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Some of the most exciting potentials for cloud streaming for me are some of the things they've toted as not possible on consumer hardware. Most of these are ju

Some of the most exciting potentials for cloud streaming for me are some of the things they've toted as not possible on consumer hardware. Most of these are just related to scale (like 1,000-person Battle Royales, 500-car races, MMOs that don't have to shard players in the same area into separate "worlds", etc), but there's other features that'd be exciting to see when games have effectively unlimited resources (instead of having to worry about what's available on each consumer's PC); Google's got a lot of resources in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues, massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than what you'd see on local hardware (I'd love to play against DeepMind's Dota 2 bots!), or even something as mundane as Maps-like navigation as a first-party feature to help you navigate through game worlds. I'm less excited about some of the streaming-based features they've advertised (streamers being able to share save-states with viewers that viewers can click to start playing from, viewers being able to instantly jump in and play live with streamers, being easier to stream at 4K while also playing in 4K, etc), but I guess those are probably appealing to some people also.

fooey 7y ago
Things that aren't possible on consumer hardware are implausible to be financially viable as an on demand service. Even for Google, it will never affordable to spin up giant clusters of servers for one person playing a video game. The basic premise of Stadia being able to match and surpass a high end desktop gaming machine makes no sense. The cloud isn't magic, and it takes people thinking it is magic to buy the pitch. Stadia reminds me of SimCity 2013 promising it had to be online based because of all the magic cloud power they needed to make it work, which was almost immediately proven to be utter bullshit. There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU, and their promise of 4k at 60 FPS takes a very serious amount of specialized gaming hardware.
- csunbird 7y ago
  but you can rent a $1000 GPU for $100 per month and make a profit of $200 per year
- drusepth 7y ago
  >There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU I think the whole idea of economics at scale (and much of cloud computing) is predicated on the idea that users want to use that $1,000 GPU without having to pay $1,000 to own it, and that companies can sell access to many users per $1,000 GPU to recoup the costs of that GPU, both over time (as the initial cost gets amortized over recurring subscription/usage revenues) and horizontally (selling access to many users who timeshare that GPU, maximizing its use compared to owning one you'd only use N hours per day). Scale that up to thousands of GPUs making a profit from hundreds of thousands of users each accessing those resources at a cost cheaper than what it'd take for them to purchase those resources for themselves and you've got the magic of the "cloud". tl;dr Users can pay <$1,000 for access to a $1,000 GPU and companies can afford to do so because the number of users multiplied by what they're paying exceeds the cost and upkeep of that GPU. Everyone* wins.
ogre_codes 7y ago
> Google's got a lot of resources in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues, massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than what you'd see on local hardware Even if Google could develop this stuff at scale and in the cloud. Google isn't writing the games, game developers are. All of these resources you are talking about require large amounts of developer time on a unique set of resources which are in theory not available on other platforms. If Google wanted to deliver this sort of unique feature into their games, they would have to bankroll it similar to the way Microsoft bankrolled a lot of the Kinect special titles.
- drusepth 7y ago
  This is an interestingly timely comment, as GRID released on Stadia today sporting an exclusive 40-person race mode (up from the standard 16-person multiplayer on other platforms) that the developer says "just isn’t possible with other hardware". I think they're just scratching the surface of what's possible, and I'm excited to see how other games take advantage of the new form factor Stadia offers as time goes on. Every console has its pros and cons, and something "new" that a new console/platform can provide can definitely be appealing to some developers looking to differentiate themselves or their games from what we've come to expect as normal (or even possible, in many cases).

fooey 7y ago

Things that aren't possible on consumer hardware are implausible to be financially viable as an on demand service. Even for Google, it will never affordable to spin up giant clusters of servers for one person playing a video game. The basic premise of Stadia being able to match and surpass a high end desktop gaming machine makes no sense. The cloud isn't magic, and it takes people thinking it is magic to buy the pitch. Stadia reminds me of SimCity 2013 promising it had to be online based because of all the magic cloud power they needed to make it work, which was almost immediately proven to be utter bullshit. There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU, and their promise of 4k at 60 FPS takes a very serious amount of specialized gaming hardware.

csunbird 7y ago
but you can rent a $1000 GPU for $100 per month and make a profit of $200 per year
drusepth 7y ago
>There's no way to offer the power of a $1,000 GPU without your own $1,000 GPU I think the whole idea of economics at scale (and much of cloud computing) is predicated on the idea that users want to use that $1,000 GPU without having to pay $1,000 to own it, and that companies can sell access to many users per $1,000 GPU to recoup the costs of that GPU, both over time (as the initial cost gets amortized over recurring subscription/usage revenues) and horizontally (selling access to many users who timeshare that GPU, maximizing its use compared to owning one you'd only use N hours per day). Scale that up to thousands of GPUs making a profit from hundreds of thousands of users each accessing those resources at a cost cheaper than what it'd take for them to purchase those resources for themselves and you've got the magic of the "cloud". tl;dr Users can pay <$1,000 for access to a $1,000 GPU and companies can afford to do so because the number of users multiplied by what they're paying exceeds the cost and upkeep of that GPU. Everyone* wins.

ogre_codes 7y ago

> Google's got a lot of resources in NLP and language recognition/generation they could apply to NPC dialogues, massive amounts of resources could make enemy/npc AI way more impressive than what you'd see on local hardware Even if Google could develop this stuff at scale and in the cloud. Google isn't writing the games, game developers are. All of these resources you are talking about require large amounts of developer time on a unique set of resources which are in theory not available on other platforms. If Google wanted to deliver this sort of unique feature into their games, they would have to bankroll it similar to the way Microsoft bankrolled a lot of the Kinect special titles.

drusepth 7y ago
This is an interestingly timely comment, as GRID released on Stadia today sporting an exclusive 40-person race mode (up from the standard 16-person multiplayer on other platforms) that the developer says "just isn’t possible with other hardware". I think they're just scratching the surface of what's possible, and I'm excited to see how other games take advantage of the new form factor Stadia offers as time goes on. Every console has its pros and cons, and something "new" that a new console/platform can provide can definitely be appealing to some developers looking to differentiate themselves or their games from what we've come to expect as normal (or even possible, in many cases).