Google Stadia - Googles new game streaming platform

[Darknessvamp]

I see this already having a problem with players who like to play single player games but hate always online. Not to mention unless Google is also thinking to become an extremely cheap internet service provider with great service then I don't see this gaining enough traction.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

what kind of fucking name is " stadia " ?

is it "stay-dee-uh" or " stah - dee-uh "

[kaelleria]

what kind of fucking name is " stadia " ?

is it "stay-dee-uh" or " stah - dee-uh "

It's the plural of stadium.

[Cracked]

It's funny, because it basically puts a VM between you and the game, which is why Blizzard banned people using the NVIDIA game streaming service, since it makes it very easy to bot in games.

Also, CBA looking at compressed video when playing games. I guess it's fine on a phone, but if you look at that shit on a normal size screen, your eyes will burn. I was intrigued by game state sharing, but then they said it needs explicit support from developers so.. yeah, rarely anyone is gonna bother.

[Jastall]

I really don't see this gaining any notable traction whatsoever, much like VR.

For the casual player, what does this give them? A monthly sub fee to play a limited selection of games they might not want with their limited time and/or interest? Sure, it saves them from making a big purchase once for a higher-end PC or something, but that's about it, and a casual user is less likely to have both the fairly high-speed internet and lack of data cap required to actually play this thing.

For a fairly hardcore gamer such as yours truly, it's possibly even worse. There's absolutely no way I'm playing any game at 180ms at best, period, not when I invest money in my gaming setup precisely to have a beautiful, smooth experience playing the games I like. And anyway I have a 500 GB data cap, I'm not even close to hitting it right now but with 10 GB/hour that means 50 hours of gaming/month, at most, before my bank account is nuked from orbit. I break that in two weeks, tops.

Not to mention other issues like forced always online internet to play your single-player games, or the inevitable input lag making any competitive game automatically useless on this service.

Maybe such an idea could work in 10, 20 years when most everyone is on fiber/5G, datacaps are gone, the game library is huge, and Google could ensure the latency and input lag aren't noticeable by a sizable enough chunk of players. But right now I see virtually no benefits for this, if you want to game cheap just buy a normal Xbox/PS4 and it's yours forever.

[LazarusLong]

Only if Google somehow magically reduced latency and input lag to zero, which isn't even physically possible over the internet.

Streaming services have been around a long time, but none of them have taken off because of just how sub-par the experience is vs playing it directly on a home console. That coupled with just how much data this kind of stuff uses, and how much the experience can be affected by minor fluctuations in bandwidth due to multiple users on the network, etc...and it just doesn't add up to a very appealing service IMO.

I think a lot of people here missing that it's not exactly over the internet. Google will stream from the inside ISP partners networks, just like with Youtube.

[Katchii]

I think a lot of people here missing that it's not exactly over the internet. Google will stream from the inside ISP partners networks, just like with Youtube.

If you need an internet connection for it to work, because it's not housed on your home machine it's "over the internet" and will have at least SOME latency and input lag as the information is transferred from wherever it's coming from to your machine.

[LazarusLong]

If you need an internet connection for it to work, because it's not housed on your home machine it's "over the internet" and will have at least SOME latency and input lag as the information is transferred from wherever it's coming from to your machine.

The average TV also has input lag somewhere between 40 and 70 ms, sometimes more. If they can aim for these numbers, it will work.

[Katchii]

The average TV also has input lag somewhere between 40 and 70 ms, sometimes more. If they can aim for these numbers, it will work.

Yeah, if they're able to get performance similar to what someone could get from a machine playing it locally like normal, it would work great. I'm just not convinced that's possible on any kind of consistent basis. But maybe I'll be surprised, will have to wait and see.

[Stormspark]

lol where are the anti-online DRM people?

This crap is by far worse than the original Xbox One.

The idea of an online only game DIGITAL STORE platform is a huge positive, but the idea of an online only game SUBSCRIPTION STREAMING platform, which is what Stadia is, is awful.

The same problems with TV streaming applies here too: buying a monthly subscription to everything is less value for money than buying specifically the items you want. And on top of that, there's also an additional problem unique to games: games come and go from the service, so what happens to your save, your progress? It's effectively gone if you can't play the game anymore.

You have no ownership of your games and game progress with streaming. You do have ownership with a digital store model (people say that technically you don't, but for all practical purposes, yes, you do).

I'm here. I will NEVER EVER stream a game. Given the choice between that and no games, I'd take the no games and just go outside or something. Or rather in my case it wouldn't mean no games, it would just mean "stick with the huge backlog of current and retro games I already have, there just won't be new games".

[Remilia]

I think a lot of people here missing that it's not exactly over the internet. Google will stream from the inside ISP partners networks, just like with Youtube.

Uhhh... what? That is not remotely how youtube works. Take this owl video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_Gi5ocXVo
This is the actual url.
https://r5---sn-a5mlrn7z.googlevideo...&key=yt6&c=WEB

It's pulling data from Google's data center, it is not pulling data from an ISP's node or what not. It'd be stupid for ISPs to essentially invest a data center per node. Anything that goes through the internet will eventually go into the ISP's network. That's literally how the internet works. Data gets traveled through a series of nodes before reaching your device.

[Tech614]

I think a lot of people here missing that it's not exactly over the internet. Google will stream from the inside ISP partners networks, just like with Youtube.

Yea your ISP is totally going to have Google Stadia blades on their network... /s

The only thing that matters is the distance the data has to travel from your device to the blade your game is currently operating on. That exchange has to happen for inputs to register.

[Very Tired]

Speed doesn't matter much here. Having more bandwidth ain't gonna magically make your latency any better. The only thing speed will increase is your image quality of the stream itself.

Even in a world where everyone had gigabit connections minimum this shit is still bad because of latency.

It should be noted that Google already ran this project through a beta test with the public, and the response was actually very positive.

[Vash The Stampede]

The average TV also has input lag somewhere between 40 and 70 ms, sometimes more. If they can aim for these numbers, it will work.

But if they're playing it on the TV then that's another 40 - 70 ms of latency. Which means in total you have anywhere from 80ms to 140ms in a best case scenario. People are going to notice that, assuming that they're connected via Ethernet and everyone isn't downloading porn all at once. Better yet, everyone isn't logging into Stadia to play games.

If you live in New York you'll get terrible latency due to the network being congested. If you live in South Carolina you get bad latency cause nobody puts servers near the middle of nowhere, and if you live in Australia you'll get bad latency because the entire country has a bad connection. But we all know this is for the casual gamer which means awful wifi with bad reception and they use Comcast, which means they'll experience this.

It should be noted that Google already ran this project through a beta test with the public, and the response was actually very positive.

I bet it's the same people that told Microsoft the Kinect was a good idea along with removing the ability to play used games and rentals on Xbox One. It's not like game companies who've been in business selling games haven't screwed up in the past, and Google has like no experience selling games besides Google Play.

Unless this service is totally free and has some method to play games you already own on their service I can't see this being nothing more than a joke on the internet. Google is like every other attempt at Cloud Gaming and that's they're hoping you don't mind the lag. There's no magic Google can muster that'll fix the speed of light.

[Charge me Doctor]

It should be noted that Google already ran this project through a beta test with the public, and the response was actually very positive.

Just like google glass. Beta tests with public are weird, you can read about them up. People tend to overrate shit in "here is an in-development piece of tech for you exclusively to test! please enjoy", and people enjoy them, turning blind eye to flaws, because they aren't fucking testers, they are people.

[kaelleria]

This tweet thread illustrates why Microsoft's xcloud is going to blow away Stadia.
https://twitter.com/russellholly/sta...69849272983552

TLDR - very little dev work to get existing games working on the platform, complete with various toolkits, etc...

Also lower bandwidth requirements and latency -
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/...meplay-2010349

[LazarusLong]

Uhhh... what? That is not remotely how youtube works. Take this owl video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_Gi5ocXVo
This is the actual url.
https://r5---sn-a5mlrn7z.googlevideo...&key=yt6&c=WEB

It's pulling data from Google's data center, it is not pulling data from an ISP's node or what not. It'd be stupid for ISPs to essentially invest a data center per node. Anything that goes through the internet will eventually go into the ISP's network. That's literally how the internet works. Data gets traveled through a series of nodes before reaching your device.

Nope. Google uses Edge network to connect Google Global Cache servers on every major ISP and traffic exchange point in the world. Once ISP detects that the same content is available in cache, it is going to stream it from there. The URL is irrelevant since it will be handled by ISP resolver anyway.
https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure
- - - Updated - - -

But if they're playing it on the TV then that's another 40 - 70 ms of latency. Which means in total you have anywhere from 80ms to 140ms in a best case scenario. People are going to notice that, assuming that they're connected via Ethernet and everyone isn't downloading porn all at once. Better yet, everyone isn't logging into Stadia to play games.

Nope. The controller is Wi-Fi enabled and will connect directly to the service.

[Remilia]

Nope. Google uses Edge network to connect Google Global Cache servers on every major ISP and traffic exchange point in the world. Once ISP detects that the same content is available in cache, it is going to stream it from there. The URL is irrelevant since it will be handled by ISP resolver anyway.
https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

Um... that URL is literally the data stream, that is not an ISP node. The service you noted is not remotely the same as a data center for compute. That service is only for grabbing cached static data quicker. Within the ISP means nothing as it doesn't denote well... anything other than monopoly if it actually occurs. I can theoretically ping a server, jump through 3 ISP nodes and come back with 10ms latency. For example if I ping to my closest youtube IP address [216.58.193.206], I'll have 15-20ms of latency. Throughout this I get 18 node hops from nodes controlled by my ISP, amusingly still using roadrunner address, then to Tata communications nodes before getting to Google's. This is not 'within network' though relatively low latency. This is just cache servers all over the place, not how youtube works. Youtube will still pull data from a major data center if the data is not there.

Also, a game rendered off site is not the same as a cache for small data (relatively speaking). A stadia instance uses a dedicated CPU and GPU per user. This is not happening on a tiny cache server. This is also dynamic information which is inherently impossible for a cache server. Latency will be determined by distance from data centers, not what you think cache servers can do.

The service you're linking is not what you think it is nor how ISPs and the internet work.

[Vash The Stampede]

Nope. Google uses Edge network to connect Google Global Cache servers on every major ISP and traffic exchange point in the world. Once ISP detects that the same content is available in cache, it is going to stream it from there. The URL is irrelevant since it will be handled by ISP resolver anyway.

That doesn't explain how an ISP won't throttle the connection?

Nope. The controller is Wi-Fi enabled and will connect directly to the service.

If the TV is your primary method of playing games and it has 70ms latency then that's always going to be there. If Google's Stadia has 70ms then that's another 70ms added to the latency. This is why the controller is stupid cause it doesn't bypass anything. The only benefit would be if the computer or tablet was slow and doesn't feed packets as fast as the gamepad.

[LazarusLong]

Um... that URL is literally the data stream, that is not an ISP node. The service you noted is not remotely the same as a data center for compute. That service is only for grabbing cached static data quicker. Within the ISP means nothing as it doesn't denote well... anything other than monopoly if it actually occurs. I can theoretically ping a server, jump through 3 ISP nodes and come back with 10ms latency. For example if I ping to my closest youtube IP address [216.58.193.206], I'll have 15-20ms of latency. Throughout this I get 18 node hops from nodes controlled by my ISP, amusingly still using roadrunner address, then to Tata communications nodes before getting to Google's. This is not 'within network' though relatively low latency. This is just cache servers all over the place, not how youtube works. Youtube will still pull data from a major data center if the data is not there.

Also, a game rendered off site is not the same as a cache for small data (relatively speaking). A stadia instance uses a dedicated CPU and GPU per user. This is not happening on a tiny cache server. This is also dynamic information which is inherently impossible for a cache server. Latency will be determined by distance from data centers, not what you think cache servers can do.

The service you're linking is not what you think it is nor how ISPs and the internet work.

Sigh. Of course, if you ping Youtube you will see the route to youtube. It's not how GCC works. Do you know how CDN works?