful of times that I did experience input lag. This was on a wired connection 100mbs down 20mbs up through Xfinity. I did notice in the Google demo, that when the person was using the game pad, he experienced input lag when he was trying to jump up on top of that steeple on top of the building.
      • dragontamer 8y ago
        Hmm, I think I like those design choices. A dropped frame or two isn't a big deal in my experience, while a delayed input is a far bigger detriment to the gaming experience. QUIC (and UDP in general) seems about right for the technology backend. I'm still of the opinion that Google shot themselves in the foot here by having a bunch of wireless controllers in one room. Its like they've never talked to a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament organizer before: Wii Nunchuks over 2.4GHz Bluetooth have dropped packets / dropped input issues when you get to ~20+ participants. Don't do mass wireless in one room. It always ends poorly. I'd expect that local wireless in a typical living-room setting would be a better experience actually. After all: the major issue is whether or not the wired-connection / fiber backbone of the typical city is up to spec for this kind of thing. (A typical living room user probably doesn't have to worry about clogged 2.4GHz connections unless they're in an apartment I guess...)
• rnantes 8y ago
  Strada looks like a game changer, I bet it will be massive by 2025 when internets speeds improve. Only companies with major infrastructure (Microsoft and Amazon) will truly be able to compete with Google. The cost of hardware can even be spread between multiple people lowering prices. Plus it divided monthly via a subscription, meaning a lower cost of entry versus buying a new Console.
• Tiktaalik 8y ago
  If this sort of thing becomes ubiquitous RIP game preservation efforts.
• cwyers 8y ago
  More details are available here: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands-on-with-google-stream-gdc-2019 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands... They have benchmarks and go into detail on how well it runs. I found this interesting: > "[It's] a complete port," Google's Phil Harrison told me. "[Ubisoft] built the game completely for Stadia and they're actually doing a talk at GDC about how they got their game up and running." > In our earlier analysis, our impression was of a game that very, very closely mirrored the PC version running at 1080p resolution, with some elements upgraded beyond the console quality threshold defined by Xbox One X. > "Correct, but they started from their main line on the consoles, it's not that they took the PC version and ported," Stadia VP Majd Bakar explains. "You can see that as the UI changes according to the controller you connect. I wouldn't call it a console port, I'd recommend going to the talk. It's going to be run jointly between Google and the team that did the work for Project Stream and they will talk about how they did it and the work stream they followed."
• o10449366 8y ago
  The optimist in me says this is exciting, but the pessimist in me says Google will just end up cancelling it in ~2 years.
• holoduke 8y ago
  The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a real problem or issue. The average Joe doesn't need another subscription just to play some games. Having a console where you buy games is more than enough. I also silently hope that Google will fail hard with this one. Since they are the worst publisher on earth with absolutely no compassion towards its developers relationships.
  • petra 8y ago
    It does solve some problems for game developers, like with style transfer. And gamers go where the content is.
    • stordoff 8y ago
      Is there any reason that requires infrastructure to _play_ the games (in a consumer sense)? That seemed more like a prototyping tool to me.
      • petra 8y ago
        No reason. But Google may decide to share it only with cloud partners. Of course it depends on the competition, but the may manage to do so.
    • dymk 8y ago
      Style transfer is something game developers want? Do popular games typically run style-transfer ML models today?
      • bobsil1 8y ago
        Feels like a gimmick.
  • joefkelley 8y ago
    Sorry, maybe I missed it; where in the announcement did they say it was a subscription?
• zarriak 8y ago
  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 is because Google has successfully captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks. ChromeOS could be as important than Android. Especially with the Windows 7 extended life support coming up, Google has less than 4 years to convince people to transfer to their platform instead of Windows 10. I know it seems heretical to imply that it will happen but I think this is a good example that Google considers it not only a real possibility but something that they might actually have a good chance of being able to pull off. The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of Windows 7 since they can't pay for extended support even if they wanted it. They can then continue this into the workplace. This is a brilliant move by Google.
  • ergo14 8y ago
    Unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS is only used in US schools on a wide scale.
    • thejj100100 8y ago
      My school uses them in the UK but I believe that's a minority. A lot more schools seem to use iPads instead.
    • botto 8y ago
      There is a wide deployment in Norway I believe, but indeed, I've not heard of big deployments elsewhere.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Worldwide it has even less market share than GNU/Linux desktops.
    • 8y ago
• cheeyoonlee 8y ago
  I also participated in the beta and was quite impressed. In my case, there was no lag and instead, when connection was poorer, the stream quality would get lowered (i.e like Youtube - 1080p to 460p). I think this can be completely resolved with a solid connection. Speaking on Google leveraging Youtube for Strada, I also think this could be an amazing affiliate opportunity for game developers and content creators. Imagine watching your favorite streamer (or I guess game reviewer) and with a click of a button, without having to download, play the game right from your browser (demo or full game). Great source of income for content creators, great frictionless experience for viewers/consumers, and great tool for developers.
  • holoduke 8y ago
    You mean a great place to loose another 30% of your income. A great place where you are forced to implement Google play related shit. A place where you can be expelled from the service based on wrong bot decisions. A place where there is no human support. A place where only the big publishers are looked after for. A place where indie developers are treated as shit. A place where search algorithms are dubious. Yes that's what you can expect from a Google stream service. Just as the playstore currently is.
    • ppseafield 8y ago
      Like Steam, but a little bit worse?
• pier25 8y ago
  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 isn't such a great experience these days. I love the idea, but realistically we are still very far away from streaming games replacing consoles or PCs. Many companies have tried (Nvidia, Sony, etc) but no one has succeeded for the simple reason that latency is not there yet.
  • AcerbicZero 8y ago
    This is a very valid point. Adding 100ms of latency to games that already struggle to deal with their built in ~100-150ms already is basically a non-starter. So you're left with casual games, single player games (with no modding), and maybe some less latency sensitive multi-player games.
  • ppseafield 8y ago
    Even the best hardware right in front of you can still currently cause a bad user experience for latency-sensitive games. All it can take is one player with high latency or an unreliable connection, and it can detract from the enjoyability of a game. And games already have latency from input devices, inputs registering, the game calculating the next frame, the monitor displaying it, and the user perceiving what has happened on screen. Every millisecond of network delay gets sandwiched between all of those.
  • yegle 8y ago
    I was a beta tester for Project Stream. FWIW, I traveled with a Pixelbook and played Project Stream with the hotel WiFi in Seattle. Everything is smooth and similar (if not the same) experience when I played with my home WiFi. The latency is good from my experience. There are occasional resolution drop but that happens <1 per hour. Mind you my experience was based on playing ACO which probably is not sensitive to latency. I also played Nvidia Shield Now on Mac while it was beta. I would say Project Stream is a much much better experience (no need to signup a new account is a plus, no client required a HUGE plus).
• ilovecaching 8y ago
  I did the beta, and I think the service is great, but I used 300GB of data in two days of play. There's no way this is going to fly when most people are under a TB cap.
• AcerbicZero 8y ago
  Cool. Unfortunately, any and all trust I had in google maintaining its services for more than a few years is long gone. I have games from ~10+ years ago I can still download, update, and play via Steam; What are the chances this lasts more than 3 years? In addition to that obvious concern, I'd also be very hesitant to let Google have any control over my gameplay experience. The downsides of the gaming as a service just have no appeal to me, although I'm sure it would be functional in certain generes, for a certain type of gamer. Regardless of how many streamers are playing Skyrim in their browser, I don't think I'll be joining them.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • aylmao 8y ago
    This is actually something that worries me, long term. There's people who still play 30+ year old games— you can still buy a used NES and play classic Tetris if you wanted. Mario Kart on the Wii still works. Online play is broken though because Nintendo has no interest in running old servers to keep a service in a long discontinued game running. If any games are developed solely for Stadia, will they disappear if the platform disappears? Even if it doesn't, will they be playable in perpetuity, or will Google shrug breaking changes if it's for games that are over N years old, and have under K users?
    • bitpush 8y ago
      I think most things we buy have a life. When I pay $$ to get shoes, I dont expect that to run forever. Sure, it might be nice but I _understand_ it might lose its life after a while. We expect software similarly to run forever, but I think we need to start associating life against it. Now if a shoe only works for a week, I'm not going to buy it. If it works for a year, sure I'll take it.Similarly for a digital good (phone, computer, software) we need to come up with a baseline on what the acceptable number for life is. It cant be Infinity, but it should be reasonable.
      • aylmao 8y ago
• andrewmlevy 8y ago
  It's a smart move for Google to leverage their huge captive audience on YouTube to drive adoption. With Amazon's similar position with AWS and Twitch I'd be surprised if we didn't see a similar offering from them.
• deleted 8y ago
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• ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  I'm most excited for Linux gaming as a byproduct!
• mmanfrin 8y ago
  This is superficial, but good lord is the box itself ugly.
• awill 8y ago
  As expected, it's running on Debian [0]. Ubuntu really messed up with their licensing, losing both Valve and Google... I'm also curious why they're not stating the CPU manufacturer. [0] https://stadia.dev/about/ https://stadia.dev/about/
• giorgioz 8y ago
  "Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who says he plays FIFA 19 “quite a bit" I just lost a lot of respect for Sunar Pichai all at once.
• ulucs 8y ago
  Honestly, there's got to be a better solution than full-on streaming. Has anyone seen the demo where there's >2 seconds of input lag? Even with around a 0.1 input lag, what can I play comfortably? Any kind of action games or platformers are out of question. Ironically, those games are the ones which usually demand high processing power. Most other games are toaster-compatible and I can run them without paying(?) Google a streaming premium. I also like being able to play games when on the bus or the subway, so the whole always-online thing is a bit of a bummer.
• LaserToy 8y ago
  Former PSN eng here. So, it will be very interesting to see what is going to happen. I feel we were not very successful with Playstation Now. It requires a lot of money to even start scaling, you need a powerful (read expensive) machine which can be fully utilized by just 1 AAA game. And for any competitive gaming experience - latency is a big one. If you want to play multiplayer as you going to have latency to Google's machine and then to the game server. Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve), but maybe this time...
  • dougmwne 8y ago
    What do you think of Google's controller? Having it bypass the laptop/chromecast and connect directly to wifi seems like it will save some latency, but how much?
    • Corrado 8y ago
      The controller was the most exciting part of the announcement, for me. I think it's a really smart move to connect the controller directly to the network and not through the "console". It makes the controller a first class citizen and gives it the ability to do all kinds of neat things.
    • LaserToy 8y ago
      My guess, they did it because of the browser. Idea is very good and makes total sense - you don’t have to integrate your controller with every browser, you just stream in it. Simple and genius.
• geddy 8y ago
  Does anyone even consider playing on the go anymore? I will be 200 years old by the time you can stream 60fps to a device sitting on a bus on my way to work. Streaming may have a place in the future, but if it's the only option, then consider me a full-time retro gamer. I already despise the fact that the masses voted to kill ownership of games, and now it's going straight to killing "rental licenses" as well, putting all of the power of entertainment and commerce in the hands of, essentially, two companies: Google and Amazon. Ya'll voted for these massive monopolies, really looking forward to the dystopia.
  • cwe 8y ago
    5G is on the way, and will enable this stuff anywhere. MWC had tons of demos of 4k, multiplayer, and VR games streaming via 5G. A lot depends on how/when/if it's all rolled out, but unless you're currently 194 years old, it's gonna be a lot sooner than you think.
    • geddy 8y ago
      Still, always-online connections are still subject to typical tech issues. We're not living in the world of Ready Player One, and the country is extremely spread out. Add to the fact that a few mega corps own all the infrastructure in the country and for business reasons don't want to spend a dime, and I don't really see how any of this is possible, or even practical. In other words, we have the technology (and it'll get better, I mean) to have handheld gaming devices. Even if they are digital only, it's extremely inefficient to generate video hundreds/thousands of miles away and beam it down to a device. To me, this sounds like mailing a letter to your next door neighbor, going through the entire US Postal system, vs. just walking over and putting the envelope in their mailbox.
    • saberience 8y ago
      If 5G is anything like LTE, it will work some of the time, cut out at other times, rapidly degrade into crap quality before coming back to full speed at random intervals. And bear in mind I live in Orange County, CA, hardly the backwoods. We are a long, long, long way away from having constant, fast, reliable, high-bit rate connections for mobile devices. (Note, I am on an IPhone XR in OC on ATT)
• sergiotapia 8y ago
  Jade Raymond is at the helm!? Color me very excited, she was running the original Assassins Creed game back in the day. She's a very talented producer!
• vernie 8y ago
  I enjoyed when the presenter said "there is basically no hardware acceleration on [the Pixelbook] whatsoever." Roasted.
• bastawhiz 8y ago
  My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world. Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the infra, and extra capacity could be sold off to GCloud customers.
  • lbotos 8y ago
    I like this thought, but if google can't build edge nodes because of: - GCP - AdSense - Gmail - Internal CDN Needs Then I don't think that Stadia would be a big push for doing so.
    • bastawhiz 8y ago
      They do already have at least _some_ edge presence. But my understanding is that's largely been for distributing content, like YouTube. I imagine storage/bandwidth at the edge are largely solved problems for Google. Has Google needed to run code physically closer to the user up until now? Likely not. Gmail/AdSense/etc. probably don't have [many] use cases where putting compute physically closer to the user (versus physically closer to a database replica) adds a ton of value. With the advent of AI/ML, that's changing. Accurately recognizing speech, recognizing people and objects in streaming video, translating text, etc. likely don't require access to other resources, but the latency between the server and the user is super important. Video games are essentially the epitome of the use case: you're not going to need to bang out many queries across the Google network to play a round of Splatoon, but every millisecond of lag you can shave off, the more valuable your service becomes. I could see Google selling cloud functions that execute within shouting distance of the user. What would the round trip be? 30ms? This could be a play by Google to take on Cloudflare workers.
• mladen5 8y ago
  I sometimes casually play Fortnite over nVidia Geforce Now via xDSL over wifi. And while i do entertain myself lag is hindering overall experience, at least in FPS games.
• buro9 8y ago
  In London where the fastest internet available to me at my address in zone 2 is 12mb highly contended in the evening. This isn't for everyone, clearly a bet for the future. But this is why Google Fiber should have gone wider and international, or governments should pressure telcos to build speeds massively in excess of demand. So much is held back by a really bad last mile.
• gwern 8y ago
  > Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout. This is a fascinating testament to the rate at which deep learning can run. If you think back to 2014-2016 (less than 5 years ago), one of the common things people said was that style transfer would be really cool to apply to video games or video, and then the middlebrow dismissal was 'style-transferring a single frame Gatys et al 2014 style takes a Titan hours so [simple math] shows we can't style transfer in realtime for decades, duh'. But, GPUs got better. Deep learning got better. Style transfer got better. Now, here in 2019, realtime style transfer is not just old hat (Facebook launched a realtime style transfer video app for smartphones years ago), but Google is announcing a service to stream countless hours of style-transferred video games to potentially millions of players.
• SoupyDolphin 8y ago
  Services like this are already in operation, see Shadow and GeForce Now. Developers don't need to do anything to have their games supported on these platforms either, so I don't understand what Google are bringing to the table with Stadia.
• daemonk 8y ago
  I wonder how much of the gaming market consist of games that requires good latency. I would be perfectly fine playing Civilization or turn based games on this infrastructure as sub-100ms latency probably isn't that big of a deal here. Perhaps google is going after that niche?
• cortexio 8y ago
  Bhahhahahaaaa xD WTF xD What are they thinking, my god. Google is such a joke lately. How about fixing your control panels???? how about keeping your eu chart server online? Cus it was down today, but still server status say everything is fine. Just checked.. still offline. That's like a full day by now. Anyway, inputs over ethernet is such a stupid idea.
• jerrybee 8y ago
  I don't understand giving a keynote like this and then not launching the product for months. Apple figured it out long ago - way more power in "it's available now" than the alternative of forcing customers to wait an indefinite amount of time.
• Gonzih 8y ago
  I hope this service will not be shut down like google reader or google+ after google fails to capture high large chunk of the market.
• codexon 8y ago
  I participated in the beta. Everything was great except the graphics became super grainy and pixelated when you rotated the camera or during high motion scenes. My download speed is 50 mbits and I had about 5 ping to the google servers. I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this unless you live downtown with 100+ mbit speeds.
  • ulkesh 8y ago
    > I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this. This is a very fair point and should be emphasized. It's not only the infrastructure, but the lack of Net Neutrality, the monopolies of many areas to a single ISP, and data caps -- they're all hurdles in the US.
• markdog12 8y ago
  A bit more info on https://stadia.dev https://stadia.dev
• rasz 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw TLDR: >60ms of added latency (160ms) while plugged on Google campus connection in specially modified and tweaked game versus unmodified typical Ubisoft bad PC port, compression artifacts
• captainmarble 8y ago
  This will boost pc gaming significantly. Now everyone can experience pc quality game on tablet, phone, mediocre pc. But bad news for mobile games and gaming hardware manufacturers IF stadia's pricing is affordable enough.
• deleted 8y ago
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• mempko 8y ago
  It's funny to see this and "The Cloud is Another Sun" on the front page. https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/ https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/
• mtw 8y ago
  Yet another google service thats going to be closed in a year or two
• shmerl 8y ago
  Let's see how easy it would be for developers to make a normal desktop Linux game from a Stadia game.
• moocowtruck 8y ago
  how do i have lan parties? how do i play these games with multiple people in same household?
• alinspired 8y ago
  reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive that was shut down in 2015
• odensc 8y ago
  As someone who participated in the beta, it's not as good as they make it sound. The compression of the video stream is quite bad in any slightly intensive scenario, the latency is certainly noticeable, frame drops every once in a while, and in general it's nowhere near as fluid as a local gaming experience. I have gigabit fiber and quite a good machine, so I'm certain that's not the issue. Maybe some of these issues could be solved by closer edge servers, but it'll be a while till it reaches the level where you can play FPS', etc.
• Animats 8y ago
  Any indication on how this ties in with the Google/Improbable deal for big-world games? Those work better if all the clients are in the same data center, a few microseconds apart. This only works with Google web clients, such as Chrome, right. It may turn out that all this is just a ploy to force everyone to use a Google web client, giving Google total control over the online user experience. ("Browser" is so last cen.) Then Google can exit games, except for putting ads in them and on top of them.
• kensai 8y ago
  A more philosophical question. If they manage it with a hard, computationally and bandwidth intensive problem like games, does this mean that this kind of computing is coming for good for every kind of activity? Is this is the last time we need to upgrade to an expensive graphics card?
• deevolution 8y ago
  Could this be peak attention economy? I fully expect - no, I demand - that the price to play these games be fully compensated for by the data I generate from playing each game.
• Paraesthetic 8y ago
  I give it a year and they kill it along with all the save files of their users. Google can't be trusted on this one.
• Anointmous 8y ago
  I used this in beta on a cheap chromebook. It worked great, and since I don't like putting games on my machines or upgrading hardware or using windows, perfect. Realistically, the only way I could play this game on this hardware.
• black-tea 8y ago
  Using the same name as one of Google Maps biggest competitors. Nice.