Ask HN: What do you think of the Google Stadia?
I watched the conference yesterday and it all sounds great at the surface, but I also don't know enough about all the things talked about to understand. Is it good, is it bad? Are they targeting Steam as well as the consoles with Stadia?
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadThe thing that's horrific to me is the quoted 20GB of data transferred per hour during playtime. I don't have data limits so it doesn't affect me too hard but my Internet connection hovers right around 5mbips per second. I live in a smallish city in Maine. Google is alienating those in rural areas.
I like the that they don’t have any load time. It doesn’t look like it’s going to support most games any time soon. It’s going to be mostly hype for a year , I feel.
20GB in an hour is about 44Mbps, so a 100Mbps connection is probably a good goal if you want Stadia to work well.
I'd expect high-speed connection uptake to be quite a bit higher amongst their target market, so over here betting than the majority of gaming users have 100Mbps+ at home isn't that crazy at all imo.
I don't think that future exists, and I don't think Google thinks it does either considering they abandoned the effort to make it happen.
People said the same about Microsoft in 2001 or whenever it was that they launched the Xbox.
The biggest issue I've had is internet. Outside of my own home the internet has been slow, laggy, or compressed the image to much. It's generally unplayable.
In between being able to afford a gaming device. I used parsec, and rented a machine to play games. FPS online multi player games were very difficult. The latency was to much for that. But other games, strategy, sports, etc. Worked fine. It was also great being able to connect anywhere and have my full game suite.
Right now I'm trying something similar in my home setup. I switched mobile gaming to old emulators and indies. With a bluetooth controller. (Ryzen 2700u). My home server is running a windows vm for gaming, and I stream everything over gigabit lan. That is working wonderfully so far.
I see this going two routes. For the casual gamer. As long as we have good internet. Then this can be a big win. Discarding the drm and ownership concerns.
For the more enthusiast / pro gamer. With the spark of 144hz freesync and gsync monitors. I don't see these streaming services being able to keep up. I still see a number of gamers wanting to build a gaming rig. I want to because I think it's fun. I just hope that this doesn't harm/limit any of the other gaming stores.
[1] https://parsecgaming.com/
https://parsecgaming.com/
I'm still a fan of the service. I'm using their software for hosting my in home network gaming setup.
Keynote in 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOkEdQYePWY
Tech Response:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273977/google-stadia-cl...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/03/google-stadias-first-...
If Google can keep latency low and graphics as close as possible to original, then it has the possibility of being a Netflix for gaming. IMHO, Google need to focus on 3 things: latency, price and game library. Without those, it will fail or be a niche product considering that for 600ish$ you can build a pretty decent gaming PC.
without client and server side input prediction you get huge input lag - way above tolerable ranges.
with input prediction you get annoyed players that their character doesn't do what they want. Plus with multiplayer games you get extra lag on top of that. And lets not forget about local input lag.
Transfer speed requirements are sky-high.
Also - can i just own something? i don't want to perpetually rent things.
I would really hate it if google attained yet another 'monopoly'.
So you'll see a visual glitch as the world jumps to "what should have been", but that's a lot better than you missing your shot / jump / whatever due to latency.
The fact that their controller is wifi and not connected to the computer gives a hint that Google is not doing this. Since the controller is independently connected, it can have a different latency than the computer.
Not necessarily. Chromecast and the like already does side-channel communication to devices on the same network. Its how my phone can know that my TV is streaming something sent by my PC.
The controller could be sending input commands directly to the server, while also talking directly to the video streaming device.
I've gone the other way. I used to download and buy movies and music. I never enjoyed having to sort it all in my computer. Thanks to spotify and streaming services I really don't get have to worry about, "owning" these things anymore. Most of the time I didnt actually want to own the movie after watching it once.
I realized this recently about steam. I've got 500ish games. I only buy them because they are on sale and I know I'll play them eventually but don't want to pay full price for them. I'd happily pay a monthly price to be able to rent/stream/play any game in the steam library that I want. It would also solve the near constant issue with multiplayer games where I want to play with friends but they don't want to make a $60 investment for a game they may not enjoy.
[0] https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/project-xcloud-the-futur...
The big advantage AMD has that no one really talks about is their ability to do client virtualization at the hardware level, not software.
[0] - https://www.amd.com/Documents/Multiuser-GPU-White-Paper.pdf
1. Google doesn't have gaming in their corporate DNA. They will commit a bunch of faux pas that will alienate the gaming community.
2. Streaming games adds latency. Latency problems ruin the experience.
3. Gamers are a very fickle community and if they don't feel your company 'gets' them, they will not engage with you.
2) I can't imagine this going out to the public with latency issues. Netflix can stream video smooth as silk to millions very nicely. Streaming the game will be the same thing, we are just getting the video. Sending keyboard and mouse input should be trivial in respects to how intense video streaming is, so I'm not sure why there would be any latency.
3) These particularly picky gamers are a small subset of the community. You can choose to listen to them or not. There are millions of gamers who don't stream, who don't watch streams, who game on their own, who don't care if the files for the games are on their computer, etc. And these gamers want popular titles on their Chromebooks. Google is about to make that happen it seems.
2. Streaming a film and streaming the full content of Halo is a whole different ballgame. Do you know the kind of optimizations devs have to do to achieve the performance they do on pcs and consoles?
3. And how many Chrome book users is there?
I think at best this will be more like a mobile game platform. Won't put a dent on AAA games on PCs and Consoles.
As for 2, Digital Foundry tested how bad the latency of Google's services was (though not in a home setting), and were able to show that it's actually on par with playing on an Xbox One X locally.
I'm not thrilled about this development, but I don't think these are reasons they'll be unsuccessful.
What percent of mobile game sales do you think go to "gamers?"
Conversely, gamers are probably a high percent of the medium-high end hardware community. Those companies manufacturing physical products do need to cater to gamers.
A pretty sizable subset of AAA games are heavily effected by reaction/latency time. It could be a solution for some kinds of MMO games though, where high latency is already designed for, and not having to distribute content updates would both be a plus for the players and allow the developers to keep "secret" content/events secured before they were intended to be made available.
to the same effect, plenty of people want 4k and hdr, but arent film critics, nor videophiles, and dont actually care about data compression, bitrates, or banding.
My point was less about demographic and more about the network-latency concerns for specific common game-types. You cite correctly that they want to commoditize high performance hardware for a mass market, and note games like Halo/COD/Fortnight seem to have a very broad appeal. My question then becomes, can their solution commoditize high performance for the masses for these kinds of games? I'm curious to see how their solutions pan out, but there are a lot of road-blocks to achieving their goals. Graphical quality is only part of what qualifies as high performance in a game. In any FPS games like these game-play/graphical latency is a huge issue for play-ability. Developers go as far to take specific monitor hardware into consideration to shave down the latency. Stadia effectively adds a network loop connection between the keyboard and screen -- that's A LOT of a extra latency. Also, if this is going to target the mass market, then it has to work for the mass market and I think (in the US at least) there is going to be a large percentage of the population who's internet will lack either the necessary bandwidth, or network latency to Stadia's servers, in order to achieve a playable/desirable experience.
Can you think of a AAA, "hardcore gamer only" game that is significantly more expensive, precisely because they know sales will be lower?
Latency can be fixed by moving the processing closer to the edge, like a CDN. Cloudflare and Netflix have boxes everywhere, google just needs to pop some mammoth consoles colocated inside isp data centers, and group people together connected to the same console. They can get there with 5G faster than itll make sense to keep adding gfx power to phones (battery life.)
Google is looking towards the future, where half the population lives in a city with cheap 5G.
I think this segment will be a primary target of Stadia. If you want uncompressed 4K, 144hz, HDR with extremly low latency then your not currently playing on a console anyway and probably have a $2000+ machine sitting on your desk. For the enthusiast the tech is not there yet in streaming. But make no mistake. It will be there soon(ish). The day is not that far off when local machines will disappear for almost anything. And on a technical level nobody will be able to tell the difference.
Stadia doesn't have to steal all of steam's userbase to be able to reach critical mass for their own userbase and videogame streaming seems like a logical next step (like music and video streaming were) if a good UX can be provided (and I think they're aware of latency concerns and would not enter this market if they thought it unfeasible to provide a good gaming experience).
Disclaimer: I work for Google but am otherwise unaffiliated with the Stadia project
It's a great business idea, it's going to be terrible for consumers.
...except all the latency between the player and the game of course.
For most games, 100ms latency between action and response is simply not acceptable. Even games like Rocksmith, Guitar Hero, and Crypt of the Necrodancer will offer calibration to overcome mere 10ms delays between the controller and the AV equipment.
I'm not a gamer. The only modern video console I own is a Nintendo Switch that I bought to play BoTW. My previous console was a Super Nintendo. I only own low-powered laptops and will probably never build a gaming PC.
But, if this remote-gaming takes off, and I can play any game from any console at any time by paying a monthly fee, count me in.
It is my understanding that this is limited to PC-gaming only. Heck, I'll even say that console manufacturers, who sell money by, you know, selling consoles, won't be very happy about this. But, in my opinion, it is an inevitable future. It is music streaming over owning CDs. It is Netflix over renting DVDs.
Hardcore gamers, and by that I mean people that spend a lot of time playing graphically intense games, have their own gaming PC's and keep up with hardware. So they aren't the customer, at least immediately, maybe in 2-4 years.
Anyone that has a current-gen console already has access to play most any AAA title game that comes out, unless it is exclusive to the "other" platform, which means it won't be on Stadia either. They aren't really the customer, at least immediately.
The boasting of Stadia GPU vs current gen consoles doesn't mean much to people playing on consoles. They already bought into a average common denominator of graphics capabilities. So they aren't the customer immediately, maybe when another generation of console comes out.
So who is the customer? Gamers playing non-graphically intense games? Why would they care? Maybe the killer feature here is being able to change devices (tablet, phone, Chromecast) and pick up where you left off. At what price point though is that worth it to someone?