Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

I wonder there is behind the scenes calibration since it’s somewhat deterministic. Sort of like how you could calibrate Guitar Hero/Rock Band for slow TVs.

Man, I can’t wait to play a game that demands precision like Mortal Kombat 11 … streaming. Seems legit.

It’ll be a decent test of some interesting things.

There are already folks who say that fighting games can’t be played online, but I’ve never had a problem doing so. Of course, I’m not remotely professional level where a single frame matters.

It shows supreme confidence in their technology and service. If MK doesn’t work on Stadia, we’ll all know day 1.

Is mortal Kombat really a harder latency test than an fps where you’re moving the cursor onto someone’s head and whipping your mouse around to look?

Yes.

Most shooters already cheat in your favor, especially if they’re being played with a controller. Worst case, they cheat a little more.

Nevertheless, I imagine even a fighting game will be fine in single player. I have no idea how they think they’re going to get low, consistent latency when it needs to go from you to the data center to the opponent’s PC/data center and back.

My intuition is that a multiplayer fighting game might not be any worse than a multiplayer fighting game run locally. It adds latency to your moves but not your opponents, because in both cases the person’s move has to traverse across the internet to the other player to resolve who actually hit and who blocked or whatever. So it might feel a bit laggy in the controls but the multiplayer resolution might be basically the same or even better if stadia can optimize the connection between the two players via Google end points

Wow, that list is terrible. Is there a game on there that hasn’t already been discounted a bunch of times on other services? Google is kicking themselves in the nuts here. Zero reason to get on board right now.

This alone would be enough to completely kill any fighting game, regardless of how good everything else about it is.

I disagree. They did a good job of getting a wide range of gaming genres to try out and prove work on the system. Red Dead 2 is a brand new game, that will allow someone like me who doesn’t have a good enough PC to run it to test how it works on a streaming service like this.

I don’t know if this service will be any good, but with that selection of games I think I could test it out and really understand if it’s worth the money. If those games prove that the system works, then it will all come down to what games they continue to add to the lineup.

Not on consoles it isn’t.

I look at it this way. If Gamepass had launched with this lineup, apart from RDR2 and I suppose ACO I’d think it was a bad launch. And all the games would have been “free”!

Fair enough. I have an older PC and a xbox 360 so for me it is “new” and a number of those games I would only be able to run at lower settings on my PC. I believe I am more in the target market for something like this compared to someone who has a higher end rig or an xbox one/PS4.

Now with that said, I agree that it’s surprising that Destiny 2 is the only free game. I think they are crazy if they think people are going to want to buy these games, or really any game for that matter, at normal prices in order to try out a new streaming service that may or may not be around in a year.

The thing is, at least as it is currently configured, you’re almost certainly better off financially getting Microsoft’s $20-to-rent-a-console-and-get-Gamepass deal, and on top of that you have a vastly bigger library of games.

The problem is that they are actually selling this to consumers. For money. They’re not announcing a period of open beta testing with a wide range of genres, or anything like that. At no point before now did they message just how slim and ancient the launch lineup would be.

If they’d launched with Stadia Base rather than just the Pro? Then this lineup would probably have been fine, because at least people wouldn’t need to get a $10 monthly subscription to play any of these 2016-2018 releases that they end up re-buying.

I still think the no-subscription options like Stadia Base are the killer app for streaming. Given what we now know, they must have been intending to launch with that, and this is yet another sign that it’s a troubled project.

It’s probably fair to say that the service is now in a paid beta phase. I guess the real launch will be whenever they introduce the integration into Youtube streaming

This is the article that Ars Technica is citing

“The best platforms for games tend to be things that don’t just have games on them” is an insightful comment, but I don’t see how Stadia’s technology is applicable to anything other than games. I mean yes, sure, streaming video is important, but YouTube and Twitch and the rest have got that covered pretty darn well.

Nobody wants thin clients; it’s 2019, your cellphone has enough power for standard office tasks. So what else can Stadia tech do?

Theoretically you could run desktop apps on it, but most of those have web versions already. You can get Word, Photoshop, etc. through a browser.

There might be a niche market for people who need render capacity on demand, like engineering firms…

I addressed that with the thin client thing. Nobody cares about that in 2019.

High power compute stuff definitely applies but that’s a tiny market, not exactly analagous to the PS2 is also a DVD player analogy.

It will do as well as Ouya and OnLive.