Vapourware Google Stadia - "a game streaming service for everyone"

[Lutte]

If Steam released a similar streaming service where you'll be able to play the games from your library AND play them locally if you so desire... That would end all of them

That's what Geforce NOW does, the Nvidia streaming service. It's been in beta for around 2 years in its current state, but it lets you play your Steam games through their Nvidia Shield android box or a PC if you're registered in the beta. I've had it for a couple of years and it's a shitload better than I'm reading about Stadia. Mind you, I don't play degenerate online games like Destiny 2 on it though.

I tried it a few times by curiosity and it indeed works rather fine for what it is, and certainly better than the videos I've seen of people showing input lag on Destiny+stadia.
NVIDIA also brings real performance to the table :
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/08/19/geforce-now-pc-gaming/

At our GPU Technology Conference earlier this year, we announced RTX Servers. Starting today, we’re beginning their rollout. Gamers in Northern California and Germany will be the first to take advantage of GeForce RTX performance. Over time, we’ll expand to our data centers throughout North America and Europe, enabling next-generation gaming in the cloud.

A far cry from the medium settings performance of stadia. Between that and the way GFNow works (bring the games you already own for real instead of buying something you may not be able to access in the future) there's just no comparison.

Unfortunately, as bad as Stadia is, it's a google product so it's going to see a ton of shilling no matter how bad it is compared to even other streaming alternatives. And I don't think NVIDIA is going to really compete on that front, the beta seems like something they do to test their cloud infrastructures more than a real project to commercialize it. Competing for users against Google, Microsoft and Sony also seems difficult.

 

[DeepOcean]

 

[abija]

175.000 (if real) is a lot. Who even is the target audience for this launch, people in first world countries with lots of money that have to try any new shit?

 

[Modron]

175.000 (if real) is a lot. Who even is the target audience for this launch, people in first world countries with lots of money that have to try any new shit?

Childless San Franciscians.

 

[Garbage]

 

[FeelTheRads]

So what? You can buy a game on Steam or Gog and have it be on sale for 90% next week or even free. I have a ton of games on GOG that were offered for free.

Lessons that should be learned instead are:
1. Don't buy games for a streaming service. Either pay for a subscription or for the game. If you do both, you are clearly retarded.
2. Don't use Stadia at all.

 

[abija]

Is there any SS review? Can't see how you make that genre playable with streaming latency.

Reddit is funny though. All these people with busy lives (kids, cats, gym, world travel, carreers) try stadia for the first time and IT JUST WORKS. Then post like 50 times on reddit about it. NOTHING fishy about it, nothing at all.

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh wow fucking FARMING SIMULATOR, truly the greatest of games to play

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

Oh wow fucking FARMING SIMULATOR, truly the greatest of games to play

Farming Simulator is one of those series of wasted opportunity. They should flesh out the gameplay by adding maybe some Crusader Kings, Stardew Valley, Rimworld or My Summer Car, but instead the next installment is just some more bling in the graphics engine and few more tractors.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

I keep scratching my head over things like Stadia. Why do the big wigs in tech/gaming keep offering us

1. Things that are really expensive and take a ton of resources to upkeep.
2. Things that are broken and require even more money and resources to just make work.
3. Things we don't want and didn't ask for.

If the answer is simple profit, then there's tons of better ways to go about it, and ones that don't require so much overhead. If it's power and glory, well fuck Google, just do what the other big corps are doing and start up your own car company or space program.

 

[Whipped Cream]

I think the answer is pretty simple. Google's upper management designed Stadia the way Google wanted it to be and completely ignored both what the consumers wanted and the current state of the technology.

They
1. Ignored the latency and bandwidth issues thinking "we're Google, we're smart, we'll find solutions to those problems", ignoring the fact that the reason that noone else has solved those problems is because they are unsolvable within the current internet infrastructure,
2. Completely ignored the existence of Microsoft and xCloud, who will crush them in the marketpace
and
3. Thought that the convenience of game streaming was so high compared to running games locally that the average Joe in the street would be willing to put up with their anti-consumer businesspractices (which may have been partially true if not for 1 and 2).

My job is in machine learning and the comment Google made about providing players with negative latency by predicting the player's inputs in advance is so hilariously out of touch with the current state of the technology that its just as stupid as someone going on stage and saying that their company will provide commercial travel to Alpha Centurai within five years. Its science fiction. It was clearly made by a business suit who doesn't understand the technology and naively thought that "we will magically fix all those problems by throwing some money at our engineering department".

 

[Gerrard]

Google making shit that completely ignores the users' opinions? That never happened before!

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/e2xqbg/stadia_deserves_more_credit/

 

[DalekFlay]

1. Ignored the latency and bandwidth issues thinking "we're Google, we're smart, we'll find solutions to those problems", ignoring the fact that the reason that noone else has solved those problems is because they are unsolvable within the current internet infrastructure,
2. Completely ignored the existence of Microsoft and xCloud, who will crush them in the marketpace
and
3. Thought that the convenience of game streaming was so high compared to running games locally that the average Joe in the street would be willing to put up with their anti-consumer businesspractices (which may have been partially true if not for 1 and 2).

I've yet to see anything that indicates 1 and 3 were bad moves on their part. 90% of the professional review complaints with Stadia are about its business model, which is terrible. All of them pretty much say the latency and graphics are surprisingly fine, and the market for this is super casual people who don't give a shit about 160ms versus 210ms of latency. A lot of this thread is wishful thinking... a service like this with a good business model (i.e. subscription based, "the Netflix of games") will have incredible appeal with a ton of people. Stadia just isn't that, unfortunately for them, which is why your number two is spot-on. If Stadia sticks to its guns and Microsoft launches with GamePass support and the same "it's fine" tech aspects, they'll kill it.

 

[fantadomat]

Oh wow fucking FARMING SIMULATOR, truly the greatest of games to play

Also why are you larping as german? Your cover was blown the moment you insulted a simulator.....a fucking farming simulator. Clearly you are no german!

 

[Fedora Master]

I own Truck Simulator 2, okay.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRzOntuSjU

 

[DalekFlay]

I don't think I'm wrong that streaming is the eventual future, but MAN it's wonderful how fast Stadia fell off the face of the earth, media coverage and hype wise.

 

[Grauken]

Yeah, but sadly somebody will probably get it right.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I've never tried Stadia, but I've tried OnLive in 2014, at a conference, therefore the performance couldn't have been better.
It worked but, everything felt off. I don't recall the lag, but what stuck with me is how the picture was very very wrong.
It felt as if I were playing a flash game but through Youtube. I'm not even 100% sure what it was but my brain just rejected the whole experience.

 

[J_C]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRzOntuSjU

That's actually pretty impressive. Of course even the console version plays and look better, but the Wolfenstein gameplay will be decent enough for the casual masses.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRzOntuSjU

That's actually pretty impressive. Of course even the console version plays and look better, but the Wolfenstein gameplay will be decent enough for the casual masses.

Well apart from the lag, there is the stutter every few seconds. The graphics look ok, but its very hard to say until you try it in person as ultimately you are watching a youtube video of a compressed stream.
Would people care? Well, if Stadia was convenient to setup (its not), and play anywhere (its not), and the price was cheap (its not), then people wouldn't mind the lag and stutter and inferior image quality.
So yes, I think people do care for these reasons and Stadia is a no-go for the gen pop.

 

[cw8]

I'm amazed by the number of people who have no idea what DRM-Free means on Reddit threads. Says a lot about the current gen of gamers and their concept of game ownership, which is basically NIL. Older generation of gamers who are against the idea of streaming will just fade into the shadows pretty quickly and I'm really afraid the majority of younger gamers will normalise streaming in the years to come. Fuck them all.

 

[DalekFlay]

That's actually pretty impressive. Of course even the console version plays and look better, but the Wolfenstein gameplay will be decent enough for the casual masses.

The problem is Google billed their service as better than Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, with "10.7 Teraflops" and "the power of the cloud." Higher latency was always expected, but the trade-off was supposed to be better graphics, "4k, 60fps" and cost/convenience. However all these analysis videos show the games look and run worse than Xbox One X, let alone PC, and certainly don't seem like they're running on advanced hardware. The games are also full price, and for now have a hardware cost on top, while most gamers have at least a base console. What they're offering just doesn't make sense or live up to their promises. I always knew "4k 60fps" was going to be the stream and not the game's actual rendered resolution, but jesus to look and run worse than a 6 year old console? WTF?

Anyway... streaming will succeed when it has a "Netflix of games" approach, comparable graphics and performance, and people don't already have hardware capable of doing a better job. Xbox's offering seems focused on that, and has a better shot.

 

[Average Manatee]

I don't think I'm wrong that streaming is the eventual future, but MAN it's wonderful how fast Stadia fell off the face of the earth, media coverage and hype wise.

I'm learning of Stadia for the first time today, and I agree. I think at this point we've had so many attempts at this crap that everyone is prepared to accept that its shit and dump it immediately. People were mildly interested that Google was somehow a company of super geniuses with super tech that could fix every problem that was had before. No, turns out they are just a regular company who got rich ruining the internet and selling your personal information to everyone from the FBI to China.

That's actually pretty impressive. Of course even the console version plays and look better, but the Wolfenstein gameplay will be decent enough for the casual masses.

The problem is Google billed their service as better than Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, with "10.7 Teraflops" and "the power of the cloud." Higher latency was always expected, but the trade-off was supposed to be better graphics, "4k, 60fps" and cost/convenience. However all these analysis videos show the games look and run worse than Xbox One X, let alone PC, and certainly don't seem like they're running on advanced hardware. The games are also full price, and for now have a hardware cost on top, while most gamers have at least a base console. What they're offering just doesn't make sense or live up to their promises. I always knew "4k 60fps" was going to be the stream and not the game's actual rendered resolution, but jesus to look and run worse than a 6 year old console? WTF?

Honestly don't think 4k even matters. Compression artifacts are the bigger deal holding back image quality. Running in 4k 60 FPS would not look like a real 4k 60 FPS game or a 4k 60 FPS youtube video, it will look like an old poorly encoded youtube video with the usual telltale problems. It's especially noticeable as soon as you are looking at video in motion rather than comparing still images.