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

[Alpan]

This thread makes me depressed btw, because you guys are probably right: Google fucked it up this time, but soon another company (Valve?) will get it right, and then we're all screwed.

To be fair, a much more affordably priced service could probably be appealing. Rather bluntly speaking, a service like Spotify isn't bad for the consumer; it's bad for the artist.

Perhaps. I think that day is further away than you think though. I'd put game streaming on a par with "VR", embraced by enthusiasts but the general public just don't get it.

Game streaming is as intuitive as it gets. Run program, click any game, you're up and playing in a minute. You already "get" game streaming if you've ever watched a YouTube video. It's the dumb pricing by Google that makes it look like an enthusiast, exclusive service.

 

[abija]

There's a huge difference in cost between serving files and running + streaming video games.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

This thread makes me depressed btw, because you guys are probably right: Google fucked it up this time, but soon another company (Valve?) will get it right, and then we're all screwed.

To be fair, a much more affordably priced service could probably be appealing. Rather bluntly speaking, a service like Spotify isn't bad for the consumer; it's bad for the artist.

Perhaps. I think that day is further away than you think though. I'd put game streaming on a par with "VR", embraced by enthusiasts but the general public just don't get it.

Game streaming is as intuitive as it gets. Run program, click any game, you're up and playing in a minute. You already "get" game streaming if you've ever watched a YouTube video. It's the dumb pricing by Google that makes it look like an enthusiast, exclusive service.

Well for a start it hasn't proven itself technically. You won't be able to just stream this game on a phone like you would with youtube. I've tried game streaming and it just doesn't look or feel right, even under ideal conditions.
That aside, from a financial point of view its not clear that it can be less economical than house hardware which is the bigger issue.

Think about it. The data centres are not run by magic. They are physical machine in real locations, and its costly to scale them up or down on demand. Hell even AWS which is years ahead of Google in Cloud you have to write an email requesting x amount of instances,
and they email you back 48 hrs later - congrats! We allow you 2 more machines.

So, uou have to have X amount of machines with Y specs in location Z available at any time for the service to work.

Or in other words, the data centres will have to be over provisioned with top end graphics hardware to work.

I don't see how this model can undercut a piece of dedicated hardware in your own home.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't see how this model can undercut a piece of dedicated hardware in your own home.

Easy:
They don't have to make a profit. That's how these companies function. Just like Amazon that functions on extremely tiny profits or often none at all.
These companies are so big that they can afford to do this to shape the market or force competitors out.

 

[KazikluBey]

Think about it. The data centres are not run by magic. They are physical machine in real locations, and its costly to scale them up or down on demand. Hell even AWS which is years ahead of Google in Cloud you have to write an email requesting x amount of instances, and they email you back 48 hrs later - congrats! We allow you 2 more machines.

... what? You don't even need to click a button to spawn new compute instances, you just have a script running that spawns/closes them on demand. Obviously there's overprovisioning on AWS's side to allow for this, which is baked into the pricing.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Think about it. The data centres are not run by magic. They are physical machine in real locations, and its costly to scale them up or down on demand. Hell even AWS which is years ahead of Google in Cloud you have to write an email requesting x amount of instances, and they email you back 48 hrs later - congrats! We allow you 2 more machines.

... what? You don't even need to click a button to spawn new compute instances, you just have a script running that spawns/closes them on demand. Obviously there's overprovisioning on AWS's side to allow for this, which is baked into the pricing.

That's totally different - if you leave it to AWS where you do the compute (e.g. Lambda) then it doesn't matter (because the machine could literally be anywhere, and latency is a non issue, which clearly won't work wit h streaming games).
And besides, have you tried to provision high end hardware on AWS? You can't! You have to email the request through. (Sure, with 1 core linux machines you can do a few right away but not with higher end hardware!).

And furthermore, the cost of the high end machines are prohibitive. They are far more costly than buying your own machine if you use more than 10-20 hrs a month.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Here look: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

Graphics pro is $1k per month.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I don't see how this model can undercut a piece of dedicated hardware in your own home.

Easy:
They don't have to make a profit. That's how these companies function. Just like Amazon that functions on extremely tiny profits or often none at all.
These companies are so big that they can afford to do this to shape the market or force competitors out.

I don't buy that at all. Its a short term strategy to kill competition maybe but would never be used long term. Check out the above pricing. ^

 

[Cromwell]

I don't buy that at all. Its a short term strategy to kill competition

defone short term. a few years?

 

[Decado]

There's a huge difference in cost between serving files and running + streaming video games.

This is the key difference that (imo) everyone is missing. Streaming a movie or a song is fucking child's play compared to streaming a video game. The data, latency, bandwidth, and server requirements are all orders of magnitude lower for streaming music and TV than a game. It's a simple fact that video games are an interactive medium and the quality of that interaction is a huge part of the experience. The response time between a person hitting a button and then the requested action being taken is a not a minor detail that only hardcore gamer nerds will care about. It's a major -- if not THE major -- characteristic of how you enjoy a game. And despite the proliferation of games where controller response is less or not relevant (mobile and casual, for example), the entire AAA industry is reliant upon fast response time for controls, with the exception of some games like turn-based RPGs or strategy games (or, perhaps, a game like Stardew Valley). But even here, latency et al. are not irrelevant, just slightly less important.

Is google going to design their way past the speed of light?

ETA: And, this still doesn't get us past the central question of "Why?" What does streaming the game give them that a service like, say, Steam wouldn't give them? What is so bad about the local installation that we need to put the resources, infrastructure, and brain power of 21st century civilization into the problem of streaming video games so you don't have spend 30 minutes to download a 60 gig game? Is it really that bad? Do we really need this?

 

[Dexter]

It's like I'm in the Twilight Zone, or maybe Groundhog Day. We've seen OnLive/GaiKai and shit try this 10 years ago and fall flat on their face. All the "OnLive is the FUTURE, man!" people were proven wrong. 10 years later Google tries it and flies flat on their face (how unexpected, absolutely nobody could have predicted this!). All the "Stadia is the FUTURE, man!" people were proven wrong. I tried Steam's "Remote Play" Streaming a month or so ago with "Guacamelee!" and the problem is the same as with all the others, the lag is noticeable and it feels like playing a YouTube video.

Yet here we still have the DalekFlay's and other retards going on about how "It's Inevitable, Maaan!". It's like they rolled some sort of natural resistance to learning from experience and are instead just repeating themselves like broken records. I feel like we've been over this enough times by now on why it is bound to fail and there's no point in repeating it constantly:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...rvice-for-everyone.126618/page-4#post-6057599
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...rvice-for-everyone.126618/page-7#post-6071341

 

[baud]

AWS has huge margins, apparently at 28%, per this article, whereas their e-commerce business has very small margins, less than 5%. And a few years ago, (2017), all of the benefits were coming from AWS, whereas the rest of Amazon was not making any money.

 

[Alpan]

Yet here we still have the DalekFlay's and other retards going on about how "It's Inevitable, Maaan!". It's like they rolled some sort of natural resistance to learning from experience and are instead just repeating themselves like broken records. I feel like we've been over this enough times by now on why it is bound to fail and there's no point in repeating it constantly:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...rvice-for-everyone.126618/page-4#post-6057599
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...rvice-for-everyone.126618/page-7#post-6071341

You little imbecile. You don't get it: This is not a question of technology, or the natural consequences of the speed of light. It is a question of monopolistic opportunity that Big Tech is starving to exploit. What's inevitable is not that natural limitations to technology will be overcome, but that the opportunity will eventually be exploited -- whether at the consumer's or the developer's expense, time will tell.

 

[Dexter]

You can't "exploit" something that inherently doesn't work and nobody is asking for or wants. You may want to sell bread with a shit filling very much, but if nobody bites it's just not gonna happen. Yet you morons that have been predicting a "Google monopoly on game development and choice of gaming platforms" just a year ago are calling other people that have been calling this right from the very beginning "imbeciles".

This is going to be a disaster of a very slow variety, though obviously the casual gamer will gain greatly in convenience. The price though will not be limited to ownership: When the target hardware for a developer stops being the game console or an average PC but the near-infinite processing power of Google's datacenters, we'll essentially be facing a Google monopoly on game development and choice of gaming platform.

 

[Alpan]

As I mentioned back then, imbecile, it is going to be a slow process. Time will tell. You seem to think that I'm hoping to be right. I'm not; I just don't think I will be wrong.

 

[Lutte]

Even if streaming were to catch on, stadia is now officially dead because NVIDIA finally decided to commercialize GeForce Now and leave the limited beta access.


On GeForce Now, you own the games. Meaning you aren't tied to the streaming service. All the games you own on steam right now can be played there.
And the hardware is much better than whatever jewgle uses.

With such a service in place, there's no way a service that makes you buy games you don't own and couldn't play if the service went down could survive against this sort of competition.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

You may want to sell bread with a shit filling very much, but if nobody bites it's just not gonna happen.

You buy out all the other bread companies.
Any new bread companies that pop up will follow the industry leader by making shit filled bread.
People will quickly forget that bread without shit ever existed.

 

[DalekFlay]

This is the key difference that (imo) everyone is missing. Streaming a movie or a song is fucking child's play compared to streaming a video game. The data, latency, bandwidth, and server requirements are all orders of magnitude lower for streaming music and TV than a game. It's a simple fact that video games are an interactive medium and the quality of that interaction is a huge part of the experience. The response time between a person hitting a button and then the requested action being taken is a not a minor detail that only hardcore gamer nerds will care about. It's a major -- if not THE major -- characteristic of how you enjoy a game. And despite the proliferation of games where controller response is less or not relevant (mobile and casual, for example), the entire AAA industry is reliant upon fast response time for controls, with the exception of some games like turn-based RPGs or strategy games (or, perhaps, a game like Stardew Valley). But even here, latency et al. are not irrelevant, just slightly less important.

No one's missing it dude, we just disagree it's insurmountable for the mainstream. Google's test run and launch was mostly remarked on as working quite well from mainstream reporters, and the same impressions have been making the rounds for Xcloud. The average Joe doesn't care about 50ms of extra latency, which is what it amounts to in tests. Would you or I care? Sure we would, especially with a mouse, but does that mean much when the vast majority of mainstream consumers think "it's fine?" No, it amounts to a hill of beans, as the saying goes. Same for people on home theater forums ranting about bitrate and compression artifacts... they care, most don't, so it doesn't matter.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This is the key difference that (imo) everyone is missing. Streaming a movie or a song is fucking child's play compared to streaming a video game. The data, latency, bandwidth, and server requirements are all orders of magnitude lower for streaming music and TV than a game. It's a simple fact that video games are an interactive medium and the quality of that interaction is a huge part of the experience. The response time between a person hitting a button and then the requested action being taken is a not a minor detail that only hardcore gamer nerds will care about. It's a major -- if not THE major -- characteristic of how you enjoy a game. And despite the proliferation of games where controller response is less or not relevant (mobile and casual, for example), the entire AAA industry is reliant upon fast response time for controls, with the exception of some games like turn-based RPGs or strategy games (or, perhaps, a game like Stardew Valley). But even here, latency et al. are not irrelevant, just slightly less important.

No one's missing it dude, we just disagree it's insurmountable for the mainstream. Google's test run and launch was mostly remarked on as working quite well from mainstream reporters, and the same impressions have been making the rounds for Xcloud. The average Joe doesn't care about 50ms of extra latency, which is what it amounts to in tests. Would you or I care? Sure we would, especially with a mouse, but does that mean much when the vast majority of mainstream consumers think "it's fine?" No, it amounts to a hill of beans, as the saying goes. Same for people on home theater forums ranting about bitrate and compression artifacts... they care, most don't, so it doesn't matter.

If anything, the average codex user would probably find it more usable due to tending towards turn-based games. Your average gamer would probably find the latency in their call of duty game unplayable.

 

[tritosine2k]

Latency is function of endpoint, for "thin client" - s it's necessary to stream a whole framebuffer for many reasons.
If theres no battery and compute constraint you can stream much more interesting things and structures, for example shaded texture is just a little bit advanced than framebuffer and even by then the latency problem is mostly solved (but you get other problems because said textures - must be defined for every surface) .

 

[Dexter]

No, it amounts to a hill of beans, as the saying goes. Same for people on home theater forums ranting about bitrate and compression artifacts... they care, most don't, so it doesn't matter.

How quickly we forget to return to spread more of the same FUD as before... BUT MUH GOOGLE TEST RUN!

OnLive version: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/onlive-died-today.45644/page-10#post-1209132

Onlive :

Local PC :

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I don't buy that at all. Its a short term strategy to kill competition

defone short term. a few years?

I bet even with the ridiculous pricing of Stadia, Google is operating at a huge loss.

Now, even if Stadia were cheaper, they would not be able to sustain losses for long enough to destroy all other gaming platforms.

Big companies DO NOT want to operate on a loss long term. Any under performing product WILL get cut. Realistically its very hard to destroy competition purely by undercutting whilst offering an inferior product.

I mean, sure the Chinese are happy to do that, but they do it with commodity based stuff (e.g. Garlic) where the differences between commodities are negligible. To help illustrate this point look at an extreme example - INDIE GAMES! E.g. The trash ones for $1.50. Sure they are cheaper but they are not going to put AAA games out of business. The value proposition is complex and undercutting doesn't eliminate competition. It has to be like for like, or very close for that to work.

 

[DalekFlay]

How quickly we forget to return to spread more of the same FUD as before... BUT MUH GOOGLE TEST RUN!

Some of you don't see to grasp that a couple examples from more enthusiast circles doesn't mean shit.

 

[Fedora Master]

How does Google treat its various other failures? Depreciation and eventually deletion.

 

[DalekFlay]

To be clear no one's saying Stadia is or even can be a success. They really fucked it up with their business model and lack of games. We're saying subscriptions are the future of everything, and yes eventually streaming, once it's pushed with the right business model and exclusives. It's depressing but it is what it is. Mainstream consumers don't give a shit about quality or ownership, only cost and convenience.