Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

Hey, totally fair to say that Google needs to prove that their product actually works. But kinda obvious, too.

With rollback networking, there’s an assumption that someone is “local”. Who or what is local when you’re playing on the cloud? As far as I know, there’s no gaming logic going on when I play street fighter 87 on my toaster oven - I don’t have the CPU for local computations, and don’t need to.

But rollback networking looks like you’re doing the computations locally then correcting them…so I can’t see how you correct the lag from your machine (which is streaming video and sending inputs) to the cloud…

In rollback networking, game logic is allowed to proceed with just the inputs from the local player. If the remote inputs have not yet arrived when it’s time to execute a frame, the networking code will predict what it expects the remote players to do based on previously seen inputs. Since there’s no waiting, the game feels just as responsive as it does offline. When those inputs finally arrive over the network, they can be compared to the ones that were predicted earlier. If they differ, the game can be re-simulated from the point of divergence to the current visible frame.

Maybe it’s not? This is a thread about Stadia? Seems like asking why Hulu is better than Netflix.

As far as I can tell it is literally the Quakeworld clientside prediction stuff which is not exactly new tech.

I know it’s a thread about Stadia. My question was with regards to the perceived value of Stadia, next to it’s only real competitor.

Shadow? PS Now? GeForce Now?

Hard to compare Stadia and xCloud since neither of them are available to the public as of yet, unlike those three above.

Heck, pretty soon you won’t have to press any buttons at all, it’ll just hit all the ones you meant to hit!

This is true, but the trend in tech over the last couple of decades is to make it “good enough” such that even though it’s worse than what they have now, people will flock to it in the name of convenience. Convenience is the only thing that seems to matter to the bulk of consumers these days, and once they latch on to something “convenient” it’s not long before the old, better thing is out of business and no longer available to those who can tell the difference.

PS Now, as currently constituted (specifically in it’s streaming form), isn’t competing with anything, haha. Latency is terrible (especially during peak hours), and the game selection, while large, is not new games at or around release, like Stadia and xCloud are aiming for.

Shadow and GeForce Now I’m not familiar with, as one is in beta, and the other isn’t available in my country.

You have a client in quakeworld that you run locally. Stadia doesn’t run locally, it runs on the cloud. So you can’t reduce lag from stadia to your display/input device with this. You can only reduce your lag to another user in multiplayer games - at least as described. Maybe they are doing something more interesting…

No one knows what business model xCloud is aiming for at this point.

I was talking about rollback networking, which does seem very similar to clientside prediction.

People forget that this only makes any sense for a a very specific tiny percentage of people:

  1. they must be gamers, else they wont pay for a subscription for gaming
  2. they must be in some financial position where the economics of an ongoing subscription is affordable but a decent gaming PC is not
  3. They must ONLY and EXCLUSIVELY be interested in playing games that work well with latency, because otherwise they DO need a gaming PC and thus the biz model is pointless
  4. They must have a rock-solid internet connection. Almost certainly fiber to the premises
  5. They must have uncapped bandwidth, or incredibly high bandwidth caps.
  6. They must EXCLUSIVELY be interested in only ever playing games that have a deal with stadia, otherwise…they need a gaming PC and again…the biz model is pointless.

This is a venn diagram with a trivial number of people in it. There is zero business model here. It will fail.

  1. video games are the largest media segment by dollars spent. there are plenty of gamers
  2. at $20/month or whatever, it would take 5-6 years for a subscription to outprice a decent gaming PC. the economics probably favor a subscription. also, convenience.
  3. the subset of games that won’t work with latency is tiny: fighting games and shmups… that’s about it
  4. i have cable and streaming works just fine for me
  5. streaming gaming video is no more bandwidth intensive than streaming non-interactive video
  6. i guess? who knows what that looks like at this point

You might be right and this will fail. I actually think it’s more likely that Google abandons it on a whim. But I think that streaming gaming will start to capture significant market share, particularly if it’s convenient and painless.

Yup. Stadia may totally fail because Google. Game streaming is inevitable. Publishers and platform owners love it. It’s the ultimate secure recurring revenue stream and it’s already accepted by consumers for music, TV, movies, etc.

Absolutely agree. Mainstream gaming will be streaming in <10 years, but it will not necessarily be on Stadia.

Same, and I did most of my streaming over wi-fi. It was pretty damn solid. Not perfect, but if streaming becomes a thing, I’ll connect my gaming PC by wire.

I just don’t really understand the predictions on doom on streaming. It solves so many problems that the major players in the industry have hated for years. They hate giving away a bunch of money to piracy, grey market keys and used games. Streaming solves most of those issues in one fell swoop.

Because it also solves the problems of people actually owning things, having to compete with old stuff (without selling it over and over again) and having affordable prices, in exchange of not doing much of anything for the customers who lose the capability of modding and preservation.
Thanks, I hate it, along with their already exaggerated entitlements.

Well said.

That’s solving so called problems for the industry not consumers.

The continued claims this stuff works fine now on almost all games is just laughable. When Google proves this works across millions of homes with all sorts of different internet connections, by different ISP’s, at any time of day including primetime hours then I’ll start to buy into it as a possibility.

No ones also mentioned they won’t ever have the big platform exclusives either. No Nintendo, PlayStation or XBox games.

negative latency, i think they mean they can use more than one process for a game, so if the player press button A, they have already rendered the frame, but if the player press button B, they have already the frame.

this would require the game to run multiple predicted versions, and I don’t think they will do that, since would require way more CPU and GPU. They can.

where they are … too creative… is in labelling this negative latency. They continue acting has is only the server and client that matters, but here we have a architecture of server-client-remote access. The data may be generated fast in the client, but for your eyeballs to see it, it must be downloaded to your machine to be rendered in your screen.

is strange that they continue this path, it only created distrust from technical people