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I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader. Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying so

I understand the cynicism of this community to Stadia but implore you all to think a little broader. Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. For one, the fact that Stadia actually costs money should be a signal of Google's long term ambition here. Yes, Fiber also cost money but was bogged down by the hell that is infrastructure development. Stadia will require a substantial engineering effort from Google to make this work. The latency and network requirements are a great test to gauge network requirements as we move into 5g, AR, and self driving cars. Gaming is huge and if Google can be the first to provide (viable) steaming as a service they can really threaten some of the incumbents like Twitch, Sony, Microsoft, etc. Obviously Google doesn't have the best track record here but I'm excited to see them tackle this challenge.

smolder 7y ago
Moving every last thing people do with computers into the cloud so their activities can be thoroughly data mined is innovative?
mempko 7y ago
You do realize that streaming games is an old idea and has been tried many times and Google's competitors do or will have similar services. Google isn't doing anything new here. They don't have any first-move advantage. The only advantage they have is infrastructure and scale. Whether that is enough, we shall see.
- 40acres 7y ago
  I do understand that this is an old idea. My TV actually has a steaming service for games built in but I have never used it because I doubt the performance would be up to standard. The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge. Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
  - hyperdimension 7y ago
    > My TV actually has a steaming service Nice Freudian slip there. We have a "smart" TV here that's never been connected to the Internet. They seem to just universally suck. For extra credit, our TV is a Roku TV, and from the CEOs comments, I doubt I'll ever connect it to the Internet. At least until they start coming with 4G connectivity built-in...(!)
  - effingwewt 7y ago
    There is ZERO innovation here. This is simply google trying to lock more people in to a service they will later try to pivot, which will then be canceled. I'm glad you are excited for this, and I hope to be proven wrong, but like all others I see a google service and wonder how long until EOL
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    >The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. Yet their launch has been plauged by issues and latency is still a massive problem. They didn't crack the nut, so again, what's innovative here?
gameswithgo 7y ago
> Google is trying something really innovative This kind of thing has been around for nearly 10 years.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Where? Who else is doing this type of cloud gaming?
  - minikites 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive >The OnLive Game Service was launched in the United States on June 17, 2010. The service was launched in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2011.
  - ARCarr 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now "PlayStation Now (PS Now) is a cloud gaming subscription service developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment."
  - headmelted 7y ago
    Onlive (deceased). Microsoft (xCloud). Free until it’s stable. Nvidia (GeForce NOW). Free until it’s stable. Sony (PlayStation Now). .. Seriously dude where’ve you been?
    - krzyk 7y ago
      And you can add others like Shadow, or you could roll your own using Parsec or Moonlight + a cloud provider like Paperspace or AWS (or even Google cloud). What is important in case of Shadow, GeForce Now and roll you own, that you buy a PC game that you can access on any PC, not just using a single service (like Stadia, or xCloud).
- ddtaylor 7y ago
  Yup. OnLive tried it with similar results. There are many markets where 10ms - 20ms latency doesn't matter that much, but realtime gaming isn't one of them. It's extremely disorienting to play a game with even the slightest framebuffer lag.
mmanfrin 7y ago
Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition. The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game. If I, conversely, buy the same $60 game on Steam, I know it'll be there years down the road, that I'll be able to play it on any PC I build, and I don't have to maintain a monthly fee for it. What Google is trying has been tried many times before, by people who had more permissive game ownership structures. Do not tell us we shouldn't be worried about using such a product from Google given their track record -- especially when the costs to them are enormous in terms of computing power and the reception has been very tepid (meaning those costs are larger per-user than they likely anticipated).
- 40acres 7y ago
  Honestly, glass simply seems too early. We know that Apple is also working on AR glasses, even Intel came out with a AR glasses platform but quickly had to kill it because the market is simply not mature. I think Google is betting that cloud steaming is now viable and are going to put as much resources as possible to make it work. I am not doubting that there are issues with the product and concerns about Google, I obviously have reservations but don't believe that it hinders me from being excited about the prospect itself
  - berberous 7y ago
    It’s not the market that wasn’t mature, it’s the technology/product —- although the latter is what you need to grow a market. I love new technology and gadgets. I bought an Oculus DK2 and Vive and they were both mind blowing when I first tried them, although I don’t still use them. Trying Google Glass, on the other hand, was beyond underwhelming. Holo Lens and Magic Leap, while slightly better, were also extremely underwhelming. Other than niche industrial applications, these products are far far too early for any consumer product.
  - lostcolony 7y ago
    I feel like "X was too early/ahead of its time" is kind of a red herring. What it's basically saying is "this failed until it succeeded", because the alternative option, that of being able to accurately predict the exact point the technology is 'good enough', has proven effectively impossible to do (given how so many companies that manage it occasionally also fail at it most of the time; it's a crapshoot). To that end, given Stadia is here, does anyone think the tech is ready? No. In fact, people seem to think the opposite, that Stadia is Google's attempt to get the tech to a specific point, or to offset the cost of the tech serving another use case. The only way Stadia has a shot is if Google stays viewing it as a way to profit from having unused GPUs sitting around within its cloud offerings.
mbell 7y ago
> Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. Genuine question: What is innovative here? There are at least a dozen attempts at 'cloud gaming' that I'm aware of dating back about a decade.
- jakebasile 7y ago
  Now you can play games at lower quality and higher latency than ever before, and pay Google for the privilege of renting them! Plus, Google can control what games you play! Innovation!
- heywoods 7y ago
  I think I can help answer your question, but just watching the keynote will be best. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM. The tl;dr of the whole keynote is what's different about Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. Outside of Amazon and Microsoft I don't know of another company that will be able to match the latency and computation requirements to make this all work as marketed. What really stood out to me from their keynote this year was the number of edge nodes that Google has on top of their datacenter infrastructure. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360 https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360
  - AlexandrB 7y ago
    > What is different with Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. That's not innovation, it's just having a bigger stick than the other guy.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Yes,we know, nothing remotely similar to anything else is innovation. Airplanes are just bicycles with bolted on wings.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 7y ago
cglace 7y ago
https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/ Has been a product for a long time and actually works really well.
eternalny1 7y ago
My concern for Stadia revolves around Microsoft's upcoming offering. Apparently, Microsoft is simply going to rack-mount XBox hardware and stream it that way, which means the entire XBox library is instantly compatible. For Stadia, games have to be modified specifically for it and their Linux configuration, which limits what games are announced for the platform, and requires engineering effort.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  If that MS approach works, why hasn't Netflix or Gog or someone already done it for any games?
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    They don't have the game dev experience or the library. Seems obvious. They can stream the games for the same reason Netflix can't buy a single DVD and stream that movie to everyone on the planet.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    Netflix has been trying to introduce interactive content to their platform for years. The latest attempt is Minecraft: Story Mode [0]. Netflix's architecture is designed around streaming static video files, on platforms without great latency guarantees. There can be gaps of up to a second when loading the next video file. Interactive UI and choicepoints are quite limited. Streaming live and streaming offline media require very different infrastructure. [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80227995 https://www.netflix.com/title/80227995
    - sincerely 7y ago
      There was also that choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror thing.
EpicEng 7y ago
>Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. Google is not the one being innovative here. This has been done before, to no real success. Google was first to the finish line (kinda, seems more like a beta in implementation), but other offerings are coming down the pipe shortly. I don't see Google winning this one. MS is in a much better position here, and NVidia also has one in the works. I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money. I'm sure there are many people who would be happy to take your money to bet against Google.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Ok, well let me know. Google fails far more often than they succeed, and they're out of their depth with this one.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      I'm not a Google advocate. But Google (well Alphabet) is a public stock - there are many ways to short it.
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        Cool. Can I short stadia specifically? I'm pretty sure you understood what I was saying.
        OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        I honestly thought you meant what you said - that you wanted to short Google.
systemdtrigger 7y ago
Except if you stepped out of the hn bubble you'll know MS has had something similar in works for a long time so no, Google can't win here
blibble 7y ago
its initial purchase price is only slightly less than a full console, the games cost more, the visual quality is worse, it is way way more subject to packet loss, the input lag is orders of magnitude worse and it (along with my purchases) have a high probability of disappearing in 3 years time where do I sign up?
- EpicEng 7y ago
  You forgot that stadia also lacks nearly all of the nice-to-gave features already provided on consoles. You don't even get a notification when you unlock a trophy.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Google can only succeed with their own low-latency internet --- Fiber, Loon etc. BTW Twitch is a different kind of game streaming.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  With the huge, hideous and costly mistakes Google has been making with Fiber, and Loon being still nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky fantasy?
cryptozeus 7y ago
Good point, also remember they have their own internet cable ruin through the globe.
ctroein89 7y ago
Remember, for years, Xbox One has allowed for local streaming from Xbox One consoles to Windows 10 PCs via the Xbox app over LAN, which gives Microsoft's Project xCloud the benefits of: * significant experience with the fundamental technology, * no new special hardware required (they can tweak existing Xbox One hardware), * a much larger library of games currently available for download (for consumers who want to switch to a local console), and * an existing Netflix-of-games program via Game Pass (for consumers interested in pure subscriptions) As-is, Google just happens to be first-to-market in the current generation of on-demand game streaming options. But we've seen this technology before, and I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  > I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home. Has anyone actually done that, or are you speculating?
  - ctroein89 7y ago
    > Has anyone actually done that, or are you speculating? There are videos on YouTube of people using Xbox game streaming, but it requires setting up a VPN at home which presumably few people do. Edit: with the Stadia launch, I'm currently working on setting up a Raspberry PI as a VPN server to try this myself.
endorphone 7y ago
On the original rumors about Stadia I did think Google was going to revolutionize the industry, particularly in social/massively-multiple games. Starting with the development stack that would leverage a coherent, synchronized world that is massively malleable -- huge banks of systems connected in the microsecond latency range with virtually unlimited throughput, massive neural engines, etc. Destructables, enormous player counts, a completely dynamic environment, virtually eliminating cheating, etc -- it would change everything. But then they come out with some hosted older games. Eh. Maybe the big reveal will come out eventually, but this far it's pretty disappointing.
- quantdev 7y ago
  So what? Products improve. This one will too. Imagine seeing an ad on Youtube and immediately being able to play the game on your chromebook. I don't know that's what is going to happen and it can't work today, but maybe in a few years.
  - maest 7y ago
    That's such a slippery argument. You can always underdeliver as long as you promise that 'products improve. This one will too'. How about I don't pay the monthly subscription/for the controller and tell Google that "payments improve. Mine will too"? I'm obviously salty because I preordered Stadia (against my better judgement) and it's terrible.
    - ircody 7y ago
      What’s terrible about it?
      - maest 7y ago
        Latency is pretty bad (GFN by comparison works fine for me). Samurai Shodown, a brawler game, is mostly unplayable. The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time). Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".
anoncake 7y ago
The question is not how innovative or useful Stadia is but how reliable Google is. If all Google produced was boring useless garbage, no one would care that they shut it down.
robertony 7y ago
Could you explain to me what is innovative about Google offering you fields to enter your social details on your Stadia profile for AIM, MSN, YIM, etc... And could you explain why they won't put fields for Google Talk, Google Wave, Buzz, Huddle, Google+ Messenger, Google Hangouts, Messenger, Google Allo, Google Duo or Google Spaces?
chrisdfrey 7y ago
I'm pretty happy with the PlayStation Now experience for games that don't require fast response times; I would say it is "viable".
downerending 7y ago
It's not just all of the products they've dropped in the past, it's also the cumulative day-to-day experience I've had with them overall. When their stuff works, it's great, but if anything goes wrong, one faces the impervious silent wall of Google's tech support, or rather complete lack thereof. The idea of trusting their compute cloud for a business service that truly has to be reliable seems insane. They make great free toys that mostly work and make a lot of money doing so. I'm glad to use those toys for free, but I'm under no allusions that what often works will always work. That's not their forte.
- downerending 7y ago
  *illusions. (good grief)

smolder 7y ago

Moving every last thing people do with computers into the cloud so their activities can be thoroughly data mined is innovative?

mempko 7y ago

You do realize that streaming games is an old idea and has been tried many times and Google's competitors do or will have similar services. Google isn't doing anything new here. They don't have any first-move advantage. The only advantage they have is infrastructure and scale. Whether that is enough, we shall see.

40acres 7y ago
I do understand that this is an old idea. My TV actually has a steaming service for games built in but I have never used it because I doubt the performance would be up to standard. The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. There is a long history of tech that simply is too early for the current environment. Google is betting the cloud gaming has reached a point of viability and it's very exciting to see them tackle the challenge. Obviously there are concerns with the products. Specifically paying for games, the games itself, etc. But generally I'm excited for this effort.
- hyperdimension 7y ago
  > My TV actually has a steaming service Nice Freudian slip there. We have a "smart" TV here that's never been connected to the Internet. They seem to just universally suck. For extra credit, our TV is a Roku TV, and from the CEOs comments, I doubt I'll ever connect it to the Internet. At least until they start coming with 4G connectivity built-in...(!)
- effingwewt 7y ago
  There is ZERO innovation here. This is simply google trying to lock more people in to a service they will later try to pivot, which will then be canceled. I'm glad you are excited for this, and I hope to be proven wrong, but like all others I see a google service and wonder how long until EOL
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >The innovation is not necessarily in the product but in the engineering required to make the product feasible. Yet their launch has been plauged by issues and latency is still a massive problem. They didn't crack the nut, so again, what's innovative here?

gameswithgo 7y ago

> Google is trying something really innovative This kind of thing has been around for nearly 10 years.

macspoofing 7y ago
Where? Who else is doing this type of cloud gaming?
- minikites 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive >The OnLive Game Service was launched in the United States on June 17, 2010. The service was launched in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2011.
- ARCarr 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Now "PlayStation Now (PS Now) is a cloud gaming subscription service developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment."
- headmelted 7y ago
  Onlive (deceased). Microsoft (xCloud). Free until it’s stable. Nvidia (GeForce NOW). Free until it’s stable. Sony (PlayStation Now). .. Seriously dude where’ve you been?
  - krzyk 7y ago
    And you can add others like Shadow, or you could roll your own using Parsec or Moonlight + a cloud provider like Paperspace or AWS (or even Google cloud). What is important in case of Shadow, GeForce Now and roll you own, that you buy a PC game that you can access on any PC, not just using a single service (like Stadia, or xCloud).
ddtaylor 7y ago
Yup. OnLive tried it with similar results. There are many markets where 10ms - 20ms latency doesn't matter that much, but realtime gaming isn't one of them. It's extremely disorienting to play a game with even the slightest framebuffer lag.

mmanfrin 7y ago

Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition. The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game. If I, conversely, buy the same $60 game on Steam, I know it'll be there years down the road, that I'll be able to play it on any PC I build, and I don't have to maintain a monthly fee for it. What Google is trying has been tried many times before, by people who had more permissive game ownership structures. Do not tell us we shouldn't be worried about using such a product from Google given their track record -- especially when the costs to them are enormous in terms of computing power and the reception has been very tepid (meaning those costs are larger per-user than they likely anticipated).

40acres 7y ago
Honestly, glass simply seems too early. We know that Apple is also working on AR glasses, even Intel came out with a AR glasses platform but quickly had to kill it because the market is simply not mature. I think Google is betting that cloud steaming is now viable and are going to put as much resources as possible to make it work. I am not doubting that there are issues with the product and concerns about Google, I obviously have reservations but don't believe that it hinders me from being excited about the prospect itself
- berberous 7y ago
  It’s not the market that wasn’t mature, it’s the technology/product —- although the latter is what you need to grow a market. I love new technology and gadgets. I bought an Oculus DK2 and Vive and they were both mind blowing when I first tried them, although I don’t still use them. Trying Google Glass, on the other hand, was beyond underwhelming. Holo Lens and Magic Leap, while slightly better, were also extremely underwhelming. Other than niche industrial applications, these products are far far too early for any consumer product.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  I feel like "X was too early/ahead of its time" is kind of a red herring. What it's basically saying is "this failed until it succeeded", because the alternative option, that of being able to accurately predict the exact point the technology is 'good enough', has proven effectively impossible to do (given how so many companies that manage it occasionally also fail at it most of the time; it's a crapshoot). To that end, given Stadia is here, does anyone think the tech is ready? No. In fact, people seem to think the opposite, that Stadia is Google's attempt to get the tech to a specific point, or to offset the cost of the tech serving another use case. The only way Stadia has a shot is if Google stays viewing it as a way to profit from having unused GPUs sitting around within its cloud offerings.

mbell 7y ago

> Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. Genuine question: What is innovative here? There are at least a dozen attempts at 'cloud gaming' that I'm aware of dating back about a decade.

jakebasile 7y ago
Now you can play games at lower quality and higher latency than ever before, and pay Google for the privilege of renting them! Plus, Google can control what games you play! Innovation!
heywoods 7y ago
I think I can help answer your question, but just watching the keynote will be best. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM. The tl;dr of the whole keynote is what's different about Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. Outside of Amazon and Microsoft I don't know of another company that will be able to match the latency and computation requirements to make this all work as marketed. What really stood out to me from their keynote this year was the number of edge nodes that Google has on top of their datacenter infrastructure. https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360 https://youtu.be/hl-Y1QVhmcM?t=1360
- AlexandrB 7y ago
  > What is different with Google's attempt at 'Cloud Gaming' is their ability to leverage their infrastructure. That's not innovation, it's just having a bigger stick than the other guy.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Yes,we know, nothing remotely similar to anything else is innovation. Airplanes are just bicycles with bolted on wings.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 7y ago

cglace 7y ago

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/products/geforce-now/ Has been a product for a long time and actually works really well.

eternalny1 7y ago

My concern for Stadia revolves around Microsoft's upcoming offering. Apparently, Microsoft is simply going to rack-mount XBox hardware and stream it that way, which means the entire XBox library is instantly compatible. For Stadia, games have to be modified specifically for it and their Linux configuration, which limits what games are announced for the platform, and requires engineering effort.

lonelappde 7y ago
If that MS approach works, why hasn't Netflix or Gog or someone already done it for any games?
- EpicEng 7y ago
  They don't have the game dev experience or the library. Seems obvious. They can stream the games for the same reason Netflix can't buy a single DVD and stream that movie to everyone on the planet.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  Netflix has been trying to introduce interactive content to their platform for years. The latest attempt is Minecraft: Story Mode [0]. Netflix's architecture is designed around streaming static video files, on platforms without great latency guarantees. There can be gaps of up to a second when loading the next video file. Interactive UI and choicepoints are quite limited. Streaming live and streaming offline media require very different infrastructure. [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/80227995 https://www.netflix.com/title/80227995
  - sincerely 7y ago
    There was also that choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror thing.

EpicEng 7y ago

>Stadia is different, with this product Google is trying something really innovative. Google is not the one being innovative here. This has been done before, to no real success. Google was first to the finish line (kinda, seems more like a beta in implementation), but other offerings are coming down the pipe shortly. I don't see Google winning this one. MS is in a much better position here, and NVidia also has one in the works. I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> I would short Google on this in an instant if someone would take my money. I'm sure there are many people who would be happy to take your money to bet against Google.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Ok, well let me know. Google fails far more often than they succeed, and they're out of their depth with this one.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    I'm not a Google advocate. But Google (well Alphabet) is a public stock - there are many ways to short it.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Cool. Can I short stadia specifically? I'm pretty sure you understood what I was saying.
      - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        I honestly thought you meant what you said - that you wanted to short Google.

systemdtrigger 7y ago

Except if you stepped out of the hn bubble you'll know MS has had something similar in works for a long time so no, Google can't win here

blibble 7y ago

its initial purchase price is only slightly less than a full console, the games cost more, the visual quality is worse, it is way way more subject to packet loss, the input lag is orders of magnitude worse and it (along with my purchases) have a high probability of disappearing in 3 years time where do I sign up?

EpicEng 7y ago
You forgot that stadia also lacks nearly all of the nice-to-gave features already provided on consoles. You don't even get a notification when you unlock a trophy.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Google can only succeed with their own low-latency internet --- Fiber, Loon etc. BTW Twitch is a different kind of game streaming.

WorldMaker 7y ago
With the huge, hideous and costly mistakes Google has been making with Fiber, and Loon being still nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky fantasy?

cryptozeus 7y ago

Good point, also remember they have their own internet cable ruin through the globe.

ctroein89 7y ago

Remember, for years, Xbox One has allowed for local streaming from Xbox One consoles to Windows 10 PCs via the Xbox app over LAN, which gives Microsoft's Project xCloud the benefits of: * significant experience with the fundamental technology, * no new special hardware required (they can tweak existing Xbox One hardware), * a much larger library of games currently available for download (for consumers who want to switch to a local console), and * an existing Netflix-of-games program via Game Pass (for consumers interested in pure subscriptions) As-is, Google just happens to be first-to-market in the current generation of on-demand game streaming options. But we've seen this technology before, and I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home.

lonelappde 7y ago
> I could get the same results with a high quality VPN set-up to connect to a Xbox at home. Has anyone actually done that, or are you speculating?
- ctroein89 7y ago
  > Has anyone actually done that, or are you speculating? There are videos on YouTube of people using Xbox game streaming, but it requires setting up a VPN at home which presumably few people do. Edit: with the Stadia launch, I'm currently working on setting up a Raspberry PI as a VPN server to try this myself.

endorphone 7y ago

On the original rumors about Stadia I did think Google was going to revolutionize the industry, particularly in social/massively-multiple games. Starting with the development stack that would leverage a coherent, synchronized world that is massively malleable -- huge banks of systems connected in the microsecond latency range with virtually unlimited throughput, massive neural engines, etc. Destructables, enormous player counts, a completely dynamic environment, virtually eliminating cheating, etc -- it would change everything. But then they come out with some hosted older games. Eh. Maybe the big reveal will come out eventually, but this far it's pretty disappointing.

quantdev 7y ago
So what? Products improve. This one will too. Imagine seeing an ad on Youtube and immediately being able to play the game on your chromebook. I don't know that's what is going to happen and it can't work today, but maybe in a few years.
- maest 7y ago
  That's such a slippery argument. You can always underdeliver as long as you promise that 'products improve. This one will too'. How about I don't pay the monthly subscription/for the controller and tell Google that "payments improve. Mine will too"? I'm obviously salty because I preordered Stadia (against my better judgement) and it's terrible.
  - ircody 7y ago
    What’s terrible about it?
    - maest 7y ago
      Latency is pretty bad (GFN by comparison works fine for me). Samurai Shodown, a brawler game, is mostly unplayable. The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time). Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".

anoncake 7y ago

The question is not how innovative or useful Stadia is but how reliable Google is. If all Google produced was boring useless garbage, no one would care that they shut it down.

robertony 7y ago

Could you explain to me what is innovative about Google offering you fields to enter your social details on your Stadia profile for AIM, MSN, YIM, etc... And could you explain why they won't put fields for Google Talk, Google Wave, Buzz, Huddle, Google+ Messenger, Google Hangouts, Messenger, Google Allo, Google Duo or Google Spaces?

chrisdfrey 7y ago

I'm pretty happy with the PlayStation Now experience for games that don't require fast response times; I would say it is "viable".

downerending 7y ago

It's not just all of the products they've dropped in the past, it's also the cumulative day-to-day experience I've had with them overall. When their stuff works, it's great, but if anything goes wrong, one faces the impervious silent wall of Google's tech support, or rather complete lack thereof. The idea of trusting their compute cloud for a business service that truly has to be reliable seems insane. They make great free toys that mostly work and make a lot of money doing so. I'm glad to use those toys for free, but I'm under no allusions that what often works will always work. That's not their forte.

downerending 7y ago
*illusions. (good grief)