8 ms·

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 service

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.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Have they even said anything about the business model? I'm a few minutes behind on the stream, but I don't recall any mention of licenses or subscriptions. The only "practical" example of launching they game they showed was... out of a button on a YouTube video. EDIT: A "Stadia store" was briefly mentioned shortly after my comment, it looked like it was tied into Google Play.
  - kabdib 8y ago
    They didn't say anything concrete about money. I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      The "Stadia store" suggested games would likely be sold or subscribed to. But I definitely have to imagine some sort of trial model being available for the launch-from-YouTube options. Perhaps a time-limited option, that won't stop you from joining a streamer with Crowd Play, but would cut you off after a while if you hadn't already purchased it? I'm very curious about the expenses game developers will face too, which definitely wasn't brought up. Id Software bragged about just using one Stadia instance, but then later demonstrations showing split screen gaming "without compromise" was shown running each screen on a different Stadia instance. While Google suggests this makes split screen gaming possible again, my guess is that split screen gaming costs the developers twice as much to implement as a service cost, since it uses twice as much hardware. Making it probably mostly a nonstarter anyways.
danso 8y ago
Huh, how can you compare this to Steam? Google aims to obviate the need for gamers to own top-of-the-line hardware. Steam does not offer that feature.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  Current gamers already have gaming PCs, so there isn't much of a benefit. Even for people that don't have gaming computers or consoles, you can put a decent one together that costs less than one of Google's phones
  - danso 8y ago
    Gaming PCs need to be upgraded on a 2-4 year basis if you want to keep near the top-of-the-line. One of Google's phones can cost $600-$1000, which is significantly more than a new console. So I'm not sure why you even bring that up, as if there were no economical difference between putting $500+ on your credit card, and trying out a $15-$30 month subscription.
    - Rebelgecko 8y ago
      Computer upgrades amortize pretty well. Over the last 8 years I've made 2 upgrades to my computer: A new SSD ($100 for 1TB) and a new GPU which is overkill for many purposes (~600 for a GTX1080). That setup can play many games at higher than 60fps, which beats the hypothetical max of Stadia (and I'll believe "4k at 60fps" when I see it— the Project Stream demo seemed to have a much lower framerate than that while still having noticeable artifacts on a 1440p monitor). Compared to that, $30 a month for streaming (if that's the price) seems as predatory as those companies that let you rent-to-own a TV. Although I'm not a fan of renting games vs owning.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    True, but the only PC you're going to build out that competes with the price of a Chromecast Ultra is a Raspberry Pi retro box.
djhworld 8y ago
I think we'll have to see what Microsoft is going to do at E3, because they've signalled in the past that they want to take this streaming approach, and they have their own cloud too...
jpambrun 8y ago
I am a "gamer", I have a 2080Ti and I hope it's the last 1500$ gaming equipment I ever have to buy. It sits idle 95%+ of the time and it is tied to only one of the all the screens in my house. I want this to work.
- swebs 8y ago
  Sounds like you want a Steam Link.
  - jpambrun 8y ago
    I knew someone would mention those.. I have two since they launched. However, they don't do 4k or HDR and I still need the 95%-of-the-time idle 1,500$ graphics card.
    - legohead 8y ago
      the latency is also terrible. even with a single player platformer game I couldn't make do with it.
      - bryanlarsen 8y ago
        Steam link games don't have latency compensation since the games are unmodified. I assume that stadia games will have latency compensation, so should be much more playable.
        gsich 8y ago
        How would you compensate for that?
        bryanlarsen 8y ago
        The server will know what frame you were seeing when you pressed your button. So it rewinds it's state machine the appropriate number of frames (hopefully just 1), applies the input, and fast forwards again. This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.
vvanders 8y ago
+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 the like). Streaming gets you none of that. It'll work for high-latency sensitive singleplayer games but not seeing it scaling out wider.
- Scramblejams 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbov 8y ago
    The joystick and display device are just the clients now. You have the same problem just moved around a bit. Without the benefit of being able to use techniques to hide latency, such as client side prediction.
    - Scramblejams 8y ago
      No, the client is still the client. It's still a big bunch of stateful code, but now it's running on the LAN with the server and can't have its bits fiddled by the customer. All that code where the server fastidiously checks the client's untrusted state updates goes away, replaced by a much simpler layer that sanity checks the inputs. All that code where the server has to rewind and replay inputs to deal with late-arriving client state updates goes away (assuming your game isn't cross-DC). All that code where the server is protecting clients from other clients, sending down corrections and fixing up the world so it maintains some semblance of causal order, goes away. At my day job I'm working on a AAA multiplayer game, and making a properly server-authoritative game with significant client-to-server latency mitigation imposes serious costs in dev time and complexity and security review process. And now, at least in theory, they mostly disappear. The input/display lag problem is different from what we have now. It's new. We don't, of course, compensate for lag from input to client. (Between client and server, yes, but that's actually a different beast.) And yes, you won't be able to do much about it. You'll be relying on Google to keep your latencies down. They said they're deploying to 7500 nodes, so there's hope. Time will tell. I'm hopeful a lot of people will be reporting single-to-low-double-digit latencies. But this is much, much more than just moving around the same problem.
Keverw 8y ago
> 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. Most of Google's services are free, but paid ones I'd hope they wouldn't as easily abandon too.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  When Project Stream closed down, Google and Ubisoft did give everyone who played a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey they could play via Uplay. As much as these companies really don't want to talk about "when we inevitably shutdown", I feel like a lot of player trust would be established if there was a clear commitment to that.
- danso 8y ago
  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.
ssully 8y ago
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.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  Gamers do. Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.
  - sbov 8y ago
    More specifically, Microsoft was losing billions of dollars per year on the xbox early on.
umyemri 8y ago
I don't know, I worked in the gaming industry as well. Only left last year, but even then I was seeing a growing desire to move to host systems: https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 or https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow... Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive. With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers. All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.
snaky 8y ago
> 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.
- fixermark 8y ago
  It'd be useful for game developers also. Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release. Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.
  - snaky 8y ago
    That's for sure, but Google wouldn't be Google if they don't invent the way to derivate from that data something like "neural heatmaps" of the particular user to use it for advertising part of business.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Not necessarily. Google doesn't derive advertising (or any other data beyond broad bytecounts, for that matter) from the cloud-customer data stored in their cloud storage infrastructure.
mikewhy 8y ago
> this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam - drastically lower power requirements - no worries about hardware refreshes - no waiting to download a 50gb game - can play anywhere (steam link is getting there, but it's not as easy as opening a new chrome tab) > hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency cool, they don't have to.
tanilama 8y ago
Let the market decides it. I would definitely try this on some quirky little games that I love to watch the streamers play, but too lazy to download. If the play could start in minutes, I would try it.
diminoten 8y ago
This doesn't offer anything more compelling over using Steam? Excuse me? At this point I see comments like yours in here (from "games industry" insiders) and I see horse breeders decrying the car. "It takes gas instead of grass, it'll never work!" Please.

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.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Have they even said anything about the business model? I'm a few minutes behind on the stream, but I don't recall any mention of licenses or subscriptions. The only "practical" example of launching they game they showed was... out of a button on a YouTube video. EDIT: A "Stadia store" was briefly mentioned shortly after my comment, it looked like it was tied into Google Play.
- kabdib 8y ago
  They didn't say anything concrete about money. I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    The "Stadia store" suggested games would likely be sold or subscribed to. But I definitely have to imagine some sort of trial model being available for the launch-from-YouTube options. Perhaps a time-limited option, that won't stop you from joining a streamer with Crowd Play, but would cut you off after a while if you hadn't already purchased it? I'm very curious about the expenses game developers will face too, which definitely wasn't brought up. Id Software bragged about just using one Stadia instance, but then later demonstrations showing split screen gaming "without compromise" was shown running each screen on a different Stadia instance. While Google suggests this makes split screen gaming possible again, my guess is that split screen gaming costs the developers twice as much to implement as a service cost, since it uses twice as much hardware. Making it probably mostly a nonstarter anyways.

danso 8y ago

Huh, how can you compare this to Steam? Google aims to obviate the need for gamers to own top-of-the-line hardware. Steam does not offer that feature.

Rebelgecko 8y ago
Current gamers already have gaming PCs, so there isn't much of a benefit. Even for people that don't have gaming computers or consoles, you can put a decent one together that costs less than one of Google's phones
- danso 8y ago
  Gaming PCs need to be upgraded on a 2-4 year basis if you want to keep near the top-of-the-line. One of Google's phones can cost $600-$1000, which is significantly more than a new console. So I'm not sure why you even bring that up, as if there were no economical difference between putting $500+ on your credit card, and trying out a $15-$30 month subscription.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    Computer upgrades amortize pretty well. Over the last 8 years I've made 2 upgrades to my computer: A new SSD ($100 for 1TB) and a new GPU which is overkill for many purposes (~600 for a GTX1080). That setup can play many games at higher than 60fps, which beats the hypothetical max of Stadia (and I'll believe "4k at 60fps" when I see it— the Project Stream demo seemed to have a much lower framerate than that while still having noticeable artifacts on a 1440p monitor). Compared to that, $30 a month for streaming (if that's the price) seems as predatory as those companies that let you rent-to-own a TV. Although I'm not a fan of renting games vs owning.
- fixermark 8y ago
  True, but the only PC you're going to build out that competes with the price of a Chromecast Ultra is a Raspberry Pi retro box.

djhworld 8y ago

I think we'll have to see what Microsoft is going to do at E3, because they've signalled in the past that they want to take this streaming approach, and they have their own cloud too...

jpambrun 8y ago

I am a "gamer", I have a 2080Ti and I hope it's the last 1500$ gaming equipment I ever have to buy. It sits idle 95%+ of the time and it is tied to only one of the all the screens in my house. I want this to work.

swebs 8y ago
Sounds like you want a Steam Link.
- jpambrun 8y ago
  I knew someone would mention those.. I have two since they launched. However, they don't do 4k or HDR and I still need the 95%-of-the-time idle 1,500$ graphics card.
  - legohead 8y ago
    the latency is also terrible. even with a single player platformer game I couldn't make do with it.
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      Steam link games don't have latency compensation since the games are unmodified. I assume that stadia games will have latency compensation, so should be much more playable.
      - gsich 8y ago
        How would you compensate for that?
        bryanlarsen 8y ago
        The server will know what frame you were seeing when you pressed your button. So it rewinds it's state machine the appropriate number of frames (hopefully just 1), applies the input, and fast forwards again. This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.

vvanders 8y ago

+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 the like). Streaming gets you none of that. It'll work for high-latency sensitive singleplayer games but not seeing it scaling out wider.

Scramblejams 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sbov 8y ago
  The joystick and display device are just the clients now. You have the same problem just moved around a bit. Without the benefit of being able to use techniques to hide latency, such as client side prediction.
  - Scramblejams 8y ago
    No, the client is still the client. It's still a big bunch of stateful code, but now it's running on the LAN with the server and can't have its bits fiddled by the customer. All that code where the server fastidiously checks the client's untrusted state updates goes away, replaced by a much simpler layer that sanity checks the inputs. All that code where the server has to rewind and replay inputs to deal with late-arriving client state updates goes away (assuming your game isn't cross-DC). All that code where the server is protecting clients from other clients, sending down corrections and fixing up the world so it maintains some semblance of causal order, goes away. At my day job I'm working on a AAA multiplayer game, and making a properly server-authoritative game with significant client-to-server latency mitigation imposes serious costs in dev time and complexity and security review process. And now, at least in theory, they mostly disappear. The input/display lag problem is different from what we have now. It's new. We don't, of course, compensate for lag from input to client. (Between client and server, yes, but that's actually a different beast.) And yes, you won't be able to do much about it. You'll be relying on Google to keep your latencies down. They said they're deploying to 7500 nodes, so there's hope. Time will tell. I'm hopeful a lot of people will be reporting single-to-low-double-digit latencies. But this is much, much more than just moving around the same problem.

Keverw 8y ago

> 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. Most of Google's services are free, but paid ones I'd hope they wouldn't as easily abandon too.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
When Project Stream closed down, Google and Ubisoft did give everyone who played a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey they could play via Uplay. As much as these companies really don't want to talk about "when we inevitably shutdown", I feel like a lot of player trust would be established if there was a clear commitment to that.
danso 8y ago
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.

ssully 8y ago

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.

anth_anm 8y ago
Gamers do. Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.
- sbov 8y ago
  More specifically, Microsoft was losing billions of dollars per year on the xbox early on.

umyemri 8y ago

I don't know, I worked in the gaming industry as well. Only left last year, but even then I was seeing a growing desire to move to host systems: https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 or https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-cloud-gaming-service-on-ec2.html https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow... Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive. With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers. All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.

snaky 8y ago

> 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.

fixermark 8y ago
It'd be useful for game developers also. Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release. Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.
- snaky 8y ago
  That's for sure, but Google wouldn't be Google if they don't invent the way to derivate from that data something like "neural heatmaps" of the particular user to use it for advertising part of business.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Not necessarily. Google doesn't derive advertising (or any other data beyond broad bytecounts, for that matter) from the cloud-customer data stored in their cloud storage infrastructure.

mikewhy 8y ago

> this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam - drastically lower power requirements - no worries about hardware refreshes - no waiting to download a 50gb game - can play anywhere (steam link is getting there, but it's not as easy as opening a new chrome tab) > hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency cool, they don't have to.

tanilama 8y ago

Let the market decides it. I would definitely try this on some quirky little games that I love to watch the streamers play, but too lazy to download. If the play could start in minutes, I would try it.

diminoten 8y ago

This doesn't offer anything more compelling over using Steam? Excuse me? At this point I see comments like yours in here (from "games industry" insiders) and I see horse breeders decrying the car. "It takes gas instead of grass, it'll never work!" Please.