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I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge

I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense. I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the cheapest option - again. It will be the most enjoyable option too: no installation, no upgrade, I can just play. Last but not least: apart from the Switch, consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom. As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work.

bobviolier 7y ago
Yeah this ^ I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. That might have been due to Google promoting it as such of course (and asking the price for it). What I also see happening is that as soon as they have a free tier, people are gonna try to play a game for 5 minutes because they saw something on Youtube or somewhere else and then 1 in X will just buy the game on Stadia.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compression artifacts. With computers cheaper than ever and games hitting a ceiling on how much power it takes to render them, Stadia makes less and less sense. What does make sense is Google is so hungry for revenue they don’t care about user experience. What also makes sense is that those downvoting me have become blinded by optimism.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    It depends on where you're located. With FiOS in NYC I can get to AWS Virginia in 18ms. I don't have any Google Cloud servers to test with. When I use Steam/NVidia in home streaming with my GTX 1080 card, I can render a 1080p frame in about 10-12ms and decode it in 10ms on my 4K FireTV. (I beat Witcher 3, TombRaider, and Hitman with it over a 50Mbit powerline ethernet setup and they all looked fine BTW.) Even if the Google data center is twice as far as AWS, that's 58ms lag, or 4 frames at 60fps. You can emulate the same lag by turning off Game Mode on your HDTV, it's fine for most games. However, it is bullshit that the Stadia website doesn't have something like fast.com that tells you if your internet connection has enough bandwidth/latency to actually work with the service. It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
    - birdyrooster 7y ago
      I don’t know what games you play, but in home streaming is too much lag for me on basically any game. For myself, 144hz is a requirement because 60fps is a slide show. The resolution would need to be increased as 1080p looks terrible, so that is unacceptable too.
      - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
        Have you considered that you might not be the target audience for a $10/month game streaming service?
        birdyrooster 7y ago
        I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full price for the games. People can finance a console purchase over a couple years for a little more money and enjoy their experience more while having a structured monthly payment.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Except if any of this was true, then OnLive would still be alive and well. And Stadia is far more difficult to support for developers as it requires custom builds for the platform, so I have no idea what their plan is to keep developers publishing for it unless they start seeing serious sales numbers very soon.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. If you charge $60 for the games, and $130 for the hardware (and associated $10/mo subscription for the premium option) - people will have certain expectations. For $300 you can get yourself a Switch and have latency-free mobile gaming experience. Obviously cloud-gaming is a slightly different use-case, but is it different enough for most?
- honestoHeminway 7y ago
  Why do you need to buy, the streaming can seemless blend into a stadia instance as a demo. Just have the streamer duplicated and the player exchanged. Including handover
- hef19898 7y ago
  MVPs are a great concept, but at least for me Google is way beyond the point to afford a MVP launch. they are Google, with that budget launched products should be a little bit better than that. DISCLAIMER: Did not check out Stadia, i prefer to play on my own hardware.
perennate 7y ago
What is the advantage of Stadia over NVIDIA GeForce NOW? I just learned today that Stadia requires games to be specifically developed for the platform, and you need to purchase a controller in order for the system to function. On the other hand, AFAIK, NVIDIA's product allows you to play most major Steam games that you own without requiring you to purchase a second physical device. I think even the Steam mods work, but you have to wait for them to install every time you launch the game.
- sjs382 7y ago
  Stadia only requires the Stadia controller if you're playing on a Chromecast Ultra. If you're playing on a Phone or in a browser window, then you can use most third party gamepads (8bitdo, Xbox, PS4)
alpaca128 7y ago
It's not a Netflix for games if you still have to buy every game individually. It's like every other console except you always have more input delay in exchange for not paying any hardware. For me the important question is: will the game pricing be comparable with Steam or more with PSN etc.? Considering Sony still asks almost full price for some 8 year old games the pricing can make a huge difference.
- perennate 7y ago
  Plus, according to their FAQ [1], "you will need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play". So apparently you have to drop $170 CAD just to get started, and that's in addition to the subscription cost (but it comes with 3 months of subscription). [1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946 https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946
  - mrep 7y ago
    Pretty sure you won't need that when the free 1080p base version comes out next year. I played 30 hours of assassins creed during the beta last year on my macbook pro with a xbox 360 controller.
    - perennate 7y ago
      Is Stadia only targeting console games? Maybe I'm confused by this controller requirement because I'm assuming that I should be able to play e.g. Cities: Skylines on my Chromebook without a controller. (something which you can already do on NVIDIA GeForce NOW in the beta) I don't get why the marketing has to be so confusing for these platforms. Stadia in Google Store focuses on these physical products instead of the digital subscription, and NVIDIA decided to reuse their name for a previous cloud gaming product that can also be confused with their GPUs. It's like they all want their products to fail.
      - drusepth 7y ago
        I'm not sure, but I think it's targeting only console games. It feels like a gigantic value-add for Chromecasts first (which generally live in living rooms with more controllers than keyboard/mice), which also happens to be capable of working on phones/pcs using the same streaming technology so it's also available there. Here's the list of the launch day games [1] -- I'm not familiar with them all, but even ones like Farming Simulator say they have full controller support on their Steam page. I wouldn't be surprised if Stadia required a controller at least for a while, but eventually got PC-only games that could use a mouse/keyboard. [1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-play-games-on-google-stadia-on-launch-day/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-play-games-on-google-stad...
mping 7y ago
Netflix is a good comparison because google will need to secure rights for AAA games, and some games don't appear in all platforms. Fortunately, a user can install Steam/GOG/Origin whatever and just pay for a single game, unlike video streaming platforms. In terms of pricing, 9$99 for 4K/60Hz games is 120$/y; if you buy two AAA games (around 59$) it's already the same price, so in the end the appeal is NOT having a beefy computer to play whatever game you'd like. My guess is that hardcore games will have their own PCs, console gamers prefer TVs but the "casual" gamer may be attracted depending on the catalog of games. edit: it seems you have to buy most of the games too? So google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency.
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  > google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency In a way, it's like renting DVDs/VHS tapes in the past. They quality wasn't always the best, but that was usually a fair trade off considering the price of owning everything. In this case, you don't need to own a really high end graphics card to get the best visual quality, but the overall quality of the experience still takes a hit due to latency.
Eridrus 7y ago
I think cost is what people are missing: Stadia hardware is much cheaper than consoles now, and when the next generation of consoles come out, they will be even more expensive, but Stadia will be the same cheap price. "Gamers" might not care about this, but parents buying their kids consoles definitely will. Obviously this is predicated on Google sorting out the content situation, but if you look at the Education/Chromebook market you can clearly see the vision of cheap hardware with most of the processing on servers already succeeding in a market that cares about cost.
- odessacubbage 7y ago
  assuming we don't run into another >599 us dollars situation, 120 + blowing the bandwith cap every weekend is not going to be much cheaper than even a full price console and will bring far more headaches. beyond that, who is gonna want to play with the kid on the lagmachine? that's not gonna go over well at the lunch table.
choppaface 7y ago
What about OnLive? oh ...
edna314 7y ago
This. Stadia is about convenience and price not about bringing a 'new' gaming experience with exclusive titles and what not. This will be the first time in over 10 years I will be able to play up to date games as it just doesn't make sense to me to buy hardware dedicated for gaming if it costs more than a chrome cast and a controller.
- Melchizedek 7y ago
  Completely agree. I want to play new AAA games on high settings but I have very little time to do so, so I can't really justify buying an expensive gaming computer. But if I only have to buy the games it's a different matter. This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      > You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. Only if you want 4K. For 1080P, you just buy a game as a product. > It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance. I agree that for the 4K Chromecast option to make any sense, it must be much cheaper than a conventional console. They would have done well to find a way to support existing (and cheaper) Chromecasts too. There's also the PC gaming market though. Stadia will reach PC gamers on all desktop OSs, no additional hardware needed. There could be a market for people with laptops, for instance. Incidentally, we've seen all this before with OnLive and PlayStation Now, which people seem to have largely forgotten about - nothing Google is doing here is new. OnLive functioned as both a microconsole, and an application on Windows/Mac/Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive
Someone1234 7y ago
> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for. For example I recently purchased an Oculus Rift. I waited until enough games released so that I couldn't be disappointed by the experience/value, and I haven't been. Anything else added after this is just value add. > I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. Stadia costs $129 with no games. An XBox One S (Digital) on Black Friday, including a game, costs $200 or $150 with no game (e.g. NewEgg). So while your point is accurate, there isn't as much in "cost" as you'd think, and I'd argue that you get far more value with an XBox One S than a Stadia (even the digital one that cannot play BluRays).
- tonmoy 7y ago
  > Stadia costs $129 with no games No, stadia founder’s edition costs $129. The regular 1080p stadia is free
  - gilrain 7y ago
    ... and isn't available.
  - clinth 7y ago
    Right now, $130 is the only edition. I think the one you're talking about comes out next year.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      We're talking about the fundamental value of the product, so the normal price matters a lot more than the preorder price.
      - clinth 7y ago
        I get where you're coming from, but go to Stadia's page. Click "Buy Now". You land at $130 plus $10/month with no other options. This isn't a future product or preorder, this is launch. The hardware and service are live right now. If you want to play: $130 plus $10/month. I think this release structure is pretty daring. They're getting a lot of bad press, it's expensive, it's not a smooth experience. Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.
shantara 7y ago
Long term vision is that Stadia exclusive games would permanently disappear as soon as Google or the publisher remove them from the servers. Obvious ownership implications aside, this also makes archiving games impossible and destroys a significant chunk of gaming history. Always online DRM and moving a portion of game code to the company servers already contributed to this. But unlike DRM that could theoretically be broken, there's nothing that could be done to preserve streaming-only games.
macspoofing 7y ago
I agree that there is something to cloud gaming that is highly attractive. For example, it would be great to throw a controller into your backpack and have full access to your AAA games to play (though hotel wifi isn't exactly super great) Having said that, when reviewing it, there is a balance between recognizing the future and taking into account present realities.
zaarn 7y ago
The problem is that cloud gaming already exists and many providers did a better job than Google. Even the latency shouldn't be an issue, I've cloudgamed to a DC in the netherlands with 2ms of latency but apparently somehow Google manages to fuck that up somehow. I doubt Google will continue Stadia, the press is already bad, the product is bad, it'll likely be dusted in a few years, leaving the product owners out of a product and their money.
- raymond_goo 7y ago
  https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming/project-xcloud https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming/project-xclou...
- lovich 7y ago
  wouldn't 2ms be <400 miles of travel? Youd have to be pretty close to the datacenter to get 2ms of latency when the computer needs time to do calculations as well
  - imtringued 7y ago
    400 miles is pretty Pretty close? That's more than the distance between Paris and Amsterdam but yes you are right. Encoding a video and decoding it introduces additional latency even on the same machine.
    - lovich 7y ago
      I'm an American so maybe it's different. 400 miles max, reduced by however long it takes for the computations, doesn't seem like a large distance for me. My VPN provider's closest datacenter is 200 miles from me
Crinus 7y ago
> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will be filled with anti-consumer garbage that you wont be able to do anything about - not even the files that make up the game are under your control. I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has. I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.
- kingbirdy 7y ago
  Stadia doesn't prevent you from owning your own hardware, nor will it. It's just another option for people who can't afford to own hardware.
  - smnrchrds 7y ago
    Imagine if we had this conversation 10 years ago: - I don't like streaming services, because content can disappear/the quality is lower/... - Streaming doesn't prevent you from owning your own DVDs/BDs, nor will it And now in 2019, there are so many films and tv shows only released through streaming services, and never sold on disks.
    - kingbirdy 7y ago
      Those are products that only exist on streaming platforms, though - as far as I know, Netflix hasn't negotiated any deals to have movies go from cinemas to Netflix and not get a physical release at all. Even some of Netflix's properties have physical releases, such as Stranger Things. So there's still just as much or more physical media available as there would be without streaming platforms.
Iv 7y ago
I could see playing RTS or tactical RPGs, but it is a very poor idea to propose FPS. It is already hard to have a reactive system locally, proposing remotely is. You need to react in 16ms if you want a snappy 60Hz. 1000 km from the server is adding 6 ms of ping. At one point, proposing this kind of service has the speed of light as a "technical constraint".
- roel_v 7y ago
  Nvidia is going to add negative lag to their service, so there's that...
  - odessacubbage 7y ago
    im still very skeptical that predictive rollback is gonna feel very good to play with, ggpo is still probably the best existing version of rollback netcode and it still gets pretty fucky when it has to roll back >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo
  - p1necone 7y ago
    Nvidia can say they're going to break the laws of physics all they want. They're not going to though. It could be feasible for certain classes of games where the options for "what thing can the player do next" are very limited, but literally anything with analog controls just can't work like that.
  - Iv 7y ago
    Well it won't work on games that are designed around the reflex of players. Unless they somehow provide an EEG on the primal motor cortex, which I would be very happy to see :-)
- odessacubbage 7y ago
  i played through most of srw t on ps4 remote play while house sitting & it worked well enough for the most part. unfortunately games like ff tactics and disgaea aren't big ticket AAA blockbusters that require a supercomputer to run smoothly.
013a 7y ago
I think it would be helpful to broaden your horizons a bit. Everyone is talking about Stadia; whether it will be good or not, whether it will eventually see long-term success. These are very boring questions. The more interesting question is whether cloud gaming will see success over the long term. Every major player, minus Nintendo, is entering or already in this market. Most notably, Microsoft is releasing xCloud very soon, and PSNow already exists. You can go play God of War, a PS4 game, on your PC, literally today (unfortunately, no Mac support yet). Its $10/month. No one talks about this! Realistically, the cloud gaming market will become a utility, just like the cloud itself. Who can provide the most datacenters as close as possible to large customer bases? Who's technology provides the best user experience? Who is available on the most screens? These are all questions that multiple major players can have great answers to. Stadia was "early" (though, Playstation was the earliest, and its not even close; they purchased Gaikai in 2012 and OnLive in 2015, they're so far ahead that Google wasn't even thinking about this when Sony was actually selling it). But a player being early means nothing if this thing that Stadia released today is in the state that its in; they need years to iterate on it. So, what will differentiate? The Games! This is the Hard Problem in this space. Not networking. Not DC locations. Games! The choice isn't just "do I want to play RDR2 for super cheap with decent quality on Stadia, or in great quality but a $500 upfront fee on my X1X". There's a third choice there: Should I play it on PSNow? xCloud? And, realistically, yeah its a very fluid market. I could play on any of them. But Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are destroying the third-party AAA game development space. Their first party studios are insanely good, seeing billions in investment and new acquisitions. They have proprietary world-class technology that they only share internally (example: the Decima engine used in Horizon: Zero Dawn was used for Death Stranding, and is widely considered to be among the most technically advanced engines in the world right now (though, Kojima isn't an SIE Studio, so maybe its a bad example)). Point being: if I pay for Game Pass on Xbox, and I'm a big fan of their exclusives, then RDR3 comes out and I can play it on xCloud, I'm going to buy that on Xbox. There's gravity to these platforms, and that gravity comes from the titles where I have to go to xCloud to play. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has the most measured and strongest position in cloud gaming. At E3, he said that he sees it as just one avenue where people will play games. In some situations, it makes sense. For some people, it makes sense (though, those people like you will never play games as much as people who have consoles/gaming PCs). So, they will build it. They have the technology and DC footprint. But, Stadia's downfall will be in their all-in approach, combined with their lack of revenue strategy and lack of first-party exclusives to build gravity.
playerqq 7y ago
> I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense. I disagree that the reviewers lacked long term vision. Nearly all of seem to have been burned by the promise of videogame streaming before, and the current state of Stadia only inspires cautious optimism at best. You're right that everybody wants to live in a world where videogames stream anywhere at 4k+ and 60+fps with minimal latency. But OnLive was 2010. Gaikai was 2012, followed by Playstation Now in 2014. This space isn't a greenfield for lack of trying. Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for.
- Lev1a 7y ago
  > Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for. Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently.
  - SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    > Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently. That's been the norm of the gaming industry for ages. Mario, Sonic, Halo, etc - its always been fragmented. You have to pay for an expensive console to get at the exclusives. Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation - assuming most are easy to subscribe/unsubscribe as video streaming services.
    - 7y ago
nilkn 7y ago
> It will be the most enjoyable option too I think it depends on the standards you judge it by. If lack of installation is the standard, then sure. If image quality is the standard, at least with this iteration of Stadia, it seems so far like you'd get better results with any modern console and significantly better results with a PC. For Stadia to take off, it's going to need to penetrate the existing gaming market to at least some degree. I don't think it can survive solely off people who haven't played any game in 10+ years but suddenly want to play the most complex AAA games like RDR2 (which was a bit hard to figure out in its entirety even for me as a seasoned gamer). These games aren't Candy Crush; the soccer mom crowd isn't going to be buying here. And for that penetration into existing markets to happen, it can't perform noticeably worse in all ways than consoles.
fbelzile 7y ago
Exactly, they have other motivations to make this work. Imagine only needing a ChromeOS laptop or Android phone to play the latest exciting games. I feel like Stadia might be the tipping point to make general computing a 100% streamed experience. People would no longer need to buy expensive devices to: 1) browse the web 2) do basic office work 3) watch TV/video 4) edit/store images and, 5) gaming... leaving traditional desktops and laptops marginalized for only those people that need special custom software.
odessacubbage 7y ago
you could get red dead + a used ps4 for probably less than 150 and resell it when you're done without much of a loss, or just give it away as a gift. you could even rent both the game and the console for probably less than the cost of playing a degraded version with stadia (9.99 + the cost of the game+ bandwith caps) >Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom steam and ps4 both support remote play, i assume xbox has something similar as well. and besides all of that, once you beat red dead and cyberpunk, how many similar big ticket games are being pumped out at a fast enough rate for you to justify maintaining a subscription? assuming it takes you maybe one month to slowplay through a game, is the AAA machine even putting out enough(computationally intensive but not greatly affected by poor latency) titles to keep people around?
cptskippy 7y ago
> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. Maybe it's because most reviewer are jaded because it's industry standard for gaming companies to promise the world and deliver on only a small part of that. In general when a gaming company says "and we're going to do..." that's generally qualified with "if there's enough user adoption and demand". To believe in Stadia, you have to trust Google will deliver on promised features, trust that Google will convince publishers to develop for it's platform, and trust your internet connection. Google really only has control over one of those things. Also, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T are holding a grudge after Google Fiber and might take steps to degrade the Stadia experience as a little fk you to Google.
- odessacubbage 7y ago
  to believe in stadia, you need to engage in magical thinking that allows you to believe that google has somehow managed to solve network latency and america's laughable internet infrastructure and just forgot to tell everyone.
  - Melchizedek 7y ago
    The US is not the world. The average person in parts of Europe and Asia has a much better internet connection.
    - benibela 7y ago
      In Germany I have 8 Mbit/s
      - vocatus_gate 7y ago
        Bandwidth has nothing to do with latency. A low-Earth orbit satellite connection could have 20 Mb/s bandwidth, but the latency on the round-trip for the packets could be 800ms, technically still under a second...but completely unplayable.
      - 7y ago
tapoxi 7y ago
Consoles don’t require you use a TV, both the PS4 and Xbox One support remote play options over your LAN or the Internet.
blueski 7y ago
The cheapest way to do it is buying a secondhand XBox/PS4/Switch + games for very little on Craigslist, and putting it back on there when you get bored (if that's within 6 months, I'd be surprised if you lost much). Or just keeping it and enjoying no input lag, no requirement for a subscription, no chance of the manufacturer bricking the device in future, and a huge secondhand market for games. Unless I really want to play games on something other than my TV or a handheld device (Switch), can't see why I'd take the more expensive and laggy Stadia option.
- krzyk 7y ago
  But what should I do if I hate using conrollers? I'm a mouse+keyboard person can I use it on any console to play games?
  - blueski 7y ago
    Some XBox and PS4 games support keyboard and mouse. I don't think this is much of a differentiator for/against Stadia.
  - denhaus 7y ago
    You can buy a Xim to use KB+M on Xbox or PS4. Works pretty well but it’s kind of like cheating for shooter games.
headmelted 7y ago
Just no. "Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games" These services have existed for a while. OnLive failed because it was ahead of it's time, and lagged. GeForce Now is free, while it's still in beta. Project xCloud is free, while it's still in beta. Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta. "If Google doesn't drop the ball" Google already dropped the ball here by asking for money for a beta test, and being the only big player to do so. I like Google, but this was just the wrong way to go about bringing this product to market. Microsoft have experience working with players and game developers. Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players, but the Shield has done well. The optics here are just bad. To see both of those companies put their services through prolonged public testing periods without charge makes Stadia look either naive (in that they thought this would be easy to build) or cynical ("hey the customers have to bear the sunk costs if it fails"). I don't for a second think Google is being cynical - but Stadia should have had a free public beta before taking a cent from paying customers.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  GeForce Now was the first time I saw game streaming as feasible. Unlike Stadia you can simply login with your steam account and get started in seconds using games you already own. If that were Stadia, I’d be more bullish.
- romwell 7y ago
  >Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players True to an extent, but people with gaming as a hobby have been using Nvidia or Radeon products for a long time, and there's a certain level of trust regarding Nvidia and gaming. GeForce as a gaming card brand has now existed for longer than a third of all gamers have been alive for now (and that's for those who don't remember Riva TNT). Back when computers didn't come with graphics accelerators, you surely knew who made your graphics chip if you wanted to play games. So a company like Nvidia would exist from interacting directly with the gamers (who would build their PCs and buy graphics cards).
- mrep 7y ago
  > Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta No, the beta was last year with assassins creed and that was free and they gave everyone a free copy of the game afterwords.
higeyuki 7y ago
Can I play offline? This is a deal breaker for me. I am not a multiplayer gamer. I prefer solo play. Also data usage being a Comcast user with a 1TB cap and a 4K TV, it is not really economical unless you are very casually using it. "At the best possible quality, Stadia will use 35 Mbps of data per second, or about 15.75GB per hour. At Google's recommended minimum quality, Stadia will use about 4.5GB per hour."
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work. I had some qualms about the rest of your post but this is where you really lost me. You just described a DOA business model.
davidjnelson 7y ago
It’s cool to have options. Hope Stadia works out and a lot of people enjoy it. There’s something really fun about building a pc and overclocking it and modding the games though :-) Also, having all your mods and saves on your own backups is great too. That being said, it’s quite perplexing that a 1080ti can’t keep a stable 60fps in 1080p on a game built on unity on ultra settings reliably. For instance, The Outer Worlds. If Stadia can crack that, they’ll make a _lot_ of money.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I think Ultra settings aren't meant to be the "goto settings" to use. A lot of things ultra settings include usually eat up a ton of needless performance. The way some games deal with it is by just degrading the quality of ultra settings.
- seabrookmx 7y ago
  Outer Worlds is Unreal Engine not Unity, FYI.
durpleDrank 7y ago
If Google starts renting games it's competition for other mass market paradigms. Buying digital downloads will be niche. I have a balls to the wall gaming PC and plenty of consoles, however, I don't want to spend 90$ every other week to see the hot new game everyone is talking about. $5 for a weekend rental is great for me (matches blockbusters old $4.75 weekend rental fee). A little lag won't be an issues especially considering most new games are story driven cakewalks anyway.
sjs382 7y ago
I'm pretty much the perfect audience for Stadia. I have three HDTVs on my house, none of which are 4K and I don't plan on upgrading unless one of them bites the dust. I imagine that I'll do most of my playing on my phone or at the office during lunchtime (in the browser), but it's nice to quickly "deploy" Stadia to each TV I have by attaching a $69 Chromecast Ultra. I don't want "stuff" in my house in the form of game discs and consoles. I'm not a collector. I don't engage in a second-hand market. And I can't imagine myself in 10 years being nostalgic about games that i played in my 30s. I don't really care that I'm just "licensing" digital copies of games and that it might go away at some point. Over the years I've occasionally seen a game that I might be interested in—I just want to be able to drop $50 on it and play half-way through until I lose interest. Stadia gives me all of that. Maybe some day I'll get "serious" about gaming again and want a full-fledged console. In the mean time though, I'm happy to pay $80 for a controller and $10/month (until it's free) for Stadia. If you consider yourself a "gamer", then there are definitely better options for you than Stadia. But for me, this is perfect.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. Perhaps I misunderstand what Stadia is actually offering, but it doesn't look like a "Netflix for games" to me. Netflix's model is you pay a monthly fee and you get to watch anything in their catalog. With Stadia, you still have to buy each game separately, correct? >I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it I am neither a gamer nor a teenager, and I don't want it. In fact, the only reason that I have any feelings about its existence at all is that if it's successful, that would mean more of the games industry will do this sort of thing, which will further reduce the amount of games available to me.
- dawg- 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the $10 a month gives you a service similar to Xbox Game Pass. You can play the games in their catalog, just like Netflix. You also have the option to purchase a game and own if even if it's rotated out of the catalog.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I couldn't find anything on Google's sites that clarify this point either way. But this is in Wikipedia's entry for Stadia (for whatever that's worth): > Stadia is not similar to Netflix, in that it requires users to purchase games to stream via Stadia rather than pay for access to a library of games. While the base service will be free, a Pro tier monthly subscription allows users to stream at higher rates for larger resolutions, and the offer to add free games to their library.
TylerE 7y ago
> It will be the most enjoyable option too No it will not be, because latency exists. It will be the opposite of enjoyable unless you like feeling motion sick.
- yathern 7y ago
  Latency is of course the biggest concern. Recent videos I saw do not indicate they have a good solution to latency. I'd absolutely love if they used some sort of 'asynchronous reprojection' like you see in VR. Essentially, send a depth buffer along with video data, and let the client reproject frames before it gets the next keyframe from the server. It can help solve input lag for movement and turning. Not so much for things like shooting.
  - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
    Wouldn't that require a decent graphics card, largely negating the point?
    - yathern 7y ago
      Not too much for reprojection. That's a very specialized task that can be optimized for in hardware, without having to support all the typical operations of GPUs. That's not to say it's easy. It requires a large amount of engine integration and the client has to now know what amount of reprojection to apply when you turn, which may vary per game or context. Hugely hugely impacts the complexity.
- drusepth 7y ago
  People used to (still?) say people wouldn't enjoy VR because they'd feel motion sick also. There are games that do make me feel nauseous occasionally, but that hasn't stopped me from putting over 1,200 hours into the games that don't. Even if latency is an issue on Stadia (contrary to what people who've tried it so far have said), there's gonna be plenty of games that don't need the lowest of latencies to enjoy.
gshulegaard 7y ago
I'm with you. I'm a gamer, but I'm also a software engineer that travels 75% of my time for work. When I travel I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Extreme Gen2 running Ubuntu. For me the idea of being able to grab a smaller form factor ultrabook but still be able to do a little gaming in the evening during the work week is massively appealing. Of course the performance would have to be "good enough". When I am actually at home and have my full rig available I would not use Stadia...but I do see a use case for Stadia (for me).
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  I mean, if it's truly an ultrabook it should probably be able to handle a game or two. Or at least, the new ones coming out now and in the next few years that're based on AMD mobile APU's will, because most of them have actually decent integrated gpu's.
  - gshulegaard 7y ago
    Well hardware for ultrabooks is still a bit anemic when it comes to gaming...but there are some 1650 equipped ultrabooks which look somewhat promising (Razer Stealth and MSI Prestige). As you point out there, are also some new AMD chips that might be make a splash in the space... But with Linux gaming is a bit of a two fold problem since Linux support for the games you want to play is also a question. Between Steam, Proton (via Steam), and Lutris (Wine) there is pretty good coverage...but there is still a lot of ground to go. This is where something like Stadia has some appeal (at least for me).
Lio 7y ago
> consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom. PS4 supports streaming to computers on the same network eg you mac. I always assumed the Xbox offered that too.
eloisant 7y ago
I want to like Stadia but I can't, not in its current form. I'm a bit weary to shell out $60 for a game that I may or may not have access to a few years from now when the service is shut down or something. Now, if the Stadia license came with a Steam key for the same price, that would be really different. I would have a fallback to play games I bought in a "traditional" way.
magashna 7y ago
My local library not only has a huge game selection, they will ship games from within the library network to a library closest to me. It's basically Blockbuster for games, but free. New games too, it's how I've played any PS or Switch exclusives for the past few years.
ofrzeta 7y ago
Red Dead Redemption 2 lists a Geforce GTX 770 as a system requirement. That you can get for around 90 bucks.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games It is by far not the first (Onlive, Gakai, etc.) and it is not a subscription like Netflix but monthly fee + buying games.
theelous3 7y ago
It's going to look and feel like shit, so it's not the cheapest way to get an optimal experience at all, because an optimal experience isn't possible on stadia. If you're fine with a poorer experience then ok, but you are part of a weirdly small market. "People who play a game that can take hundreds of hours, but are not willing to spend money for the experience to be good, but also have enough money to happily early adopt subscription services." Doesn't sound like a group that can support a massive ecosystem. Also, it's 2019. Downloading games only takes a few minutes, and installation takes seconds. You can buy a pc for like 500-600$ that will beat stadia, and you get to keep it. Probably even cheaper actually.
EpicEng 7y ago
>I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work. But it won't, because if 'gamers' and teenagers don't want it, people like you won't be enough to support it.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Netflix streams consumable media. Sure, it is nice if it starts playing the movie the moment you click play, but having it buffer a few seconds at the start isn't a complete disaster preventing you to enjoy the evening. And once you are watching, the network can be pretty unreliable as long as on average it can succeed in downloading enough in advance to cover glitches. You can even use a TV to watch Netflix in total comfort, blissfully unaware some of these tale up to seconds to render the screen on the reception of a new frame. So you're watching a frame that was send out by the Netflix edge cache server at your ISP 5 seconds ago, so what? Gaming is different. You will have noticed gaming equipment like monitors, keyboards, mice, network-cards, routers, ... all advertising and competing on latency, in the x ms range. This is because for many games, the reaction speed by which your actions are delivered to the game server and update the game world and that new world-state is delivered to the players, that round trip, is crucial. It is very hard to upgrade your reflexes, and you have no control over what the game server or the ISP/Internet does, but you can shave of crucial milliseconds through equipment choices under your control. Now imaging getting the most kick-ass gaming PC, but you can only play on it to through the slowest and most unreliable keyboard, mouse and monitor connection (by an order of magnitude) ever, because that PC is across the country from you. Now Google could in theory move the PC closer to you, like curbside or even in your basement. But the closer to you, the less optimal it becomes for other gamers as it moves further away from them and the business model needs those others to timeshare that PC to make it affordable. The latency problem is not the same for all games or genres. Competitive FPS or MOBA's will be very sensitive to latency, while e.g. older MMO's or turn based strategy games can be far more forgiving.
rasz 7y ago
Long term vision is death to ownership, resale, game preservation, and quality.

bobviolier 7y ago

Yeah this ^ I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. That might have been due to Google promoting it as such of course (and asking the price for it). What I also see happening is that as soon as they have a free tier, people are gonna try to play a game for 5 minutes because they saw something on Youtube or somewhere else and then 1 in X will just buy the game on Stadia.

birdyrooster 7y ago
It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compression artifacts. With computers cheaper than ever and games hitting a ceiling on how much power it takes to render them, Stadia makes less and less sense. What does make sense is Google is so hungry for revenue they don’t care about user experience. What also makes sense is that those downvoting me have become blinded by optimism.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  It depends on where you're located. With FiOS in NYC I can get to AWS Virginia in 18ms. I don't have any Google Cloud servers to test with. When I use Steam/NVidia in home streaming with my GTX 1080 card, I can render a 1080p frame in about 10-12ms and decode it in 10ms on my 4K FireTV. (I beat Witcher 3, TombRaider, and Hitman with it over a 50Mbit powerline ethernet setup and they all looked fine BTW.) Even if the Google data center is twice as far as AWS, that's 58ms lag, or 4 frames at 60fps. You can emulate the same lag by turning off Game Mode on your HDTV, it's fine for most games. However, it is bullshit that the Stadia website doesn't have something like fast.com that tells you if your internet connection has enough bandwidth/latency to actually work with the service. It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    I don’t know what games you play, but in home streaming is too much lag for me on basically any game. For myself, 144hz is a requirement because 60fps is a slide show. The resolution would need to be increased as 1080p looks terrible, so that is unacceptable too.
    - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
      Have you considered that you might not be the target audience for a $10/month game streaming service?
      - birdyrooster 7y ago
        I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full price for the games. People can finance a console purchase over a couple years for a little more money and enjoy their experience more while having a structured monthly payment.
gambiting 7y ago
Except if any of this was true, then OnLive would still be alive and well. And Stadia is far more difficult to support for developers as it requires custom builds for the platform, so I have no idea what their plan is to keep developers publishing for it unless they start seeing serious sales numbers very soon.
macspoofing 7y ago
>I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. If you charge $60 for the games, and $130 for the hardware (and associated $10/mo subscription for the premium option) - people will have certain expectations. For $300 you can get yourself a Switch and have latency-free mobile gaming experience. Obviously cloud-gaming is a slightly different use-case, but is it different enough for most?
honestoHeminway 7y ago
Why do you need to buy, the streaming can seemless blend into a stadia instance as a demo. Just have the streamer duplicated and the player exchanged. Including handover
hef19898 7y ago
MVPs are a great concept, but at least for me Google is way beyond the point to afford a MVP launch. they are Google, with that budget launched products should be a little bit better than that. DISCLAIMER: Did not check out Stadia, i prefer to play on my own hardware.

perennate 7y ago

What is the advantage of Stadia over NVIDIA GeForce NOW? I just learned today that Stadia requires games to be specifically developed for the platform, and you need to purchase a controller in order for the system to function. On the other hand, AFAIK, NVIDIA's product allows you to play most major Steam games that you own without requiring you to purchase a second physical device. I think even the Steam mods work, but you have to wait for them to install every time you launch the game.

sjs382 7y ago
Stadia only requires the Stadia controller if you're playing on a Chromecast Ultra. If you're playing on a Phone or in a browser window, then you can use most third party gamepads (8bitdo, Xbox, PS4)

alpaca128 7y ago

It's not a Netflix for games if you still have to buy every game individually. It's like every other console except you always have more input delay in exchange for not paying any hardware. For me the important question is: will the game pricing be comparable with Steam or more with PSN etc.? Considering Sony still asks almost full price for some 8 year old games the pricing can make a huge difference.

perennate 7y ago
Plus, according to their FAQ [1], "you will need a Stadia Controller and access to Stadia to play". So apparently you have to drop $170 CAD just to get started, and that's in addition to the subscription cost (but it comes with 3 months of subscription). [1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946 https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946
- mrep 7y ago
  Pretty sure you won't need that when the free 1080p base version comes out next year. I played 30 hours of assassins creed during the beta last year on my macbook pro with a xbox 360 controller.
  - perennate 7y ago
    Is Stadia only targeting console games? Maybe I'm confused by this controller requirement because I'm assuming that I should be able to play e.g. Cities: Skylines on my Chromebook without a controller. (something which you can already do on NVIDIA GeForce NOW in the beta) I don't get why the marketing has to be so confusing for these platforms. Stadia in Google Store focuses on these physical products instead of the digital subscription, and NVIDIA decided to reuse their name for a previous cloud gaming product that can also be confused with their GPUs. It's like they all want their products to fail.
    - drusepth 7y ago
      I'm not sure, but I think it's targeting only console games. It feels like a gigantic value-add for Chromecasts first (which generally live in living rooms with more controllers than keyboard/mice), which also happens to be capable of working on phones/pcs using the same streaming technology so it's also available there. Here's the list of the launch day games [1] -- I'm not familiar with them all, but even ones like Farming Simulator say they have full controller support on their Steam page. I wouldn't be surprised if Stadia required a controller at least for a while, but eventually got PC-only games that could use a mouse/keyboard. [1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-play-games-on-google-stadia-on-launch-day/ https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-play-games-on-google-stad...

mping 7y ago

Netflix is a good comparison because google will need to secure rights for AAA games, and some games don't appear in all platforms. Fortunately, a user can install Steam/GOG/Origin whatever and just pay for a single game, unlike video streaming platforms. In terms of pricing, 9$99 for 4K/60Hz games is 120$/y; if you buy two AAA games (around 59$) it's already the same price, so in the end the appeal is NOT having a beefy computer to play whatever game you'd like. My guess is that hardcore games will have their own PCs, console gamers prefer TVs but the "casual" gamer may be attracted depending on the catalog of games. edit: it seems you have to buy most of the games too? So google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency.

bonestamp2 7y ago
> google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency In a way, it's like renting DVDs/VHS tapes in the past. They quality wasn't always the best, but that was usually a fair trade off considering the price of owning everything. In this case, you don't need to own a really high end graphics card to get the best visual quality, but the overall quality of the experience still takes a hit due to latency.

Eridrus 7y ago

I think cost is what people are missing: Stadia hardware is much cheaper than consoles now, and when the next generation of consoles come out, they will be even more expensive, but Stadia will be the same cheap price. "Gamers" might not care about this, but parents buying their kids consoles definitely will. Obviously this is predicated on Google sorting out the content situation, but if you look at the Education/Chromebook market you can clearly see the vision of cheap hardware with most of the processing on servers already succeeding in a market that cares about cost.

odessacubbage 7y ago
assuming we don't run into another >599 us dollars situation, 120 + blowing the bandwith cap every weekend is not going to be much cheaper than even a full price console and will bring far more headaches. beyond that, who is gonna want to play with the kid on the lagmachine? that's not gonna go over well at the lunch table.

choppaface 7y ago

What about OnLive? oh ...

edna314 7y ago

This. Stadia is about convenience and price not about bringing a 'new' gaming experience with exclusive titles and what not. This will be the first time in over 10 years I will be able to play up to date games as it just doesn't make sense to me to buy hardware dedicated for gaming if it costs more than a chrome cast and a controller.

Melchizedek 7y ago
Completely agree. I want to play new AAA games on high settings but I have very little time to do so, so I can't really justify buying an expensive gaming computer. But if I only have to buy the games it's a different matter. This should do a lot to lower the barrier of entry and greatly expand the market for the most advanced games.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    > You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. Only if you want 4K. For 1080P, you just buy a game as a product. > It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance. I agree that for the 4K Chromecast option to make any sense, it must be much cheaper than a conventional console. They would have done well to find a way to support existing (and cheaper) Chromecasts too. There's also the PC gaming market though. Stadia will reach PC gamers on all desktop OSs, no additional hardware needed. There could be a market for people with laptops, for instance. Incidentally, we've seen all this before with OnLive and PlayStation Now, which people seem to have largely forgotten about - nothing Google is doing here is new. OnLive functioned as both a microconsole, and an application on Windows/Mac/Android. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Someone1234 7y ago

> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for. For example I recently purchased an Oculus Rift. I waited until enough games released so that I couldn't be disappointed by the experience/value, and I haven't been. Anything else added after this is just value add. > I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. Stadia costs $129 with no games. An XBox One S (Digital) on Black Friday, including a game, costs $200 or $150 with no game (e.g. NewEgg). So while your point is accurate, there isn't as much in "cost" as you'd think, and I'd argue that you get far more value with an XBox One S than a Stadia (even the digital one that cannot play BluRays).

tonmoy 7y ago
> Stadia costs $129 with no games No, stadia founder’s edition costs $129. The regular 1080p stadia is free
- gilrain 7y ago
  ... and isn't available.
- clinth 7y ago
  Right now, $130 is the only edition. I think the one you're talking about comes out next year.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    We're talking about the fundamental value of the product, so the normal price matters a lot more than the preorder price.
    - clinth 7y ago
      I get where you're coming from, but go to Stadia's page. Click "Buy Now". You land at $130 plus $10/month with no other options. This isn't a future product or preorder, this is launch. The hardware and service are live right now. If you want to play: $130 plus $10/month. I think this release structure is pretty daring. They're getting a lot of bad press, it's expensive, it's not a smooth experience. Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.

shantara 7y ago

Long term vision is that Stadia exclusive games would permanently disappear as soon as Google or the publisher remove them from the servers. Obvious ownership implications aside, this also makes archiving games impossible and destroys a significant chunk of gaming history. Always online DRM and moving a portion of game code to the company servers already contributed to this. But unlike DRM that could theoretically be broken, there's nothing that could be done to preserve streaming-only games.

macspoofing 7y ago

I agree that there is something to cloud gaming that is highly attractive. For example, it would be great to throw a controller into your backpack and have full access to your AAA games to play (though hotel wifi isn't exactly super great) Having said that, when reviewing it, there is a balance between recognizing the future and taking into account present realities.

zaarn 7y ago

The problem is that cloud gaming already exists and many providers did a better job than Google. Even the latency shouldn't be an issue, I've cloudgamed to a DC in the netherlands with 2ms of latency but apparently somehow Google manages to fuck that up somehow. I doubt Google will continue Stadia, the press is already bad, the product is bad, it'll likely be dusted in a few years, leaving the product owners out of a product and their money.

raymond_goo 7y ago
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming/project-xcloud https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming/project-xclou...
lovich 7y ago
wouldn't 2ms be <400 miles of travel? Youd have to be pretty close to the datacenter to get 2ms of latency when the computer needs time to do calculations as well
- imtringued 7y ago
  400 miles is pretty Pretty close? That's more than the distance between Paris and Amsterdam but yes you are right. Encoding a video and decoding it introduces additional latency even on the same machine.
  - lovich 7y ago
    I'm an American so maybe it's different. 400 miles max, reduced by however long it takes for the computations, doesn't seem like a large distance for me. My VPN provider's closest datacenter is 200 miles from me

Crinus 7y ago

> the lack of a long term vision How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service (which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will be filled with anti-consumer garbage that you wont be able to do anything about - not even the files that make up the game are under your control. I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail exactly because i can imagine all the negative potential it has. I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.

kingbirdy 7y ago
Stadia doesn't prevent you from owning your own hardware, nor will it. It's just another option for people who can't afford to own hardware.
- smnrchrds 7y ago
  Imagine if we had this conversation 10 years ago: - I don't like streaming services, because content can disappear/the quality is lower/... - Streaming doesn't prevent you from owning your own DVDs/BDs, nor will it And now in 2019, there are so many films and tv shows only released through streaming services, and never sold on disks.
  - kingbirdy 7y ago
    Those are products that only exist on streaming platforms, though - as far as I know, Netflix hasn't negotiated any deals to have movies go from cinemas to Netflix and not get a physical release at all. Even some of Netflix's properties have physical releases, such as Stranger Things. So there's still just as much or more physical media available as there would be without streaming platforms.

Iv 7y ago

I could see playing RTS or tactical RPGs, but it is a very poor idea to propose FPS. It is already hard to have a reactive system locally, proposing remotely is. You need to react in 16ms if you want a snappy 60Hz. 1000 km from the server is adding 6 ms of ping. At one point, proposing this kind of service has the speed of light as a "technical constraint".

roel_v 7y ago
Nvidia is going to add negative lag to their service, so there's that...
- odessacubbage 7y ago
  im still very skeptical that predictive rollback is gonna feel very good to play with, ggpo is still probably the best existing version of rollback netcode and it still gets pretty fucky when it has to roll back >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo
- p1necone 7y ago
  Nvidia can say they're going to break the laws of physics all they want. They're not going to though. It could be feasible for certain classes of games where the options for "what thing can the player do next" are very limited, but literally anything with analog controls just can't work like that.
- Iv 7y ago
  Well it won't work on games that are designed around the reflex of players. Unless they somehow provide an EEG on the primal motor cortex, which I would be very happy to see :-)
odessacubbage 7y ago
i played through most of srw t on ps4 remote play while house sitting & it worked well enough for the most part. unfortunately games like ff tactics and disgaea aren't big ticket AAA blockbusters that require a supercomputer to run smoothly.

013a 7y ago

I think it would be helpful to broaden your horizons a bit. Everyone is talking about Stadia; whether it will be good or not, whether it will eventually see long-term success. These are very boring questions. The more interesting question is whether cloud gaming will see success over the long term. Every major player, minus Nintendo, is entering or already in this market. Most notably, Microsoft is releasing xCloud very soon, and PSNow already exists. You can go play God of War, a PS4 game, on your PC, literally today (unfortunately, no Mac support yet). Its $10/month. No one talks about this! Realistically, the cloud gaming market will become a utility, just like the cloud itself. Who can provide the most datacenters as close as possible to large customer bases? Who's technology provides the best user experience? Who is available on the most screens? These are all questions that multiple major players can have great answers to. Stadia was "early" (though, Playstation was the earliest, and its not even close; they purchased Gaikai in 2012 and OnLive in 2015, they're so far ahead that Google wasn't even thinking about this when Sony was actually selling it). But a player being early means nothing if this thing that Stadia released today is in the state that its in; they need years to iterate on it. So, what will differentiate? The Games! This is the Hard Problem in this space. Not networking. Not DC locations. Games! The choice isn't just "do I want to play RDR2 for super cheap with decent quality on Stadia, or in great quality but a $500 upfront fee on my X1X". There's a third choice there: Should I play it on PSNow? xCloud? And, realistically, yeah its a very fluid market. I could play on any of them. But Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are destroying the third-party AAA game development space. Their first party studios are insanely good, seeing billions in investment and new acquisitions. They have proprietary world-class technology that they only share internally (example: the Decima engine used in Horizon: Zero Dawn was used for Death Stranding, and is widely considered to be among the most technically advanced engines in the world right now (though, Kojima isn't an SIE Studio, so maybe its a bad example)). Point being: if I pay for Game Pass on Xbox, and I'm a big fan of their exclusives, then RDR3 comes out and I can play it on xCloud, I'm going to buy that on Xbox. There's gravity to these platforms, and that gravity comes from the titles where I have to go to xCloud to play. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has the most measured and strongest position in cloud gaming. At E3, he said that he sees it as just one avenue where people will play games. In some situations, it makes sense. For some people, it makes sense (though, those people like you will never play games as much as people who have consoles/gaming PCs). So, they will build it. They have the technology and DC footprint. But, Stadia's downfall will be in their all-in approach, combined with their lack of revenue strategy and lack of first-party exclusives to build gravity.

playerqq 7y ago

> I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense. I disagree that the reviewers lacked long term vision. Nearly all of seem to have been burned by the promise of videogame streaming before, and the current state of Stadia only inspires cautious optimism at best. You're right that everybody wants to live in a world where videogames stream anywhere at 4k+ and 60+fps with minimal latency. But OnLive was 2010. Gaikai was 2012, followed by Playstation Now in 2014. This space isn't a greenfield for lack of trying. Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for.

Lev1a 7y ago
> Furthermore, with initiatives by Microsoft (Project xCloud) and EA (Project Atlas), there's no reason to accept Google as the standard bearer for game streaming. There's plenty of companies that could be coming up with the experience we've been waiting a better part of a decade for. Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently.
- SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
  > Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently. That's been the norm of the gaming industry for ages. Mario, Sonic, Halo, etc - its always been fragmented. You have to pay for an expensive console to get at the exclusives. Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation - assuming most are easy to subscribe/unsubscribe as video streaming services.
  - 7y ago

nilkn 7y ago

> It will be the most enjoyable option too I think it depends on the standards you judge it by. If lack of installation is the standard, then sure. If image quality is the standard, at least with this iteration of Stadia, it seems so far like you'd get better results with any modern console and significantly better results with a PC. For Stadia to take off, it's going to need to penetrate the existing gaming market to at least some degree. I don't think it can survive solely off people who haven't played any game in 10+ years but suddenly want to play the most complex AAA games like RDR2 (which was a bit hard to figure out in its entirety even for me as a seasoned gamer). These games aren't Candy Crush; the soccer mom crowd isn't going to be buying here. And for that penetration into existing markets to happen, it can't perform noticeably worse in all ways than consoles.

fbelzile 7y ago

Exactly, they have other motivations to make this work. Imagine only needing a ChromeOS laptop or Android phone to play the latest exciting games. I feel like Stadia might be the tipping point to make general computing a 100% streamed experience. People would no longer need to buy expensive devices to: 1) browse the web 2) do basic office work 3) watch TV/video 4) edit/store images and, 5) gaming... leaving traditional desktops and laptops marginalized for only those people that need special custom software.

odessacubbage 7y ago

you could get red dead + a used ps4 for probably less than 150 and resell it when you're done without much of a loss, or just give it away as a gift. you could even rent both the game and the console for probably less than the cost of playing a degraded version with stadia (9.99 + the cost of the game+ bandwith caps) >Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom steam and ps4 both support remote play, i assume xbox has something similar as well. and besides all of that, once you beat red dead and cyberpunk, how many similar big ticket games are being pumped out at a fast enough rate for you to justify maintaining a subscription? assuming it takes you maybe one month to slowplay through a game, is the AAA machine even putting out enough(computationally intensive but not greatly affected by poor latency) titles to keep people around?

cptskippy 7y ago

> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. Maybe it's because most reviewer are jaded because it's industry standard for gaming companies to promise the world and deliver on only a small part of that. In general when a gaming company says "and we're going to do..." that's generally qualified with "if there's enough user adoption and demand". To believe in Stadia, you have to trust Google will deliver on promised features, trust that Google will convince publishers to develop for it's platform, and trust your internet connection. Google really only has control over one of those things. Also, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T are holding a grudge after Google Fiber and might take steps to degrade the Stadia experience as a little fk you to Google.

odessacubbage 7y ago
to believe in stadia, you need to engage in magical thinking that allows you to believe that google has somehow managed to solve network latency and america's laughable internet infrastructure and just forgot to tell everyone.
- Melchizedek 7y ago
  The US is not the world. The average person in parts of Europe and Asia has a much better internet connection.
  - benibela 7y ago
    In Germany I have 8 Mbit/s
    - vocatus_gate 7y ago
      Bandwidth has nothing to do with latency. A low-Earth orbit satellite connection could have 20 Mb/s bandwidth, but the latency on the round-trip for the packets could be 800ms, technically still under a second...but completely unplayable.
    - 7y ago

tapoxi 7y ago

Consoles don’t require you use a TV, both the PS4 and Xbox One support remote play options over your LAN or the Internet.

blueski 7y ago

The cheapest way to do it is buying a secondhand XBox/PS4/Switch + games for very little on Craigslist, and putting it back on there when you get bored (if that's within 6 months, I'd be surprised if you lost much). Or just keeping it and enjoying no input lag, no requirement for a subscription, no chance of the manufacturer bricking the device in future, and a huge secondhand market for games. Unless I really want to play games on something other than my TV or a handheld device (Switch), can't see why I'd take the more expensive and laggy Stadia option.

krzyk 7y ago
But what should I do if I hate using conrollers? I'm a mouse+keyboard person can I use it on any console to play games?
- blueski 7y ago
  Some XBox and PS4 games support keyboard and mouse. I don't think this is much of a differentiator for/against Stadia.
- denhaus 7y ago
  You can buy a Xim to use KB+M on Xbox or PS4. Works pretty well but it’s kind of like cheating for shooter games.

headmelted 7y ago

Just no. "Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games" These services have existed for a while. OnLive failed because it was ahead of it's time, and lagged. GeForce Now is free, while it's still in beta. Project xCloud is free, while it's still in beta. Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta. "If Google doesn't drop the ball" Google already dropped the ball here by asking for money for a beta test, and being the only big player to do so. I like Google, but this was just the wrong way to go about bringing this product to market. Microsoft have experience working with players and game developers. Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players, but the Shield has done well. The optics here are just bad. To see both of those companies put their services through prolonged public testing periods without charge makes Stadia look either naive (in that they thought this would be easy to build) or cynical ("hey the customers have to bear the sunk costs if it fails"). I don't for a second think Google is being cynical - but Stadia should have had a free public beta before taking a cent from paying customers.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
GeForce Now was the first time I saw game streaming as feasible. Unlike Stadia you can simply login with your steam account and get started in seconds using games you already own. If that were Stadia, I’d be more bullish.
romwell 7y ago
>Nvidia have experience working with game developers - less so with players True to an extent, but people with gaming as a hobby have been using Nvidia or Radeon products for a long time, and there's a certain level of trust regarding Nvidia and gaming. GeForce as a gaming card brand has now existed for longer than a third of all gamers have been alive for now (and that's for those who don't remember Riva TNT). Back when computers didn't come with graphics accelerators, you surely knew who made your graphics chip if you wanted to play games. So a company like Nvidia would exist from interacting directly with the gamers (who would build their PCs and buy graphics cards).
mrep 7y ago
> Google Stadia is £120 down and a monthly fee... while it's clearly still in beta No, the beta was last year with assassins creed and that was free and they gave everyone a free copy of the game afterwords.

higeyuki 7y ago

Can I play offline? This is a deal breaker for me. I am not a multiplayer gamer. I prefer solo play. Also data usage being a Comcast user with a 1TB cap and a 4K TV, it is not really economical unless you are very casually using it. "At the best possible quality, Stadia will use 35 Mbps of data per second, or about 15.75GB per hour. At Google's recommended minimum quality, Stadia will use about 4.5GB per hour."

oarabbus_ 7y ago

>As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work. I had some qualms about the rest of your post but this is where you really lost me. You just described a DOA business model.

davidjnelson 7y ago

It’s cool to have options. Hope Stadia works out and a lot of people enjoy it. There’s something really fun about building a pc and overclocking it and modding the games though :-) Also, having all your mods and saves on your own backups is great too. That being said, it’s quite perplexing that a 1080ti can’t keep a stable 60fps in 1080p on a game built on unity on ultra settings reliably. For instance, The Outer Worlds. If Stadia can crack that, they’ll make a _lot_ of money.

Mirioron 7y ago
I think Ultra settings aren't meant to be the "goto settings" to use. A lot of things ultra settings include usually eat up a ton of needless performance. The way some games deal with it is by just degrading the quality of ultra settings.
seabrookmx 7y ago
Outer Worlds is Unreal Engine not Unity, FYI.

durpleDrank 7y ago

If Google starts renting games it's competition for other mass market paradigms. Buying digital downloads will be niche. I have a balls to the wall gaming PC and plenty of consoles, however, I don't want to spend 90$ every other week to see the hot new game everyone is talking about. $5 for a weekend rental is great for me (matches blockbusters old $4.75 weekend rental fee). A little lag won't be an issues especially considering most new games are story driven cakewalks anyway.

sjs382 7y ago

I'm pretty much the perfect audience for Stadia. I have three HDTVs on my house, none of which are 4K and I don't plan on upgrading unless one of them bites the dust. I imagine that I'll do most of my playing on my phone or at the office during lunchtime (in the browser), but it's nice to quickly "deploy" Stadia to each TV I have by attaching a $69 Chromecast Ultra. I don't want "stuff" in my house in the form of game discs and consoles. I'm not a collector. I don't engage in a second-hand market. And I can't imagine myself in 10 years being nostalgic about games that i played in my 30s. I don't really care that I'm just "licensing" digital copies of games and that it might go away at some point. Over the years I've occasionally seen a game that I might be interested in—I just want to be able to drop $50 on it and play half-way through until I lose interest. Stadia gives me all of that. Maybe some day I'll get "serious" about gaming again and want a full-fledged console. In the mean time though, I'm happy to pay $80 for a controller and $10/month (until it's free) for Stadia. If you consider yourself a "gamer", then there are definitely better options for you than Stadia. But for me, this is perfect.

JohnFen 7y ago

> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. Perhaps I misunderstand what Stadia is actually offering, but it doesn't look like a "Netflix for games" to me. Netflix's model is you pay a monthly fee and you get to watch anything in their catalog. With Stadia, you still have to buy each game separately, correct? >I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it I am neither a gamer nor a teenager, and I don't want it. In fact, the only reason that I have any feelings about its existence at all is that if it's successful, that would mean more of the games industry will do this sort of thing, which will further reduce the amount of games available to me.

dawg- 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the $10 a month gives you a service similar to Xbox Game Pass. You can play the games in their catalog, just like Netflix. You also have the option to purchase a game and own if even if it's rotated out of the catalog.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I couldn't find anything on Google's sites that clarify this point either way. But this is in Wikipedia's entry for Stadia (for whatever that's worth): > Stadia is not similar to Netflix, in that it requires users to purchase games to stream via Stadia rather than pay for access to a library of games. While the base service will be free, a Pro tier monthly subscription allows users to stream at higher rates for larger resolutions, and the offer to add free games to their library.

TylerE 7y ago

> It will be the most enjoyable option too No it will not be, because latency exists. It will be the opposite of enjoyable unless you like feeling motion sick.

yathern 7y ago
Latency is of course the biggest concern. Recent videos I saw do not indicate they have a good solution to latency. I'd absolutely love if they used some sort of 'asynchronous reprojection' like you see in VR. Essentially, send a depth buffer along with video data, and let the client reproject frames before it gets the next keyframe from the server. It can help solve input lag for movement and turning. Not so much for things like shooting.
- kosievdmerwe 7y ago
  Wouldn't that require a decent graphics card, largely negating the point?
  - yathern 7y ago
    Not too much for reprojection. That's a very specialized task that can be optimized for in hardware, without having to support all the typical operations of GPUs. That's not to say it's easy. It requires a large amount of engine integration and the client has to now know what amount of reprojection to apply when you turn, which may vary per game or context. Hugely hugely impacts the complexity.
drusepth 7y ago
People used to (still?) say people wouldn't enjoy VR because they'd feel motion sick also. There are games that do make me feel nauseous occasionally, but that hasn't stopped me from putting over 1,200 hours into the games that don't. Even if latency is an issue on Stadia (contrary to what people who've tried it so far have said), there's gonna be plenty of games that don't need the lowest of latencies to enjoy.

gshulegaard 7y ago

I'm with you. I'm a gamer, but I'm also a software engineer that travels 75% of my time for work. When I travel I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Extreme Gen2 running Ubuntu. For me the idea of being able to grab a smaller form factor ultrabook but still be able to do a little gaming in the evening during the work week is massively appealing. Of course the performance would have to be "good enough". When I am actually at home and have my full rig available I would not use Stadia...but I do see a use case for Stadia (for me).

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
I mean, if it's truly an ultrabook it should probably be able to handle a game or two. Or at least, the new ones coming out now and in the next few years that're based on AMD mobile APU's will, because most of them have actually decent integrated gpu's.
- gshulegaard 7y ago
  Well hardware for ultrabooks is still a bit anemic when it comes to gaming...but there are some 1650 equipped ultrabooks which look somewhat promising (Razer Stealth and MSI Prestige). As you point out there, are also some new AMD chips that might be make a splash in the space... But with Linux gaming is a bit of a two fold problem since Linux support for the games you want to play is also a question. Between Steam, Proton (via Steam), and Lutris (Wine) there is pretty good coverage...but there is still a lot of ground to go. This is where something like Stadia has some appeal (at least for me).

Lio 7y ago

> consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom. PS4 supports streaming to computers on the same network eg you mac. I always assumed the Xbox offered that too.

eloisant 7y ago

I want to like Stadia but I can't, not in its current form. I'm a bit weary to shell out $60 for a game that I may or may not have access to a few years from now when the service is shut down or something. Now, if the Stadia license came with a Steam key for the same price, that would be really different. I would have a fallback to play games I bought in a "traditional" way.

magashna 7y ago

My local library not only has a huge game selection, they will ship games from within the library network to a library closest to me. It's basically Blockbuster for games, but free. New games too, it's how I've played any PS or Switch exclusives for the past few years.

ofrzeta 7y ago

Red Dead Redemption 2 lists a Geforce GTX 770 as a system requirement. That you can get for around 90 bucks.

diffeomorphism 7y ago

> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games It is by far not the first (Onlive, Gakai, etc.) and it is not a subscription like Netflix but monthly fee + buying games.

theelous3 7y ago

It's going to look and feel like shit, so it's not the cheapest way to get an optimal experience at all, because an optimal experience isn't possible on stadia. If you're fine with a poorer experience then ok, but you are part of a weirdly small market. "People who play a game that can take hundreds of hours, but are not willing to spend money for the experience to be good, but also have enough money to happily early adopt subscription services." Doesn't sound like a group that can support a massive ecosystem. Also, it's 2019. Downloading games only takes a few minutes, and installation takes seconds. You can buy a pc for like 500-600$ that will beat stadia, and you get to keep it. Probably even cheaper actually.

EpicEng 7y ago

>I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work. But it won't, because if 'gamers' and teenagers don't want it, people like you won't be enough to support it.

PeterStuer 7y ago

Netflix streams consumable media. Sure, it is nice if it starts playing the movie the moment you click play, but having it buffer a few seconds at the start isn't a complete disaster preventing you to enjoy the evening. And once you are watching, the network can be pretty unreliable as long as on average it can succeed in downloading enough in advance to cover glitches. You can even use a TV to watch Netflix in total comfort, blissfully unaware some of these tale up to seconds to render the screen on the reception of a new frame. So you're watching a frame that was send out by the Netflix edge cache server at your ISP 5 seconds ago, so what? Gaming is different. You will have noticed gaming equipment like monitors, keyboards, mice, network-cards, routers, ... all advertising and competing on latency, in the x ms range. This is because for many games, the reaction speed by which your actions are delivered to the game server and update the game world and that new world-state is delivered to the players, that round trip, is crucial. It is very hard to upgrade your reflexes, and you have no control over what the game server or the ISP/Internet does, but you can shave of crucial milliseconds through equipment choices under your control. Now imaging getting the most kick-ass gaming PC, but you can only play on it to through the slowest and most unreliable keyboard, mouse and monitor connection (by an order of magnitude) ever, because that PC is across the country from you. Now Google could in theory move the PC closer to you, like curbside or even in your basement. But the closer to you, the less optimal it becomes for other gamers as it moves further away from them and the business model needs those others to timeshare that PC to make it affordable. The latency problem is not the same for all games or genres. Competitive FPS or MOBA's will be very sensitive to latency, while e.g. older MMO's or turn based strategy games can be far more forgiving.

rasz 7y ago

Long term vision is death to ownership, resale, game preservation, and quality.