IF everything is fine, then why do I get a connection problem when am using a wired connection and have a 1GB net connection, which my average is 800mb, if they mean fine what does that mean.
That's where marketing folk trot out phrases like "we're continuing to add value to the entire ecosystem for each of our stakeholder groups". When you convert that from marketing to English it means "you're SOL."
Because a promise to support the product for X years would just be twisted to "the product will be killed in X years" headlines. You can't fight a double standard like that, the best you can do is avoid feeding it.
Even so, will be killed in 5 years makes me more confident in trying it than knowing it could be killed at any moment or in 6 months. 5 years is the life of a game console.
I'd be curious how many of that demographic aren't already avoiding it like the plague for the originally stated reasoning though. I.e. it's not likely the lack of any guarantee is making many in that group any more confident the service will be here in 6 years in the first place.
But at least it would give clarity. Right now both dev studios and gamers are very cautious because they have no idea whether Stadia will exist for 5 more weeks or 5+ years. In a time when courts are trying to decide whether an online "purchase" is actually a purchase or if the company can just make it inaccessible over night this is not a good situation.
The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed their dev studio days after telling their employees everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem even riskier than it looks right now.
This. Google must be well aware of their reputation. It boggles my mind why they keep repeating the same pattern.
Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything they release, no matter how great it is.
I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more use.
Is the article conflating creating 1st party games for an empty service versus choosing _not_ to create 1st party games for a busy service?
I don't 100% grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it correlates to Stadia's free tier release: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...
4x increase compared to what baseline? And will these curious people trying it out convert to paying customers or will people give up on it again, like they apparently did in April 2020?
Google spent tens of millions of dollars bringing big games to their platform
The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost money on every Xbox sold for many years.
Every console loses money on the hardware, because you'll immediately make up for it with software sales. Stadia's still struggling with the latter part.
Microsoft recently confirmed that they have always lost money on their consoles (during the Apple vs Epic proceedings). In contrast, Nintendo usually makes a profit on selling their hardware.
AFAIK Nintendo is not necessarily in the business of losing money on hardware, especially if you count accessories like their controllers. I'd need to see numbers to believe that they lose money on the Switch, I suspect that thing is profitable.
You are correct, the most technical correct. However a more closer to reality is > dozens of trillions USD. Remember, gaming industry is bigger than both movie AND music industry combined.
Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten. Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great. Play a AAA game on a $180 chromebook with basically identical resource consumption to watching Netflix.
But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...
Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.
It's not like the proposition is good from user point of view either.
You "buy" a right to rent games, which right can be terminated by google for any reason, or no reason at all.
Even if you really bought a game and google would give it back to you when they inevitably shut down the service, you still wouldnt be able to play it, since the whole point of stadia is to not own the hardware.
Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.
It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …
The main difference to me is that Steam is an established platform with a reputation for not pulling games for no reason and also the fact that there's always "extralegal" ways to play that same game if Steam does pull it. That's not the case with streaming-exclusive games (and sometimes iOS games, sadly).
Exactly, and steam isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so I don't have to worry more about the game itself becoming dated or unsuccessful and pulling down their servers way before Steam decides does.
It's a licensing model, not a rental model. You're not paying anybody a monthly fee to play, you have all the files locally, and the threshold for revoking your license or otherwise losing access to a title is extremely high.
Even games with components that have expired licenses are kept on the account, your access is never really revoked -- even a VAC ban won't lose you your library.
Steam is not a rent model.
Steam recently got sued because you couldn't resell your games, nor your account.
You are now allowed to sell your steam account because you owe the games.
Steam is explicitly NOT a rental model. You buy games, and then you have them, on your hard drive, to play whenever you like. You could be banned from Steam, Gabe could personally make a youtube video telling you to fuck off, and you could still start up Steam in offline mode and play all the games just fine. The only thing you could THEORETICALLY lose is the ability to re-download games in your library, but to my knowledge this has never happened aside from accounts getting hacked etc.
Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do to. So it's gratifying to see that this one time, we don't have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
It's technically possible for Valve to pull access to your entire library and games that use Steamworks DRM will no longer work in that circumstance, but as far as I know it's very rare for them to do it at this point. They used to do it if you issued a chargeback, but they had to stop doing that since it was in violation of various government and payment processor policies.
Those apps (assuming they aren't indie) will almost always try to communicate with the Steam client. There are hooks which automatically run Steam if it's not available.
Steam API integration is entirely optional, so it's not just indie games that ignore them or fail gracefully. Obviously you can't access Steam's online services in the game, but that's not a stopper for many games.
Almost all Steam games do use achievements and other stuff though (which works offline, but not forever). The reason I mention it is because you have to go out of the way to fail gracefully.
There are projects providing replacement Steam dll-s so these requests wouldn't crash the game (note, this isn't "cracking" the game, it just removes Steam dependency for games that were coded as such)
> Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away.
People get banned on Steam and lose access to games too. I know Valve promised you that they aren't renting those games, but if you look at the contract you'll find all you have is a license. And there have been multiple circumstances already where Valve has kicked users and/or lost licenses to its content.
> Steam is a rent model too, but nobody seems to mind.
A long time ago, there was an official statement to the effect of "if steam goes down, we'll release a patch to unlock your games" or something to that effect.
I think that was before third parties could even sell on Steam.
Could also be apocryphal, or photoshopped emails and screencaps and the like. It almost certainly doesn't hold true today.
But at the very least, you can download your steam games today, and if it shuts down at some point in the future, you can modify or crack those local files and executables to be playable; multiplayer systems notwithstanding. There's a path forward. With Stadia games, there is nothing without original publisher or developer intervention.
Steam doesn't require me to pay several hundred dollars a month to have an internet speed fast enough to play a game without lag. I just run it on a piece of hardware I already own anyways.
I think it’s more the case that Steam is a known quantity by both players and developers. There aren’t many surprises ther and Steam hews closely to its core competencies. The few times they’ve tried to expand their horizons, there’s been noise, but it soon fizzled and they went back to what they do best.
I wonder if there are any examples of Google previously spinning off companies and selling them. It's hard to imagine it given how entrenched most products are in its internal software ecosystem
They have the technical chops, but not the capital goods. At the end of the day Stadia works by equipping a bunch of local datacenters with specific hardware and maintaining those with high reliability across a global market. Running the framebuffer through a video encoder isn't really the hard part. And the part that is the hard part is absolutely Google's domain of expertise.
Which is a shame, because the technology really is just plain great.
Is it, though? You're really renting a server. Other companies who rent you remote game servers have gone broke, because it wasn't cost effective. Google can afford losses to get market share, but at some point the price has to go up.
Imagine you're bigcorp and you sell a game which features multiplayer PVP combat as your central feature. You can optimize your entire engine to kingdom come and back, but if there are still latency issues, your developers get the blame.
Outside of some AAA RPG and adventure games, most of the rest of the truly big games feature PVP content as their main selling point. Fifa, Call of Duty, Madden, Halo, Destiny, Fortnite, Apex Legends, DOTA, League of Legends, etc... they all live and die on network latency. They are the biggest of the big and if your platform doesn't have them AND run them well, you're dead.
Hard to get someone to invest in your product knowing that your product is going to suck for the games people really want to play.
I'm still not sure why Amazon hasn't bought Discord and Valve. Discord makes perfect sense as a complement to Twitch, and Valve would ensure that they basically own the entire PC gaming space.
The industry did want to bite and all the ingredients were there. The only reason Stadia didn't succeed is that Google fucked up in the most ridiculous ways.
It just doesn’t look or feel as good as the native experience and the only people saying the tech was great are not serious gamers. Casual people don’t care enough to try Stadia and serious gamers can tell how shitty it is.
Specifically Google Marketed it as a full priced full featured platform with a pitiful initial catalogue of a couple games (namely Destiny). They also went completely dark for periods of months here and there, typically around the winter holidays, which frustrated what initial users they did get.
The Indie folks are easily wooed away from Steam, just look at how successful Epic has been with their free games, which they paid pittances for (eg. Super Meat Boy for $50,000).
Look at No More Robots titles on Xbox Games Pass (which is also on PC).
The problem is that Google just didn't put any money into buying up rights for titles. Plus, as other mentioned, the outdated pricing model. It should have been $20/month for unlimited gameplay of any title with maybe a discount tier of $15 for 900p.
Super Meat Boy is a 10 year old game that probably had sales close to 0 at this point (it has been on sale for a couple bucks multiple times by now). Taking 50k now a decade after release and losing practically nothing as anyone who was going to buy it already did makes a lot of sense for a small indie dev (literally just 2 people if I remember right)
Well it's not like Google Stadia is the only one trying to provide cloud gaming, alternatives exist: Geforce Now, Shadow, Playstation Now, Blacknut.
So I don't think the industry is completely against it.
The latency is never going to be acceptable playing an FPS or similar over a video stream. It's fundamentally a stinker of an idea for anything but turn based strategy and similar games.
Much smaller differences in latency have been shown to be relevant to competitive FPS (it's not necessarily absolute reaction time but relative to your opponents that matters). That said it's unlikely to be entirely the decider for a lot of people. Also, that kind of latency is basically the best case scenario: when you factor in a not-fantastic internet connection, location, and wifi, the user experience could still wind up quite poor in a lot of games (and it's not something which all players are going to notice consciously, they're just going to feel like the game controls worse).
20ms is a bit more than one frame at 60 fps. If you still have a NES and an analog CRT tv, the best way to feel the difference is play super mario brothers for an hour on your modern tv that probably takes at least 20 ms to process rca video and display it, then play on the CRT for a while and see how much better it feels. Some things that get especially hard to do with lag, but are easy enough for most people otherwise are jumping onto a block above your head when you're on a single block, like the ? blocks in 1-1; and sliding through a one block space when you're big, like the spot towards the beginning of 1-2.
Of course, modern games are built around expecting a lot more latency in the system, but having your input a frame behind to start with, before adding render time, encoding time, decoding time, and then display processing makes for a tough experience.
Or an area that is simply not that close to Stadia's servers. Or an area on a bad backbone - like much of the world, like much of north america (maybe north america isn't Google's target audience though? ;)
Or - and this is the kicker - in an area that has lots of Stadia users. Which makes sense - more load, more demand = service gets worse. But that means that you end up with a messed up "regional playability" curve, where the best experience - if not the only good experience - is had by people in areas close enough to the servers, but where Stadia is not too popular as to be overloaded.
That particular caveat has gotten better over time, from what I understand. Throw more hardware at the problem, open more datacenters in the same region, and that helps deal with load. But it certainly left a well-deserved poor first-impression for many people.
This could work for casual FPS games, but for competitive FPS gaming like Counter-Strike or Valorant, 20ms is a deal breaker for players who want to perform at a high level.
Pro FPS players consistently choose monitors with the highest refresh rates available.
A 60hz refresh rate corresponds to 16.67 milliseconds frame time, and a 240hz rate corresponds to 4.2 milliseconds.
The issue here is not reaction time, but "feel". Even a moderately skilled player can test this for themselves by switching between refresh rates. Specifically the "feel" is the relationship between moving the mouse and the shift of perspective on the screen. Low refresh rates cause players to over correct their aim as the gaps between frames are larger, and the motion on the screen is less smooth.
Never is pretty harsh. On my current internet connection with 20 ms to the first hop, yeah, it's not ever going to be good. If you use a low delay, high bandwidth codec, and restrict to users with enough bandwidth and sub 10 ms roundtrip, the customer base will be tiny, but the experience would be fine. Helps if they don't use wifi, or at least have a good rf environment.
not sure if there is math to back this up. a regular multiplayer FPS already sends and receives a lot of data. there is always some lag. you could say at least the input lag is 0 but for multiplayer it's not exactly true. the server is authoritative and it might revert your movement or decide you didn't shoot where you think you shot, etc.
I think a decentral approach to gaming, the classical one, is just better scalable. While our communication infrastructure will come to a point of feasibility, it doesn't make much sense to me. The logistical challenge of deploying games has become almost trivial and the barrier is shrinking further.
People compare it to Netflix. It is convenient, true, but I canceled that just recently anyway. It is probably me, but it did incentivise me to watch crap.
Except if you wait for sales, then it can be less than $60. Also you don't have to pay a subscription nor a controller. Other than that, you are 100% correct.
I've already played $200 worth of games and they sent me $100 worth of devices, and I paid in total $130. And that's without counting that I didn't have to have hardware to run the games also.
Steam already supports cloud gaming. I signed a legal agreement on top of the existing Steamworks distribution agreement which lets my software be distributed through GeForce now and quote "Valve operated cloud gaming services". So I assume this is something they are at least considering.
> Yeah, the industry just seems not to have bitten
Assuming that the industry would do all of their work for them, and that 99.99999% of the responsibility lied anywhere other than Google themselves seems like a very Google thing to do. It is, predictably, the kind of arrogance that begets a (perceived to be) floundering product like this.
The system launched with a pitiful fraction of the features they advertised that it could and would do. It launched with many important questions unanswered - often purposely, because everyone already knows the answers and those answers are bad and answering them could only hurt Google further.
It still lacks many of those features, too.
The story of how their reveal event's gaming history display case came to be - the one that showcased several great failures and blunders in gaming history, with Stadia as the next in line - is an excellent microcosm of the kind of decision making that went into the Stadia project as whole.
EDIT:
> But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution.
There have been many games on streaming services that did not make their way to early Stadia. Many that may still not be on Stadia - I haven't done the research lately, so I can't say.
Moving to a pure streaming solution - one where they don't have to provision and manage the hardware and all that sticky ugliness - is an absolute dream for many game publishers. Console hardware control is a small part of that dream, and it's less important than the rest. Stadia very well could have been the mass-accepted vehicle that delivered on the rest of that dream, had Google executed well.
To this day, I'm still astonished that they've dropped the ball, the slam dunk, this hard. They're limping along when they very well could have had their revolution, had they done a better job.
I know folks at AAA game studios/publishers and the primary reason I've repeatedly heard is: Stadia requires that we port to Linux.
Completely insane requirement. Steam, meanwhile, is making Linux gaming better than ever with their investment in Proton (which is incredible, wine has never been so good) and Nvidia's game streaming service "just works" and you bring your own games (just log into steam).
Stadia is screwed from the get-go by thrusting inane requirements onto their potential partners. If they had huge market power, maybe it'd fly, but it's effectively a new console as far as publishers are concerned.
Instead it should just work with PC games. End of story.
It using Linux shouldn't be an issue. You could use Wine and Proton to make the difference the same way Valve does.
They purposefully hamper the systems though. So even a game like Destiny 2 is running at Medium settings on a datacenter. Just to be able to containerize it and all that noise.
You're right that it should just work from the devloper's perspective. I personally think this is all possible with existing tech, but Google failed to deliver. Game devs have weird gripes about porting to Linux.
They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?
No. Porting engines across complicated SDKs and build environments is what these studios do every day of their existence, and virtually all the backends run fine on Linux already.
Again, the reason the big studios aren't on board is because they don't want to be part of an app store ecosystem. It's not a technical thing at all.
> They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?
Ports to Xbox, Switch and PS5 have a long established record of making money, those devices have huge established userbases and they have very good toolsets for doing the ports. The engines will have already been ported.
None of those are true for Linux, and the toolsets for doing so are not mature in the slightest, for a completely unproven market.
It's because their expertise is in Linux for most of their products. They are incentivised to leverage their domain expertise here, and maybe only Amazon has comparable expertise in.
I think the industry is quite keen on the idea, as there are many similar services entering the space. I think the problem is stadia's model: the best value for players can be found in platforms like geforce now or the various smaller players where it's basically just renting a windows VM with a low latency connection, so they can just play their existing library (and which can be transferred to another service or played on your own PC), or in the offerings from Sony and Microsoft where you pay a monthly fee but get access to a huge library. The fact that stadia wants you to pay again for your games, which are locked into that service, have a smaller selection of games, and pay a monthly subscription is probably not worth the ability to play on a chromecast or a maybe slightly better latency, especially when there's unforced errors like some games becoming unplayable on the service for months due to bugs.
Agree. The problem is that Google didn't make any effort understand what people want. It's not just the payment/ownership model, it's also true of the technical decisions.
They aimed for 4K out of the gate, but the sorts of people who care about 4K gaming are going to own their own high-end hardware. Stadia's potential customers don't care about 4K, they care about 1080P working really well. Here, Stadia loses to the competition. 1080P gaming from GeForce Now looks a good deal better than 1080P gaming from Stadia. The graphics settings can be adjusted to be higher than those of Stadia (where the settings cannot be adjusted), and there are fewer compression artifacts, especially in dark scenes which look awful in Stadia.
To return to the payment/ownership model, GeForce Now is better not only in that it doesn't ask the customer to buy the games a second time, it's also better in that the customer can freely switch between GeForce Now and their own hardware, through the magic of cloud saves. Constrained to your laptop for a while? No problem, use GeForce Now. Stadia, on the other hand, has made a conscious effort to separate itself from the PC gaming platform. Cloud saves won't sync between Stadia and your own machine, as Stadia tries to present itself as a whole new platform, separate from PC gaming and from the various consoles.
> geforce now or the various smaller players where it's basically just renting a windows VM with a low latency connection, so they can just play their existing library
Not quite, as GeForce Now will only run officially supported games.
> or a maybe slightly better latency
Not in my experience. I've found GeForce Now and Stadia to both be very good in terms of latency.
messaging in big corporate entities is like soviet totalitarian states. they'll swear up and down everything is great, even as the radiation detectors are off the scale.
One of the biggest problems Google has is that they excel at engineering, but they lack proper marketing talent. Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform. During covid time that's truly a lost opportunity.
I'm wondering how many of their products were killed just because of the fact, that there was no plan beyond letting it out in the market.
Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
You have to pay for the games and you can't take them with you and we know Google will shut this down eventually. It would be different if you could use your existing licenses, or even if you could buy on Stadia and play on something else too.
License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
I subscribe to Geforce Now. The tech works well but the business model is a bit niche. I pay a subscriber fee but still have to buy the games. If I already had a large game library then it's because I already had a computer that could play them. If I buy new games that my computer can't run then I will lose access to them once I stop my subscription. Not every game on my steam library is supported, in fact the library is missing a lot of the major publishers besides EA.
As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
nvidia recently doubled the price[1] and have basically done zero marketing for it. They seem to be as prosperous as they want to be. When publishers tried to extort GFN, nvidia just shrugged and kept going (and have been adding dozens of games weekly).
[1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
Publishers removed their games because they want the platform to pay them to have their games on there eg Rockstar, Bethesda, EA, etc. It's disgusting since it's depriving the end-user who has already paid for their games to play on the hardware of their choice, all because they want to double-dip.
Perhaps gamers should stop bending to game developers and platforms until they make the game available on their favorite platform. That’s exactly what I do: I picked a platform, and only play games available on it. Game developers and platforms refusing to publish a game on that platform are loosing my money.
I pay for GFN because my main device is Linux, so if a game can't be run locally via Wine/Proton I can just play it on the cloud. My existing games library is decent so it makes far more sense to play my Steam games here than pay for a different subscription.
As a consumer, I personally knew it was over when Google released the new Chromecast without Stadia support. They could have had an opportunity to shave a few more milliseconds off the lag with a bespoke device that paired with the Stadia controller for "The best streaming experience on any platform!" Instead they don't even support their own services. What a completly sad and broken company.
This is Google we are talking about. The company that does “moon shots” that are 20 years away but sells them off a few years later. They can’t focus on anything long term that doesn’t feed AdSense to the degree YouTube, Search, Maps and Gmail do. Stadia isn’t doing that and it will be gone in a couple years.
Have you even read a Google earnings report in the last couple years? Or listened to an earnings call? Your failure to mention Google Cloud just shows how aging your perspective of the company is.
I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
My point is that Stadia is a critical layer on top of the cloud platforms. If cloud is a proven market, then accessing gaming chips for playing games is also a proven market. I think the ditching of their internal game studio is a sign of strength, not weakness, in this case.
Support is absolutely urgent. If you don't seem to be taking your platform seriously by doing things like day 1 support for your own hardware, you shouldn't be surprised that consumers don't take it seriously either.
What a strange idea. There was a pandemic keeping everyone at home, a major shortage of GPUs and next gen consoles, a holiday season, stimulus checks, and a full playing field of new cloud and console products vying for the next gen. And Google decided to delay streaming support for 8+ months because nothing was urgent? This is the very apotheosis of urgent. Some other competitor is going to win the cloud market (My guess is Microsoft) and then Stadia's opportunity will be gone.
Not disagreeing it’s surprising. Its the reason I still have a Chromecast Ultra instead of the new Google TV one. But I’m not throwing away my stadia controller just because I can’t play on their newest tv product. Winning the cloud gaming market will take a decade. Microsoft can’t win it in a quarter, half or year
Knew it was over? Double knew it was over? It ain’t over. The disruption is in the distribution (no consoles) not
business model. Netflix of gaming won’t work. At best we will subscribe to studio channels ex) Ubisoft+
I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.
One engineering problem they haven't solved is keeping an old service on life support. Nobody gets promoted for keeping their API stable indefinitely, so prohibitive maintenance costs are driving them to kill everything but huge hits.
The addressable market for stadia right now is vanishingly small compared to the market for every other platform. What proportion of gamers live in an area where it's available? Is it even a double digit percentage? I doubt it.
Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
I disagree here. They don't lack marketing talent. They lack executives with a cohesive view of 'Google' the company. It's just a bunch of hyper rational utility maximizers trying to meet whatever quarterly/yearly targets they have.
By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.
That’s not what’s happening. Google has a product strategy problem more than it has a marketing problem. Google can hire people to do marketing (and they do) but they can’t outsource product strategy.
> Stadia is really cool, yet the company did nothing to attract players and grow the platform.
Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
Doing fine with ~50mbps WiFi. The issue is not the bandwidth but latency. Check the 99 percentile of ping, should be within ~20ms for comfortable gaming.
Like Jamie larnier said in the book “you are not a gadget”, you don’t want a culture that is dominated by the vision and culture of advertising people.
Personally I'm not willing to invest in games I could lose access if they decides to pull the plug. I suppose they'd offer some kind of license transfer or some kind of compensation if that happened, but to me it seems like a risky deal from a consumer point of view. I'd be less worried if a purchased game was made available on alternative stores right off the bat.
With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
Google is in the ads business. Anything that doesn’t align with that is not important to Google. In other words, if a new Google product/service doesn’t help Google making more money on ads, it will eventually be shut down.
I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company...
I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering.
There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution.
I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.
I jumped on Stadia with Resident Evil 8: on PC (Win 10) I had constant frame drops with Chrome, fixed by installing Chrome Canary. Not a great start, but after that the game played perfectly.
Then I got the chromecast ultra + pad bundle, too bad by the time it arrived I already completed Resident Evil; the onboarding is kinda silly, having to download one app to set up the chromecast and one to set up the controller, logging in to Google twice.. but the real problem is the selection of available games. Very very few recent/new games, a bunch of random indie games, a bag of generic old shooters… and that’s it
It's grimly hilarious that Google picked a business model that was so bad they couldn't make Stadia a success in a time period that could not be more suited to it. Hardware costs are insane. Consoles are nearly impossible to get. The GPU market is destroyed by semiconductor shortages and crypto miners. Yet Google's reputation is so god-fucking-awful people still won't bite on their "we promise we won't treat this service like we've treated literally everything else we've ever made" product.
It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.
Yes. That matters immensely. This is not just any bubble, but the bubble of the people who drive technology adoption...by writing articles on tech, by having friends trust their judgment, and so on. It is a leading indicator, not a lagging one.
Gmail has well over a billion users. The number of people who search with Google is in the multiple billions.
The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.
In two weeks, Google will start counting new photos against users' Gmail/Drive space unless one pays to upgrade. I think it could cause a shift in perception.
Google and Gmail adoption was also driven by the same sorts of people that would have been on HN if HN were around back then. Yahoo and MSN/Hotmail used to matter a lot more than they do nowadays.
This does not invalidate the original argument: This crowd here is representative of who first adopted GMail and spread the word. Without these early adopters, the other billion users would likely not have followed suit.
I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it likely that it was similar back in the day.
In every industry that might depend on it for revenue via platforms like Stadia. I’m in a number of game industry Discord servers and Stadia is a joke because everyone knows that Google’s rollout has been so bad that they’ll likely shutter the service within a year or two, which means nobody wants to put any effort into supporting it.
The other issue is that their advertising is so bad that most of the regular gaming audience has no idea what it even is. My housemate is a casual gamer with a doctor-level education and I asked him if he understood what Stadia was or did and he had no idea.
I agree with your points, though re: hardware and cloud-gaming in general: I wonder if its availability and cost issues would serve as a driver for _consumers_ - where they would seek a cloud-streaming solutions (so _they_ don't need to find/buy the scarce high end GPUs or consoles themselves -- and let Google Stadia or Shadow.tech or GeForce Now or xCloud or whoever take care of that).
I think that was their point about hardware. It's so hard and expensive to acquire as a consumer that stadia is tempting even for peoe who usually build their own gaming PCs.
I like playing games. I like playing them a lot but the reality is that these days I don't do it that much. I'm about as far from a hardcore gamer as it's possible to get, although the games I tend to play overlap significantly with what more "serious" gamers might choose to play (I'm not really at all into the category of games generally described as "casual" these days).
That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers.
Why do I bring this up?
Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection.
If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case.
Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience.
Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience.
Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.
Pretty much all the old classics hum at a cool 60fps.
3 frames of latency borders on unplayable if you want to make a game that flirts with human reaction time - one popular sweet spot of "fun" in the design space.
You can definitely feel 2 or 3 frames of added latency at 60fps. No matter the game. And the games of old did run at 60fps and there's definitely value to the ones that do nowadays too. Even if the AAA games moved away from low-latency gaming in general.
Honest question: Have you actually tried Stadia? You have a lot of assumptions and theoreticals in your post, but for all of Stadia's shortcomings the streaming tech is _incredibly_ good.
A ton of people will run mental calculations, assert it must add at least x ms of latency so it can't possibly work, but just try it. It's free. It works.
I have been PC gaming for 25 years. I have a $3k+ rig with a 3080. I'm very attuned to input lag and fidelity. Is Stadia as good as playing locally? No, of course not, but it's far far better than I imagined it could be. You might be surprised.
A difference of even 2-4f in a fighting game can make all the world of difference, both in balance and in the simple feel of the game. Games have to be designed for an expected amount of delay, which itself is often a design component of how they expect the game to function online (i.e. type and implementation of netcode).
So what did we see with that genre on Stadia? Well, Stadia not only adds different input/response latency for both players in a fighting game, but it also doesn't colocate the matches to the same server in between players (or same running game instance); so the matches have the standard lag between Stadia data centers on top of the user <-> stadia delay. Unsatisfying for both players, and inferior to alternative ways of playing those games.
Ironically, player-led initiatives for that kind of hosting - to deal with poor netcode of older fighting games - have shown that the very idea is sound, and can deliver a better experience e.g. Parsec game tournaments. Not optimal, but better. Google has simply failed to deliver.
Part of the problem is up to the developers to solve, but the buck stops with Google. Stadia needs to deliver a world class experience on its merits, and it needs to give developers the tools and guidance and working examples - if not real games - showing how to do so. And it needed to be doing that on Day -1.
Or they can just say "Stadia is for genres X, Y and Z", and only spend their time and money courting games and developers in those genres, and everyone involved would probably be better off for it. They could have - and still can - set grand but realistic expectations and deliver on them.
You chose the single most latency sensitive type of game. If you're someone who plays those games competitively, you're better off sticking to your local rig and CRT display.
For most games and most users, you'll get the feel within a minute and forget you're not playing locally. I played quite a bit of Destiny 2 streaming and it was quite playable. Again, no comparison against my powerful local rig but I don't think Google/Amazon/NVidia are targeting 3080 owners for their streaming services.
I play Destiny 2 semi-regularly with friends on Xbox at the moment. Latency issues are sometimes noticeable (and quite irritating), even though it's obviously sending a lot less data down the wire than Stadia during play.
Theoretical concern or not, if that can't work flawlessly over my broadband connection then I don't see how Stadia can: it's not magic.
Sadly it doesn't actually matter how well it works for other people because it has to work well for me on my internet connection. The evidence I have so far suggests it's not going to be that great, so I'm not going to pay for it.
The reason this doesn't bug the heck out of me already is because I don't actually play that many online games: I'm a fan of single player story driven campaigns, and (to a lesser extent) single player sandbox experiences, as well as arcadey racing games with couch and online play. Finally, I also play a lot of more retro titles.
These are all experiences that work really well when played on local hardware that absolutely aren't going to improve via any kind of streaming experience as those services currently exist.
Fair enough. For what it's worth, Stadia pro includes Destiny 2 and the expansions/DLC and there's a 1 month free promo. (The base game is also totally free without the pro trial, but honestly there's not much to do in the base game anymore.)
Stadia plays Destiny at 60fps (pretty sure Xbox One is 30). So it sometimes actually feels as good or better than on consoles imo. In any case, since it's free it's worth checking out just to see what the tech is like. You might reaffirm your opinions, but you might reconsider them too.
It is such a confusing proposition to buy. I got a discount offer for the Stadia (£60) but I couldn't find an official list of what games are available, or how much they cost!
Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an extra tenner a month!
At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.
It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest, coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly, Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it very unattractive to me.
I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid before I gave up on it.
The game selection has improved a lot, but is still the weak point. Resident Evil, Cyberpunk, Madden, FIFA, etc were huge wins. Ubisoft seems all in on Stadia and streaming more broadly. If they can work out a deal to get the upcoming Division Battle Royale as a true free to play on Stadia that could breathe life into the user base.
I tried stadia, didn't convince me at all, it was rather a let down. The most jarring was the sound, it stuttered. The video was fluent enough, but seemed horribly compressed (washed out and artifacts) and low res (but I have a 4k monitor). Yet when I hear others talk about it its nearly the same as running a game local, or even better when, like me, you don't have the latest and greatest videocard. I suppose the bottleneck was my Internet connection, a "lowly" 30 Mbps, but then again, it's good enough for everything else, and the stadia test thingy said I should expect a high quality experience.
I hope it sticks around. I have a Mac and a Nintendo Switch for the kids so I don't really have a good way to play games, unless I buy a console. I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia and it's been great. No downloads is great. I honestly don't really care if they shut it down in a couple of years, personally once I beat a game I don't really go back to it. In the meantime they're giving me a super powerful gaming PC for basically nothing.
I'm in a similar boat: if Stadia isn't here, I'm pretty much praying that Luna continues, because honestly, the other option is mobile games. A gaming PC or console does not interest me any more. It's a different kind of lifestyle, really.
But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games like Civilization, of course.
It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the leadership to make that happen.
I love Stadia and hope it doesn't go anywhere. Playing Destiny 2 with my wife during Corona with free controllers we got for preordering Cyberpunk was an awesome experience. Playing Cyberpunk and then RE7: Biohazard during quick breaks, anywhere, on a potato laptop, convinced me that this is the way we're all going to be playing games not long from now.
Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish Biohazard.
that potato laptop costs more than the latest playstation though. and it can't really be a potato laptop. you need a good internet connection and good video decoding
I finished RE8 on Stadia on launch day; it looks great on PC but for some reason it looks even better on a TV with the CCU. As someone who's put hundreds of £s and hours into Stadia, I'm quite content with it, I wish it had more games though, most of the free titles that come with Stadia Pro are ridiculous (though, to be fair, they did help me discover gems such as The West of Loathing).
It works really well, it's really a very convincing experience. It's particularly attractive now that Google throws cash at you in the form of free controller + Chromecast.
On one hand game streaming is great, as it reduces hardware requirements, but not having actual game files on your PC might not give some gamers a chance to experience game modding or "hacking", that usually leads to learning how games are built, and even how computers work.
After seeing the news about a Quake 3 client hitting the front page, I can't help but ask my fellow shooter fans who have tried stadia or another such service: how bad was it?
Well unfortunately there's no equivalent to Quake 3 on Stadia, nowadays the FPS are all controller-friendly crap. The controller friendly crap works well on Stadia.
I think it's alright for casual gaming. It's limited to 60 FPS and even in games like Orcs Must Die! 3 it struggles to maintain that. There are compression artifacts.
If you've got a gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU Moonlight performs much better.
http://shadow.tech is still way better - you get your own PC so can run all games and work related software, stream 4k with 10ms latency from datacenters near you, it's almost impossible to discern a difference from running locally. All for 12$ a month, a stupid low price.
Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out recently so the future is uncertain.
Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years, so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.
You also get to deal with game downloads, updates, system maintenance and all the other stuff that I really don't want to deal with if I just want to quickly play a streamed game. (and that's if you can even get a shadow box before the end of the year).
True, but personally i haven't had any hassle. Blazing fast connection speeds so you just install steam or another client and download your games, updates are super fast too.
But yeah, the perfect platform would be 1-click games - but then you can't mod and have way less games available because publishers as in the film industry just cant figure out licensing.
The business plan submitted by OVH to the bankruptcy court says the monthly subscription will need to be raised to $25 in hope for profitability within 3 years.
It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the same peak hours.
I imagine these streaming game services would be much more successful if the model was “stream an arbitrary gaming desktop to your random device,” but then they couldn’t double dip by charging for the service and also the games.
The original Xbox lost $5-7 billion in 5 years
Epic games has lost $593m on the Epic Game Store in 3 years
Apple invested $500m in Apple Arcade (and that was on an existing hardware install base).
I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive investment that it required.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadWhich is a problem in the way that selling out a concert venue is a problem.
If Google is (officially) that confident Stadia is doing well why don't they officially commit to support the product for the next X years?
The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed their dev studio days after telling their employees everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem even riskier than it looks right now.
Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything they release, no matter how great it is.
I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more use.
I don't 100% grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it correlates to Stadia's free tier release: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...
The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost money on every Xbox sold for many years.
According to a Bloomberg article from January 2017 (just before the release of the Switch) concerning Nintendo's yearly earnings report,
> While game consoles are usually sold at a loss early in their life cycles, the Switch will be profitable from the start, Nintendo said.
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloom... (the URL also works without web.archive.org, but the current version contains a paywall)
You are correct, the most technical correct. However a more closer to reality is > dozens of trillions USD. Remember, gaming industry is bigger than both movie AND music industry combined.
As of 2018, video games generated sales of US$134.9 billion annually worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...
Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.
It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …
Even games with components that have expired licenses are kept on the account, your access is never really revoked -- even a VAC ban won't lose you your library.
You can't mod a Stadia game...
Ehh, I prefer to buy from GOG when I can for that exact reason.
Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do to. So it's gratifying to see that this one time, we don't have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
People get banned on Steam and lose access to games too. I know Valve promised you that they aren't renting those games, but if you look at the contract you'll find all you have is a license. And there have been multiple circumstances already where Valve has kicked users and/or lost licenses to its content.
A long time ago, there was an official statement to the effect of "if steam goes down, we'll release a patch to unlock your games" or something to that effect.
I think that was before third parties could even sell on Steam.
Could also be apocryphal, or photoshopped emails and screencaps and the like. It almost certainly doesn't hold true today.
But at the very least, you can download your steam games today, and if it shuts down at some point in the future, you can modify or crack those local files and executables to be playable; multiplayer systems notwithstanding. There's a path forward. With Stadia games, there is nothing without original publisher or developer intervention.
Is it, though? You're really renting a server. Other companies who rent you remote game servers have gone broke, because it wasn't cost effective. Google can afford losses to get market share, but at some point the price has to go up.
Outside of some AAA RPG and adventure games, most of the rest of the truly big games feature PVP content as their main selling point. Fifa, Call of Duty, Madden, Halo, Destiny, Fortnite, Apex Legends, DOTA, League of Legends, etc... they all live and die on network latency. They are the biggest of the big and if your platform doesn't have them AND run them well, you're dead.
Hard to get someone to invest in your product knowing that your product is going to suck for the games people really want to play.
I'm still not sure why Amazon hasn't bought Discord and Valve. Discord makes perfect sense as a complement to Twitch, and Valve would ensure that they basically own the entire PC gaming space.
Look at No More Robots titles on Xbox Games Pass (which is also on PC).
The problem is that Google just didn't put any money into buying up rights for titles. Plus, as other mentioned, the outdated pricing model. It should have been $20/month for unlimited gameplay of any title with maybe a discount tier of $15 for 900p.
Of course, modern games are built around expecting a lot more latency in the system, but having your input a frame behind to start with, before adding render time, encoding time, decoding time, and then display processing makes for a tough experience.
I think this is the most important part of the ordeal: lower latency/shorter input-stimuli loop feels better and games are all about feeling good.
I wonder how Google of all players missed it because back in 2010s they were talking how fractional second delays hurt click metrics.
Or - and this is the kicker - in an area that has lots of Stadia users. Which makes sense - more load, more demand = service gets worse. But that means that you end up with a messed up "regional playability" curve, where the best experience - if not the only good experience - is had by people in areas close enough to the servers, but where Stadia is not too popular as to be overloaded.
That particular caveat has gotten better over time, from what I understand. Throw more hardware at the problem, open more datacenters in the same region, and that helps deal with load. But it certainly left a well-deserved poor first-impression for many people.
Pro FPS players consistently choose monitors with the highest refresh rates available.
This informal experiment is quite convincing
Does High FPS make you a better gamer?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA
A 60hz refresh rate corresponds to 16.67 milliseconds frame time, and a 240hz rate corresponds to 4.2 milliseconds.
The issue here is not reaction time, but "feel". Even a moderately skilled player can test this for themselves by switching between refresh rates. Specifically the "feel" is the relationship between moving the mouse and the shift of perspective on the screen. Low refresh rates cause players to over correct their aim as the gaps between frames are larger, and the motion on the screen is less smooth.
Even then, if the market is restricted to non-competitive players, that's a huge majority of the market.
People compare it to Netflix. It is convenient, true, but I canceled that just recently anyway. It is probably me, but it did incentivise me to watch crap.
The others all die a dramatic and fiery death.
Capcom had RE Village on there same day as the other stores.
EA are also releasing games on there.
So it seems at least some of the big publishers aren't that against the idea.
Assuming that the industry would do all of their work for them, and that 99.99999% of the responsibility lied anywhere other than Google themselves seems like a very Google thing to do. It is, predictably, the kind of arrogance that begets a (perceived to be) floundering product like this.
The system launched with a pitiful fraction of the features they advertised that it could and would do. It launched with many important questions unanswered - often purposely, because everyone already knows the answers and those answers are bad and answering them could only hurt Google further.
It still lacks many of those features, too.
The story of how their reveal event's gaming history display case came to be - the one that showcased several great failures and blunders in gaming history, with Stadia as the next in line - is an excellent microcosm of the kind of decision making that went into the Stadia project as whole.
EDIT:
> But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution.
There have been many games on streaming services that did not make their way to early Stadia. Many that may still not be on Stadia - I haven't done the research lately, so I can't say.
Moving to a pure streaming solution - one where they don't have to provision and manage the hardware and all that sticky ugliness - is an absolute dream for many game publishers. Console hardware control is a small part of that dream, and it's less important than the rest. Stadia very well could have been the mass-accepted vehicle that delivered on the rest of that dream, had Google executed well.
To this day, I'm still astonished that they've dropped the ball, the slam dunk, this hard. They're limping along when they very well could have had their revolution, had they done a better job.
I know folks at AAA game studios/publishers and the primary reason I've repeatedly heard is: Stadia requires that we port to Linux.
Completely insane requirement. Steam, meanwhile, is making Linux gaming better than ever with their investment in Proton (which is incredible, wine has never been so good) and Nvidia's game streaming service "just works" and you bring your own games (just log into steam).
Stadia is screwed from the get-go by thrusting inane requirements onto their potential partners. If they had huge market power, maybe it'd fly, but it's effectively a new console as far as publishers are concerned.
Instead it should just work with PC games. End of story.
They purposefully hamper the systems though. So even a game like Destiny 2 is running at Medium settings on a datacenter. Just to be able to containerize it and all that noise.
You're right that it should just work from the devloper's perspective. I personally think this is all possible with existing tech, but Google failed to deliver. Game devs have weird gripes about porting to Linux.
They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?
No. Porting engines across complicated SDKs and build environments is what these studios do every day of their existence, and virtually all the backends run fine on Linux already.
Again, the reason the big studios aren't on board is because they don't want to be part of an app store ecosystem. It's not a technical thing at all.
Depending on the engine it can be quite a lot of time. Especially if you don’t already have a Vulkan backend.
Therefore if you don’t think the additional sales are worth the expense, including the opportunity cost of your devs, why bother?
Ports to Xbox, Switch and PS5 have a long established record of making money, those devices have huge established userbases and they have very good toolsets for doing the ports. The engines will have already been ported.
None of those are true for Linux, and the toolsets for doing so are not mature in the slightest, for a completely unproven market.
They aimed for 4K out of the gate, but the sorts of people who care about 4K gaming are going to own their own high-end hardware. Stadia's potential customers don't care about 4K, they care about 1080P working really well. Here, Stadia loses to the competition. 1080P gaming from GeForce Now looks a good deal better than 1080P gaming from Stadia. The graphics settings can be adjusted to be higher than those of Stadia (where the settings cannot be adjusted), and there are fewer compression artifacts, especially in dark scenes which look awful in Stadia.
To return to the payment/ownership model, GeForce Now is better not only in that it doesn't ask the customer to buy the games a second time, it's also better in that the customer can freely switch between GeForce Now and their own hardware, through the magic of cloud saves. Constrained to your laptop for a while? No problem, use GeForce Now. Stadia, on the other hand, has made a conscious effort to separate itself from the PC gaming platform. Cloud saves won't sync between Stadia and your own machine, as Stadia tries to present itself as a whole new platform, separate from PC gaming and from the various consoles.
> geforce now or the various smaller players where it's basically just renting a windows VM with a low latency connection, so they can just play their existing library
Not quite, as GeForce Now will only run officially supported games.
> or a maybe slightly better latency
Not in my experience. I've found GeForce Now and Stadia to both be very good in terms of latency.
Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
[1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
My laptop doesn't handle monster hunter well (my desktop does), i wanted to play with my wife, but the game was pulled out.
This make it challenging: I have a steam library, but I can't trust what I can and cannot play. In the end it's easier to buy another desktop.
Well, unless crypto fucks up the chip world. Sigh.
I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
Support is absolutely urgent. If you don't seem to be taking your platform seriously by doing things like day 1 support for your own hardware, you shouldn't be surprised that consumers don't take it seriously either.
I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.
Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.
Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
Personally I don’t care if they pull the plug: it’s unlikely I’d want to play the same game again, and if I do, I have no problem purchasing it again.
They would have made more by developing or buying a game engine and tying their services into it.
At this point google is to greedy for it’s own good. It wants the whole vertical from day one. A consistent Google scale hug of death.
I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company...
I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering.
There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution.
I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.
It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.
Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.
The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.
I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it likely that it was similar back in the day.
View a Reddit thread. Not exactly representative I know, but pretty normie imo.
The other issue is that their advertising is so bad that most of the regular gaming audience has no idea what it even is. My housemate is a casual gamer with a doctor-level education and I asked him if he understood what Stadia was or did and he had no idea.
That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers.
Why do I bring this up?
Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection.
If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case.
Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience.
Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience.
Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.
3 frames of latency borders on unplayable if you want to make a game that flirts with human reaction time - one popular sweet spot of "fun" in the design space.
You can definitely feel 2 or 3 frames of added latency at 60fps. No matter the game. And the games of old did run at 60fps and there's definitely value to the ones that do nowadays too. Even if the AAA games moved away from low-latency gaming in general.
A ton of people will run mental calculations, assert it must add at least x ms of latency so it can't possibly work, but just try it. It's free. It works.
I have been PC gaming for 25 years. I have a $3k+ rig with a 3080. I'm very attuned to input lag and fidelity. Is Stadia as good as playing locally? No, of course not, but it's far far better than I imagined it could be. You might be surprised.
So what did we see with that genre on Stadia? Well, Stadia not only adds different input/response latency for both players in a fighting game, but it also doesn't colocate the matches to the same server in between players (or same running game instance); so the matches have the standard lag between Stadia data centers on top of the user <-> stadia delay. Unsatisfying for both players, and inferior to alternative ways of playing those games.
Ironically, player-led initiatives for that kind of hosting - to deal with poor netcode of older fighting games - have shown that the very idea is sound, and can deliver a better experience e.g. Parsec game tournaments. Not optimal, but better. Google has simply failed to deliver.
Part of the problem is up to the developers to solve, but the buck stops with Google. Stadia needs to deliver a world class experience on its merits, and it needs to give developers the tools and guidance and working examples - if not real games - showing how to do so. And it needed to be doing that on Day -1.
Or they can just say "Stadia is for genres X, Y and Z", and only spend their time and money courting games and developers in those genres, and everyone involved would probably be better off for it. They could have - and still can - set grand but realistic expectations and deliver on them.
For most games and most users, you'll get the feel within a minute and forget you're not playing locally. I played quite a bit of Destiny 2 streaming and it was quite playable. Again, no comparison against my powerful local rig but I don't think Google/Amazon/NVidia are targeting 3080 owners for their streaming services.
Theoretical concern or not, if that can't work flawlessly over my broadband connection then I don't see how Stadia can: it's not magic.
Sadly it doesn't actually matter how well it works for other people because it has to work well for me on my internet connection. The evidence I have so far suggests it's not going to be that great, so I'm not going to pay for it.
The reason this doesn't bug the heck out of me already is because I don't actually play that many online games: I'm a fan of single player story driven campaigns, and (to a lesser extent) single player sandbox experiences, as well as arcadey racing games with couch and online play. Finally, I also play a lot of more retro titles.
These are all experiences that work really well when played on local hardware that absolutely aren't going to improve via any kind of streaming experience as those services currently exist.
Stadia plays Destiny at 60fps (pretty sure Xbox One is 30). So it sometimes actually feels as good or better than on consoles imo. In any case, since it's free it's worth checking out just to see what the tech is like. You might reaffirm your opinions, but you might reconsider them too.
Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an extra tenner a month!
At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.
It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest, coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly, Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it very unattractive to me.
I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid before I gave up on it.
But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games like Civilization, of course.
It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the leadership to make that happen.
Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish Biohazard.
That's an entry-level feature on a phone, let alone a tablet or laptop.
If you've got a gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU Moonlight performs much better.
Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out recently so the future is uncertain.
Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years, so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.
It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the same peak hours.
I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive investment that it required.
Give people a 'Halo' exclusive, or go home.
80% of the business plan relies on hard hitting amazing exclusive titles.
And of course massively subsidized hardware.
And a long term vision.
It's sad because the model looked kind of cool, I'll never get to try it out ...
Stadia flat refused to give me a refund.