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Although Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and
by haolez 7y ago
Although Stadia might fail, I see cloud gaming (i.e. streaming A/V) as a revolution for multiplayer games. We can now have all kinds of complicated physics and particle engines, since all players are known to experience the exact same “world model”. It might help a lot with anti-cheat technology as well. It’s pretty exciting!
- jimbob45 7y agoThis is the problem with modern gaming. Everyone wants to fix all the problems that aren't the core problem we have with gaming: microtransactions. No one cares about how nice your game looks or how low-latency your game is if you designed it around microtransactions with pay-to-win gameplay and a laughably greedy content update schedule.
- deminature 7y agoMicrotransactions are a pet peeve of the hardcore crowd, but ask any average gamer and it probably doesn't rate in the top 10 disagreements with modern gaming. It's an artifact of the hardcore gamer filter bubble online, not a widespread grievance. The problems Stadia addresses - eliminating 100GB downloads and constant 10-20GB patch downloads that might take hours to pull down, removing the cost of entry in the form of a console, being able to play AAA games on your phone - these are things the average non-hardcore gamer cares about.
- meheleventyone 7y agoBut it replaces multi gigabyte downloads with multi gigabyte per hour downloads.
- deminature 7y agoIt allows instant-play on 10mbit connections, where you would need to wait 10-20hrs otherwise to play. Even on gigabit connections, you're going to wait ~1hr to play AAA games as opposed to starting immediately. Instant gratification is powerful.
- meheleventyone 7y agoSure but I’m highlighting the cost of that cause it’s not free. If you’re playing at 4K (which you couldn’t on 10mbit) you’ll be downloading 15Gb of data per hour. I also predict this is going to go up rather than down as we see more data packed in to help reduce felt latency.
- darkcha0s 7y agoUntil you play COD with a latency of 80ms
- k__ 7y agoYes, I don't get streaming for realtime games.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoThis is laughably first world problems. I've been playing cod and other multiplayer games with >80 ping my entire life. It's fine. I was expecting people to be worried about stadia being 200 or more ms latency but 80? Come on.
- Slartie 7y agoThese 80ms were just fine because game engines already employ a lot of nifty tricks to minimize the negative impact of latency. Tricks which mostly only work as well as they do because the engine has an inside view on the gamestate. 80ms of video lag are far worse for the gaming experience than 80ms of "conventional" client-server lag.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zeulhex 7y agoTry to track a moving target when your screen updates almost 0.1 seconds after you adjust your joystick. I expect Stadia input latency to be much greater than that, though, because most display hardware adds at least 30ms on top of whatever latency Stadia introduces.
- haolez 7y agoI had an intuition that quantum entanglement might be used some day to give us worldwide 0 latency communication, until I understood that this would break the universe’s causality :)
- bandrami 7y ago
- cma 7y agoPlus gaming has a very sharp peak utilization at a certain time of day and then much lower. When not being used for gaming they can use the GPUs for training, so the marginal cost of providing the gaming stuff could be very low compared to if they had to idle all that hardware most of the day.
- windsurfer 7y agoModern multiplayer games already do the "world model" calculations on the server, with clients simply rendering the little data they have.
- haolez 7y agoThen what’s stopping us from making a MMORPG with the physics of a simulator?
- nepeckman 7y agoThe technical difficulty of making an MMORPG I'm guessing.
- kllrnohj 7y agoA lack of gameplay from the resulting physics to justify the server costs? Game devs don't simulate worlds for the fun of it. They have a purpose behind things. There's a cost/benefit involved.
- honkycat 7y ago> Game devs don't simulate worlds for the fun of it. Unless you are Tarn Adams
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoOr about a thousand other small indie devs, but somehow I don't think Stadia has much interest in them. P.S.: Don't take this statement the wrong way, I love small indie devs and donated for Dwarf Fortress.
- beaconstudios 7y agoI would hazard to guess that latency would be a killer for that. It's painful enough if you have 100ms ping on tactical FPS games like CS:GO for instance, but if the delay in a player's position updating caused a completely different physics cascade to happen (running into a wall rather than a stack of cardboard boxes for instance), that could get pretty jarring to see either the correction occurring constantly or the physics delayed after someone's actions. Of course I'm just theorising - it could be an idea that no-one's implemented yet.
- tw04 7y agoI would agree - if every purchase of a game on their platform included a coupon for a physical copy of the game on my console/PC of choice. The fact that I have to pay full price for a copy of a game that may go away at any moment is ridiculous.
- haolez 7y agoThat’s a problem with their business model. I’m not defending Stadia, but the concept of cloud gaming.
- Karunamon 7y agoNot until the world's internet gets a heck of a lot better. There's no beating the laws of physics here. RTT in normal installed titles with modest system requirements is already an issue for gamers, let alone the latency this requires. Maybe in a few years when something like Starlink is in wide use, this can be revisited. I really don't get who Google's target market is for this. A flat monthly fee I can see, that's what Playstation Now and, I think, XCloud is doing, but requiring full price purchases on this platform is lunacy.
- 0xffff2 7y agoStarlink also has to contend with the laws of physics (in particular, the maximum density of ground stations is quite low). It's a service for rural customers and a select few urban/suburban customers at best. It's not a mass-market technology that's going to put cable/fiber ISPs out of business.
- Karunamon 7y agoDarn.. I hadn't heard of this density limitation yet. I was getting rather hyped up for nothing :(
- ghaff 7y agoHardcore gamers may not like it, but it's hard to argue against the observation that the overall trend everywhere is towards hosted services. Yes, there are some limitations imposed by physics but applications requiring specific high-performance local [client] hardware are going to be increasingly niche. (As, arguably, a lot of the most hardware-intensive gaming already is in the scheme of the population as a whole.)
- JohnFen 7y ago> Hardcore gamers may not like it I'm not a hardcore gamer -- I think hardcore gamers would call me a "casual gamer". But Stadia is not interesting to me at all. It offers tons of important limitations, and brings no actual benefit that I can see.
- ghaff 7y agoI'm a very casual gamer and have no particular opinion about Stadia in its current form. And am perfectly willing to believe that it's pre-1.0 in its current form. But it's the direction things are headed.
- spuz 7y agoYou can't see any benefit to never having to download a game before playing it or running 4K games without needing the latest gaming hardware? Given the obvious theoretical benefits regardless of how Google actually delivers on them, it's hard not to take your claim of "no actual benefit" as disingenuous.
- JohnFen 7y agoI should have said "no benefit to me" The benefits you cite are not things that matter to me at all. They may matter to others, of course, but I can't speak for others.
- rapsey 7y agoContext matters. For gaming the main trend is move to mobile.
- Aaronstotle 7y agoI agree, but I think Microsoft would end up leading the way. They have all their Azure data-centers already, and I believe they're working on Xbox/Cloud streaming. Looking forward to what game developers can do with powerful dedicated servers.
- make3 7y agoGoogle (GCS) has huge gpu server farms everywhere too. that's not the factor here
- make3 7y agothe thing with multiplayer games is that they are often latency dependant like first person shooters or fighting games, or mobas. Portable and cheaper single player games may be a better application in practice, because you're more rarely fighting over advantage over fractions of seconds with other agents, and NPC behavior is likely easier to predict for the machine learning next frame prediction stuff I imagine they are using
- manojlds 7y agoMicrosoft is working with Sony and Nintendo on this in some form or the other. Cloud gaming has a future, but it's not going to be Stadia by the looks of it.
- lanius 7y agoThe anti-cheat potential would actually be a killer feature for me. Unfortunately the games which would benefit the most from it also tend to be latency-sensitive.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- golf3 7y agoAlways online is really just for smooth microtransaction delivery.