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"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

• SeanMacConMara 7y ago
  i fear people will "want it" when it gets good enough the combination of "dumb screen(TV?) as interface" with "any/all content* you want (cheaper with ads)" will be very attractive to the 99% of humans who dont want to think about computing is widespread personal physical ownership and control of general purpose computing a feature of the future ? what laws do we need to think about to prevent harm that may cause ? *text/radio/TV/movie/social/web/games/etc
• tombot 7y ago
  Stadia exists because Google wants to create more opportunities to show video advertising. What better way to do this than to turn games into another type of streaming video. Pre-roll before the game starts, mid-roll in between levels. When players stream games to other views, more pre-roll before they watch.
  • deepbake 7y ago
    You could just pay for the subscription and skip the ads though, similar to netflix or disney+.
    • tombot 7y ago
      and YouTube premium :)
  • javajosh 7y ago
    This is absolutely true, but it doesn't mean the product doesn't have it's place. I for one don't particularly want to get involved with the "gaming PC" consumption game, but I sometimes would like to play a AAA game I read about. Playing a game through a stream on someone else's gaming rig seems like a good way for me to do this. Of course, what would really be interesting would be to setup a city-wide pool of gaming PCs and pay your neighbor to remote-pilot games, with low latency and keeping the spend local (and distributed). Think of it like "AirBnB for Gaming PCs". You could cobble something together today with VNC.
  • icandoit 7y ago
    I thought that they created Stadia so that they could get recurring-revenue-customers to buy their GPUs for them.
  • BinaryIdiot 7y ago
    There are no ads on Stadia nor have they announced that there would be. You currently have to pay full price for their games, I don't see how you can just shove ads into them. Maybe in the future if they offer a subscription but right now your comment is just guessing at the future intent of a newly launched product.
• sct202 7y ago
  I'm not sure if I want a Stadia, but I think there is a product that could succeed doing something similar. Like, I occasionally play Starcraft and other PC games, but it's kind of a pain to plan out future desktop or laptop upgrades because I can only consider products with more powerful video cards and enough extra space to hold each 60+gb game to handle even moderate gaming.
  • plopz 7y ago
    I couldn't imagine how painful playing starcraft would be with an extra 100ms of latency.
    • PaulHoule 7y ago
      It's funny how often I have experienced 30 to 300 ms between a computer or game console and the display. I have a Alienware "gaming" laptop where the built-in screen lags about 30 ms relative to most monitors I plug it into. I have a video to prove it where I am duplicating the screen and running a clock. When I was playing League of Legends it seemed to me that I just couldn't win when I was using the built-in monitor but then the game got a lot easier when I used an external monitor. I had a similar experience with much worse latency playing Titanfall on an XBox plugged into a Samsung TV. When I switched it to "Game Mode" I suddenly started moving up the ranks. It's an issue that people are surprisingly oblivious to, but fast reaction doesn't matter much for single player games and when people lose at multi player games they just blame themselves.
    • oefrha 7y ago
      There are plenty of high ping players on the ladder already. I myself have played on the NA server while physically in Asia. American pros train on Korean or European ladders too. It’s okay. Also, StarCraft doesn’t have to be ultra-competitive. You can enjoy the campaign or coop, or just play some unranked multiplayer for fun. A bit more latency doesn’t ruin the experience, and many/most human beings aren’t twitchy enough anyway.
      • plopz 7y ago
• Despegar 7y ago
  I think it exists because they've got plenty of infrastructure assets all around the world because of GCP (and are investing in more) and they're probably trying to dream up ideas to drive up utilization and gain some operating leverage on it. A consumer subscription business that depends on all your data centers would do that. That's not a really good reason to make a product though.
  • TremendousJudge 7y ago
    The same way they were able to become an ISP! wait
  • mrep 7y ago
    I would argue that, and it allows them to reuse idle resources. Instead of everyone having to buy their own game console or pc which sits idle most of the time, google only needs to buy enough for peak demand and then they can use the idle resources for their own purposes when not in demand.
  • Jonnax 7y ago
    This is what they said of their specs: "CPU: Custom 2.7GHz hyper-threaded x86 CPU with AVX2 SIMD and 9.5MB L2+L3 cache. GPU: Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units, capable of 10.7 teraflops. RAM: 16GB of RAM with up to 484GB/s of performance." That's not really a spare capacity machine but what sounds like Custom SoCs. But perhaps if it goes to crap, there'll be a new GCP instance type.
• tiborsaas 7y ago
  Offtopic, but why someone bothers to type a proper blogpost in Twitter? It's such a crap experience read something there that multiple thread reader projects exists. I can only think of the simplicity to publish content makes it too easy for lazy authors.
  • draw_down 7y ago
    > Offtopic, Mmhmm. > but why someone bothers to type a proper blogpost in Twitter? I submit that this horse is sufficiently dead and beaten.
  • perennate 7y ago
    I scroll with my mouse to read pages, and the very slow scrolling amount on this "threader.app" was very frustrating.
    • aembleton 7y ago
      Worked fine for me on Firefox 70.0.1 on Ubuntu. Have you tried turning off Javascript? That might help.
    • choward 7y ago
      I'm using Linux Mint and it scrolls super slow. I will never understand why companies insist on wasting resources on ruining a feature that works perfectly fine. What do they get out of it? Does it somehow lead to more profit? It really baffles me. It seems like nobody wins.
      • tiborsaas 7y ago
        The designer of the project probably gets an anxiety attack each time they see how scrollbars wildly fluctuates in different platform. This had to stop so let's ruin the experience for everyone :) (It scrolls just fine for me in Chrome, on a Macbook)
  • chapium 7y ago
    Because thats where their social network is.
• ryandvm 7y ago
  Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine. Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so... here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the program in 3 or 4 years. That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The upshot of course is that every now and then one of these "side projects" takes off into an enormously successful business unit (e.g. Android, Maps, GSuite). All of those programs could have just as easily died on the vine like Google Plus or Wave.
  • nerdjon 7y ago
    Stadia is unique though that there are people buying digital games locked to the platform. So its entirely possible when the inevitably kill it those games could just be lost. So I hope for the people's sake that buy into it that Google won't shut it down (or at least have a way to add your purchases to steam or something), but its a different risk this time.
    • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      I think Stadia being shut down is a near certainty (and the GP comments' 3-4 years is very optimistic for how long it might survive), but I think that Stadia owners losing their games is fairly unlikely. When other digital services with purchases have shut down, there's often some attempt to offer a migration for user licenses. (I've watched Ultraviolet and Flixster's shutdowns and the like of late.) The game studios partnering with Google would be extremely upset for their customers to be dropped, and I'd especially expect games like Destiny 2 to cleanly migrate a user's data and progress to playing on another platform. Even when Google shut down their Assassin's Creed demo of Stadia's technology, which was free, they gave everyone a game key to redeem on Steam at the end, so my guess is that's what would happen in a Stadia shutdown. The most likely "loss" is from the hardware purchases, though Google has hedged here a bit on the fact that a Chromecast Ultra will still be useful post-Stadia. Even the controller might not go to waste if it works as a generic PC game controller.
    • ansible 7y ago
• 762236 7y ago
  The author means that she doesn't want it. I want Stadia and everything that it brings.
• birdyrooster 7y ago
  Stadia is and will remain laughable because it has absolutely no answer for VR content and is a laggy mess in the best conditions. If a partnership between AT&T and NVidia couldn’t crack this egg, why in the world would Google be able to? It’s a physics problem that cannot be overcome. The hubris of Google to tout this platform is incredibly annoying as a gamer.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • ansible 7y ago
    Yes, on the one hand, traditional gaming (FPS, etc.) is most of the market now. Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. But we're on the cusp of VR/AR really taking off. The current all-in-one VR systems are almost good enough for a lot of people to jump in. I can see the next-gen of those being very popular. Certainly, you're giving up a lot by wearing all the rendering silicon on your head, but the other side of that is that it shaves precious milliseconds off the end-to-end latency, which is critical for a good experience. And there's no way to do any of that with streaming games. Now, for an old man like me who's mostly playing turn-based strategy games, card games and such, Stadia might be an attractive offer. Of course, those sorts of games don't push the limits of my old system, so... yeah, I don't need it right now either. While top-end PCs can render better than top-end consoles right now, I don't see that as being compelling enough, especially when you factor in the network bandwidth / low-latency needed.
• EugeneOZ 7y ago
  I want Google Stadia. My internet bandwidth is more than enough for 4k 60 FPS and price for their service is pretty good - better than $3k PC for 5 years - you need to upgrade GPU at least every 3 years and CPU every 2 years (and, therefore, motherboard) to keep "high-end PC" title and play new games on "ultra" settings. Here they promise the same for a price, comparable to what my high-end PC takes for electricity.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • utf985 7y ago
    Where are you getting this data from? 2 years for a new CPU? My gaming pc from 2015 that cost just a little over $1k runs all recent games on ultra just fine.
    • EugeneOZ 7y ago
      I'm talking about playing with 4k screen resolution.
  • EugeneOZ 7y ago
    correction: I'll be ready to pay when they ship all what promised, not half-backed "something" they've launched today.
• PaulHoule 7y ago
  The strange thing about Stadia is that not only is Google making an impractical product that people don't want, but so are Sony and Microsoft. It's like the "race" to 5G or the "race" to AI, but in this case there is no prize -- you expect any hardware from Google to be a lost cause, even Microsoft has had good luck selling mice, but Sony is serious about hardware so how did they get caught up in it? The one real advantage I see is that if you want to livestream a game it is probably more efficient to stream the game down to the player and then pipe the stream into a CDN for everyone else than it is to upload the stream and then pipe it into a CDN. Maybe you could make a game like Titanfall or Fortnite that runs on some monster server in the cloud and hypothetically eliminates the need to share state across a network, but I think you're trading one set of problems for another set of problems. I used to have two Sunrays and a SPARC Solaris server in my cubicle, we were hoping to use them for kiosks at a large university library (might have bought 200+) but we couldn't compile Mozilla for Solaris and all of the other browsers available for Solaris were either too old or looked like somebody's science experiment. Today there is a real market for desktop virtualization. The Bridgewater hedge fund has switched to desktop virtualization because they are paranoid MoFo's who (1) are worried about the physical destruction of their headquarters and (2) don't want employees walking out with a laptop full of secrets. So they RDS in to cloud servers and like it that way.
  • TremendousJudge 7y ago
    > but in this case there is no prize The prize is getting people to pay for a subscription forever instead of buying your console once
• eternalny1 7y ago
  Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is how we will be gaming. Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no brainer. Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k 60 FPS? No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new system. They are all there and you just "press start". I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.
  • Causality1 7y ago
    Bandwidth isn't the problem. Latency is. Multiple gigabits of bandwidth won't help you when it takes half a second for your character to start jumping after you hit the button.
    • EugeneOZ 7y ago
      With such latency we would have 0 online shooters. But we have a lot of them.
      • tikkabhuna 7y ago
        There is a bunch of tricks that go into the netcode though. A slight delay on hit recognition is noticeable and sometimes annoying, but movement can be silky smooth. With Stadia, wouldn't that latency open you up to input lag?
        • EugeneOZ 7y ago
          Of course there is, but there are some tricks also for it :) Modern software (and AI) can predict some user actions very precisely. Anyway, there will be input lag, without any doubts, even with the smartest AI, but for some games it's pretty acceptable. Especially for non-competitive ones.
• devit 7y ago
  Seems to me that it would be very good for people who have fiber connections at home and are close to a Google datacenter (or just don't care about latency), and want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU without having to pay for it and own a physical desktop computer (perhaps because they don't have the budget, or play games rarely, or buying a desktop computer is hard or uncomfortable for them).
  • iMark 7y ago
    If you want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU, you almost certainly care about latency.
    • devit 7y ago
      Not necessarily, you might like sophisticated graphics but not play games where latency is particularly important, or just not be annoyed by latency and not interested in competitive play. Also as an anecdote right now I have 5ms ping to google.com and 1gbps downlink (fiber at home in major city), so it seems like 60fps or maybe even 120fps zero-extra-frames-latency gaming would be achievable there, for instance.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Jyaif 7y ago
  > Sun started with: "What can we build?" "What would be good for US, if people wanted it?". The author wasn't in the room when this idea came up, so I feel like this is a completely made up story. These Sunblade were a great idea, and they still are. I'm sure we'll eventually get there again at one point. Sun failed on the execution, but that's an other story.
• perennate 7y ago
  With smaller devices like laptops and netbooks (along with smartphones) becoming increasingly popular, Stadia caters to people who don't want to invest in a second device just for gaming. I know several people who only own a laptop and are interested in this service; I'm sure the market is there. The main challenge, though, is that they are late to the competition -- NVIDIA GeForce NOW seems much more mature (the aforementioned people are already using their beta) and it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that NVIDIA can't do better (since they make the consumer GPUs). Also, I think Google messed up by focusing on the Stadia controller and other physical devices; that's exactly what people don't want, to purchase more devices. And I read through their FAQ and don't even understand whether you need the controller to use Stadia. If it's actually required, that's ridiculous.
  • gambiting 7y ago
    The biggest advantage that GeForce NOW has is that it just runs regular PC executables. Games for Stadia need to be compiled specifically for Stadia, and I have no idea why developers would spend the time and money building yet another version of their games, unless Stadia turns out to be incredibly popular or Google throws a lot of money at them.
    • perennate 7y ago
      Wow, I didn't know that. I thought it'd be like GeForce NOW, and somehow let you play your Steam games from your computer in Chrome. Starting to agree with the author, I no longer get what the point of Stadia is.
  • dwild 7y ago
    > it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that NVIDIA can't do better The price Sure Nvidia GeForce Now is free right now, but that's because they test the market. They can't afford this forever. There's many service that tried this in the past with Nvidia Grid, for a pretty high price, and they all went away (OnLive, LiquidSky).
  • maest 7y ago
    Stadia and GFN strike me as two very different products. GFN works and it's a straightforward product: you play for access on powerful gaming rigs and you can run your games. Stadia seems more like a platform play where they have their own game dev framework, they plan to integrate with youtube and will probably have exclusives in the future.
• twoquestions 7y ago
  There's already a bunch of gaming computer providers like Parsec and Vortex, what does Stadia bring to the table? Personally I doubt the decision makers involved play games more twitch-based than Civilization. For fighting and rhythm games, being meters too far away from the game system makes latency annoying, let alone 200ms away! Even a game server at every residential zone and apartment block would not be better than a potato machine a foot away. Cynically, it looks like they're trying to swallow that market whole, betting they have more money on hand to price themselves artificially low to carpet-bomb the small cloud gaming market. EDIT: Something I forgot to mention, Parsec already works with the games you own anywhere else, and on a crappy Android tablet. What Stadia looks like its selling is increased latency, plus a walled garden store, plus necessary custom hardware. Unless Google is giving away the hardware you need to play, I can't see this being price competitive next to a Nintendo Switch, and the latter needs no Internet connection at all.
  • twoquestions 7y ago
    Scratch Parsec, they don't rent cloud machines anymore, it looks like they're a streaming service now.
• ArmandGrillet 7y ago
  I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense. I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the cheapest option - again. It will be the most enjoyable option too: no installation, no upgrade, I can just play. Last but not least: apart from the Switch, consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom. As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it the business model will work.
  • bobviolier 7y ago
    Yeah this ^ I guess Google did an MVP and everybody is expecting it to be a fully-fledged offering already. That might have been due to Google promoting it as such of course (and asking the price for it). What I also see happening is that as soon as they have a free tier, people are gonna try to play a game for 5 minutes because they saw something on Youtube or somewhere else and then 1 in X will just buy the game on Stadia.
    • birdyrooster 7y ago
      It’s not well known but AT&T and Nvidia partnered to use hardware encoding/decoding (Shield) and fiber internet with compute at the last mile and they still couldn’t make a product that wasn’t laggy and have distracting artifacts. I am sorry to say Google‘s demonstration was more of the same and customers will not overlook this. Imagine how bad VR titles would get you motion sick with all of that latency and compression artifacts. With computers cheaper than ever and games hitting a ceiling on how much power it takes to render them, Stadia makes less and less sense. What does make sense is Google is so hungry for revenue they don’t care about user experience. What also makes sense is that those downvoting me have become blinded by optimism.
• skohan 7y ago
  As a consumer and a developer I don't really want Stadia to succeed because of the shift it represents in terms of ownership of media, as well as hack-ability of games. In general I want to have games locally so I can do whatever I want with them. However, as an industry observer, it's hard to imagine that something like Stadia doesn't have the potential to be a huge success if they really could deliver on promise. With all the people watching people play games on Youtube and Twitch, it's hard to imagine you couldn't convert at least some small percentage of that massive audience into players if the barrier to entry was only a click of a button.
  • yummypaint 7y ago
    I agree. Right now the focus is on new capabilities this can bring, but if it succeeds it provides an even more invasive way for companies to insert themselves between people and their property. I would argue that the reason stadia is being developed is to further the trend of moving users' files and computation away from their control. Now everything people do in games can be third-party trackable. The computing industry has figured out they can double dip by pushing people into work flows that just happen to trequire a subscription. Expanding this conquest to gaming is happening now because the rationalization is just becoming believable.
• kgraves 7y ago
  Stadia is a staple of what the open web should be for games. Just open a web browser and the game is available. Much in the same way that Photoshop should be available on the web. Unfortunately it had to be Google that had to get their oar into this space and therefore it looks like just a toy demo for them. I do wish engineers at Google should instead contribute to the technologies that advance the open web instead of vanishing Google products.
  • skohan 7y ago
    I for one would like to see more, better local software rather than web-everything. My laptop is more than capable of running photoshop locally, and I don't see the benefit of running a slower, high-latency version which is vulnerable to network conditions. It seems like that does much more for Adobe, their cloud provider, and my ISP than it does for me. That's not to say there shouldn't be online options for things, but it seems inevitable that as those options become increasingly viable, software vendors will aggressively push consumers toward them so they can have an excuse to have a recurring revenue model.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    What exactly is open about a video stream of a program you have no access to, not even the binaries.
• evervevdww221 7y ago
  I used to work on (the second generation) cloud gaming. It's very difficult to be profitable. Most people would think that the challenge is latency, streaming quality. But the real challenge is cost management. The cost can be easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a decent computer or a console. It doesn't make sense. Plus, to make cloud gaming work, you have to own everything. From the video encoding hardware, operating system, virtualization, game content, distribution channel, cloud ... For example, we tried to hack windows to support existing windows games. It was very difficult. Windows isn't a multi-user system. There is no proper user isolation. We have to monitor the hard drive to see what files are touched by games, and try to resolve conflicts caused by different users using the same machine. It's very hacky. An easier way is just discarding the VM and refreshing the hard drive, but it will result in long loading time of several minutes, very high cost and poor experience. And then there is the game store problem. Game publishers won't share revenue. You basically sell the games at the same price and also charge users for the cloud gaming platform for a compromised experience. doesn't make sense. There is only one company that owns the whole stack, Microsoft. They own the OS and APIs (so that includes all the drivers), virtualization, games (XBox store), data centers (Azure). A few years ago, YC invested in a cloud app streaming company (they kinda used the same technology we used.). I was surprised. After working on it for a few years, I would not invest if I were an investor. Google's stadia seems to be smarter. As it tries to avoid some of the dead-ends we went to, especially trying to hack windows to make it cloud gaming friendly. Google chose to use Linux and develop games tailored for cloud gaming. I think that's a better choice, but will face content issues.
  • akvadrako 7y ago
    How does it make sense that a computer at home, with 5% utilization and retail power prices, can be less per hour than a computer with 50% utilization and wholesale power? Even if all you do is host single-user machines with retail games installed and some kind of imaging solution, it seems like it should pay off.
    • evervevdww221 7y ago
      $2 per hour per machine is not a made-up number, just check how much Amazon charges for a GPU vm. Again, we were a small company, we had to use other cloud providers. I don't know why amazon or alike are so expensive. We tried colocation too, not any cheaper to be honest. Also, when buying a computer or a console, you don't pay by usage. you pay one time to own the hardware and the remaining 5 year usage is free, plus power bills no one really cares. 5% utilization times 5 year is still some decent hours, the cost is not necessarily more than a cloud vm. For a cloud vm, you pay by usage. The more you use, the more you pay, the overall payment is not capped. Eventually the cost will surplus that of the hardware. And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.
• archie2 7y ago
  The original iPhone was not a product that existed because people "wanted it". It existed because Jobs had a vision - and he was effective at convincing people that they actually did want it. Stadia unfortunately misses the mark on the second part due to sloppy implementation and just boneheaded PR. I think game streaming can be viable - but I doubt Google will be the one to crack this nut. My money is on Microsoft with xCloud, but even then that's still a wait and see for me.
  • edent 7y ago
    That's an interesting look at history. The original iPhone was a synthesis of existing phones. People who wanted a touchscreen had a SE p900, people who wanted a decent camera got an N95, people who wanted a decent web browser installed Opera - and so on. The iPhone succeeded (eventually) because it looked at what a diverse group of people wanted and (eventually) put the best features in one package. Regarding Stadia - there are a huge number of gamers who buy fewer than 2 games per year. An expensive console is a turn-off for them. There are a huge number of gamers who want to play every single game - subscriptions are their saviour. Stadia could - eventually - bring together what a diverse group of gamers want.
• ekianjo 7y ago
  I read the article, but it feels like "don't build anything until you are sure users want X". The problem is that nobody knows what users actually want, especially when you build something new. And the market will keep throwing ideas in several directions until one day, an idea sticks and becomes successful. Like, no gamer in pre-Wii times "wanted to play hours standing with a motion controller". Nintendo released the Wii and it was a huge success (for a while at least). Maybe the author's point is that Stadia is not doing anything "new", and this may be a good point. But it's still early days, and Google has deep pockets. It's a little too early to discard Stadia.
  • ben_jones 7y ago
    If you're a serial entrepreneur trying to get rich, or maybe a corporate product manager trying to get a juicy bonus, ya you'll have no clue what the users want because you'll be forcing it. But if you are one of the users you are very much aware of what your problems are and what might solve them - even if you don't have whatever domain experience is necessary to solve them. I agree with your overall point, that things are worth trying even if they don't inherently scream success. But that doesn't mean we need to try everything and abandon common sense at the door. In this case I don't think Stadia defies common sense, I think it defies consumer benefit: gamers should own the games they buy, freemium services powered by ads are dubious, and products which need to be advertised dishonestly to sell well probably shouldn't be sold at all.
    • ekianjo 7y ago
      > gamers should own the games they buy Agree with the sentiment, but almost every digital purchase nowadays does not tie with ownership, but a license to use whatever you pay for - and it can be nullified at any point in time. If Steam were to go bankrupt tomorrow (unlikely, but for the sake of the argument let's imagine it), you would probably lose complete access to your library of games you "bought". One exception may be GOG with its DRM-free policy, but it's a very small part of the online reselling market.
      • ben_jones 7y ago
• dmtroyer 7y ago
  ::yawn:: I get the point, but this is mostly conjecture.
• danShumway 7y ago
  Somewhat of an aside, but I see mcc come up on Hackernews fairly often, and whenever that happens I usually find myself enjoying her technical commentary a lot -- even when I disagree with it. In this case, I think the analysis is pretty spot-on. I can think of a world where Stadia is solving real problems and presenting a really attractive use-case. I don't think that's the world we live in.
• adamnemecek 7y ago
  I've been using Nvidia GeForce Now for over a year and it's been pretty good actually. Like there is a small delay but it only really impacts me if I play against other people. For RPGs for example, it's really good.
  • woudsma 7y ago
    Same here, I use it on my Mac and it works great with a Steam account. I like that portability. Also the quality is pretty amazing. I only play games every now and then, so a piece of software instead of dedicated hardware is a good solution for me.
• dcchambers 7y ago
  My only issue with Stadia is that Google has no policy regarding what happens to the games you have purchased if/when they shut down the service. Well, I guess they have a policy - and that is "you don't own these games, you temporarily own the rights to use them while this service is running." I take solace knowing that the $60+ games I buy for my PC or Switch are mine because I have local copies. I am not going to spend that same amount on a game that I don't control. And Google is now infamous for terminating services that people like and use with little notice. I think the tech is fine. I think they'll get the latency issues worked out for most uses. Fighters, rythem games, or fast-paced shooters were never going to work well streaming from the cloud. The physics just don't work. But there are many games that would be enjoyable streaming and ~150ms of latency wouldn't matter much. Sadly, I think the negative press from this launch is an early nail in the coffin. I don't know if Google cares enough about the product itself to turn it around.
  • randyrand 7y ago
    Steam only has a promise that they’ll give you the games without DRM if they shut down. Id much prefer something more legally binding.
    • dcchambers 7y ago
      That is true - but I can legally download and keep a copy of all games I own on Steam on my hard drive forever. If they are online games/have DRM the online/activation servers might shut down some day, but every single player game I have should be useable forever. Until my drive fails anyway. Most games have had the DRM cracked. In my mind it's perfectly legal for me to take advantage of that crack to bypass the DRM in a case like this since I have legally purchased and downloaded the product. I have a number of DRM-free games (from Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, etc) that I have offline copies of. No one can take those away from me by shutting down a service.
• conradfr 7y ago
  I have colleagues who use Shadow[1] at work during lunch on their work macbook and they really like it, even the lag is very manageable. So I guess many people want it. The real question is how long until this kind of gaming is imposed, like the need for a connection even for single player games today. https://shadow.tech/usen https://shadow.tech/usen
• _bxg1 7y ago
  I think if they dropped the purchase price that currently sits on top of the subscription price then it would become scary. I don't know if those financials would work out, but it would be compelling. Note that I say scary. I'm not even a game developer, but I am terrified of the implications of centralized, ownership-less gaming. Independent game preservation would disappear overnight. Things that end up in licensing hell could be retroactively removed from the face of the earth. Indie developers would be even more at the mercy of publishers and gatekeepers than they already are. Of course it would be twice as bad for Google to be that streaming company, given their general detachment from and lack of understanding of games culture. But I won't support even the streaming efforts of Microsoft and others. Having it become the de-facto distribution model would be a bad thing for developers, and a bad thing for people who like games.
• OedipusRex 7y ago
  I said this in another thread about Stadia, the market for Stadia is vanishingly small. The people who have high enough internet speeds that either can't or won't get a "traditional" console or PC is extremely small. Too small to signal to Google that this is worth maintaining (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/). For Stadia to survive, Google needs to bring in new "gamers", because existing "gamers" already have their own in-house platforms to play on. OnLive tried streaming games a few years ago (granted, without the Google advertising budget and infrastructure) and it was too unstable to play. On top of all this, Stadia is going to have to either pony up and pay an existing company to include Stadia players in their online servers (Steam, Epic Games, etc) or silo all the Stadia players together. The first time input lag causes you to lose a fight is the day you cancel your subscription. "Gamers" are not very forgiving. It's a terrible idea that was built because Google can build it (as stated in article). It may live on with a cult following but I highly doubt it.
  • dawg- 7y ago
    I think they are probably betting that for $10 a month, people who already have a playstation or xbox would check it out and subscribe from pure curiosity. When the next generation of consoles come out in a couple years, here's the choice users will be looking at: $500 for a new playstation/xbox? Or just keep paying that $10 a month subscription that I forgot about two years ago? Imagine you are a parent and your 13 year old kid wants to play whatever the new popular game is. You can spend a few hundred bucks on a console, or you can spend $10 a month for them to play the same game. It's an easy decision.
    • dlp211 7y ago
      This is a very naive point of view. The whole reason to buy a console is exclusives. I'm not buying a PS5 to play the next crossplatform game, and 13 year old will want many of those same exclusives. Also, the next gen of consoles is slated to drop next year.
  • turtlebits 7y ago
    Disagree, there are a ton of professionals that would love to play current games casually, but don't want to spend on extra hardware (or even having another device around), and waste time with game patches/updates. For me, I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my primary notebook just to play the occasional game or two.
• Justsignedup 7y ago
  It is a product that needs to exist in the future. It should have been on the drawing board for the next 5 years. Google will kill it. I guarantee it. In 5 years someone will release a better version because the internet infrastructure will be ready for it.
• jasonkester 7y ago
  This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work. There is evidently a small area centered around the San Francisco Bay Area where internet connectivity is ubiquitous and perfect. You get unlimited 5G coverage with 2ms ping times and hundred gigabit fibre into every habitable structure. And Google, Apple, etc. all have their offices there where they design products that connect to the internet. There's no reason for an engineer at one of these companies to consider a situation where somebody wouldn't be connected to good internet. Certainly it'll always at least be 4G speed (if the user is in a tunnel or something maybe), but it'll never not exist at all. So you get things like Apple Music (and Google Play Music and every other streaming service) where you get in the car and it starts playing where it left off in your playlist, then you head off down the road in your little thousand person European village. The song ends when you get to the edge of town, and silence ensues. Because it didn't occur to the app to buffer the next song. And not because of bandwidth reasons. Bandwidth is free, remember. Apple will happily charge you 60mb of it to view their homepage, and your device can happily buffer 3mb worth of song (or the next 50 in the playlist) without breaking a sweat. No, it's because nobody who worked on that product has ever been off of the Apple campus. So it never occurred to them that people might want to listen to music someplace where there was no internet. So no, I can't imagine trying to stream a video game over the broadband in our house. I don't think there are that many places in the world where you could do so today.
  • rahimnathwani 7y ago
    Your general point is valid, but FYI not every place in the Bay Area has access to fibre optic internet. Where I live, the options are: - ADSL, around 5Mbit/s down and 0.5Mbit/s up (with AT&T or Sonic) - Cable, around 80Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up (Comcast Xfinity) - Roof antenna, around 100 down and 50 up (MonkeyBrains)
  • plorkyeran 7y ago
    TIL I actually have perfect 5G coverage and not incredibly flaky 4G that drops every time my BART train goes underground or when I ride my bike around a hill. The SF Bay Area's internet infrastructure is much worse than you think, and I regularly find myself without a working mobile signal and I don't have the option of fiber at home.
• JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  I think streaming gaming is doomed but that Sunblade system they are describing sounds really cool for casual computing.
• poorman 7y ago
  We had Sunrays at SUNY Oswego when I was in college. I thought they were great. I didn't have to carry a laptop around, just a little smart card that fit into my wallet. Plug it in and I had access to 120 core servers.
  • schnable 7y ago
    We had them at Case, too, but they weren't that popular.
• scotth 7y ago
  I want it.
• bhauer 7y ago
  Here's a take: I don't want Stadia; I want a modern and personal Sunray. I've described a computing model called PAO [1] on my blog that is Sunray-like in that you connect to your own personal computing environment from all devices concurrently. Singular instances of your applications are merely viewed on all of your devices, using view adaptation similar to today's responsive web apps (and Microsoft's UWP desktop app model). The key differences from Stadia: 1. PAO would not be just for games but for all computing. 2. PAO would not be centralized by default, but broadly deployable, making it something you could self-host on a compute node anywhere (e.g., in your home with a static IP and VPN). PAO would work especially well with a network abstraction layer like ZeroTier, allowing all of your devices to coexist in a private virtual network. You could of course pay a service provider to host your compute node, but that would be one option among many. 3. PAO would expect multiple concurrent clients to applications. A single email app would exist and service views on your home laptop, work desktop, and mobile phone concurrently. [1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
• buddylw 7y ago
  I actually think there's real potential for these services, especially among kids in the enthusiast gaming community. I don't necessarily think we'll be throwing out our PC's for stadia, but I think there is a market if someone can deliver a cost effective product. A bit ago Fortnite went from requiring DX 10 to DX 11 support in Windows. Kids with old hardware were devastated. Out of nowhere they couldn't play their favorite game until they saved up for a new video card, or worse, an entire laptop. PC gaming is a really expensive hobby that's completely out of reach for many. You can point to consoles as a lower cost answer, but $400 is still a lot of money for some people, and PC gaming is still preferred by many enthusiasts for the keyboard/mouse experience and the ability to multitask with Discord, Spotify, etc. Consoles are closing that gap in functionality, but they aren't quite there yet. Some people were saved in the above fortnite situation by GeForce Now, a competing service to Stadia that's been around a while. You can pick at the technical problems with streaming games vs PC, but at the end of the day, kids with reasonable internet that signed up were able to play fortnite in their PC's again. It solved a real problem. If you add to all this the fact that so many kids interact with the world through a Chromebook or iPad issued by their school, one can see a world where a stadia gaming app or a GeForce Now app is their most convenient gateway to big games. Stadia could still flop if Google doesn't develop and promote it properly, or if people aren't willing to pay enough for the service. I do believe there are people that want stadia, though, and outside of slow internet connections, I don't see why the sharing economy can't extend to gaming PC's.
• d--b 7y ago
  I work remotely. My computer is in New York and I live in Paris. It works very well. I don’t understand the long rant about explaining why people don’t want remote computers. Then Stadia, as a casual gamer I’d be more than happy to pay $2 every now and then rather than paying 300 for a device I don’t buy $60 games for. There you go
  • scott_s 7y ago
    I don't think that's the pricing. The device itself is about $130, $10 a month for the service, and then you will likely pay $20 - $60 for each game. Yes, they will eventually have a catalogue of games like Netflix, but similar to Netflix, it may not have the game you want to play now. See https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-review-gaming-streaming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-r...
    • wildrhythms 7y ago
      Stadia isn't a device; it's a service. There is no "device itself", unless you count the bundle they sold that included a Chromecast, controller, and 3 months of the service + 3 months for a friend. You can play Stadia on an Android phone, Chromecast, or a Chrome browser on a laptop or desktop. The service is free; you pay for the game only. The $10 per month is only for the Plus service or whatever it's called that gives you 4K resolution and 5.1 surround, and presumably some free games/deals based on the marketing. The communication thus far has been shitty, that said.
• ptah 7y ago
  Sunray but for Linux would be awesome Linuxray
• chrischen 7y ago
  What exactly is google doing that OnLive didn't do? I tried OnLive... it worked well. It was just pointless because it didn't really offer any benefits over running games locally.
• crispweed 7y ago
  When considering selling points, everyone seems to be focusing on the advantages of being able to run traditional games without console hardware or delays for installation, but no-one seems to be talking about how something like this could fundamentally change the constraints on multiplayer game design. I wonder what the server side looks like, and whether anyone is working on MMO type products that are designed specifically for this setup..
• someexgamedev 7y ago
  As someone who used to make async multiplayer games I think Stadia is a good fit currently for that style of game. Using it for latency-sensitive AAA games seems like a decade or two too early for the tech. Cloud gaming has huge multiplayer advantages because you can skip the whole network stack and build your game for couch multiplayer, yet it's still playable over the internet. Combine that with the deep pockets of F2P gamers, and Google's existing relationship with these devs via Google Play; I have no idea how they missed this.
• api 7y ago
  Google Stadia belongs to yet another category: products that some people like and want and others hate and hope fail for social/political/economic reasons. AMP and Facebook Libra are other examples of products like this. I hope Stadia fails because if PC gaming dies it will harm consumers broadly by further decimating the high-end PC market and reducing demand for high-end edge device CPUs, GPUs, etc. We do not want a world where all compute belongs to someone else.
• siffland 7y ago
  So it is $129 for the device, $9.99 Per month, $x.xx for the internet connection you require at all time due to no offline play, $x.xx to buy titles that you can only play with said internet connection. At least now you CAN buy games you can play offline with the other consoles and PC. If someone came up with Movies Anywhere for video games so i could buy it once and play on any console i would be cool with this, but 20 years from now when you get that nostalgia and want to pull the Stadia out and play that one game....well you can't (unless it is still around, but then they will pull games from stores due to licensing, maybe because it has that one song on it and it is copyright....). At least with a physical game and ps4 or xbox1 there are usually ways to play without internet on some games. I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked). I think the tech is cool and some people will love it. Not sure if it is what i would want to invest in.
  • chachachoney 7y ago
    >> I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked). It's going to get interesting when they decide to start aggregating and storing in game behaviors, and then selling that data to third parties or using it to augment their incursions into health-care/insurance. It'll get even more interesting when they cooperate with authoritarian states to identify 'problem' citizens based on in-game behaviors or limit the spectrum of possible in-game behaviours within ostensibly open world sandbox environments. I'll leave the predictive policing branch of this prognostication as an exercise for the reader.
• jupp0r 7y ago
  Comparing Stadia to Sun Rays does not make sense. Companies buying Sun Rays did have to pay for the server in the basement. For me it solves an actual problem - I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, but don't have a gaming desktop computer or a TV, just a Macbook. I don't have to spend $2000 on a machine that will be obsolete in 2 years, takes up a ton of space in my house, even when not in use. Why isn't the use case obvious?
• JohnFen 7y ago
  I certainly don't want Stadia. Stadia doubles down on the very things that drove me away from most modern games in the first place.
• jrockway 7y ago
  > And, of course, "run Solaris" just killed the whole thing instantly, so instantly it baffles me how they didn't stop the project on day one. In 2004 nobody could use Linux except programmers— you struggled to run office suites on Linux— and Solaris was one step harder than Linux. I dunno about this. My dad was a research chemist and when I was a kid I would occasionally go into the office and check out the computer. They were all using Unix workstations (Solaris I believe) and seemed to get their work done fine. There was Lotus Notes, there was NCSA Mosaic... all the things you do with your computer today, they did with Unix 25 years ago. My dad wasn't a programmer and neither were his lab-mates. That was just how computers were then. This was not 2004, though, this was like 1995. But I was 10 and figured it out with 10 minutes of screwing around on "take your kid to work day", so maybe it wasn't so complicated that no mere mortal could ever hope to compute in that environment. I agree that office suites circa 2004 were bad. I used Linux all throughout high school and never liked Abiword or the competition (I guess OpenOffice might have been a thing back then). I learned LaTeX and used that. Looking back, I don't think I would have liked Microsoft Word, either. WYSIWYG was a big deal back then, but I didn't really care what I got. (I ended up tweaking LaTeX to double-space and use thin margins to look like Word, since teachers demanded it. I personally didn't care; whatever Knuth decided looked good, I was fine with.) Using Unix or Linux back then was really liberating. I remember that if you wanted to learn C or C++ on DOS/Windows/Mac at the time, you had to spend hundreds of dollars on an IDE (Borland C++? Visual C++? I don't really remember.) Or you could just install Linux, and it was all free. Sure, Emacs had some warts, and wasn't really integrated with GCC... but if you were willing to push through, you could do your homework at home, while your classmates had to stay in the computer lab and do it. I dunno, I don't think it was all that bad. We ended up using the "software runs on a server" model anyway, with web apps. You open Google Docs to type something and if your computer blows up, no worries, you can just keep working from another computer. Very much like the Sun smartcard-based system the author describes, just with more "material design" instead of "some UNIX geeks were excited they figured out how to draw shadows efficiently." What's old is new. Not much has REALLY changed.
• rossmohax 7y ago
  Stadia has a chance of killing cheating for PC gamers (if that can still be called PC gaming of course)
• hypertexthero 7y ago
  Hopefully Stadia encourages more publishers to make games that work across platforms, especially multiplayer games. I think cross-platform play is one of the main reasons Fortnite is so popular. I am skeptical about everything else, especially with the direction Google’s management has steering toward, but curious what will happen. Are more ads and abusive user tracking in games the price of ”free”? Would all ads and tracking really be turned off if paying a monthly or yearly fee? What happens when the network goes down or the service is retired? What happens to modding? Who controls what can or cannot be said, and what can and cannot be criticized, or even mentioned, in a story?
• turtlebits 7y ago
  "Gamers" don't want Stadia. And all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs. It's targeted for those that don't have either, like me. I carry my Pixelbook everywhere and would be nice to play games on it. I don't want another device to carry around and don't have the time or patience to wait for patches/updates or the ridiculous storage requirements games have nowadays. The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?
  • krzyk 7y ago
    Controller and chromecast is for console guys, we laptop owners can use mouse+keyboard + chrome browser to play. But this will be available later, unless you want o throw $130 for just 3 months of Stadia Pro (and a controller+chromecast that will gather dust).
    • turtlebits 7y ago
      You need both to play at launch. Seems more like an early adopter tax - they could have just provided an update to the existing Chromecast Ultra and let you use a Bluetooth controller. Heck, I'd shell out the $130 if was in the form of prepaid credit or something else. I don't want 2 more devices - and I'm not interested in playing on my TV.
  • shinteao 7y ago
    >all the negative reviews of Stadia are by people who already have console/gaming PCs. I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes. So, they might have opinions on what a good gaming experience is. And, if they have issues with Stadia (incl latency, graphical fidelity, and library), then it might be coming from an informed place.
    • vvanders 7y ago
      Yup, also if you look at people who write or have written netcode for a living, it's been pretty obvious where Stadia was heading for a while. You need to be able to reliably hide ~100-200ms of latency for any number of reasons. If you're talking about something that runs over wifi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you. The way you do that is with client side dead-reckoning and/or lock-step simulation with a pre-shared seed. Streaming video eliminates any opportunity to do that and you don't get to buffer frames ahead like Netflix can. There's a reason OnLive folded and I wouldn't be surprised if you see Stadia EoL'd in the next year or two.
• jshaqaw 7y ago
  Stadia interests me. I haven’t played games in a long time because dabbling back into them after decades I don’t want to make a major commitment to buy equipment and keep it up to cutting edge. Plus I really like my iPad form factor for games. At the end of a long work day sitting at a desk in front of a computer I really don’t want to be sitting at a desk in front of a computer.
  • vocatus_gate 7y ago
    I know you said you don't want to purchase equipment and keep it up to date, but the progression of CPU's and GPU's has slowed drastically in the last decade. I easily get 5-6 years out of my gaming rigs now, and build them fairly well specced for $800-1000. Keeping current is significantly less hassle or cost than it was ~10 years ago.
• dmix 7y ago
  Sunray might have failed but there were tons of companies who used Windows thin client machines successfully...Oracle/Larry Ellison made a big deal about it. Obviously they all switched back to fat clients but Sunray wasn't the only one who tried it and some made a lot of money while it lasted.
• jancsika 7y ago
  omg what is with the slow scroll on that site? When I roll the mousewheel or arrow down it moves so slow. What could possibly cause a front-end designer to choose to slow down scrolling like that? omg the whole text is a giant link that takes me to the less readable twitter feed.
• partiallypro 7y ago
  I genuinely just don't see how Google can possibly compete with the gaming catalogs of Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft is already testing xCloud with some positive (and negative) comments. Sony just signed a cloud deal with Microsoft to do better game streaming...I just don't see how Google competes. And given Google's track record in killing products before they can get off the ground, I don't know why users would invest in it.
• awill 7y ago
  There are rumours of a Steam Cloud [0] IMO this would be the best of both worlds. I don't want to purchase games from Google that will only work on Stadia. The ideal solution is to purchase games on Steam that you can play either on a regular PC, or on Steam's Cloud Gaming Service. I'm fine to pay $5-10/mo for Steam Cloud, but I really, really don't want to re-purchase some games again (like I'd have to do with Google), or lose my cloud purchases if either a) Google cancels Stadia, or b) I want to switch to a different cloud. [0]: https://www.resetera.com/threads/rumor-valve-is-working-on-steam-cloud-gaming.151484/ https://www.resetera.com/threads/rumor-valve-is-working-on-s...
  • thrownblown 7y ago
    this already exists, its called nvidia geforce now.
• owaislone 7y ago
  I consider myself a "gamer" and would never ditch my PS4 or PC for Stadia but most of my friends who like to play games casually would love something like Stadia. One of them even purchased the founder edition. Most of them don't want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on consoles and high end PCs to play just for a few hours on every other weekend. It's just too costly for casual gamers. A service like Stadia makes total sense for such people.
  • dijit 7y ago
    I’m a grown up now. Booting my PS4 to play only to be greeted with “40G download required before online play is possible” is what makes me think stadia could take off. The on boarding of consoles is super crappy and the UX of pc gaming is also very inconvenient and is prone to weird issues.
• bloopernova 7y ago
  I wonder how long it is before we see a news story like: "Whole family's Google accounts destroyed because $child tried to hack/cheat in Stadia game"
• p1necone 7y ago
  It was obvious from the start to me that Stadia was not going to succeed. Sure it's totally plausible tech, and it does work relatively well if you have a stable, fast, non data capped internet connection that's close to a data center. But the portion of the population that doesn't have all those things is way too high and the negative PR about Stadia being awful for those people is going to sink it.
• 013a 7y ago
  Stadia is a mess of inconsistencies in strategy that I can't seem to resolve. It provides the closest to an "awesome" experience when wired up on fast, reliable internet. But its also the most interesting in a mobile setting where I can't necessarily have dedicated gaming hardware, but where I'll also have inconsistent WiFi/LTE. Its target market isn't really traditional gamers, instead, I guess, focusing on the untapped segment of casual "gamer-interested" people. But, these people are going to generate FAR less revenue. And, there's a free tier? Why would people who play very casually choose to pay for it? Cloud gaming is an insanely expensive infrastructure investment. What's their revenue plan? In a couple months, xCloud will be out. XBL Gold gives me like three games per month. Game Pass has, like, 200 games including some awesome titles like Gears 5. Unclear how much xCloud will cost, but I'm certain Microsoft is willing to fight on competitive pricing. Why should I buy Cyberpunk on Stadia? Why should anyone? The incumbents have insanely good first-party studios churning out exclusives; they have brand recognition; they have consumer trust; they have the technology and DC footprint; there's no visible plan here to convince anyone that Stadia is the platform to be on, which means their customers won't be loyal. They're giving them no reason to be. Cloud gaming, in general, is pretty cool. I love the tech, and I could see myself using it... but as a value-add to a home setup. I think that's where it'll shine, and that's what xCloud is targeting. My broader point isn't that there aren't people who will find Stadia as a good fit for them, but rather that Stadia isn't going to survive just on those people. Cloud gaming only makes sense as a value-add to a broader platform that can support it, both from a revenue and consumer experience perspective.
• thrownaway954 7y ago
  is it just me? going to the website i can't seem to really find how you purchase games, hook this thing up or even what the benefit is.
• lnanek2 7y ago
  Personally, it seems to fill a niche I'm in. I don't have any high graphics quality gaming systems. The closest I have is: a 5 year old macbook, a Switch, a Quest. Stadia would let me play some of the hi-fi titles out there without buying a more serious console or a newer PC. Hell, even the Witcher novels were fun to read and I'd enjoy trying the games. I ordered a founder's edition Stadia, but haven't received it yet. Biggest drawback to me is that it won't support a higher quality VR headset than my Quest, like the Index, and won't support the latest Half Life game. What if the next Portal is in VR? Then I'll have to buy a PC and Stadia was pointless...
• bscphil 7y ago
  Real twitter link: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762 https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762
• rsweeney21 7y ago
  I want Stadia. A couple of weekends ago I wanted to play games with my kids. We have 4 PS4s and we were going to play Destiny together. The wonderful family time never happened. We spent 2 hours waiting for updates to the PS4 so we could connect to the playstation store to download Destiny. We then spent 3 hours waiting for Destiny to download (60GB IIRC). By the time everything had downloaded and updated the moment was gone. We don't play games often, but when we try to, we spend all the time we had waiting for updates. Stadia solves a real problem.
• madrox 7y ago
  No matter how you look at it, Stadia is going to be an interesting business study in a couple years. It's clear publishers don't care about it. Fun fact: when I last checked, all the publishers that are launch partners all have Google Cloud accounts. I suspect game publishers are in this for the free servers, not because they believe in the platform.
• Grzegrzolka 7y ago
  I'm a lifelong gamer (since 1996), currently have PC that only has weak integrated GPU so I cant play much, but super speedy 500mbs fiber internet connection and 80mbs LTE on the phone. I look like ideal Stadia client, right? Well, no. I'm not interested in slightest, I'm waiting passionately for PS5. Current internet technology (latency) is not enough to make cloud gaming possible, you can instantly feel this 140+ ms of delay. Other than that, Google don't know jack shit about games, you can clearly see it in Stadia announcment conference. Good luck, I give it 1.5 year and nobody will remember what "Stadia" is.
  • kenhwang 7y ago
    The interesting part is it could've worked if Google actually understood gaming. The PS4's remote play capability is more than usable for most games. That pretty much relies on your own uplink speed and hops over residential internet hosted on underpowered hardware. Google is one of the few companies that could've had enough data centers geographically spread out enough where most people's latency is tolerable and game selection is curated to not be latency sensitive. But instead they completely flub both the technical implementation and the pricing model.
• bobloblaw45 7y ago
  To be totally fair I hated the idea of steam when it first came out.
• magwa101 7y ago
  I don't want to dive into the world of gaming, consoles, and expensive machines. Not interested. Stadia as an easy way to try games out? Yeah, I'm in.
• mrob 7y ago
  >I do see two fighting games and two rhythm games (latency hell!) Fighting games benefit greatly from low latency, but rhythm games do not. The important thing with rhythm games is consistent latency, and that can be achieved by adding artificial latency when network latency is low. You can adjust the input timing windows forward or backward to match the latency, and many rhythm games already allow that. High latency like you might get with Stadia will make the feedback the game gives you harder to associate with your performance, but when you're playing well you're primarily paying attention to the input cues, so the game is still perfectly fun and playable.
• scrumbledober 7y ago
  It seems like stadia or something similar would be perfect for simulation games that are often CPU limited and could be pretty latency tolerant. Would love to play Factorio on a stadia like service. Reaction times are not important and frame rate is usually limited by cpu
• balls187 7y ago
  This is a hell of an article. The talk about sunray is intereting with another HN article about FB/MSFT Remote Development. I use Cloud9, after using sublime for nearly 8 years. My dream scenario is my iphone is my computer, and monitors and keyboards are dumb terminals that can stream I/O from my iphone wirelessly/dock.
  • balls187 7y ago
    I'll offer a counter--if we never had the Apple Newton, would we ever have the ipod,Iphone,Ipad?
• kossTKR 7y ago
  Slightly off topic but weird to not see Shadow.tech mentioned. It's a smaller French streaming company where you get a complete VM you can do anything with for an unlimited amount of time. It's not as easy because you will end up spending a little bit of time setting things up compared to a game-only system though. I have used their service and was absolutely blown away _as a casual gamer_. I stream in 1440p 60fps+ with no hiccups and a latency of about 18ms from my laptops. You need a solid connection, no low caps, and a good wireless router but other than that it's pretty amazing how well it works - also i would rather not use Google after their turn towards monopoly in the last years. They are coming out with support for up to Nvidia Titan Tiers so you can have a crazy 3D rendering workstation on the go. On the downside i guess it's not very green to be streaming several terabytes of data each month, also it's beginning of a pretty horrible slippery slope privacy wise. But for "just gaming" or other non privacy/important stuff the "terminal" concept is pretty cool. On a side note does anyone have any CO2/Megabyte calculator? I have had a hard time figuring out how impactful the move to constant HD streaming in a lot of homes is? I slightly remember reading that the internet could use upwards of 1/3 of total power consumption in X amounts of years.
• pier25 7y ago
  That's not true. Stadia does solve a number of problems some people want solved. 1) Faster multiplayer 2) Immediate streaming to Youtube at high quality 3) 4K 60Hz gaming without requiring a high end PC, or even simply gaming without a dedicated gaming device 4) Cross platform gaming so you can seamlessly move from one device to another Nobody really wants to stream games, but moving gaming to cloud solves those problems. It remains to be seen if Stadia can indeed solve the lag issues though.
• squar1sm 7y ago
  Sun was ahead of its time in many ways. I used a Sunblade and never thought of it again until this article and its relation. Interesting. I've thought a lot about zones and Docker. I remember booting a zone for the first time on Solaris (copies the kernel) and was amazed at how fast it booted. It had a lot of the same things (volumes that are mounted). I used to explain Docker as Solaris zones sometimes but no one knows what Solaris is.
• shmerl 7y ago
  One positive result from Stadia can already be observed. More developers are starting to implement Vulkan renderer in their games and custom engines (common engines all have Vulkan renderer for a while already). And not only that, they finally are starting seeing Vulkan as the real common API: Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCqut9tr6iA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCqut9tr6iA > We realised that if we did a port to Vulkan, which is a > renderer that is used on phones and various other stuff, > we get Mac support, we get Linux support, we get support > for things like Google Stadia and so on - it was just > worthwhile to do a Vulkan port. So we started that, > because it's going to be good for Path of Exile players. I suppose they mean translation from Vulkan to Metal with MoltenVK when they mention "Mac support". But that line of thinking is going to become more and more widespread now, thanks to Google throwing their weight behind Vulkan for Stadia. Optimistically, pressure on MS, Sony and Apple will increase to the point where they'll support Vulkan on their walled gardens that now enforce DX, GNM and Metal lock-ins, because developers will demand it. And even if they'll resist, projects like MoltenVK and gfx-rs will help break their lock-in despite such resistance. gfx-rs would need to add Vulkan to GNM translation though. So while I'm not using Stadia due to its idea being basically DRM on steroids, the positive effects from it also exist.
• theseadroid 7y ago
  Car was not a product people wanted when they only wanted faster horses.
• catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
  I loved the sunray description. In a lot of ways this reminds me of Firefox OS. It's really amazing technology but before finding product/market fit, we have to find product/solution fit. Super important to find even the core group of users who really need this. I like Stadia - and I'm a social casual gamer. I play games on my Fire TV lol, and it'd be a convincing argument for a device to bridge the gap to more beefy games, but positioned against Xbox and PS4, I'm not looking to do any sort of heavy gaming
• zinclozenge 7y ago
  ok boomer
  • corodra 7y ago
    LOL At 32 I'm called a boomer because I said to hug a tree. Good job. You're right, let's start chopping down them trees because baby boomers like trees... you cunt.
    • robteix 7y ago
      Can please you calm down? You've been spamming this discussion while getting increasingly hostile. We get it, you don't think people should play as much videogames as they do. Good, we get it.
      • corodra 7y ago
        I'm fascinated by people's reactions. The identity to needing video games absolutely intrigues me. So yea, at this point, it's my vice to poke and prod and better understand how people relate to video games. So... yea, I'm identifying with trying to better understand the psyche of those that identify with needing video games every minute of their lives. That, and I'm actually really curious how many downvotes it takes to get banned.
        • magashna 7y ago
          > trolling to see how many downvotes to get banned And here I was thinking video games were a waste of time! Heyooo
        • maktouch 7y ago
          If you are really trying to understand the psyche, you would be more open, ask more questions, and be less judgy. Telling people to go hug a tree is not how you understand people, and it does make you look bad. I'm in the same boat as you, tho. I'm in the video game streaming industry... I don't understand at all how people actually watch other people play video games, and I do think there's benefit to disconnect.
• scotth 7y ago
  I want it. And now I have it. And I like it.
• jagger27 7y ago
  My hot take is that if the speed of light was 10 times faster I would like Stadia. 20ms of extra latency is unacceptable to me, but 2ms would be fine.
• uhhhhhhh 7y ago
  Unfortunately his view of sunray misses the fact that that is a massive market with a significant use case in govt/healthcare. Sun may have been early and had crap for marketing, but the idea was good and there certainly is a market for it.
• torgian 7y ago
  The problem I see with Stadia: lack of ownership of games and bandwidth. I guess lack of ownership of things, at least for media, is something that is just gonna happen. But, bandwidth, that is a big problem. Especially in the US, where internet is shit in most places. Can't see playing a game over the internet in most of the world. Maybe in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, you could, but not many other places.
  • crooked-v 7y ago
    Also, even where the internet isn't shit, all the major ISPs have implemented 1 TB monthly data caps.
    • torgian 7y ago
      This too, though it's not necessarily true for some countries. I enjoy unlimited bandwidth in Taiwan. I've played online games using my phone as a hot-spot (not ideal, but it's possible here). Honestly, I hope Stadia fails partially due to this, and other potential issues that come with that service. Stadia is like Audiobooks or E-Books managed by a central database. It's all well and good until someone decides to cancel those services forever (Microsoft actually did this recently)
• Animats 7y ago
  From a game developer point of view, it's terrifying. If you thought that dealing with Nintendo or Valve was tough, imagine dealing with Google. "The biggest complaint most developers have with Stadia is the fear that Google is just going to cancel it"[1] You don't even get to see the terms and conditions unless you apply to be a developer and are accepted. That's scary. Maybe the big guys get better terms. Then there's the Google "I am altering the deal" approach to terms. Google already has a cloud-hosted game product - Improbable's Spatial OS, a back-end system for large MMOs. Improbable raised about $2 billion to develop it, and it's used only by a few indy developers, two of whom launched, got some users, then shut down their game. Cost too much. Runs only on Google's servers. There are some games in development for it that might launch someday. (I liked the Improbable technology concept, but they spent so much VC money developing it that it's now too expensive to use. The investors are going to have to take a haircut.) [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the-biggest-concern-with-stadia-is-that-it-might-not-exist/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the...
• RockmanX 7y ago
  if google says you want it, you better want it
• rawoke083600 7y ago
  Gheesh I would def want stadia ! I no longer have to fret over which bodypart to sell for the latest in graphics cards or wonder should I rather go the console route. Which version of WINE should I try to use today. I think if the Stadia experience works(technically speaking) it might just be the "new way" and make the "old way" well feel old ! Like Uber(the concept not the cmpy). Prev I had to look up a taxi's company number... phone them and tried to tell a person what my address is (keep in mind in my country we have 11 official languages, can you imagine the accents and trying to correctly spell your address over the phone), after that I have to phone them a few times to ask "Where are you" etc... I hope cloud gaming will be the new thing ! I can't keep up buying graphics cards and lugging my desktop to my gf's house. Google please make Stadia work !!
• mikedilger 7y ago
  Before that Sun tried the JavaStation, also an attempt to return to the mainframe/terminal paradigm. Management was stuck on the idea that such a paradigm was the only solution for Sun as a company.
• sidcool 7y ago
  I think the current version of Stadia is just the beginning. Eventually most big techs will offer cloud gaming. It's going to be glitchy for some time. I am very optimistic on the future of stadia. People giving negative reviews seem to be missing the long term vision. I hope the naysaying does not discourage Google, Microsoft or even Apple.
• dehrmann 7y ago
  This brings back memories. My college had a bunch of Sun Rays (or a similar Sun product) in the CS labs. I TAed for a classes that used them. Non-CS majors hated them. And vi.
• mirimir 7y ago
  Actually, aren't Google Docs and Office 365 basically Sunray? With a GUI, of course. But still ...
• est 7y ago
  News at 11: PCI out performs fiber connection over public Internet
• ksec 7y ago
  I disagree with the reasons that this article put forward. >I think the answer's obvious. Because they designed the product backward. They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?". Sun started with: "What can we build?" Both the case study with Solaris and Stadia failure has nothing to do with wants or needs. I actually want Solaris features of Thin Client, and the magic it describe where its state lives on Big Computer. Along with Stadia's idea of streaming games. Both of them are perfect in concept, I want them! The problem is the experience. Apple didn't start if it could or not, they ask if the User Experience will be great. And I cant think of a product or services where latency is not part of the User Experience. Both Solaris and Stadia's experience so far is simply not good enough, and for me it might never be good enough. Solaris might have nailed the Thin Client Desktop technology, but its UI along with no quality apps, no one wants it. These apps and ecosystem are all part of the experience. Stadia are also good in concept, in practice the latency and graphics quality just put people off. And the trend is in Mobile Gaming, when was the last time you heard Mobile Network Operators said they have abundant of bandwidth? And it is the same with VR Gaming. If VR Gaming failed now it is not because the build or want problem. We WANT VR Gaming, the problem is the technology we have right now doesn't bring the experience we want just yet. It is like Pre iPhone era Smartphone. If the experience were good, people will buy it, if it is not, they wont. It will all sort itself out.
• touchpadder 7y ago
  If Stadia will be free then why is Google charging money? Are they short on cash? No. They want to limit the majority of reviews to fanboys who buy into "what it can become" narrative. On top of that it will not become free.
• Grue3 7y ago
  >and I've never heard of anyone other than Sun using it Well, I happened to have used it. This entire post gave me flashbacks. I was studying in Moscow and was too poor to afford my own PC, and when I bought one I still didn't have an Internet connection, so I was mostly using a computer room in a certain educational organisation. And they had all those Sun thin clients, and that awful-looking UI and Opera browser (back when it had ads). There were some ancient computers with text-only displays as well. It was definitely an experience.
• lazydon 7y ago
  When I saw the domain (th(e) reader) next to this post, I for a while thought it was a Google reader clone that's going to be lamenting about it. As in Google Reader was a product people actually wanted but it no longer exists as opposed to Google Stadia. Ah, how much I miss Google Reader to make this weird connection.
• rogerkirkness 7y ago
  Stadia will clearly win, and people's stockholm syndrome about local consoles will melt away the way it did for other rejections of cloud. Local compute will become a niche.
• wkearney99 7y ago
  The controller is not very good. It's in-between the PS4 and XB1 controllers and just a little off to be unsatisfying to use.
• wkearney99 7y ago
  The bigger hassle is adding users. Apparently, right now, before Xmas, there's no way to add users without buying more hardware kits?
• bigboi222 7y ago
  STADIA TRAVELS ACROsS ScrEeNS
• bigboi222 7y ago
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