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

[Jarpie]

It's official:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January.



Does it make GeForce Now the only player left in this field?

 

[Zed]

Will they refund the retards who bought games on stadia? the only respectable streaming model is the GFNow style.

They're even refunding hardware

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the one cool thing about our rainbow-colored fag dystopia is all the people in charge are massively incompetent

 

[Gargaune]

It's official:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January.

By pure coincidence, I bought some champagne today. It's nice when things work out for a change.

 

[Blaine]

the one cool thing about our rainbow-colored fag dystopia is all the people in charge are massively incompetent

 

[The_Mask]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA~!

 

[Norfleet]

Will they refund the retards who bought games on stadia? the only respectable streaming model is the GFNow style.

They're even refunding hardware

I assume they don't actually expect you to return the hardware, so you get the joy of trying to figure out how to repurpose your brick into something other than a doorstop, maybe by trying to install Linux on it.

 

[Blaine]

Tele-gaming has been tried repeatedly for well over a decade now and has always failed, primarily due to latency, quality loss, and the immense amount of bandwidth required—both throughput and total.

Even under optimal conditions (fiber-optic cable all the way, cutting-edge remote servers, direct wired connection to the end user's modem, and close proximity to the data center), the round-trip delay time becomes substantial.

It's unacceptable to you and I. To Mr. Joe Average coming home from work and getting an hour of gaming in before the kids finish their homework? Playing something like Assassin's Creed? I doubt it. Some tech sites have actually praised the performance of Stadia, and mostly knocked it for its business model.

I firmly believe when someone offers "the Netflix of games" it will get a ton of support from the kind of people who buy a handful of PS4 games a year and don't take it too seriously. Microsoft seem to be aiming for that. Even people have mentioned playing streaming versions on here multiple times recently, and this isn't a casual site. I mean I'd love to be wrong but...

Ahhhh... memories.

So anyway, like I was saying two and a half years ago, game streaming services past and present were and are doomed to fail.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

So anyway, like I was saying two and a half years ago, game streaming services past and present were and are doomed to fail.

Stadia failed because it has no games though, not because it's a streaming service.
Even if it had games, it provided none with the subscription, and people simply aren't going to buy games locked to a streaming service.

 

[Blaine]

So anyway, like I was saying two and a half years ago, game streaming services past and present were and are doomed to fail.

Stadia failed because it has no games though, not because it's a streaming service.
Even if it had games, it provided none with the subscription, and people simply aren't going to buy games locked to a streaming service.

Barely made it five minutes before receiving [EXPECTED RESPONSE].

Here is my prepared counterargument: It stands to reason that a game-streaming platform with no games (or that fails to provide the consumer with reasonable purchasing agreements) is 100% destined to fail, no matter what other circumstances pertain. I contend that even if Stadia had had games, it would have failed anyway due to the reasons I outlined.

Essentially, I'm going one step further than you are: "Even if it had games, and even if its purchasing agreements had been reasonable, it would still have failed due to quality, latency, and reliability issues."

Two and a half years ago, I had no way of knowing how badly Google would fuck up the planning, logistics, and price modeling of Stadia, but I did know that people wouldn't stand for fuzzy graphics and substantial input lag.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Even if it had games, and even if its purchasing agreements were reasonable, it would still have failed due to quality, latency, and reliability issues."

None of these were an issue in any of the services I tested ITT except for stadia. The xbox streaming service had low quality but that's because they're actually xbox games being ran on an xbox potato.
My xbox streaming test even has an OSD of me pressing the button and reacting almost instantaneously.

I see a lot of people desperately wanting streaming to fail so badly that they've confirmed their own biases.

[edit]
and I couldn't test Luna because it simply didn't work on linux for... whatever reason. But I did test Stadia, GFN, and XCloud. Both XCloud and GFN had no noticeable latency.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Some will keep mint or shrinkwrapped stadia merch and even keep the app or w/e thd hell it is on their stadia holding device and sell it years in thd future to a gaming library.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Some will keep mint or shrinkwrapped stadia merch and even keep the app or w/e thd hell it is on their stadia holding device and sell it years in thd future to a gaming library.

AFAIK It's essentially just one of those chrome streaming sticks, nothing special about it.

 

[Atlantico]

Even if it had games, it provided none with the subscription, and people simply aren't going to buy games locked to a streaming service.

Imagine if you had to pay a monthly subscription fee for Netflix and then have to buy access to individually every single show or movie.

How could this have gone wrong?

 

[Blaine]

My xbox streaming test even has an OSD of me pressing the button and reacting almost instantaneously.

I see a lot of people desperately wanting streaming to fail so badly that they've confirmed their own biases.

The key word here is "almost." Almost is all it takes. As for quality (or perhaps we should call it "fidelity"), it may very well be quite good if you live near a datacenter and have a fast connection, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the fidelity in non-ideal conditions (such as entire countries with generally spotty connectivity); how the fidelity stands up during peak times when the local/regional telecomm monopoly is deceitfully throttling everyone's bandwidth; how it stands up when Dad is streaming a Bang Bros. porno in UHD/60FPS simultaneously with Mom watching her favorite crystal healing guru on YouTube; and (should the service take off and become successful) whether or not your fidelity will remain high when a lot of players are straining the streaming service's server clusters, or just in general.

It goes without saying, of course, that if the internet is down (such as when you're stuck inside with nothing to do during a bad storm), you won't be playing shit.

The entire point of these services is to save consumers money via not having to buy consoles/a gaming PC or pay full-price for games, but only first-world city dwellers can be (mostly) guaranteed to enjoy minimalization of the obvious connectivity downsides, the least of which is that you must always be online on a private connection. These days, even part-time Walmart buggy-pushers can afford to buy rather than pay somewhat less for something they clearly know they don't own and can't rely on to work well at all times; and many people can rely on free wi-fi/data and go without a dedicated home Internet connection.

I don't really give a damn whether game streaming fails as a concept or not. There are many, MANY list items much higher on my "I hope it fucking burns" priority list than game streaming. In the two and a half years since I first posted in this thread, and including today, I've thought about the issue a total of twice. After today, I may never think of it again.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

My xbox streaming test even has an OSD of me pressing the button and reacting almost instantaneously.

I see a lot of people desperately wanting streaming to fail so badly that they've confirmed their own biases.

The key word here is "almost." Almost is all it takes. As for quality (or perhaps we should call it "fidelity"), it may very well be quite good if you live near a datacenter and have a fast connection, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the fidelity in non-ideal conditions (such as entire countries with generally spotty connectivity); how the fidelity stands up during peak times when the local/regional telecomm monopoly is deceitfully throttling everyone's bandwidth; how it stands up when Dad is streaming a Bang Bros. porno in UHD/60FPS simultaneously with Mom watching her favorite crystal healing guru on YouTube; and (should the service take off and become successful) whether or not your fidelity will remain high when a lot of players are straining the streaming service's server clusters, or just in general.

It goes without saying, course, that if the internet is down, you won't be playing shit.

The entire point of these services is to save consumers money via not having to buy consoles/a gaming PC or pay full-price for games. These days, even part-time Walmart buggy-pushers can afford to buy rather than pay somewhat less for something they clearly know they don't own and can't rely on to work well at all times.

"Almost" as in "a guy who used to play video games competitively and therefore likely has better reaction time when playing video games than 99.9% of the population didn't notice it"

It goes without saying, course, that if the internet is down, you won't be playing shit.

I see you haven't played a game released in the past decade.

how the fidelity stands up during peak times when the local/regional telecomm monopoly is deceitfully throttling everyone's bandwidth;

reminder that ISPs weren't throttling netflix, netflix was throttling customers to get them to yell at their ISPs to force ISPs to pay to upgrade their infrastructure to better support Netflix.
Yes, really.
https://cei.org/blog/netflixs-throttling-scandal-possibly-illegal-but-not-an-fcc-matter/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryd...ed-the-net-neutrality-debate/?sh=28071b551c4d

I get it, you guys don't want streaming to catch on, neither do I. But it doesn't mean your fantasies become reality because you say so.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Don't forget the stadia gamepad.

 

[Blaine]

"Almost" as in "a guy who used to play video games competitively and therefore likely has better reaction time when playing video games than 99.9% of the population didn't notice it"

Expected response #2 has arrived. Latency at any appreciable distance is unavoidable due to certain universal constants, so you either live very close to one or more major datacenters, or what you "played competitively" was the Uno game programmed into Second Life. I played various Tribes games competitively throughout the 2000s and early into the 2010s, I have excellent reflexes, but unlike you I don't deny the inevitability of latency. I'm not buying what you're selling.

I see you haven't played a game released in the past decade.

This is the Codex, so that's an incredibly generous compliment, as you ought to know. As it happens, though, I in fact don't play games that are designed to phone home/have an always-on connection, unless they're exclusively multiplayer, because needing a connection for those is simply a fact of life and that was true even of text MUDs in the 1980s.

reminder that ISPs weren't throttling netflix, netflix was throttling customers to get them to yell at their ISPs to force ISPs to pay to upgrade their infrastructure to better support Netflix.
Yes, really.

Probably the only good thing Netflix has ever done! Am I supposed to feel scandalized that Netflix engineered events such that monopolists would be forced to do something constructive for a change? However, Netflix can't throttle non-Netflix applications, and that occurs as well. Also, I dropped my Netflix subscription (which I originally used to get DVDs through the mail) around the time the first article was written.

I've personally witnessed and been affected by ISP shenanigans over the years. As an example, some years back, mine sent out mailers urging to me to "upgrade" my service. I declined. What occurred, of course, was that my speeds subsequently decreased; the "upgrade" was a shakedown for more money to simply keep one's current speeds (in the US, by the way).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Expected response #2 has arrived. Latency at any appreciable distance is unavoidable due to certain universal constants, so you either live very close to one or more major datacenters, or what you "played competitively" was the Uno game programmed into Second Life. I played various Tribes games competitively throughout the 2000s and early into the 2010s, I have excellent reflexes, but unlike you I don't deny the inevitability of latency. I'm not buying what you're selling.

Expected response #3: I am a superhuman who can detect latencies nobody else can.

Oh look, I already answered this.

If you don't notice the input lag in a fps at 45ms latency to Stadia/GFNow you should check a medic. (or stop exaggerating for effect)

My roundtrip delay on GeForce Now is <25ms, meaning it takes about 10-12ms for my input to reach the server.

It appears that most expert-level tournament gamers can't detect input delays below ~48ms despite them thinking they all have superhero powers that let them detect delays of even 2ms
https://cogsci.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Thesis2017Banatt.pdf
If you can detect a 10ms delay then that would indeed qualify as superhuman.

Also, funny part from the article: a few non-video game players managed to crash the test software because it took them too long to detect the input delay.

 

[Average Manatee]

1. Saying that you can't detect a difference is not saying a difference doesn't exist. Lower latency is always an advantage. If you press a button the fire a shot when something is in your crosshairs and the latency is 25ms then you have to hope that it doesn't move out of your aim in that 25ms. This is independent of your reaction time.
2. Latency is always additive, so even if your 25ms is correct that's 25ms added on to your mouse/keyboard latency, system latency, network latency, and screen latency.
3. 25ms equates to an FPS of 40. Limit your FPS to 40 in a game and tell me if you can detect input lag. If you can't, you're an idiot who should go back to consoles. I can notice up to around 100-150 in games (though I'd guess the latter is because games often themselves have some extra input lag).
4, The study you linked looks pretty shit. They are measuring pressing some undefined buttons, which themselves screw up anything (who knows exactly when a button is pressed without hours of practice?). This is the opposite of a mouse click which is very precise and you can very easily notice whether the feedback is immediate.
5. Even ignoring all of points 1-4, if you cant detect 25ms latency, you can still detect smoothness. Just open up your OS desktop, set the background to full black, and move the bright mouse cursor back and forth across it quickly by shaking your wrist. You can notice it jumps in position. I have a 60 Hz screen and a 144 Hz screen. On the 60 Hz screen I can detect big jumps, on the 144 Hz screen the jumps are half the size because it updates in half the time. The actual refresh rate of my screen to fully give a smooth motion is probably like 2000 Hz. Is this an incredibly artificial test? Yes, but it's still measurable and detectable effects of latency. Games tend to be not black and white, and tech to include motion blur (fuck that), but you can conduct similar tests and see similar results where very low latency gives improvements.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

1. Saying that you can't detect a difference is not saying a difference doesn't exist. Lower latency is always an advantage. If you press a button the fire a shot when something is in your crosshairs and the latency is 25ms then you have to hope that it doesn't move out of your aim in that 25ms. This is independent of your reaction time.
2. Latency is always additive, so even if your 25ms is correct that's 25ms added on to your mouse/keyboard latency, system latency, network latency, and screen latency.
3. 25ms equates to an FPS of 40. Limit your FPS to 40 in a game and tell me if you can detect input lag. If you can't, you're an idiot who should go back to consoles. I can notice up to around 100-150 in games (though I'd guess the latter is because games often themselves have some extra input lag).
4, The study you linked looks pretty shit. They are measuring pressing some undefined buttons, which themselves screw up anything (who knows exactly when a button is pressed without hours of practice?). This is the opposite of a mouse click which is very precise and you can very easily notice whether the feedback is immediate.
5. Even ignoring all of points 1-4, if you cant detect 25ms latency, you can still detect smoothness. Just open up your OS desktop, set the background to full black, and move the bright mouse cursor across it. You can notice it jumps in position. I have a 60 Hz screen and a 144 Hz screen. On the 60 Hz screen I can detect big jumps, on the 144 Hz screen the jumps are half the size because it updates in half the time. The actual refresh rate of my screen to fully give a smooth motion is probably like 2000 Hz. Is this an incredibly artificial test? Yes, but it's still measurable and detectable effects of latency.

you guys are making me want streaming to take over just because you're all so smugly annoying thinking you're correct when you haven't even tried it

 

[Average Manatee]

you guys are making me want streaming to take over just because you're all so smugly annoying thinking you're correct when you haven't even tried it

Cool non-argument.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

you guys are making me want streaming to take over just because you're all so smugly annoying thinking you're correct when you haven't even tried it

Cool non-argument.

What's a non-argument is "the study is bad because I declare myself a superhuman"

 

[None]

Google really is just a glorified ad company at this point, aren't they?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

at this point,

wot