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.

I think streaming gaming is doomed but that Sunblade system they are describing sounds really cool for casual computing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, aren't Google Docs and Office 365 basically Sunray?

With a GUI, of course. But still ...

Car was not a product people wanted when they only wanted faster horses.

To be totally fair I hated the idea of steam when it first came out.

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.

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.

Sunray but for Linux would be awesome Linuxray

I want it. And now I have it. And I like it.

::yawn::

I get the point, but this is mostly conjecture.

News at 11: PCI out performs fiber connection over public Internet

if google says you want it, you better want it

I want it.

The author means that she doesn't want it. I want Stadia and everything that it brings.

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.

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

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.

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

    > 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Stadia has a chance of killing cheating for PC gamers (if that can still be called PC gaming of course)

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

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.

> 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.

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.

Real twitter link: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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"

The bigger hassle is adding users. Apparently, right now, before Xmas, there's no way to add users without buying more hardware kits?

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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?

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..

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.

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.

I'm with you. I'm a gamer, but I'm also a software engineer that travels 75% of my time for work. When I travel I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Extreme Gen2 running Ubuntu.

For me the idea of being able to grab a smaller form factor ultrabook but still be able to do a little gaming in the evening during the work week is massively appealing. Of course the performance would have to be "good enough".

When I am actually at home and have my full rig available I would not use Stadia...but I do see a use case for Stadia (for me).

If Google starts renting games it's competition for other mass market paradigms. Buying digital downloads will be niche. I have a balls to the wall gaming PC and plenty of consoles, however, I don't want to spend 90$ every other week to see the hot new game everyone is talking about. $5 for a weekend rental is great for me (matches blockbusters old $4.75 weekend rental fee). A little lag won't be an issues especially considering most new games are story driven cakewalks anyway.

>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.

I had some qualms about the rest of your post but this is where you really lost me. You just described a DOA business model.

This. Stadia is about convenience and price not about bringing a 'new' gaming experience with exclusive titles and what not. This will be the first time in over 10 years I will be able to play up to date games as it just doesn't make sense to me to buy hardware dedicated for gaming if it costs more than a chrome cast and a controller.

I'm pretty much the perfect audience for Stadia.

I have three HDTVs on my house, none of which are 4K and I don't plan on upgrading unless one of them bites the dust. I imagine that I'll do most of my playing on my phone or at the office during lunchtime (in the browser), but it's nice to quickly "deploy" Stadia to each TV I have by attaching a $69 Chromecast Ultra.

I don't want "stuff" in my house in the form of game discs and consoles. I'm not a collector. I don't engage in a second-hand market. And I can't imagine myself in 10 years being nostalgic about games that i played in my 30s. I don't really care that I'm just "licensing" digital copies of games and that it might go away at some point.

Over the years I've occasionally seen a game that I might be interested in—I just want to be able to drop $50 on it and play half-way through until I lose interest.

Stadia gives me all of that. Maybe some day I'll get "serious" about gaming again and want a full-fledged console. In the mean time though, I'm happy to pay $80 for a controller and $10/month (until it's free) for Stadia.

If you consider yourself a "gamer", then there are definitely better options for you than Stadia. But for me, this is perfect.

I agree that there is something to cloud gaming that is highly attractive. For example, it would be great to throw a controller into your backpack and have full access to your AAA games to play (though hotel wifi isn't exactly super great)

Having said that, when reviewing it, there is a balance between recognizing the future and taking into account present realities.

Consoles don’t require you use a TV, both the PS4 and Xbox One support remote play options over your LAN or the Internet.

Netflix streams consumable media. Sure, it is nice if it starts playing the movie the moment you click play, but having it buffer a few seconds at the start isn't a complete disaster preventing you to enjoy the evening. And once you are watching, the network can be pretty unreliable as long as on average it can succeed in downloading enough in advance to cover glitches. You can even use a TV to watch Netflix in total comfort, blissfully unaware some of these tale up to seconds to render the screen on the reception of a new frame. So you're watching a frame that was send out by the Netflix edge cache server at your ISP 5 seconds ago, so what?

Gaming is different.

You will have noticed gaming equipment like monitors, keyboards, mice, network-cards, routers, ... all advertising and competing on latency, in the x ms range.

This is because for many games, the reaction speed by which your actions are delivered to the game server and update the game world and that new world-state is delivered to the players, that round trip, is crucial. It is very hard to upgrade your reflexes, and you have no control over what the game server or the ISP/Internet does, but you can shave of crucial milliseconds through equipment choices under your control.

Now imaging getting the most kick-ass gaming PC, but you can only play on it to through the slowest and most unreliable keyboard, mouse and monitor connection (by an order of magnitude) ever, because that PC is across the country from you.

Now Google could in theory move the PC closer to you, like curbside or even in your basement. But the closer to you, the less optimal it becomes for other gamers as it moves further away from them and the business model needs those others to timeshare that PC to make it affordable.

The latency problem is not the same for all games or genres. Competitive FPS or MOBA's will be very sensitive to latency, while e.g. older MMO's or turn based strategy games can be far more forgiving.

Netflix is a good comparison because google will need to secure rights for AAA games, and some games don't appear in all platforms.

Fortunately, a user can install Steam/GOG/Origin whatever and just pay for a single game, unlike video streaming platforms.

In terms of pricing, 9$99 for 4K/60Hz games is 120$/y; if you buy two AAA games (around 59$) it's already the same price, so in the end the appeal is NOT having a beefy computer to play whatever game you'd like. My guess is that hardcore games will have their own PCs, console gamers prefer TVs but the "casual" gamer may be attracted depending on the catalog of games.

edit: it seems you have to buy most of the games too? So google is basically renting a gaming PC with a higher latency.

> consoles force me to use a TV, Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom.

PS4 supports streaming to computers on the same network eg you mac.

I always assumed the Xbox offered that too.

The problem is that cloud gaming already exists and many providers did a better job than Google. Even the latency shouldn't be an issue, I've cloudgamed to a DC in the netherlands with 2ms of latency but apparently somehow Google manages to fuck that up somehow.

I doubt Google will continue Stadia, the press is already bad, the product is bad, it'll likely be dusted in a few years, leaving the product owners out of a product and their money.

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.

I want to like Stadia but I can't, not in its current form.

I'm a bit weary to shell out $60 for a game that I may or may not have access to a few years from now when the service is shut down or something.

Now, if the Stadia license came with a Steam key for the same price, that would be really different. I would have a fallback to play games I bought in a "traditional" way.

What about OnLive? oh ...

you could get red dead + a used ps4 for probably less than 150 and resell it when you're done without much of a loss, or just give it away as a gift. you could even rent both the game and the console for probably less than the cost of playing a degraded version with stadia (9.99 + the cost of the game+ bandwith caps)

>Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom steam and ps4 both support remote play, i assume xbox has something similar as well.

and besides all of that, once you beat red dead and cyberpunk, how many similar big ticket games are being pumped out at a fast enough rate for you to justify maintaining a subscription? assuming it takes you maybe one month to slowplay through a game, is the AAA machine even putting out enough(computationally intensive but not greatly affected by poor latency) titles to keep people around?

My local library not only has a huge game selection, they will ship games from within the library network to a library closest to me. It's basically Blockbuster for games, but free. New games too, it's how I've played any PS or Switch exclusives for the past few years.

>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.

But it won't, because if 'gamers' and teenagers don't want it, people like you won't be enough to support it.

> Stadia is the first offering that matches my needs of a Netflix for games

It is by far not the first (Onlive, Gakai, etc.) and it is not a subscription like Netflix but monthly fee + buying games.

Red Dead Redemption 2 lists a Geforce GTX 770 as a system requirement. That you can get for around 90 bucks.

Long term vision is death to ownership, resale, game preservation, and quality.

I think it would be helpful to broaden your horizons a bit. Everyone is talking about Stadia; whether it will be good or not, whether it will eventually see long-term success. These are very boring questions. The more interesting question is whether cloud gaming will see success over the long term.

Every major player, minus Nintendo, is entering or already in this market. Most notably, Microsoft is releasing xCloud very soon, and PSNow already exists. You can go play God of War, a PS4 game, on your PC, literally today (unfortunately, no Mac support yet). Its $10/month. No one talks about this!

Realistically, the cloud gaming market will become a utility, just like the cloud itself. Who can provide the most datacenters as close as possible to large customer bases? Who's technology provides the best user experience? Who is available on the most screens? These are all questions that multiple major players can have great answers to. Stadia was "early" (though, Playstation was the earliest, and its not even close; they purchased Gaikai in 2012 and OnLive in 2015, they're so far ahead that Google wasn't even thinking about this when Sony was actually selling it). But a player being early means nothing if this thing that Stadia released today is in the state that its in; they need years to iterate on it.

So, what will differentiate? The Games! This is the Hard Problem in this space. Not networking. Not DC locations. Games!

The choice isn't just "do I want to play RDR2 for super cheap with decent quality on Stadia, or in great quality but a $500 upfront fee on my X1X". There's a third choice there: Should I play it on PSNow? xCloud?

And, realistically, yeah its a very fluid market. I could play on any of them. But Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are destroying the third-party AAA game development space. Their first party studios are insanely good, seeing billions in investment and new acquisitions. They have proprietary world-class technology that they only share internally (example: the Decima engine used in Horizon: Zero Dawn was used for Death Stranding, and is widely considered to be among the most technically advanced engines in the world right now (though, Kojima isn't an SIE Studio, so maybe its a bad example)). Point being: if I pay for Game Pass on Xbox, and I'm a big fan of their exclusives, then RDR3 comes out and I can play it on xCloud, I'm going to buy that on Xbox. There's gravity to these platforms, and that gravity comes from the titles where I have to go to xCloud to play.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has the most measured and strongest position in cloud gaming. At E3, he said that he sees it as just one avenue where people will play games. In some situations, it makes sense. For some people, it makes sense (though, those people like you will never play games as much as people who have consoles/gaming PCs). So, they will build it. They have the technology and DC footprint. But, Stadia's downfall will be in their all-in approach, combined with their lack of revenue strategy and lack of first-party exclusives to build gravity.

Exactly, they have other motivations to make this work. Imagine only needing a ChromeOS laptop or Android phone to play the latest exciting games. I feel like Stadia might be the tipping point to make general computing a 100% streamed experience.

People would no longer need to buy expensive devices to: 1) browse the web 2) do basic office work 3) watch TV/video 4) edit/store images and, 5) gaming... leaving traditional desktops and laptops marginalized for only those people that need special custom software.

It’s cool to have options. Hope Stadia works out and a lot of people enjoy it. There’s something really fun about building a pc and overclocking it and modding the games though :-) Also, having all your mods and saves on your own backups is great too.

That being said, it’s quite perplexing that a 1080ti can’t keep a stable 60fps in 1080p on a game built on unity on ultra settings reliably. For instance, The Outer Worlds. If Stadia can crack that, they’ll make a _lot_ of money.

Well hardware for ultrabooks is still a bit anemic when it comes to gaming...but there are some 1650 equipped ultrabooks which look somewhat promising (Razer Stealth and MSI Prestige). As you point out there, are also some new AMD chips that might be make a splash in the space...

But with Linux gaming is a bit of a two fold problem since Linux support for the games you want to play is also a question. Between Steam, Proton (via Steam), and Lutris (Wine) there is pretty good coverage...but there is still a lot of ground to go. This is where something like Stadia has some appeal (at least for me).

On top of all that, Google has said that they plan to roll out over 7500 edge computing clusters just for Stadia, all for tackling the latency problem. (Not clear if those clusters can be put in existing Google facilities or not.) Having so many edge clusters runs counter to the ability to amortize costs by ensuring fully subscribed hardware usage. Each edge cluster will be as costly as the required peak usage for each location. And I imagine Stadia will have a very distinct pattern of peaks and troughs of usage relative to local time.

Sounds like we need a startup that offers mobile flying datacenters!

Sharing without comment: https://twitter.com/GenePark/status/1196488999524802562

The latency for a few people involved did actually exceed a second.

The problem is you need the latency for the nearest Google DC with graphic cards in servers which might not be your nearest Google DC at all. And Google probably fucked up other things too, considering the amount of fail in thsi product.

That type of thing is alright for action inputs like shooting, running, etc. I've yet to use a game streaming service, including Steam Link inside my own house, that doesn't make first-person camera movement nauseating.

Er... Was 2001 the last time you gamed on a computer?

All those issues are solved in modern day pc gaming. Even GOG with its drm free games automatically updates and syncs your games, and even supports beta channels. Also, I don't recall the last time I had a OS related problem more complex than "update your graphic card driver".

On consoles this is even more of a non issue.

Steam automatically updates your games. Windows 10 automatically installs updates for your system. Chocolatey automatically updates your apps. And your driver software automatically updates your drivers if you choose. Everything on my computer automatically updates without my intervention unless I choose to intervene right now. With GNU/linux it's even easier with package managers. Same with Mac.

Consoles solved the sysadmin problem decades ago.

Stadia isn't going to give you the visual quality of a high-end gaming machine so that's a bad comparison. 4k at 60 FPS doesn't mean anything if there is lag and compression artifacting.

Stadia is like a 960 GTX equivalent quality for the free tier and a 1080 GTX for the 4k tier. Let's not kid ourselves about the level of hardware power that one gets from this service.

Not necessarily if you factor in some sort of impact for the slightly degraded experience they'll be offering you. You and Google may buy the same gaming pc and clearly they'll have lower costs, but that doesn't mean that your experience playing locally on that machine is the same as the experience of a streamed game on that machine. To compare apples to apples you'd have to compare the kind of machine you'd need to replicate the streamed experience, and that would very likely be a cheaper computer, so it's really an empirical question.

The high end PC customer can keep upgrading frequently, while Google will need to upgrade their entire data center to offer the top experience every few months. They will settle for a reasonable good/great experience for their user base, while the High end PC owner will always be above the Stadia standard setup.

So it's not that Google's cost is higher than the high end PC owner, it's just that the high end PC owner is willing to throw more money at it to stay on top compare to what Google is willing to throw at its entire user base.

"Back in 2020 I sometimes had to choose between playing video games at 1080p and going to play outside because my parents didn't want to subscribe to the 100 M net connection, you kids today don't know how tough we had it." "Really gramps? I know 1080p looks terrible but how could they threaten you with the outside?" "Well the outdoors was less of a scorched hellscape back then. "

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)

Wouldn't that require a decent graphics card, largely negating the point?

Microsoft is hedging, because they're behind the two leaders (Sony, then Nintendo. Lets not get ahead of ourselves here). Whether they're genuine or have ulterior motives is irrelevant, but you should watch some of Phil Spencer's interviews; it feels very genuine.

Stadia's business model is identical to every other game platform's business model; percent of sale. So, to be clear about this; you're suggesting that Stadia can support a global DC footprint with massively expensive silicon and networking, off of the same revenue stream that Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, EA Origin, etc all already utilize, these companies who don't have infrastructure investments of the same magnitude or clearly plan to have a more distinct subscription category to support it? The economics don't make sense. They have options: sell ads, get rid of the free tier, create a pay-as-you-go paid tier based on time played, shut down, etc; but none of these look like the Stadia people are excited about today.

Microsoft also has first party titles. They own some of the strongest IPs in the history of gaming (Halo, Gears, Forza, Minecraft). They have the most powerful consoles. They run sales all the time. Doesn't matter; the X1 was the poorest performing console this generation.

Creating new gaming studios is difficult. Creating games is difficult. Creating great games consistently is a feat only a half-dozen studios in the world have figured out. Games that sell consoles generally come from creative teams with VAST cohesive industry and technical experience, not from new studios.

Halo 1, 2, and 3 were fantastic; then, Microsoft formed 343 Industries to build Halo 4 and 5, threw a billion dollars at them, and they were a shadow of the former games. Stardew Valley was made by ONE GUY with no money, and some estimates put his revenue between $50-$100M. Anthem was made by an insanely experienced studio (Bioware) with massive amounts of cash, a deadline 6 years out, and a proven history of successful titles; it sucks. God of War (2018) was made by an insanely experienced studio (Santa Monica Studio), with massive amounts of cash, a deadline 6 years out, and a proven history of successful titles, and it is widely considered among the best games released in the past decade.

There's no pattern to why a game will be successful. Its not about manpower, or money, or talent, or anything. Stadia Game Studios probably won't make anything capable of driving meaningful revenue in the next 5 years. Maybe they'll get lucky. They probably won't.

Given that plane Internet is generally satellite based with at minimum 300ms latency and at most 25MB/sec for all 150+ passengers on the plane, I’m guessing pretty bad. Even if it’s not terrible and unusable, I’m guessing it’ll be blocked fairly quickly like most streaming video providers are now.

Maybe one day the airlines will offer Starlink based broadband on-board. Then you might have a chance.

I couldn't find anything on Google's sites that clarify this point either way. But this is in Wikipedia's entry for Stadia (for whatever that's worth):

> Stadia is not similar to Netflix, in that it requires users to purchase games to stream via Stadia rather than pay for access to a library of games. While the base service will be free, a Pro tier monthly subscription allows users to stream at higher rates for larger resolutions, and the offer to add free games to their library.

The context here is obviously PC/console gamers. No one is clamouring for Candy Crush to be brought to Stadia. There may be overlap, but the mediums are completely different.

In my experience, it's difficult to get Google to hold up that warranty. When my Nexus 6P started to bootloop, Google refused to repair the product at all nor refund me the money (I purchased directly from Google and I did have copies of all receipts including pictures of the original package it was delivered in).

The bots don't care if they decide the warranty doesn't apply.

If Google decides to just not refund the game price or offer ownership in other ways, what are you going to do? You didn't buy a game, you bought a license to stream the game from Google's servers. You don't own anything and Google owes you squat.

100% right, and they've been panned for this.

The result is a 16" Macbook that's thicker, larger, and has an "old-style" scissor switch keyboard.

Even the new Airpods pro finally have silicone tips.

Apple has learned the hard way, and looks like they're finally turning around a bit. Maybe even the next iPhone will have USB-C?

I don't own a single Apple device but would consider an iPad (a base model.. I don't need/want an expensive "Pro") if it had USB-C.

Is that true though? When I buy (and install) a game on steam it gets put into a downloads folder with an executable I can use outside of Steam to start the game. Are you saying that Steam would be legally obligated to delete this directory should they go out of business?

Or multi-month long business trips (I know a lot of people in this situation); if I was in that situation, you bet I would take some form of video game system with me. I already do when I travel alone, even if just for the 1-2 hours at the hotel between dinner and bed (I've always hated nightlife, the way most people understand it). In fact these hours usually become the most relaxing moments of the whole trip.

You must be talking about sc2, in remastered theres only one global ladder and when you do hit koreans, if the turn rate drops due to latency, many will just leave the game.

Some XBox and PS4 games support keyboard and mouse. I don't think this is much of a differentiator for/against Stadia.

You can buy a Xim to use KB+M on Xbox or PS4. Works pretty well but it’s kind of like cheating for shooter games.

Their competition includes Nvidia, that is testing a streaming service that allows you to buy games through other platforms (Steam, Uplay, maybe others) and stream them from the cloud.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/

I didn't care about latency on old tile based games, but now that everything is 3D with smooth scrolling and animations the latency makes a difference.

Google Play Music is heading to the graveyard and replaced by the worse YouTube Music. Nexus is long dead.

Nvidia can say they're going to break the laws of physics all they want. They're not going to though. It could be feasible for certain classes of games where the options for "what thing can the player do next" are very limited, but literally anything with analog controls just can't work like that.

im still very skeptical that predictive rollback is gonna feel very good to play with, ggpo is still probably the best existing version of rollback netcode and it still gets pretty fucky when it has to roll back

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TZdY9_XHo

Well it won't work on games that are designed around the reflex of players. Unless they somehow provide an EEG on the primal motor cortex, which I would be very happy to see :-)

Imagine if we had this conversation 10 years ago:

- I don't like streaming services, because content can disappear/the quality is lower/...

- Streaming doesn't prevent you from owning your own DVDs/BDs, nor will it

And now in 2019, there are so many films and tv shows only released through streaming services, and never sold on disks.

Only if you assume Stadia will be around seven years from now. You're essentially talking about spending $60 on game licenses, plus $130 on hardware, that may ultimately no longest exist in a few years.

At least I can reasonably assume an XBox One S digital purchased today will still "basically work" five-seven years from now. I won't assume that about Stadia.

So you’re saying it’s now... stable?

Chromecast Audio, Nexus, Nest? Even the Pixel, their "flagship" phone, has only gotten 3 years of updates, ending this year [0]. That, and just look at the YouTube debacle and how they treat creators. Fool me once...

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/rip-og-pixel-google-...

> What service has Google shut down that you paid for?

Google Play Music will soon get replaced by the arguably worse YouTube Music, so that. I paid for GPM for years and when the YT Music switch happened and they announced my uploads and library won't get migrated for a while (with uploads maybe not at all), I left for Spotify. Not to mention how much worse YT Music is compared to GP Music.

> I sure hope you don't use Steam!

Steam has existed for the past 17 years, and Gabe Newell has gone on record saying that if Steam ever shut down they would look into unlocking all protected games. Even if that turns out to be impossible I still trust Valve in their industry way more than I trust Google in an industry they just entered.

Nowadays a great deal of Steam games don't even use Steam's DRM features and will run happily without Steam, or with a stub "steam_api.dll".

Steam doesn't take away any control over its games from me. You can mod any part of your game and still run it. Hell, you can turn off updates for any game and still run it via Steam (not breaking DRM if it uses it).

400 miles is pretty Pretty close? That's more than the distance between Paris and Amsterdam but yes you are right. Encoding a video and decoding it introduces additional latency even on the same machine.

>The fact is that Stadia makes it possible to play games on devices where it previously was impossible is pretty compelling. (even if it's at 720p).

It makes it possible to play modern AAA games on devices where it previously was impossible.

That's a dramatic difference. There are plenty of incredible gaming experiences you can have on low-powered hardware, without needing a clunky streaming-as-a-service infrastructure to back them up. They just won't be the latest FIFA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Battlefield: Modern Duty.

Honestly, I tend to think that having environments that don't have full fat AAA games available is good for the gaming market as a whole. It opens up markets for indie developers and new formats. I'm thinking of the Wii and Switch for comparison-- if they had been built with the same spec hardware as their competitors, they would have been flooded with ports of the big multi-platform franchises, rather than the unique experiences they're known for.

Sonme of my favourite gaming experiences include playing Zangband on an already-obsolete Pentium II in 2003, and Cave Story on a pre-Atom netbook starring a 900MHz Celeron-M.

Do you mean the Xbox Game Pass? That doesn't offer streaming it seems.

> Also, when those other streaming services are at least somewhat established there will most likely be content fragmentation soon after, i.e. Microsoft (published) games only on "Project xCloud" etc. like we're seeing in Video Streaming currently.

That's been the norm of the gaming industry for ages. Mario, Sonic, Halo, etc - its always been fragmented. You have to pay for an expensive console to get at the exclusives.

Streaming services have the potential to improve that situation - assuming most are easy to subscribe/unsubscribe as video streaming services.

> You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.

You're banking on their goodwill here, not any actual obligation they might have.

> Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely. I get that you _want_ this but considering you already don't have it, I don't understand why this would be taken out only on Stadia.

Is this so? There's a huge aftermarket of games for a reason. People buy old consoles, from NES to XBox 360s, all the time. A lot of people prefer physical media for this reason too.

Even for heavily DRM-d content, it's just a matter of technical skill and people with the will to crack a game to catch up to the techniques used to keep it locked. With streaming there wouldn't be anything to crack. You simply don't have the game, period.

Yeah,they will just disappear. You may be able to get save games, maybe. OnLive (which was great, btw) just went poof, gone.

> But you don't actually know that. You're paying for a license for the game and even though they're likely covered in the event of a shutdown, it's unlikely they could do it without giving back _something_.

But you don't actually know that :-P. You are assuming goodwill, i am assuming badwill. Between the two, the former is nice to have, but the latter is something i'd really want to avoid. So i am focusing on the latter one as i'd rather avoid the negative.

(and all that ignoring other issues, e.g. the version that they may decide to give out is inferior to the original version)

> Does it happen all the time?

Yes, even successful services get shut down all the time - even for reasons that would logically make no sense to an outsider (e.g. internal politics). I have seen way too many software stores (for games mostly) disappear to trust any (and not just indie stuff, e.g. Stardock developed Impulse - where i used to have an account - which was later bought by GameStop only to be shut down a few years later - losing my stuff with it).

Google's services even more so, they still do shut down paid stuff.

> Do you want PS Now to fail? xCloud? I really don't understand the polarization here.

AFAIK PS Now (i don't know about xCloud but i guess the same) are about games that you can also play in the console itself, it doesn't replace the console. My issue is with not having control over the game files so that i can keep my own copy in case things disappear.

Though FWIW i am not into consoles at all, exactly because of those restrictions they have. But, at least AFAIK, despite the restrictions it still is possible to preserve console games (see Konami's P.T. which if it was done with Stadia now it'd be gone forever).

> It seems like so many _want_ it to fail because of _theoretical_ issues. It's so bizarre.

The problem here is that you can only stop something while it is being at a theoretical level because after that it'd be too late.

> Why not, you know, just let it compete on its own merits?

Because its own merits are

> You already do not have this freedom. Even with physical games if you let the device connect it can be changed or prevented from working entirely.

...no? The majority of the games i have are DRM free from GOG, Itch.io, Humble Store, GamersGate and i have manually downloaded them on my own storage and update them if i deem the update necessary (at least GOG does publish changelogs after each update). They are completely under my control. Though even with my Steam library (which is also large mainly because at the past i wasn't thinking too much about these issues, though i do try to keep offline copies whenever possible) i still have control over the files themselves - it is how i install mods and custom patches for otherwise broken (yet entertaining - see VtMB before it was released on GOG) games.

I don't know what Stadia does, but it could

* downsample when connection is poor * extrapolate future frames from past frames, either locally or by sending bonus frames from server.

Unless I misunderstand their model is not like the companies you mention since you still have to buy the games. Imagine paying monthly for Netflix and still having to pay full price for every movie you watch without owning it.

The problem is that it is about "me" (and others who think like me) because what everyone else does also affects what i get to experience myself thanks to market forces. In other words, if everyone goes Stadia (or a Stadia-lookalike) then the market (both for software but also - and most importantly - for hardware) will vanish. At best it will only be available for very high prices, just for the rich few, but i'm not rich so that wouldn't mean anything to me.

Before you get too scared, please watch this ads sponsored by Ad, Inc between your corridor transitions. Btw, your game developer didn’t intend that at all, its just for our platform to be profitable.

You can remove it by going premium (tracking not included) for only $RTX3080Ti/year.

High quality graphics aren't that important to make good games. And any graphical improvement is having diminished returns. The jumps between PS1->PS2 and PS2->PS3 (using console because it's static comparison points, but it applies to PC game too) were noticeable and huge, but now each new generation bring smaller and smaller diminishing returns. And then there's all the games that don't go for cutting-edge graphics.

> I'll suggest a longer term vision: no individual consumer will be able to afford any hardware needed to use anything more than a thin client.

Compute power has become cheaper and cheaper over time. If you just look at the ridiculous powerhouses smartphones have become in a very short time, it is apparent that will not happen.

Also, consoles are pretty damn affordable - certainly compared to how expensive console/pc games are. Major game technology updates are mainly driven by new console generations. You might get some extra resolution or niche technologies on an ultra-highend PC, but the main underlying tech of modern games is still tailored to the current generation of consoles. I own a i7 with a 2080ti - and sure, games might look a bit better than their console versions (if available at all) - the game on my 4k+ desktop PC is still essentially the same that I could run on a $300 PS4.

Ready Player One movie comes to mind; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)

I had similar reaction when initially thinking through such a centralized architecture - and made me understand that a decentralized computational infrastructure ("personal computers") is a necessary failsafe to prevent against pitfalls of such centralization; similar reason as to why I think mesh network technology should potentially be everywhere, however not used as a default network.

These are the systems and failsafes, along with canaries we build into systems, that we need to educate everyone about - so the public can clearly understand and have a document available for them be able to refer to.

Seeing how, imho, the best games of all time were all made in the 1990s, I don't think gaming is all that reliant on powerful hardware.

Yeah, that is basically the end game i was thinking at with my last moment. I just didn't want to start with this because it'd sound too tinfoil-hatty :-P (and some already told me i am assuming too much :-P).

but then you've probably already invested in some game pc/console. not one of the mythical people referenced here

Yea, like eating a salad and a Big Mac are the same class of food as well. Feels so weird since it's so obvious. A salad and a Big Mac. They're both food, thus they are both equally nutritious.

Go out and get some sun.

Right now, $130 is the only edition. I think the one you're talking about comes out next year.

> The regular 1080p stadia is free

Will be free, somewhere in 2020

... and isn't available.

dualshock 4 = 66 dollars (I know you can find it for cheaper, but that's the price on playstation.com) chromecast ultra = 70 dollars

so I am going to stand by my original comment ;)

Hey, when I first visited Vegas, landed at noon, drunk by 2, vomiting by 4, asleep by 5, woke up with a hangover at 10. First time I went from sober, to drunk to hungover in the same calendar day. Fat Tuesdays margaritas man... so good... but will knock you clean the fuck out like Tyson.

But... seriously though... I like video games too. But not that much. The whole escape reality, I get it. I enjoy it too. But, if you are escaping reality more often than you are in it... that's a problem.

Movies are an easy example: Do you want to watch the original ending of Return of the Jedi, the special edition ending, the revised ending post-prequels, the 4:3 edition or the widescreen edition? There are plenty of reasons to want to keep a copy of the version of the experience you enjoyed and want to experience again.

Movies still come out on disc because they're good stocking stuffers for the holidays, and you can carve out a pretty good margin selling box sets of film anthologies.

Plus Blu-rays can be sold globally. What's available in one country's Netflix often doesn't line up with what's available in a different country. Plus, a good chunk of the US movie-watching population does not have reliable broadband access.

Game developers would have more to gain from a streaming-only model:

1. It's expensive to develop for multiple platforms. If you can get people to buy into streaming, you theoretically have only one hardware target.

2. Streaming is more effective at enforcing DRM for games. You can make a recording of a movie you're playing on Netflix, but games would require remote execution which can't be copied.

Just recently lost a major syncing ability and became less useful.

Amazon is a bad fit for this use case. Amazon's value proposition is: "you are making money, pay us a big chunk of it and we will help you scale up with less effort and fewer staff.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that making a cloud gaming service would necessitate assembling your own servers. Games just have different hardware requirements to everything else, it's well known that "pro" graphics cards are not meant for gaming.

> And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.

I was the technical lead on a project where I warned the product owner that implementing a certain feature the way they wanted in AWS would have astronomical costs. I was told "let me worry about the money".

A month later we were told to scale down our ECS and EMR usage as the bill was astronomical.

I assumed you were not using Amazon because it's obviously a bad choice for this use case. $2/hour is $87k over 5 years — not surprising you can't make money.

One can rent a rack for about $3k a year which comfortably fits 20 servers. Obviously, colocation is much cheaper.

the fact that google is trying to to use a fighting game to showcase their product should tell you everything you need to know about their understanding of the market.

Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine.

I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.

I also tested Project Stream, and the vision then made a lot more sense, that you were playing a game with cloud saves that could then be continued on your own hardware. This is the model Microsoft is creating with their xCloud while Stadia is forcing you to pay full price for a game for a diminished experience.

I mean... Google has metrics, presumably. They can measure these things. They know what proportion of their traffic has adequate bandwidth and latency for their services.

The US is not the world. The average person in parts of Europe and Asia has a much better internet connection.

Basically everyone there uses client based prediction models (for your and enemies actions).

See also: https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_t... https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...

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?

but thats different. the input is still local so the latency there is only the output. its much more noticable if the input has latency

> Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

So, so wrong.

1. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly.

2. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly unpredictable latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games. And at that point, why not just run it browser-based and be done with it?

3. Packet loss. Packet loss doesn't matter on streaming video because you can just wait for the server to re-send it, or just buffer till you get far enough ahead. On games, real-time response is critical, and there's no tolerance for waiting to "catch up on the stream."

The Internet will never be a good streaming platform for real-time gaming, not without some serious protocol upgrades. Everyone focuses on Netflix like it's remotely the same; it's not. Netflix is one-way, loss-is-okay, and latency (round-trip time for the packets, NOT the same as bandwidth) doesn't matter. Gaming is exactly opposite.

Without proper end-to-end QoS or dedicated circuits ($$$) Google Stadia will fail just like every other games streaming platform before it.

Is download time a significant factor for people with the types of connections that will have a good experience on Stadia? It’s my understanding that downloading a large game in a timely fashion and streaming it are both bandwidth-intensive. As for “terabyte-sized games” are there any of those on the market, or even on the horizon? At some point it’s either outside of the budget of most games to produce that many assets, or the 1080p/upscaled to 4K experiences that Stadia provides won’t make use of extremely high resolution textures.

I do not fail to imagine the positive potential, i just consider it totally insignificant to the negative potential it has. None of those you mentioned is worth giving up control over the games you are paying for and your computing environment.

Instead you have TB sized streaming.

Instead, you have carefully controlled and moderated interactions between players. LAN parties and internet cafe's would just not be possible.

Cheating will still occur, just at different levels. And I have to ask, why is cheating in a single player offline game bad in the first place? Cheating was built into many past games.

Piracy I'll give you, but I firmly disagree that it will lead to more or better games. It will just pad the pockets of the gaming studios more.

Instead you get to play on wifi only. No cell phones (not fast enough). Nowhere with data caps. Nowhere that isn't near to a Google data center.

>Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

Modding keeps many PC games going for years. This just means most games will be dead after a few months of launch.

>better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment)

What koolaid are you drinking? Subscription services can cost you more over the long term than just buying. Tech isn't changing so fast anymore and the same goes for gaming. You can absolutely use the same setup for the last 6 years without any change other than wanting something new to get off on having.

>better graphics,

Why? Google is right now hardfocused on removing all visual fidelity because they need to compress fames as much as possible. The US has near permanent third world grade internet and it's not going to change anytime soon as long as 3 ISPs own most of the residential service. Wireless offering such as "5G" and Elon's pixie dust are only going to be make slight dents in the lack of high speed service.

>no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games)

That doesn't make any sense. Where is that money supposed to come from? People who aren't buying your games are not your customers so denying service to them does nothing for your bottom line.

All that plus an extra 20ms of input lag on top of whatever your tv already gives you because speed of light is a thing....

Or not.

There are lots of fun games and other activities.

That's what I have ended up doing as gaming continues to get more hostile.

Childhood nostalgia absolutely plays a role, but in my experience game developers tended to trade quality for graphics as the years advanced. In the 1980s games like Ultima 4 couldn't use graphics as a crutch and thus had to make the games really engrossing. My other grips is the ever-decreasing difficulty of the games. Back in the 1980s most games were difficult (if not very difficult/nearly impossible) to finish. You could play a game back then for months or years and never finish it. There was no internet to search for the answers to problems or riddles you couldn't solve. Games were not designed to be easily completed by virtually anyone who played. I can't remember how many hours I spent playing Zork before I was able to solve all the puzzles and beat that game (let alone Zork II and Zork III).

Or I want to be able to handle Chromium?

Really though, my "gaming computer" winds up getting used more for CAD than gaming (by me) at this point.

I'm probably a casual gamer.

They don't have to say on their website that it's three-ish months of paid beta access to make that the reality.

> Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.

Google can very easily afford to pay 50 developers to optimize for it. I only see this dying from Google's direct failures, not from that kind of death spiral.

This FAQ page DOSE NOT have this quote right now!

From this FAQ page: > Do I need to use your Controller? (Stadia Controller) > No, you can use many popular HID compliant controllers when playing via USB cable on Chrome or mobile. To play on your TV you will need to use the Stadia Controller and Google Chromecast Ultra.

Pretty sure you won't need that when the free 1080p base version comes out next year. I played 30 hours of assassins creed during the beta last year on my macbook pro with a xbox 360 controller.

Fighting games are also a best-case scenario for Stadia's latency-mitigation tech, since they often already have a rollback system implemented for online multiplayer.

I think that's exactly why they included it - to demonstrate how good (or bad) the latency is on Stadia.

not only that, but the audience for fighting games and in particular one as niche as a legacy snk title, are people who will buy a 200 dollar arcade stick just to have slightly more consistent inputs & execution. this is not exactly a group of people that will accept latency that ranges from okayish to semi-unplayable. the samsho community is fucking livid right now that snk went through with this deal before releasing a proper pc port.

Of course if you buy the XBox bundle, you pay once and you can play Red Dead Redemption 2 as long as you want in 4k. If I get Stadia and want to keep playing my game in 4k a year from now, I have to sign on to a monthly fee.

Just to be clear the XBox One S for $150/$200 listed above also included a controller, it isn't just a bare console with no way to play on it. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I agree with your overall point but not so sure on this specific piece:

>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.

Signal propagation speed (velocity factor) over air is only a bit slower than cat7 copper, and on-par with fiber optic. From memory:

In a vacuum: VF = 1 (equal to speed of light)

Over copper: VF = .75 (one quarter speed of light)

Over air or fiber: VF = .66 (one third speed of light)

Wi-Fi is measurably slower than wired copper cable for a few reasons but I don't understand physics to be one of them. With the distances relevant to last-mile connectivity like we're discussing here, that difference in VF appears to be immaterial.

Then again, you could argue that the air being a contended medium is by it's very nature a physics problem, and that does seem to be the root of most of the drawbacks of running low-latency workloads over wireless. Not necessarily an insurmountable physics limit though, with spectrum allocation, code division, and beam forming already doing a lot to mitigate the issue, there's the potential for further developments that might bring things to parity.

Still, you're not going to get past the VF limit I described above but again, if we're only talking about in-home WiFi rather than across the entire service-to-consumer run, it doesn't play a large part.

100-200ms latency seems a little extreme to me. Its an 8ms ping from my home to the nearest Google edge node (supposedly where Stadia nodes will live), 9-11ms on my WiFi. Compression and decompression of the video stream with hardware acceleration and tuned for speed over quality should only add maybe another ms or two. Where is the extra 80+ms coming from?

I lost a lot of games when OnLive folded

(LA Noir, Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders 2, London Olympics 2012, Deus Ex Human Revolution.....)

I think Stadia could work in big cities. If Google has servers in the city and you're using a wired connection then it should work fine for a large portion of games. It probably won't give a good experience for first person shooters though.

> 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.

There's margin no? I mean, right now I get 3ms ping to Google from my wired computer, and 10~15ms from my phone on wifi. Wifi doesn't add that much.

And I'm in a large European city, not in Silicon Valley.

But you won't be playing the games on high settings. You'll be playing them on the equivalent of a mid tier computer with extra lag. The article goes into this in depth about how degraded the quality of play is. You have to pay for access and the games as well as have a device locally that stream. It's really barely going to be cheaper than an Xbox and give you significantly less performance.

You can play new AAA games on high with just a $150-$200 GPU. Every other piece of your computer doesn't really matter.

> I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about your experience with mobile internet, but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going. With remote gaming, you're now adding controller input to that datastream, outbound, and then rendering those actions and transmitting back to the device to enable anything remotely approaching a good gaming experience seems like science fiction.

The people who will be most interested in this are those without a "home" setup, and the less "home" you have, the more appealing, but also seems like it would in turn be the most frustrating experience to try and use. Which is sort of what this piece is getting at:

- Gamers don't want it, because we already have our libraries and such tuned to existing platforms and devices

- Casual gamers may want it, but they're already spoiled for choice in a massive mobile market, where games just happen on their already very powerful phones

This puts Stadia in an awkward position of in theory being the worst of both worlds: the limitations of console, with the network requirements only high tier residential internet can deliver, over devices with limited network capability.

Because xyz-as-a-service is anti-consumer. Unless you've been under a rock the past decade, there are many flaws with the model when it comes to consumers. It's great for business. Terrible for the user. As-a-service puts the consumer at the mercy of a company. Along with their privacy data. Steam at least is setup in a way where if they were to end, the games you have can be downloaded and unlocked. Just make sure to back it up. Stadia isn't setup for anything like that at all. If google put Reader out to pasture, something that cost them jack-dick-all to keep running, something as expensive to maintain as Stadia when it flops... "Oh, sorry, it didn't work out. Sucks for all of you."

Just because you can't see how a trap will be sprung, doesn't mean the trap doesn't exist. This will bite people in the ass a year or two down the road. Then everyone will cry, "How could this happen? We need legislation to protect us!" No, you just need to be quit being a baby and start being an adult and understand that minor comfort and convenience can come at a heavy cost.

It depends on where you're located. With FiOS in NYC I can get to AWS Virginia in 18ms. I don't have any Google Cloud servers to test with.

When I use Steam/NVidia in home streaming with my GTX 1080 card, I can render a 1080p frame in about 10-12ms and decode it in 10ms on my 4K FireTV. (I beat Witcher 3, TombRaider, and Hitman with it over a 50Mbit powerline ethernet setup and they all looked fine BTW.)

Even if the Google data center is twice as far as AWS, that's 58ms lag, or 4 frames at 60fps. You can emulate the same lag by turning off Game Mode on your HDTV, it's fine for most games.

However, it is bullshit that the Stadia website doesn't have something like fast.com that tells you if your internet connection has enough bandwidth/latency to actually work with the service.

It's also not a good sign that they're not talking about avoiding wifi for your connection the way Steam does.

I'm playing Stadia on my non-fiber cable internet, and there's no perceptible lag. I previously tried Geforce Now, under the same conditions, same pc - and it was unplayable.

Somehow even Steam in-home streaming between two wired PCs is a mess of distracting artifacts for me when playing a turn-based game from 2005 at 1080p. Is it really that hard?

Their cloud offerings are a distant third to Microsoft and Amazon and support - especially enterprise support - is legendarily bad.

Firebase was bought, not developed by Google itself.

Why not play Hearthstone or similar games on MBP? They need to invent new class of games: latency-tolerant, but graphically intensive. Photorealistic turn-based massively multiplayer games?

FWIW Hearthstone calibre games are already playable on any moderately recent smartphone. Not much gain from Stadia in that regard.

What about it requires the more expensive option? If an entry level chromecast can stream from youtube, why can't it stream from stadia?

Maybe google is only willing to sell hardware equivalent to the ultra for use with stadia, but I don't see how that's a technical requirement. It seems like a business decision, and as such, is fair game for criticism.

> Every Flash/Shockwave browser game is becoming increasingly hard to play.

If you have the actual .swf file, you can run the game in Flash Projector, easy!

> Games for ancient Windows versions can be devilishly hard to get running

What doesn't work in Virtualbox? Luckily, games from the 90's generally don't need GPU acceleration. I'm also continuously amazed by how much just works in modern Windows.

> games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible.

There you have a point. Although even then, you can use VMWare + some unlocker tools to install Snow Leopard, and from there use Rosetta. Qemu is also supposed to be pretty good these days, although I've never tried it. Alternately, it's not that difficult to track down old Mac hardware.

> Emulation is flaky and incomplete for console games of all kinds.

Huh?

The Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, and all Gameboy models have damn-near perfect emulators. Identical to console down to the pixel, for every game.

Dolphin isn't quite take-a-microscope-to-the-screen accurate, but it will run the vast majority of the Gamecube and Wii's library such that you won't notice a difference.

The N64 and PS2 lack great emulators, but what's available is still very good. Some niche titles will exhibit glitches or refuse to run, but most stuff works well enough.

The Wii U and PS360 don't have such good emulators yet, but that's because those consoles are relatively recent. RPCS3 and Cemu are making great progress, and can already run a handful of large titles without problems, such as Persona 5 and BotW.

The original Xbox lacks a usable emulator, which sucks. Luckily, this isn't the norm.

Emulator developers have done amazing work, and the result is that most of gaming history is fully open to your exploration. Games will never be quite as plug and play as music files, but they aren't that labor-intensive to get working either.

There are people who try to archive Flash and Shockwave games and if anything, this is a good example of trying to fix something after the bad situation has already happened: the best time was when things were new. But better now than never.

PowerPC and 86k macs can be run under emulation so not everything is lost. Similar for games for DOS and ancient Windows versions, though from my personal experience 99.9% of old games will work on Windows 10 with some tweaks and/or wrappers (like dgVoodoo2, dxwnd, otvdm, etc and of course user made patches). It is extremely rare that i find an old game i cannot get to run.

> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.

Which means your (full price) "rental(s)" and the subscription fees for Stadia are gone right out the window.

Then when you want to play one of those games again you'll have to subscribe to the next GaaS and most likely buy... sorry rent that game again probably for full retail price. Rinse and repeat.

GaaS to me is an utterly nonsensical cash grab and as others ITT have mentioned a solution looking for a problem.

> So even if Stadia looks too short-lived, the second or third big game-streaming service might convince people it'll last as long as any other software does.

Considering that I still play games that I bought over 20 years ago, it would take at least 20 years for a streaming service to be able to convince me of this.

> and games for PowerPC Macs are all but impossible

Personally I played games for Mac OS 9 without any problem in standard QEMU+libvirt and performance was decent on my i7 4771.

It is a problem with Stadia, because Google says you should have at least 10mbit/s

I think I've seen one or two reviews from people that have actually tried it and say they noticed latency/lag, with dozens of reviews from people who haven't tried it saying that would probably be the case. The other reviews so far (that I've seen, I guess) have all been from people effectively saying they might not even realize they were streaming from the cloud if they didn't know otherwise.

Mine gets here tomorrow though, so I guess I'll wait and see for myself.

citations please? All the reviews I read said it worked great on home networks.

I understand. I use AWS at work now. It's mostly curiosity about your experience than anything else.

> just like you wouldn't be paying monthly on Stadia when you weren't using it

Just like I don't pay for my gym membership when I'm not using it ;-)

Apple computers with discrete GPUs (like the aforementioned MacBook Pro) are great at running DirectX-based games natively under Windows via Boot Camp.

They're also great at running Metal-based (e.g. Apple Arcade) games natively under macOS.

A lot of older games are being re-released so they shouldn't be ignored, and even action based ones often have internal cooldowns and timers for a pseudo turn-based system.

I mean Persona 5 was a pretty big game that AFAIK has turn based combat. It would be nice to stream since I won't own a Playstation any time soon.

Regardless, they are definitely less latency intensive than FPS or other genres.

"You watch any good movies, read any good books, or play any good games lately?"

"No, child, I was honing my mind as one does a blade."

Someone might smugly say that indeed.

Why do you bring books and movies then? "You seriously can't mature through being alone in your own thoughts?"

Yeah and wifi is already pulling out all the tricks like FEC, CSMA and the like just to scale with usage.

At the end of the day the internet is a packet switched and not circuit switched topology despite telecom pushing hard for circuit switched in the early days. Preference is given for throughput and not latency(although network-next is working to address some of that).

I spent a year in florida. I'll agree to some extend. the food is fantastic, the weather is nice and the snorkeling and parks are wonderful. All that said, I spent way too much time trying refuting the idea that steven miller's kids in cages plan is good for america and among other very persistent conservative talking points. Also that I don't believe in jesus seems to be an open invite for people trying to "save" me. It is what it is and SF is a dumpster right now so I can't disagree.

Stadia Pro for $10 a month gets you a selection of games I believe. But it really is in it's infancy, and not very good. We'll just have to see if google throttles it before it can mature like most other things they do.

Presumably over provision and then when idle, they can reuse them for their own internal batch work.

Sure, there are lot of scenarios how this could fail and I might be a bit optimistic, but the idea just makes sense. If stadia doesn’t work out sooner or later there will be a platform that will work.

It's not possible to get used to such huge latency (500ms). He is a burden for a team in competitive games. It is a fact (if that "friend from Australia" exist at all).

Well, he plays with between 100 and 300ms latency on average, atleast whenever I check the player screen. They're perfectly capable of hitting targets reliably.

On a similar note, I used to play World of Tanks with around 400ms latency before I got a better internet uplink, while it's certainly bad for a month, you start to get used to it eventually and the brain compensates. Of course, if reaction time matters you loose, but you can adapt your playstyle in a lot of games so that pure reaction time doesn't matter as much.

I don’t know what their target audience could possibly be. If the game is so visually unappealing that the customer doesn’t care about frame rate or resolution, then it’s likely they already have the capability to render that with the console they already have. Stadia needs to convince people they have a better product than what consumers have today. Instead it looks like a step down and you still have to pay full price for the games. People can finance a console purchase over a couple years for a little more money and enjoy their experience more while having a structured monthly payment.

> If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc

They're not, unless you're willing to pay extra for them to be.

Netflix is not preservable, DVDs are.

Spotify is not preservable, CDs/MP3s are.

Most of the stuff we watch/listen to is on non-preservable media, and for the most part, we don't care.

If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there. You already have people optimizing their display & input latency, not to mention GPU buffering tweaks, to shave anywhere from 5-20ms off the final result, and that's in _local_ gaming. Windows 10 1803 introduced a "fake fullscreen" mode to cut around the window compositor lag.

Assuming Stadia really does all these render path micro-optimizations perfectly, you then have the issue of datacenter location and speed of light creating more latency. And because in this case the end user needs to react in real time rather than offload operations or create autonomous behaviour (the stock market example), at some point they'll have to move closer to their nearest datacenter. (assuming the US ISP landscape is fixed by then)

Turbofan optimisations, SharedArrayBuffer, Web Assembly really impacted performance of my game engine. With enough assets it's already possible to make GTA V complexity and quality game running in the browser. The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago. It already happened and is possible NOW, even on phones.

"Loading time is latency too" no it isn't. It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay. But in streaming game as a video when the whole gameplay is delayed by 300ms it already makes entire competitive game unplayable.

Games are not movies though many making this connection is probably why many games are awful nowadays as they try to be something they are not. It doesn't surprise me that executives who have no idea about gaming see flashy graphics and associate them with movies.

Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.

Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).

None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.

This is actually the perfect comparison. I can still watch movies from the 1950s on various media. Good luck playing a Stadia exclusive in 2090 in any format. Treating games like a disposable commodity is short-sighted and undermines any claim the medium might have to being an art form.

> Was it still a good movie?

Sure. It might even be good enough that you want to have a copy of your own that you know you'll be able to watch at any point in the future.

> Maybe longevity is overrated? If you play a game for a month or two and enjoyed it, it's worth the price

It probably depends on what sort of games you enjoy, and why.

I still pull out games that I bought 20 or more years ago and play them, and am very happy that I can do that. I wouldn't pay money for a game if that weren't possible.

You feel differently, and that's fine. Different people have different needs and wants.

When buying a game on Stadia is the same price as buying it on other platforms but with the downside of a total loss of control or ability to play offline it becomes less attractive.

I think it really comes down to the kinds of games you play, and the way you like to play them.

If you tend towards single-player, story-based games, like Red Dead etc., then maybe playing through it once and moving on is enough for you. Then again, maybe you'll want to come back to it in 3, 4, 5 years, and hopefully you'll be able to with Stadia, but with a disc/download you definitely should be able to.

On the other hand, if you play multiplayer, "live-service" games, as many are pushing to be these days, then you're already at the mercy of the dev/publisher to keep supporting the game so you can play it in the future. In that case, it become a question of who will give up support first, Google or the developer?

In either case, I think the Xbox Pass-style "all-you-can-eat" model is a better solution. No big, upfront cost for any single game, and you can still go back to something older, as long as it remains supported.

There are other ways to watch movies.

When those delivered a sufficiently good quality experience, I stopped going to a theatre.

Control is one part of that. "Let's pause..."

Replay is another. Maybe watch it a few times for whatever reason.

Sharing is another. I still like physical media for this reason.

Games are similar.

Renting a game should cost less than one that can be replayed, shared, etc...

Keeping history is another good reason. I have media and games from times past, and I have the ability to share that experience today. High value.

Gaming and movies today? Definitely moving away from the higher value things, yet pricing often seems the same, or not in line with the lower value proposition.

That doesn't answer the second question I asked, though.

And pretend I asked what percent you continue to play more than a year after starting them.

"will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?"

I'm betting I could print it and hack something together from some hobby electronics kit if I really wanted to.

But you are absolutely correct. There is a category of games for which the complete experience is unseparably attached to the original substrate.

On the other hand, keyboard and mouse driven games are fairly maintainable accross platform generations.

I'll go a step farther, it only makes sense as part of a "PS Now" like service, where you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a catalog of games. Nobody is paying for locked-in games that only run on Stadia given Google's track record of goldfish-like attentions span on these projects.

If you are just renting hardware then you need to run a local Steam cache (this exists), and allow players to use their existing game catalog. This is basically the "GeForce Now" model.

And yes, you may note that I am referencing other game streaming services. Google is late to this party, and they have nothing unique to offer, nor a particularly compelling business model, nor the trust of their userbase. Stadia is DOA.

If Google wants it to be not-DOA with their current business model, nothing short of a guarantee that if they fold within the next 10 years then they will issue a full and unconditional refund is going to do it. Nobody is going to pay full price for locked-in games on a platform with a track record like Google's.

Sure, if you are the kind of person to sell and buy used games, that will probably be pretty cheap. But that's becoming more niche by the day, even without Stadia. Most game sales are digital downloads from a storefront.

What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.

You're not "running modern games" at any kind of acceptable frame rate and quality on a 15 year old CPU. And you absolutely aren't running VR on a 15 year old CPU even if you have a 4 year old GPU that technically fits within the minimum requirements.

> You don't need a "multi-hundred-dollar GPU" to play modern games.

If you want the equivalent visual quality of the service, I don't think a 4 year old $120 GPU is enough. Maybe you don't care about the game settings, but I was going for apples to apples.

Specifically I am talking about advanced features for my AMD GPU in the context of SteamVR. I was also under the impression that Windows 7 still got intel microcode updates.

Also, an RX 580 8GB is massive overkill for VR. An RX 480 8GB goes for about $80 on ebay and will have 90% of the performance of the 580

Keep in mind MMOs have a persistent world. In CoD, meeting a cheater can ruin a 20min (? haven't played in a while) game session. In an MMO, it might screw up the entire economy. Thus off-loading authoritative work to clients is pretty much a no go.

To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory management. As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.

Pretending all this to be no big deal might be right for some specific (kind of) games, but generalizing it that much is... unrealistic at best.

Btw, dev time is valuable as well, so an overly engineered solution probably isn't a realistic option for many online games either.

You need 40 cores to run one instance?

I just think that's pretty uncommon among games.

Maybe I'm wrong, but keep in mind that something like "an MMO" managed to work on the hardware that existed 15+ years ago and the underlying computational details have barely changed for many of them.

And something like Eve is single threaded.