I think it depends more on how many strong single player games they can get. Will lag be dangerous for competitive play? Yes.

But single player games aren’t as reliant on connectivity.

 

Honestly, I'm not worried about input lag. Input lag in this kind of setup is a solvable problem, and everything I've heard about Stadia is that Google has more-or-less solved it. It's not quite native response times, but it's close enough that humans can't tell the difference, and that's all that really matters.

But that's irrelevant, because nothing I've seen or heard about this project has addressed the fundamental issue of Stadia:

We just don't have the infrastructure to support it.

There isn't a single city in the entirety of the US (and honestly, I'd be shocked if there was anywhere in the world) with the internet infrastructure to stream 4k60fps like they claim they're gonna do (that's roughly 500 MB every second, 30 GB every minute, 1.8 TB every hour, etc for just the frames). Even the best ISPs in the US can't come close to that that for the majority of the country, and the places where they can have data caps that you'd hit in under an hour. Hell, even at 30 fps, you'll hit the monthly cap right as you're getting into the groove of your first session.

I just don't see how this is at all feasible.

If they limit it to 1080p60fps, then it's at least possible, though you're still looking at almost 500 GB of bandwidth for every hour of playtime. Sufficiently advanced compression algorithms could get that down to a number that's vaguely reasonable, but most people are still gonna be hitting their cap fairly early into the month, and that kind of thing is going to kill this super ultra mega dead.

And that's just in the cities. You get more than 50 miles away from a major city and the internet infrastructure turns to total crap almost immediately. Most of those areas couldn't even get close to the bandwidth required for 1080p60fps, let alone 4k.

This really seems like it's got disaster written all over it; I expect it'll explode in popularity for the first month or two, largely because of Google's name on it and the marketing budget behind it, but once people start seeing $400+ internet bills and/or hit their cap and timeout, they're going to flee the sinking ship in droves.

So yeah, I expect 3-6 months of mega-success, followed by total collapse over the period of a month or two and then it's quietly shuffled off behind the shed until they get back around to rolling out nationwide fiber lines and all that rot.

 

@Arthellion doesn't matter. Singleplayer also depends on latency. Input lag is never not a total irritation.

 

Interesting article on Stadia and Net Neutrality

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&sou...aw1cUG68xadkY4DEM4zOfKqL&ust=1553439970380696