Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

I dont see any point in discussing it when everyone is filled with snark, so knock yourselves out and buy some juicy alphabet shares.

Take your ball and go home if you want, but deleting old posts so people don’t understand replies is uncool. Sad.

I do hate the snark. It’s like nobody knows how to have a good faith discussion or disagreement anymore and they’re posting to own the other side.

Dude, the exact words I used in the message you’re nominally replying to were “it seems quite possible that Stadia fails”. How is that claiming that this will be huge?

My disagreement is with your repeated claims about who the target market is. You claim that people like you are the target market, you don’t have interest in Stadia, ergo Stadia will fail. If we accept the premise about who this is for, there’s no discussion to be had. Of course people with several kinds of modern gaming hardware and a deep investment in the existing ecosystems have little interest in Stadia.

But I take it by your latest message that you now agree that Stadia’s plan is to reach a new audience? Note: I’m not asking whether you think that’ll succeed, just whether it’s what they’re obviously trying to do.

F2P seems like a big risk. The economics of those games work by having low marginal costs for each new player, so it doesn’t matter if just 5% of the players actually pay something. That won’t be the case when the graphics are running in the datacenter. And since there’s no barriers to entry at all (no subscription, no up front purchase), a huge portion of the audience for a F2P game wouldn’t even have the ability to purchase anything via micro-transactions even if they wanted to.

Why will it need exclusives? I mean, it’s obvious why physical consoles need exclusives. It’s also obvious why subscription services need them. But why are exclusives vital to a non-subscription streaming service?

It’s not just resolution, video can be cached to hide latency and temporary network failures. Games, not much. I don’t have any idea how many people it would affect, though.

I’m a virtual/remote employee. I know how volatile the residential connections are. I am usually one of the unfortunates that gets to call in an outage, and that experience has never gotten better.

I am sure streaming will work for some people, and that’s fine; the problem crops up when someone says something like this it the future of gaming! and then then act like they’re so surprise when someone pushes back against that. I see this as likely to be the future of gaming as those Jetson flying cars the boomers were all waiting for.

“The future of gaming” means different things to different people. I think we’re closer than flying cars, but it’s not next year, for most people.

LMAO I’m not the one making wild claims about a totally unproven service. I don’t need the “data”. Everything put out so far is just PR, hype and so far pure fantasy. So complain all you want. Just because I’m not one of the fanboys proclaiming Google’s inevitable dominance over all of gaming you get all pissy. Not my problem.

I have a feeling your apparent total hatred of Google might be biasing your opinion and making you kindof a jerk.

Yea that’s exactly how this conversation has went. You are the true knower in this conversation and no one else can have a rational thought about the product that disagrees with you without being a fanboy. What a quality add to a discussion! I’m sure you are rich in your all knowingness of all streaming and gaming technologies because you know consumers more than anyone.

Without commenting on Stadia’s viability: I was thinking about the difficulty of sending multiple frames to do optimistic rendering without a client that runs the game. What are the most advanced techniques available to do that right now? Obviously getting two nice-looking frames out the door in 10ms or whatever is very difficult, but has there been any engine work into assigning the results of one compute to separate cores with their own GPUs? Or rendering a frame as a shared base plus smaller overlays that can a client can composite based on input? I really don’t know what might be possible.

The thing is, its not pure fantasy. A lot of people, right here in this forum, has tried the model and it worked way better than they expected (Assassins Creed Odessey).

As for the business model itself - who knows, but there is a lot of people (The phone gaming people) who likes games, but dont see themselves buying a console or computer.

There is definitely something about these cloud gaming products that apparently makes certain people unreasonably angry. It’s not totally clear to me what it is, but I am very interested to figure it out.

It just seems so unrealistic, so the proponents come across as hype-merchants.

We tried something similar in a field much less demanding than gaming and it fell flat on its face - it was too hard to get the interactivity users wanted, it was too expensive on the backend, and the reliability was never where it needed to be.

I can see how google’s architecture and expertise mitigates some of the problems, but the backend cost and interactivity issues are real.

I think there is a good niche for the “pro” tier as a good alternative to owning a console for the “mid range” market who live near enough to a google datacenter. I don’t think the base tier can make economic sense for google.

Weren’t people generally pretty happy with the free trial of Assassin’s Creed months ago? It seems like it isn’t unrealistic.

I think the “unrealistic” or “hype” complaint is specifically referring to the “negative latency” bit from Google. Most of us that did the Odyssey trial agree that it was positive, but there were definitely some latency issues at times.

Any comments on the meat of my post? I dont think anythin I say is inconsistent with an Assassins Creed trial being successful.

Which field are you referring to?

You didn’t provide any details. Just some vague assertions. Hard to comment on that. Shadow seems successful. Sony, Google, nVidia, and Microsoft are all doing this streaming gaming thing, so there’s pretty broad support for the idea by the major players. The network infrastructure for streaming video already exists. It doesn’t seem unrealistic.

I guess I was responding to you saying the concept seems unrealistic. I didn’t understand why that would be if they had run a successful trial. Doesn’t that show it isn’t unrealistic?

I didn’t have anything to say about the rest of the post, so I didn’t.

I don’t think I’m that interested in Stadia, so I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. I just browse this thread on occasion to see if there is any new info about it. If the price is right and the tech works, I may consider it. There are a lot of games I play once and am done, so signing up for the service for a month or two and dropping it could work out for me.