Google Stadia

[Artean]

https://nordic.ign.com/company/23515/ne ... eature-det

Hit or miss?

Given the recent insane prices of building new gaming computers, the idea of streaming games on simple hardware is tempting. Obviously there are pitfalls as latency, video quality and price models... Your thoughts? Will we find Egosoft games on Stadia?

[pjknibbs]

I have never seen the point of this sort of thing. If I wanted the speed and ping of my internet connection to affect the game I'm playing, I'd play an MMORPG.

[Len5]

I was wondering how this works. Let's say that 100 million people world wide want to play games at the same time, it means that Google's servers will need the computing power of 100 million high end pc's, right?

People that do other things that need a good pc, people that want the best possible graphics, people with a data limit, people without a good connection or people that dislike Google, won't be signing up. And there are probably more reasons not to.

[Morkonan]

https://nordic.ign.com/company/23515/ne ... eature-det

Hit or miss?

Given the recent insane prices of building new gaming computers, the idea of streaming games on simple hardware is tempting. Obviously there are pitfalls as latency, video quality and price models... Your thoughts? Will we find Egosoft games on Stadia?

Complete miss.

These "budget machine solutions to PC" never, ever, work. They always fail horribly, generally only making money due to initial investors.

Now, if this was a "5G" machine, it might get some traction. But, given that 5G is one of those things nobody is coming to the table on except Huawei, who's already having trouble even in Europe, with US issues, it's doubtful that's even going to be widely available enough to push such hardware.

My verdict - Stoopid. Never turns out well. Only reason to try it is to get investment money.

[Rapier]

I think Egosoft probably fall into the 'squeezed middle' discussed in this piece: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47634263. Personally, I don't think things would get quite as extreme as this. I can see it being moderately successful, but ultimately not to the extent it utterly changes the way we play games. I'm going to stick my neck out now and say that Google will sell this to Netflix or Amazon in a few years time, who will bundle it in with their current streaming options as an extra (or, possibly, one of those services will set up a rival that will beat the Google offering).

[CBJ]

Google does a lot of speculative stuff, trying out different markets to see how they go. Not all of them work out, and many end up being quietly retired after a year or two. It's one of the luxuries they have because of the vast amount of money at their disposal.

That said, I think people dismissing this out of hand ought to look at the points raised about the music industry that are mentioned in the article that Rapier linked, and the way that industry has had to change and adapt. When services such as Spotify started, they were dismissed in much the same way, yet despite the fact that they struggled to generate any income in the early years they have still completely changed the way the music industry works. Data clearly shows that people really are giving up on buying music and are instead just consuming it on demand as part of a monthly package.

If you look at the gaming market as a whole rather than just the hardcore PC gamers, It doesn't seem an unreasonable leap to suggest that the same thing might well happen there. Yes, of course there will always be hardcore gamers who will buy games, just as there are still hardcore music-lovers who still buy music (whether by download, on CDs and even on vinyl), but the gaming landscape as a whole may well change around them. Many people playing games on their consoles and mobiles will no doubt jump at the chance not to have to keep buying and upgrading expensive hardware, not to have to keep buying and installing games, and to have a much wider choice of games to play for a flat monthly fee.

[Tamina]

Spotify still loses money every year, so... huh.

[CBJ]

Nevertheless, more music is now streamed than bought in the traditional sense, and the way the music industry generates money has changed irrevocably as a a result.

[matthewfarmery]

The biggest problem will be bandwidth, and only those that have unlimited caps will really make the most of this. those that are living in the real world and have to deal with caps, stuff like this just won't work.

Then again, hasn't this been done already? with a streaming game service? pretty sure it has, but I can't remember the name of it. or how well it still doing?

[Morkonan]

The biggest problem will be bandwidth, and only those that have unlimited caps will really make the most of this. those that are living in the real world and have to deal with caps, stuff like this just won't work.

Then again, hasn't this been done already? with a streaming game service? pretty sure it has, but I can't remember the name of it. or how well it still doing?

Several. I was trying to remember that first huge flop.. "Net Machines" or some crap like that? A low-budget web box. Not quite as bad as the PET... Then there's more modern attempts that never went anywhere, like the Steamboxwtf.

Now, cloud-enabled software stuffs is a big deal and that's a big part of business solutions and stuff. But, that's software. You can run it on stuff that runs software. This is a "captive box" like leased computers or junk boxes that only run whatever they want them to run. "Consoles"

This is Google's "Google Glass got humped by pervs, so we gotta come up with something else for the hardware market" testing the waters attempt. No big deal, just a billion bucks or so. Google, AT&T and others probably wasted more on their "Fiber to your door" attempts.

But, Google can go google itself if it thinks it's going to get a bigger foot in my door than it already has. Besides - No console survives the Console Wars without a gimmick or exclusive content. And, if it's either, that's going to make either Google front more money or make them more expensive.

I'm snoozing on it - Not worth paying attention to until there's more going on with it than a press release.

[Masterbagger]

If google is involved then there is a plan to harvest personal data from gamers and monetize it.

[Artean]

The biggest problem will be bandwidth, and only those that have unlimited caps will really make the most of this. those that are living in the real world and have to deal with caps, stuff like this just won't work.

Then again, hasn't this been done already? with a streaming game service? pretty sure it has, but I can't remember the name of it. or how well it still doing?

Several. I was trying to remember that first huge flop.. "Net Machines" or some crap like that? A low-budget web box. Not quite as bad as the PET... Then there's more modern attempts that never went anywhere, like the Steamboxwtf.

Now, cloud-enabled software stuffs is a big deal and that's a big part of business solutions and stuff. But, that's software. You can run it on stuff that runs software. This is a "captive box" like leased computers or junk boxes that only run whatever they want them to run. "Consoles"

This is Google's "Google Glass got humped by pervs, so we gotta come up with something else for the hardware market" testing the waters attempt. No big deal, just a billion bucks or so. Google, AT&T and others probably wasted more on their "Fiber to your door" attempts.

But, Google can go google itself if it thinks it's going to get a bigger foot in my door than it already has. Besides - No console survives the Console Wars without a gimmick or exclusive content. And, if it's either, that's going to make either Google front more money or make them more expensive.

I'm snoozing on it - Not worth paying attention to until there's more going on with it than a press release.

This isn't about machines.

There are three main aspects the likely will determine the (potential) success factor of Stadia - latency, video quality and price model. As a mainstream service targeting a mainstream audience, the benefits are obvious and could change things up quite drastically in the console/gaming market. No doubt, we WILL see some form of streamed gaming eventually. It mostly a matter of when, by who and to what extent it will replace serious gaming hardware in households.

[Morkonan]

This isn't about machines.

There are three main aspects the likely will determine the (potential) success factor of Stadia - latency, video quality and price model. As a mainstream service targeting a mainstream audience, the benefits are obvious and could change things up quite drastically in the console/gaming market. No doubt, we WILL see some form of streamed gaming eventually. It mostly a matter of when, by who and to what extent it will replace serious gaming hardware in households.

Oh, I agree - But, the market they are pushing for is intimately tied to "machines." And, their flagship going into that market is, in fact, a "machine." Step 1, getting the machine to the consumer, must be achieved before Step 2+.

That being said, it's not going to work without some pretty hefty infrastructure to handle things like bandwidth/latency/all the issues you mentioned. That's why I said 5G is probably the only thing that will open this possibility up. (PS - Right now, Europe may be a more advantageous opening market than the US considering the US is having serious issues regarding a "first-move" into 5G/etc. But, Europe has not exactly been friendly to Google's march towards supremacy...) As it is, consoles specially bred for the purposes of connecting and transferring data to and from a specific source... often bork up. They can be fragile things with latency issues, drops, server problems, etc. A cloud-computing approach is a cool idea for gaming, but it needs infrastructure to support it. This will not, for instance, likely be something ADSL/DSL users can make use of.

As CBJ pointed out, Google likes "testing the waters." We'll see how it turns out. Google might get enough of a buy-in with its name and in areas that can support it. But, Google has had other somewhat "breakthrough" projects that haven't fared so well. Google Glass, Google Fiber, etc..

I agree we will see some sort of "streaming" applications in gaming, but not until the infrastructure is robust enough to truly support it. There have been plenty of businesses that had a "first to market" advantage in markets that were not ready to support their product and which lost their share to competitors who's additions were more timely.

If google is involved then there is a plan to harvest personal data from gamers and monetize it.

Absolutely. They'll put the Toy Store Window right in the living room in front of the kids, tailored for whatever their desires are and feeding them exactly what it wants to feed them. But, the fight for data isn't just Google now - Everyone is pushing the limits in search of profit margins by selling private data... Once this becomes even more evident to end-users than it is now, things might get a bit heated. But, big-data is Big-Money and privacy advocates are often demonized and ridiculed.

[felter]

So I've been paying a little bit of attention to this and I have come to the conclusion, most people including some here have no idea on how this all works, most are comparing it to the likes of streaming from Netflix or Spotify. The problem is music and video streaming are totally different to game streaming, they are so far apart you cannot compare them to each other. Audio and video streaming both use buffering to counteract the likes of lag, this means both formats will download part of the file before you are ready watch or listen to it, where a film could download the next 15 minutes of the film from where you are in watching it. Game streaming cannot do this as it does not know what the player is going to do in the next second, let alone in a minutes time, chalk and cheese.

I have also seen some say steam stream games, that is totally wrong you download games from steam, mind you they do allow you to stream games from lets say your desktop to your laptop, but that is not from steam and it is only a single game over a single internet connection, from one computer to another and I have even had lag using it in my home.

There has also been the comment of, but I play MMO's and they are streaming, but once again they are not really streaming a whole game, only small parts of it. The majority of the MMO's software is on the clients computer, your computer, not the server. So the problem is what Stadia wants to do is to stream the whole game play to a client, so if you were playing a FPS, if you were to look behind you all that animation would be done on the server and streamed to the client, that's a lot of streaming and computation on the server behalf, in a MMO the animation would be done on the clients computer, just where you are and others are on the map is being transmitted, along with anything else that changes (a little bit more to it) but no animation is streamed, two totally different things. Also you are not sharing the animations or games computations with others each client does that by their self, Imagine GTA V at launch being streamed where 10 million people were all trying to play the game all at the exact same time those servers would have to do all the work for those 10 million games. Or do you remember the server problems Diablo 3 had at launch because the servers couldn't handle all those people trying to play at the same time, now imagine that a million times worse for a popular game release, because the servers have to do everything.

The next thing is bandwidth, you know how much of the internet you are using at any one time, google are saying you will need about 25MB/s for Stadia, Netflix uses 2 - 4MB/s depending on the quality of the video you are watching. In America the majority of internet connections do not go over 12MB/s, so basically half the speed that would be required, and as far as I'm aware the American ISP's are not too keen on spending money on upgrading their internet infrastructure, hits the profits. Not just that the more you use the more they want to charge you for using the internet, remember Trumps government got rid of their net neutrality.

This now leads to cost, the price for Stadia is being put at $15 - $30 per month, which on top of your ISP fees which as I just pointed out will rise due to the extra bandwidth it requires to stream games, but wait there is one other thing to think on. Right now we have steam but there is also a thing called EPIC that is currently doing a lot of game exclusives, so what happens when you have steam streaming, EPIC streaming and Stadia streaming, all with their own exclusives. Now there would be the cost of your internet and the 3 streaming services if you want access to the games, ultimately I put the conservative cost for playing games will be around the $2000 per annum, I currently don't even spend £100 on games per year, notice the difference, you think I will still be able to play the games I want t play for under £100 per year.

[CBJ]

I'm pretty sure that if you'd asked someone 20 years ago whether they'd be streaming music, they'd have thrown up a lot of very similar technical arguments why it wasn't possible and probably never would be. Go back another 20 years and people would probably have laughed if you'd suggested they'd be paying £45 a month for a cable or satellite TV package or £30 a month for a mobile phone contract. Maybe it won't happen with gaming, but I won't be betting against it.

Just to put this in context, I am not enthusiastic about the prospect, and I'm also not a likely customer of this kind of service. I don't have a cable or satellite TV package or mobile phone contract, let alone a music streaming subscription, but I'm well aware that that puts me in an ever-shrinking minority.

[felter]

It's not that I'm not enthusiastic about it, I just think it won't work, if it does work it will be over priced as it will have to be to make it work, or even that it will be good for gamers, it may be good for publishers, though I doubt it will be good for developers. My internet is 6 times the recommended speed and I have issues streaming my own games, so I can only imagine how bad it will be with 10 million others streaming at the same time. If it happens and it is the only way to get games, then a lot of people are not going to be able to get those games. The mainstream gaming industry is already in an abysmal state for gamers right now and I honestly think Stadia will just make it even worse, it could even kill off the small indie market, it most certainly would kill off the modding of games.

I don't have a mobile phone, I can't afford one or the cost of having one. I do have cable television, but I don't use it, I would get rid of it but others in the house do use it. I do spend my spare cash on my internet and Netflix and that's it. I can barely afford games as it is, last year I spent a total of £30 on games that's all I could afford, I most certainly can't afford £15 to £30 a month for a gaming service. It was my Birthday recently I had hoped to get some cash and maybe buy a game or two, but I had to buy a pair of shoes instead, that's how real life works. They said get a smart meter it'll save you money they said, so she got one put in, they undercharged me for my electricity last year and put the price up by £20 a month for the next year. Not everyone has money to spare, a lot of people like myself just live from day to day, we just don't have these things that you mention, that everyone seems to think everyone has. Just like I would love to get the new X game but I just cannot afford it right now. Where am I or others meant to get that £15 to £30 a month from.

I'm sorry I'm rambling, but I just can't see how it will work or how it will be good for games or people without the means to buy into it.

[silenced]

Nevertheless, more music is now streamed than bought in the traditional sense, and the way the music industry generates money has changed irrevocably as a a result.

But what they don't tell the people: music industry makes MORE money than EVER before now, with the new business models, the models they fought ferociously for a very long time.

[pjknibbs]

I'm pretty sure that if you'd asked someone 20 years ago whether they'd be streaming music, they'd have thrown up a lot of very similar technical arguments why it wasn't possible and probably never would be.

Thing is, there are fundamental limitations that have to exist for this service. You can stream a *lot* of separate movie or music streams from a single PC, because the limiting factor is really only how fast you can read data off the internal storage. With a game, you have to dedicate a lot more of the machine's resources to it because they tend to be very heavy on CPU and GPU--that makes it a lot more expensive to have this set up. The lag problems Felter alludes to aren't fixed, either--if I try to play a game across my home Wi-Fi, which is far faster and has less ping than my Internet connection, I still find it to lag sometimes. How much worse will it be across the Internet?

(Apparently Digital Foundry did a test of Assassin's Creed Odyssey on Stadia and measured the input lag as 166ms. This is slightly worse than the XBox One X (145ms), which gamers often complain about the input lag on, and *massively* worse than the 79ms measured on a local PC).

[fiksal]

Many people playing games on their consoles and mobiles will no doubt jump at the chance not to have to keep buying and upgrading expensive hardware, not to have to keep buying and installing games, and to have a much wider choice of games to play for a flat monthly fee.

This is the *thing* I see with this as well. Depending on their pricing model, they could make this a viable thing for those who dont want to buy expensive consoles, or even more expensive PCs. From what I recall my last PC cost me 2-3k to build... now my next one might be too, but that's a lot of games to buy on the streaming service for $30 to $60 a piece (instead).

For (multiplayer) game developers, I think, the idea of a cluster where each client is trustworthy and is essentially on the same network - is a very interesting candy. That can scale beyond what we do now. Large scale co-op, pvp or MMO-like games that weren't possible before, could be possible on Stadia.

So the next would be to see how well does it actually perform and if it scales as they claim it does. That'll mean a lot for its future.

[Morkonan]

This is the *thing* I see with this as well. Depending on their pricing model, they could make this a viable thing for those who dont want to buy expensive consoles, or even more expensive PCs. From what I recall my last PC cost me 2-3k to build... now my next one might be too, but that's a lot of games to buy on the streaming service for $30 to $60 a piece (instead)....

But, aren't we getting tired of all the different platforms and distribution networks we have to put up with just to get access to a game we might want to play?

They're not interested in selling the hardware to budget-conscious consumers because budget-conscious consumers habitually don't spend a lot of money... They want a captive audience just like any other exclusive hardware manufacturer wants. Nobody has ever made any money selling a pre-packaged budget-computer product of any sort. (That I can think of, at least.) Every console manufacturer leaves money on the table as soon as the console ships. They make their money on licensing fees and, at best, a little bit on monthly subscriber fees.

And, now here comes "Epic" gobbling up exclusive content to try to be a Steam-killer with half the distribution fees and hunting a catalog of "AAA" high-profile titles. What's "Google" going to do with a "budget PC-gaming'ish rig?" Not making profits on the hardware, that's for sure.

It's all 5G. It's all about upcoming 5G. The "new guys" are looking to edge that into a new "paradigm shift" to make them bajillions of monies. But, the New Guys don't have a user-base to exploit. How are they going to get it? Using the same old paradigm, of course!

<-- Cynical