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

[polo]

I think if someone can pull this kind of shit, that would be google. +40~ms of input lag against xbox pro or psone is not much for most of the games tbh.

 

[Volokard]

People who think the idea has no future are extremely shortsighted. OnLive was to game streaming what early Windows Mobile and Nokia Communicators were to smartphones. Almost nobody gave a shit about pocket PCs for aeons but when android and iOS came out it took over the world.
Yes, competitive fighting games and FPSes are not going to be best played on a streaming service.. so what? Do you actually believe the platform needs to be optimal with every single genre of video game to become successful? I guess Nintendo can stop selling 3DSes

I agree with you that streaming seems to be the future. Everything just seems to go in that direction right now, including games. Just because OnLive failed or that right now only some countries have great internet doesn't mean that it will stay this way. It would be silly to assume that it will never work fine. In the near future everyone will have better internet. Though I am just disappointed that it will be this way. I wish actually having a digital/physical copy of what you purchased was something more important to people. But maybe it's not going to be so bad. Maybe, as others said, you can still own your game, play it offline, and this will just be another way to play it. Having this as an option is a good thing as long as other ways to play will still exist. I don't want this to become the main way to play a game.

 

[Lutte]

I agree with you that streaming seems to be the future.

It doesn't need to be -the future-, it just needs to be good enough for a lot of people to be a viable market of its own.
Google isn't OnLive, they have big datacenters and peering agreements with ISPs all over the world. I've seen OnLive's quality, it wasn't even close to PSnow, which itself isn't close to GeForce Now. The canard of repeating onlive failure, a tiny corp with shit tech and no means to build infrastructure as a failure of the idea itself is as retarded as people dissing the iPhone during its first launch. Typical nerd shortsighted.
I haven't been in the beta of this Google service, but I would be really surprised if it was inferior to GeForce Now. If anything it should be better, Google has the best peering of the world.

And google through monopolistic power solved marketing and UI for such software. FFS, it can't be overstated what it means for this service to be directly launchable on youtube. First of all, this means they intend to seriously invest in infrastructure, this isn't a side project. How much hardware do you think they need to build for something like launching asscreed odyssey through its youtube trailer ? At first gamers don't even need to specifically care or want or think this service has a use, what google will do is market it live on youtube by making it seamless to try it. And since trying it will be seamless and marketed through all the video games trailers on youtube, you can bet a lot of curious people will try the thing even if without an intent to seriously game on it, so there is NO doubt Google is going to have to invest a decent amount of money into this because millions will be clicking on that button to see what this playing asscreed through the browser is all about. All they have to do then is offer a decent enough experience to make it stick.

I'm not even happy about this. I think this sort of tech has great potential for a lot of users, but I much prefer NVIDIA's approach of running steam in a VM instance over a service where you don't own the games, and obviously I don't trust google. But as much as I'd like to see google fail, this is an instance where they have all the cards to play it right. YouTube's integration will have a major impact.

 

[Lutte]

Historians will dig up this thread and laugh at you.

Yup, this thread is basically this in a nutshell :
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/79084-ten-reasons-why-you-shouldnt-buy-an-iphone
https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-scoop-iphones-touchscreen-keypad-kinda-sucks/
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

http://archive.fortune.com/2007/10/04/technology/nokia_N95.fortune/index.htm
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Study-iPhone-Keyboard-Sucks-83489.shtml

"but but but my physical keyboard!!!111 touchscreen are a stupid idea!!11"
"where my adobe flash support!!!1 JAVA!!!!!!!!"
people will look at threads like this with derision ten years from now.
It's always sobering to look at the average loser nerd vision of what can make or break the success of a product.
Like this :
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod
>. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Nerdlings, your desires and most important needs do not correlate with what will make a product successful.

 

[RapineDel]

Thinking about it, their idea of playing in 4K at 60 FPS really isn't relevant to most people. The vast majority of "gamers" I'm sure they surveyed and looked into likely only play mobile games and there's a good reason the switch has been commercially successful despite outdated tech, most people simply don't care about 4K and probably don't know anything about frames per second.

Then you have the people who are all over this stuff and watch Digital Foundry videos. These people are going to be turned off by a streaming service as well, most of these people barely even game, they just love beefing up their computers and whether they admit it or not, the tech side of it is their real hobby and they probably don't even have that much time to game anyway. You take away that side of it and they probably lose interest overall.

This service seems to be for people who don't have heaps of money, have great internet and likely don't care about Xbox/Sony. They'd need their own offering of exclusives and I can't see them really being on top of that in the next 5 years.

I think they'd have been better off focusing on the mobile games market, it's more lucrative and there's probably more that can be done there. Thinking about all this properly I just don't think the market for people who actually play a large variety of games is actually big enough for them to be interested in a few years time.

 

[Valky]

The only streaming I would ever want is to stream from my own hardware platform, not some mystery silicone owned by a company, because it CAN be useful to be able to access your computer away from home. And remote desktop technology already exists. This gay faggot shit is pure millennial pipedream written all over and if they actually wanted to make a good product they would get into improving and optimizing remote desktop for everyone's use. This is an incredibly limited bastardization where you don't own NOTHING, goy!

 

[Trithne]

Historians will dig up this thread and laugh at you.

Yup, this thread is basically this in a nutshell :
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/79084-ten-reasons-why-you-shouldnt-buy-an-iphone
https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-scoop-iphones-touchscreen-keypad-kinda-sucks/
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

http://archive.fortune.com/2007/10/04/technology/nokia_N95.fortune/index.htm
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Study-iPhone-Keyboard-Sucks-83489.shtml

"but but but my physical keyboard!!!111 touchscreen are a stupid idea!!11"
"where my adobe flash support!!!1 JAVA!!!!!!!!"
people will look at threads like this with derision ten years from now.
It's always sobering to look at the average loser nerd vision of what can make or break the success of a product.
Like this :
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod
>. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Nerdlings, your desires and most important needs do not correlate with what will make a product successful.

I miss phones with physical keys. I used to have a Nokia N97, why couldn't that design take off?

 

[Ezekiel]

Have you guys who are welcoming this even experienced significant input lag? It sucks. I can't even stand the input lag from my living room to my bedroom PC. I'd love to play PC games (those that are made more for controllers) on my big TV, with my sound system, but the delay between the 70 feet of HDMI, the wireless signal and the USB repeater cable is not fun at all. This thing is going to be impossible to make enjoyable without powerful servers in every town and ISPs that don't make such scummy contracts/deals.

 

[Bester]

Have you guys who are welcoming this even experienced significant input lag?

My wife is a gamer and she doesn't notice when FPS in HotS drops down from 60 to 15 due to some shit she's got open in her browser.

A lot of people cannot notice fps, input lag, mono sound, and lots of other stuff. It's how their brain functions.

I'm not saying that these people are retards. But that's only cause I got one of them in my family.

 

[taxalot]

"Haha, how can you guys be interested in a technology that will be still around and imposed on us within 10 to 15 years until forever, whereas in beta it still has a 100 ms input lag on wifi & adsl."

 

[HansDampf]

"Haha, how can you guys be interested in a technology that will be still around and imposed on us within 10 to 15 years until forever, whereas in beta it still has a 100 ms input lag on wifi & adsl."

How can the problem of input lag ever be solved? Or is your fabulous optimism based on the notion that technology is just going to advance in general? At some point we are going to hit hard physical barriers like the speed of light.

 

[Bester]

"Haha, how can you guys be interested in a technology that will be still around and imposed on us within 10 to 15 years until forever, whereas in beta it still has a 100 ms input lag on wifi & adsl."

Cucksalot, current technology don't allow better ping in the foreseeable future.

What makes it up:

- Internet latency. You're likely going to have 50ms. It's not noticeable in games like Quake or LoL, but that's because they have movement prediction. In streamed single player games it'll be noticeable.

- Encoding/decoding. At this point it looks like this takes 500-1000ms. It's theoretically possible to reduce it to about 50ms if you have specialized supercomputers on both ends, which is not happening either.

- Games have input lag as it is, most games have 100+ ms input lag according to Carmack. Reducing that would required a Carmack per studio, which is not happening.

- Monitors have 6-15 ms.

Unsolvable in the next 20 years.

 

[Turjan]

Given the state of my internet connection (discrepancy between promised speed and actual speed), I can safely ignore this for the foreseeable future.

 

[Fedora Master]

Just combine it with VR so you can't play any games that require fast motion or free movement. Problem solved.
Now pay 500 bucks plus 50 a month in subscription fees to play VR Go or some shit.

 

[Bester]

Just combine it with VR so you can't play any games that require fast motion or free movement. Problem solved.

Actually, the contrary.

Carmack worked his ass off for a couple of years to reduce input lag in Oculus. The reason being, if you turn your head, the in-game camera must turn without delay, otherwise you quickly lose all impression of virtual reality.

Input lag being over 1 second is forbidding of any VR.

 

[Fedora Master]

Just combine it with VR so you can't play any games that require fast motion or free movement. Problem solved.

Actually, the contrary.

Carmack worked his ass off for a couple of years to reduce input lag in Oculus. The reason being, if you turn your head, the in-game camera must turn without delay, otherwise you quickly lose all impression of virtual reality.

Input lag being over 1 second is forbidding of any VR.

So in other words this whole thing is shit and works with nothing at all.

 

[taxalot]

Whining about Input Lag disregards that there is already a lot of feedback of users of cloud gaming services who witness it's not an issue in the great majority of cases.

Yours included.

 

[abija]

Well, if dev payment is based on time spent in their game, the atrocities in design generated will make input lag a non issue for sure :D

 

[Lutte]

Have you guys who are welcoming this even experienced significant input lag?

Seems like I'm not repeating myself enough because cunts keep acting like we don't have experience of the technology. Have I experienced latency and game streaming? Why yes, I played Bloodborne from beginning to end game on PSNow. That service has more noticeable latency than GFNow.
I've played a few levels of Dishonored 2 and parts of Prey through the service to see how much better the tech got, and to compare GFNow to PSnow.

The latency would only be a problem for competitive gaming and arcade style games (I ain't even going to try to play shmups on a stream service). Modern games, even souls likes such as Bloodborne, are not a problem. And on the better services like GFnow it's much closer to unnoticeable levels if your internet isn't fucking dogshit : sony would need to improve their infrastructure dramatically to compete with what is coming.

 

[unfairlight]

You're not wrong that the latency is not unplayably bad on streaming services. It wasn't unplayably bad even on OnLive way back when. The issue is that many people still don't have good internet connections. It's mostly console audiences interested in game streaming, and as is common knowledge the only serious console audiences in the world are America, the UK and Japan. The third loves physical, the first two have horrible internet connections in too many places and data caps are still very common which is impossible to circumvent unless you want very low bitrate video quality, as this uses 20gb per hour.
Here's the catch though; You aren't gonna go anywhere with any of these services if your game selection is not up to snuff, and as it stands it still won't be up to snuff with almost any of these services. It's hard to compete with the 30,000+ games of Steam. You will basically be culling anyone that wants playable multiplayer games, anyone that wants the lowest latency games, anyone that lives 2 countries away from the nearest datacentre, anyone that wants old games and anyone that wants obscure games. Your only option on these services will be the newest AAA garbage, which nowadays is becoming surprisingly irrelevant. The most played games today are competitive multiplayer games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Dota 2, League of Legends, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, et cetera. Good fucking luck trying to win that market over with streaming, it's impossible.

 

[Heretic]

"Stadia" is too long to type.
I propose to abbreviate it
Google STD

 

[Lutte]

Here's the catch though; You aren't gonna go anywhere with any of these services if your game selection is not up to snuff, and as it stands it still won't be up to snuff with almost any of these services. It's hard to compete with the 30,000+ games of Steam.

For now, the final business model is still undecided and there's two factions at NVIDIA for GeForce Now, but one of the two that is currently winning inside the company is running Steam directly on their infrastructure, with your personal account. That's what the current GeForce Now beta client currently does.
The other faction leans on the "netflix of gaming" side.
Still I don't think it matters nearly as much as you think it does. Nintendo wouldn't be able to sell boatloads of switch otherwise. Google only needs a decent selection of video games to make it work, they don't need the full 30k of steam.

The rest of your comment is a reflection on the current market which is typical shortsighted, static views of current instead of what could be. Nobody wanted a smartphone (Nokia communicators, Windows Mobile) before the iPhone. Now everyone owns a smartphone, although not necessarily an iPhone. With the right timing, technology and vision new markets cam form, new audiences can be brought in. If you go solely by revenue potential mobile market and its cazul shit games is just as big as the games you've cited. Heck, Fortnite is popular on mobiles, that should tell you something about its audience and willingness to put up with things like unsuited control schemes. A little latency wouldn't be a killer so long as it stays within reasonable amounts. Once again I'm repeating myself but you don't realize how fearsome the idea of being able to play a game directly from clicking a button on youtube after watching its advertisement trailer can be.
This will either spectacularly fail or become a next huge market in competition with what already exists.

Your point about US datacaps and other US shenanigans is valid though. The US won't be a targetable market for the years to come. That may be something that will change, but it'll take time.
For starters, 5G is an impossibility if the US doesn't improve its fiber infrastructure and pull so much fiber everywhere that it wouldn't make sense to not go for the last mile and make use of it for residential internet too. So while things won't change tomorrow I expect the US situation to get better in the near future, considering how much cell phone providers are attracted to 5G.

In France, fiber deployment has finally gotten really serious. Unless you live real deep in the boonies you'll have some form of high speed internet, if not now, then pretty soon.

 

[newtmonkey]

Such a glorious future awaits, where everyone but a handful of data scientists is somehow paying for rent, food, and health insurance on their $1,000 UBI. At least entertainment will be cheap, since it will only be $20 USD a month to enjoy all-u-can-consume "GOOGLE/NETFLIX/AMAZON ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL," with AI retroactively replacing actors/actresses who have said the wrong thing on Twitter once or modifying textures and models in games to comply with the latest guidelines of the Secretary of Diversity and Inclusion.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

I hope this shit crashes and burns.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Seems like I'm not repeating myself enough because cunts keep acting like we don't have experience of the technology.

Fucking this. There's no need to make baseless assumptions about latency, because the tech already exists, and it works. It's a goddamn fact that it works. Whether there's a market for it is a different issue. I think there is, if Google play their cards right and their infrastructure is up to snuff. But yeah, maybe not in the US. Time will tell.