Stadia - Google's vision for the future of gaming

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.

Streaming video doesn’t have to actually process the game state and render each frame. That’s the backend compute challenge. And the solutions that are typically used to maximise utilization in cloud workloads aren’t so good when you have long-term stateful connections.

It’s all doable of course. But making it economic for a “free” tier I don’t see.

And the pro tier is going to struggle against the immutable latency problem. But I can see it has a niche. Just not sure how big it is.

Fair enough, and maybe it will be like 3D televisions. I actually cancelled my Stadia pre-order because pricing and game distribution news from Google has been vague and somewhat alarming. (If it’s not a subscription service like Netflix, I’m not in. At present, I’m not interesting in buying streaming access to specific games, particularly at full game prices and particularly not from Google. They’ve has announced that Destiny 2 will be part of the pro subscription package to begin with, but there is not a game I could care less about.) But I was a Shadow subscriber for a few months and I liked the service. I may resubscribe at some point (particularly if Shadow increases the disk space per shard.) $35/month amortizes the cost of a new PC over 4 years.

The ability to start from someone else’s state and share a link in a stream is super cool. Maybe I’m being too FPS focussed thinking about all this.

As a consumer, PS Now is a complete non-starter to me until it stops listing games as “available until X/X/2020.”

If you want to get me to pay a monthly subscription to stream content, that content simply cannot go away for the foreseeable future. I don’t expect you to have PS4 games available in 2030, but having PS4 games they plan to take down in 2020 is just ridiculous.

All these sub services for media work like that. No one is going to pay for licenses in perpetuity. The only media they can offer forever is the stuff they own, which is why so many of these services are turning into their own production companies.

Yeah the rights are messy, but it does seem like they are incredibly short for some of these titles. I’m guess there is a minority of players that play their games for decades, but this is a sure way to kill off long loved titles if you just strip them off the service and then maybe won’t pay to get them back on.

I think the difference in this case is that PS Now shows that on Sony’s own games as well. They can’t even commit to keeping their own games available in the long run.

The fact that you don’t actually own anything, maybe? That they can take your stuff anytime they want, or they could shut down the service whenever they like? Maybe they decide to make you pay for stuff again when they stop supporting that game you bought a few years ago because you now have to get the “new HDier version!” in order to keep playing?

This is all outside of the discussion of whether it works or not, which people are naturally very skeptical of.

It’s a solution in search of an audience IMO. The only people that will happily accept this are people who never bought a game before in their life. Everyone else will be (and should be) skeptical of why this exists.

Ultimately, I think this is all about control. They want to control it on their end so you can’t own it on your end. No mods. No files or code you can touch or ever see. It’s supposed to be the Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, that sucks. If they truly own the rights and license to everything in those games, then I have no idea what that’s about.

You might be right, that games are totally different than movies/tv/music and people really want to own them, including the entirely new generation growing up right now that has been raised on free to play and Spotify.

I wouldn’t bet on it, though. If game streaming offers enough benefits, including instant start, never wait to update your game, play on any device, anywhere, not having to worry about upgrading your PC ever again, not having to buy a console ever again, etc., then I think there will be an audience.

PS - not to mention a bunch of features that cloud gaming brings that are totally new and unique, including the ability to assign multiple GPUs/CPUs on the fly, multiplayer simultaneous input, game sharing, etc.