STADIA - will it be a hit? Yes or no

Really interested to see where everyone stands.

I think it looks fantastic honestly. I think it will be a hit.

Did they announce a cost?

I think it’s great on paper but I’m not so sure my ISP would agree.

I also haven’t bought a new console since PS2, so I’m not sure I’m their demographic.

:-1:

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I think this is worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw

DF mentions 166ms of lag, they were on a 200mb connection and they said something a long the lines of “the smaller the screen the smaller the artifacts, I found the sweet spot to be my 13 inch macbook”

IMHO it doesn’t matter if you have a 10tflop gpu, and will do 4k streaming if you’re streaming it at 8mbs.

For the people that get into it now, I hope so, since if it isn’t then will see how fast google drops it and what happens to the money everyone that got into it loses. Google defiantly has the ability to make it a hit, but how far are they willing to take it?

For me, wait and see. I’m interested in the future of the tech and what they are doing but nothing announced drives a need for me. The “play games right now” is on the super low end of something I care about as I’m someone who even picks slow shipping options if it’s at all cheaper. And I would find just about no amount of input lag acceptable as a trade off for getting things faster.

Still the same approach I am taking towards VR while VR is something I am extremely interested in.

Given I think I’m like most of the people on this board who want a button push to show me the action on screen in as little time as possible with as little lag as possible with the prettiest picture possible, I think this is a big nothingburger and it doesn’t interest me at all.

It’s not something I have any interest in but I hope it blows the doors off what Microsoft and Sony are doing. Competition is always a good thing !

I have two kids, so my gaming time that I get downstairs on the PC or the dedicated retro setup is always pretty limited. I have been putting far more time into the Switch and the NES/SNES Classics upstairs on the living room TV, because I can get in little sessions of gaming while I’m with the kiddos.

With that said, I still pine for the days when I can sit down at my PC and work through a long engaging single player game on the PC. Something like this service, or other gaming services might work well for me, as I could do some more PC gaming on the TV upstairs.

I will definitely try one of them out when the time comes that they are readily available, cheap, and reliable.

I don’t think I would ever want to play any competitive games on them like Rocket League, Apex, Quake Live etc, but for single player, it may be just the thing for me.

Only two games announced to support the platform so far plus the fact that the vast majority of people won’t have anything the internet capabilities to support the frame rates and resolutions needed to give a comparable experience to a physical piece of hardware mean its a hard pass for me so far. I have no doubt streaming services are going to become a huge deal but it means nothing without games and the necessary infrastructure to support it.

Hard hard pass from me. Less than 0 interest in streaming games.

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It’s a really cool technology. If I could play my games natively at home and then stream it to my phone when I’m out that’d be the best of both worlds. If Sony had a Vita successor this would be a game changer if they had a feature like this.

It sounds fantastic, but there are still a few crucial unknowns such as cost/monetization and how it will play with “real life” internet packages. Will ISPs extort payments to prioritize the service on their lines? (This is especially an issue in regions where net neutrality is not a given.) I do believe that their infrastructure is as good as they say it is, but ultimately the quality is contingent on “the last mile” which is something that they do not have control over.

On a side note, a friend who works for YouTube tells me that the team responsible is based out of my hometown, Google Kitchener! :raised_hands:

Honestly I felt a little sick after watching through the presentation. I think it’s going to be a guaranteed success in the long run, and when it does become a hit the industry will face another round of unsettling disruption.

It’s positioned to take advantage of the shift we’ve seen in home console gaming over the last five years towards connected games and services, and the problems with immediacy created this generation, where some of the most played games can have massive patches, require more connectivity than before and just don’t feel made for local machines anymore (consider the amount of player data-mining and unsettling behavioural analysis/prediction publishers rely on servers for with their service-based games)

Google has basically made a platform that’s perfect for today’s attention economy. In essence I think the marketing types have won this one. Being able to launch games on the world’s most popular browser by clicking links, or after watching an advert, caters to the increasing trend for today’s services to be as frictionless as possible, and therefore catering to serving impulses immediately. When the platform launches people will, in theory, see plenty of links to playing games on Stadia, and it’ll be easier than ever for them to start playing.

If it works as described it’s so frictionless that I can’t see new generations of players, or more casual console owners, passing this sort of platform up over buying a new PS or Xbox to play the small number of online service-type games they already play. Because this generation has seen third parties command even more power over the appeal of owning a console in the first place, and with the rise of cross platform multiplayer, it will be easier than ever to convince certain players to move platforms.

Of course there are still many questions which Google was able to get away without answering because this is GDC, which benefits the public perception of the product, but I think even if the streaming tech isn’t as robust as it seems the sort of people this is going to convince more easily - say your average simulation mobile games player - isn’t really going to care about image quality and response. Which is probably why Fortnite took off on phones anyway.

Monetisation is interesting. I could see Google making it a subscription to access a library of games with demo cuts from developers (like those used in adverts) free to all. Or maybe shudders it might be funded by ads, YouTube-style, if Google treats games as videos. It doesn’t sound like they plan on offering a limited selection of games like Game Pass is doing. If developers get paid based on how long players spend in-game then I can see it impacting game development forever. This seems somewhat likely given how developers will need an incentive to support features like State Share.

While it personally doesn’t appeal to what I’m looking for in my game platforms there are some cool features. State Share is probably the best - it’s basically similar to what the SNK 40th Anniversary does in letting players watch an expert play a game, then continue right where they left off. That’s a neat utilisation of the tech that current platforms can’t do seamlessly.

I’m just worried that if this sort of platform takes off, something will be lost. But it’s hard to pinpoint what that will be exactly yet. We’ll need to think about why Google - organiser of the world’s information, and excellent predictor of human behaviour - wants to enter the gaming space with a platform that so clearly hooks into their services.

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I’m in a crappy part of town with bad internet so a streaming box is a no from me.

You see what I see.

There are time’s when I’m disappointed in where gaming is going and I feel like it’s leaving me behind. Then I remember I have 35 years of existing content that I don’t think I’ll ever even get through if/when gaming does go somewhere I’m not interested in.

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I do think streaming services will be big in the future. It’s too early to tell with this one. For many people, lag and data caps are issues.

I was wondering how is this better than the other streaming platforms that went before and failed?

As Google had built out a large number of data centers across the globe, the company believes that Stadia is in a better position for cloud gaming compared to past endevours like OnLive, PlayStation Now, and Gaikai, as most players would be geographically close to a data center. Stadia is able to support the streaming of games at 60 frames per second at both HDR and 4K resolutions, and anticipates eventually reaching 120 frames per second at 8K resolutions.

Wikipedia contributors are on it super fast.

It’s probably, in part, company PR employees that are adding to the article with pre-drafted statements.

Such a cynic. But you’re probably right.