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"Last year, Google announced Stadia, and It blew my mind. That idea is so unique and innovative." How is it unique and innovative if such services existed for

"Last year, Google announced Stadia, and It blew my mind. That idea is so unique and innovative." How is it unique and innovative if such services existed for over a decade (OnLive)?

tomschwiha 7y ago
There are quite a few attempts to that topic (Parsec Gaming, Shadow Gaming, ..) I tried a few of them but as for latency relevant online gaming current solutions are rather meh. For an old laptop I guess its alright and price for casual gaming is probably hard to beat (if renewing every 3-4 years hardware). But as with any cloud/rental after paying its gone.
drusepth 7y ago
Most of the initial innovations seem to be in the hardware, e.g. controllers that hop over your PC/console, game servers in edge nodes, etc. They're incremental improvements, but my latency on Stadia gets down to single-digits at times (though is usually low-mid double-digits), which is something I never saw with OnLive (not a direct comparison since I have better Internet now). There's some interesting software innovations that may or may not be implemented (I'm not sure?), but I haven't heard of other streaming platforms doing things like running games at significantly higher framerates (to minimize the time between player input and game response) and predicting button presses to buffer a stream before they happen. Those seem like innovations in the space, even if they're under a terrible umbrella of a name ("negative latency").
- anonymousab 7y ago
  > predicting button presses to buffer a stream before they happen That sounds a lot like the server and client-side prediction (or p2p 'rollback') netcode that is in a lot of online games.
carlsborg 7y ago
AWS Appstream has been around for many years and its pretty good. This presentation is from 2013. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021482/Amazon-AppStream-New-Gaming-Experiences https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021482/Amazon-AppStream-New-G...

"Last year, Google announced Stadia, and It blew my mind. That idea is so unique and innovative." How is it unique and innovative if such services existed for over a decade (OnLive)?

tomschwiha 7y ago

There are quite a few attempts to that topic (Parsec Gaming, Shadow Gaming, ..) I tried a few of them but as for latency relevant online gaming current solutions are rather meh. For an old laptop I guess its alright and price for casual gaming is probably hard to beat (if renewing every 3-4 years hardware). But as with any cloud/rental after paying its gone.

drusepth 7y ago

Most of the initial innovations seem to be in the hardware, e.g. controllers that hop over your PC/console, game servers in edge nodes, etc. They're incremental improvements, but my latency on Stadia gets down to single-digits at times (though is usually low-mid double-digits), which is something I never saw with OnLive (not a direct comparison since I have better Internet now). There's some interesting software innovations that may or may not be implemented (I'm not sure?), but I haven't heard of other streaming platforms doing things like running games at significantly higher framerates (to minimize the time between player input and game response) and predicting button presses to buffer a stream before they happen. Those seem like innovations in the space, even if they're under a terrible umbrella of a name ("negative latency").

anonymousab 7y ago
> predicting button presses to buffer a stream before they happen That sounds a lot like the server and client-side prediction (or p2p 'rollback') netcode that is in a lot of online games.

carlsborg 7y ago

AWS Appstream has been around for many years and its pretty good. This presentation is from 2013. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021482/Amazon-AppStream-New-Gaming-Experiences https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021482/Amazon-AppStream-New-G...