https://www.businessinsider.com/goo...y-the-former-ubisoft-executive-jade-raymond-9

This looks fascinating. There are a lot of positives on this, but also some very big potential negatives. I'm curious to see where this goes...


(If I can finally play nintendo games on my PC I'll be happy).

 

old ones yeah with emulators. I'm referring to newer games by nintendo.

 

Google's Stadia is a mistake that I hope fails badly and puts streaming games back 30 years.

A successful launch will alter game design to accommodate huge jumps in input lag and there is no world were I can see it benefiting from that.

 

If it it succeeds and offers real triple A experiences, this could be the death of consoles.

That said, I really don't expect it to do so, or at least not be able to do so quickly. Acesss to the game service and each game would have to be pretty damn expensive for the individual consumer in order for google to turn a profit after the costs of server space, the costs and technical hurdles for game upkeep and maintenance, and the costs of actual AAA game development.

 

On one hand... no need to buy hardware to play the games you want? Is this a dream?

Otoh, it's a further move to always be online. I miss the days of installing the game and not having to give a shit about whether I'm hooked up to Steam/UPlay/Origin/GOG and have everything I do tracked and logged.

I think overall I'm more in the "nope" aisle.

edit: not to mention, if processing is handled externally, what about access to game files? Installing mods? If Google even provided ability to stream the use of a modding toolkit, it's a bad idea to hand over all control to the game publisher/platform holder. Hell, what about save files? Speedrunning for example depends on having the ability to manipulate save files as you please.

 

I can see this going the way of Google+, people are too entrenched with the big three and PC and honestly, who needs yet another subscription service?

 

Whether or not it happens, Google is at a stage of omnipresence and strategic control that it needs breaking up. I can't possibly support it attempting to dominate yet another avenue of online activity (and as Scott points out, I wish gaming *wasnt* as online as it is).

 

This is one of those things that is conceptually really cool, and there's likely to be a sizeable market if done well, but I'm not sure if Google has both the tech and the will to do everything necessary to overcome all the many hurdles they'll face.

The concept of a centralized server to stream games from is great, as it removes the pricey hardware barrier to entry for games, and more people playing games is great. I just... we don't have the internet infrastructure in most places for this to work very well. There are hard caps on both resolution and performance that are vastly lower than that of a native game on even mid-range hardware, and that's before you get into mods and all the rest.

This is something that, at least for the first couple decades, is going to be entirely ignored by hobbyist gamers, while the "normies" that have only a passing interest in games will eat it up as a kind of Netflix for video games. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not for me.

All that said though, Vlad is 100% correct here as well, and Google's bullshit really doesn't need to extend even further.

 

The biggest measure of success for stadia will rely on three things:

Stability: How stable can the games run.
Library: How many games will stadia get.
Price: I can't see people paying more than 30 dollars a month for this.

 

At the end of the day, ignoring the larger issue to Google's monopoly, it comes down to your Internet connection. Industry giants regularly shit the bed when it comes to releasing a stable game build for online play when game files are on your machine. The infrastructure to provide a stable stream like the one Google's describing just isn't there for the average consumer.

 

Do they care?

So long as they corner the market, it doesn't matter from google perspective if the market is (for now) miniscule.

It's laying claim at the ground level. Even if it loses cash in the near future google can absorb that.

It could still go tits up, but if it doesn't the long term gains are invaluable compared to the here and now. Plus, infrastructure tends to have a self-fulfilling prophesy effect. If the infrastructure is built predicting this new trend for gaming, thats likely the way it will go as everyone builds to the infrastructure...

The lesson from google+ is that the social tech market punishes laggards.

 

So uh... what's actually new or innovative about this? Is it just because it's Google? (For me that's a downside these days...)

OnLive was created over 15 years ago, and Nvidia has a game streaming service that's literally out right now - you can go and subscribe. Multiple streaming services have failed in the past.

 

What's new is Google's backend and marketing, which might actually manage to make it successful. As I said though, we don't have sufficient internet infrastructure to do the idea real justice though, so I'm not expecting much from Stadia. It'd be neat if they managed some degree of success though, if only so people start actually investing in improving the 'net infrastructure.

 

Given Google's pull-out of Google Fiber and their tendency to cancel everything they build, I wouldn't hold out hope on that last part.

 

I honestly kind of hope this flops. It's a great idea in concept, but in practice it hurts consumers.

As just one example, it demands constant and presumably high quality internet connection. So people who have bandwidth limits imposed by their ISP's will get shafted with this sort of thing.

 

This is a step towards the future but the best gaming experiences will still be on PCs and to a lesser extent consoles. There are two main reasons for this.

1) compression - that 4k 60fps will be compressed which imo is a much bigger deal than having "multiple gpu's" available for image quality. Compare a 4k bluray to 4k stream from anything. The bluray is significantly better.

2) latency - this is the bigger deal and more insurmountable. Google and every other streaming service is at the mercy of the last mile providers and I don't see a huge jump coming from them to make this a great experience. If you are streaming a game and there is a hiccup in latency and you die while your game freezes that is incredibly frustrating and a huge turn off. There will be latency now on your control of your game session because your controller syncs to the server rather than your game session so if there is an uptick in latency you will 'move' and your character will take a moment to react. These latency issues already exist in the current setup to lesser degrees even without having to stream 4k @ 60fps to the screen. If you watched their announcement stream even that hiccuped at least twice. Also notice that none of the games demoed on any of these streaming services are multiplayer first person shooters.

That said the promises of streaming are game changing in terms of being able to switch sessions and take your game on the go. The elimination of downloads and not having to buy a console is nice but I'd prefer a better experience while gaming and enduring the occasional loading screen. I do look forward to the day that the streaming experience is worth it. The biggest problem for this going forward is that Google killed Google Fiber.

 

Whatever happens I'm sure this won't be as huge a flop as the Ouya.

 

That's a feat that's really, really hard to match, yeah. I kinda wanna see it happen now though, because the salt would flow like nothing else.

 

Remember the Phantom, or OnLive? This is going to be a huge flop too, but not at first. Gaming mags will eat it up for perhaps the first year or two, and business will be briefly great, but will slowly die off as gamers realize that a ~100ms delay (depending on where the servers are located) on every input will essentially kill competitive gaming on the platform. Eventually people will get fed up with their subscription model and it will go the way of Google Plus.

That's my prediction anyway.