Well, for Stadia, it requires developers to re-write their games for the particular Linux distro they’re using. They can either eliminate this problem or not.
But there’s nothing inherently magical about cloud gaming that would address the underlying code of a game and make it work better.
Virtual machines with tons of CPUs tend to have fewer GHz per CPU. That said, there are possibly fewer background services inside a virtual machine.
So basically, unless a game was built from the ground up to take advantage of way more cores, it will run worse on Stadia because no one is going to literally re-write their entire game for the platform.
You’d have to talk to developers themselves. Right now, when Stadia has 0 customers, I think it’s a tough sell. But in reality since Stadia is a walled garden, and will only carry games that are approved by Google, they’ll probably only choose games that work well with their hardware.
I think you’re broadly correct in that it may perform worse than high-end enthusiast machines.
The pain of re-development is why Google has been focused on integrating with common engines like Unreal Engine and Unity so that the pain is minimized, but I think we’ll have to wait to see how easy that actually makes it for devs to optimize for Stadia w/o spending a ton of time on it.
PS Now’s timing limitations are less about licensing and more about Sony not wanting to maintain an endlessly increasing games library that is supposed to somehow be available instantly. Which is one of the many technical limitations that nobody is really thinking about. This supposed new market of casual game streamers aren’t going to tolerate install times. They’re going to expect that whatever they start is playable in a few seconds.
I wonder which game/developer has been the most successful at doing this?
Why no competition for this type of thing?
Right, whether that is true is the most interesting question! At the moment the base tier is what makes Stadia substantially different from the alternatives. If that’s not sustainable, the service becomes a lot less interesting.
Are your concerns about opex or capex?
I haven’t been following this technology very closely, but this made me laugh.
Once again just to clarify, this isn’t my content, I am sharing it only because I thought it was funny. If you take issue with the content of this web comic, direct concerns here.
Most games aren’t particularly CPU-bound because most games are console ports and current-gen consoles all have excruciatingly slow CPUs. That will likely change to some degree next console generation. But for now, it doesn’t matter much.
Yeah, but a lot of console games are latency bound as well. And games that aren’t latency bound (Civ series, Dwarf Fortress or whatever) are often CPU bound.
Assuming Stadia games won’t mostly be cross-platform console games, regardless.
That only applies to like 4 games, games they plan to replace with other promoted games. And I think listing an end date is better than stuff just randomly rotating out which happens to pretty much every subscription video and game service.
Actually, I think it’s more of an experiment in time-limited marketing to create a FOMO component to the value proposition.
No one is thinking about it because it’s a non issue. Modern data centres are good at this stuff.
Yeah, I don’t think Google serving the data is the issue…
Simple, just as streaming has all but wiped out music ownership, it’s reasonable to expect that a successful game streaming product will wipe out game ownership, and some of us aren’t exactly looking forward to that.
My guess would be no. Given games are notoriously poor at multi-threading, clock speed rules the roost and hyper-scalers don’t typically deploy the highest clock speed processors. In the hyper-scale world, cores matter more as cores drive density and economics. Could be Stadia will buck the trend, but I doubt it.
If Stadia can deliver mid-range PC gaming performance on a office PC, would it replace gaming PC’s? Probably. That is an irresponsible “if” though.
However, some genres are probably just fine with the network lag. Imagine being able to play a gorgeous version of X-Com or Civilization on a budget PC? Now Stadia makes sense as an “entry” into gaming and a way to game when away from your budget build.
Those are my thoughts anyways, even if Google hasn’t realized what the target market should be.
Yes, and I’m one of those people. But that hasn’t blinded me to the fact that our numbers are shrinking, and drastically so in recent years. There is a vast swath of consumers out there who are intent on the simple act of consuming, without any thought given to wanting to replay the game again later. The “use and dispose” mentality is really coming into its own.
Thus, I predict Stadia will be a resounding success.
Just not with me personally. The only way I’ll even try it out is because I’m curious. If one day a free Stadia game shows up on my YouTube page, yep I’ll hit the Play button and give it a shot. But that’s all. No way I’m contributing any of my own money into this service.
But I’ve given up on trying to convince the hordes of people out there that will eat this stuff up. They seem to be interested only in the latest and coolest tech, and fuck anything that came before.
I sound bitter, don’t I? I’m really not, although I do confess to once telling a bunch of kids to get off my lawn. :)
You know, with a streaming service you can replay a game as many times as you want, just like with Spotify where you can replay a song as many times as you want.
