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Comment by azurezyq | Hacker News Reader

Really feel sad about recent prevailing sentiment across HN. Some comments seem to suggest Google needs to provide the following for this kind of "tech test":

* Available for all browsers and comply all web standards.

* Available for all languages across all regions, with accessibility features.

* Promise not to "launch and shutdown in a few years".

* Imply a real future product.

But I'm guessing what Google wants to do is to just prove if "game streaming" is technically / financially viable for mass crowds based on their technology in hand. If not, maybe shelf and wait for a couple of years without dumping a lot of resources and drawing bad sentiment.

What requirements are you thinking which should be applied to such a "tech test"?

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They can do whatever they want; I signed up for the trial, but bullet points 3 and 4 are why I would be extremely hesitant to pay a dime for it today.

In contrast, I made a Steam account back in 2003, right when they launched. In college and grad school, I fell out of gaming, but when I came back in around 2012 with a brand new computer, all my old games were still available in my account, ready to be downloaded.

This seems to be a test that may turn into a future cloud product? Google has a lot of Pops which provide great latency for users, If they start filling these pops with gpus so that companies like ubisoft or epic or $gamecompany can pay for the infrastructure and let users pay them a subscription and then I don't have to drop 500+ dollars every year to stay relevant with AAA titles, maybe it all works out?

This is the reason MANY people don't get into PC gaming and opt instead for a console. Yes, it's a downgrade from what you can get with a PC, but having to drop $500+ every other year on the latest graphics card is not something many want to do.

And the browser-based approach seems like a great solution for the platform issue. Being a Mac user I often miss out on steam games since they are mostly focused on Windows releases.

I'd like to see a contingency in the agreement that allows one to download the games you own if they shut down the service. Would have been nice if OnLive had done that.

Good luck getting agreement from the game publishers.

These are the sorts of projects that make sense to me for Google to be playing around with. Namely, they are highly experimental and pushing what might even be possible, but have the potential to (especially if Google shows success) suddenly boom into a large market since games have a high demand.

It also makes sense for Google to push for this sort of usage since it's more data going through pipes. Data they can analyze in some way, make money, etc.

The Google projects that make less sense to me are projects that are largely about data retention, long term stability, and are generally considered solved problems. I.e. email and office suites.

Those long-term solved projects can be sold to other companies as part of GSuite.

I'm honestly not sure how that wasn't obvious to me.

> highly experimental and pushing what might even be possible

This is hardly true, Nvidia already does this, charges for it, and it works really well on a good connection.

I know where you are coming from, and I am sympathetic to Googlers who just want to do a quick test.

But "Google" means something specific in regards to quality for Billions of people, and you start to have a responsibility to the brand regarding dependability at some point if you want to do things under the Google Banner.

But it's so easy to give these projects their own name, branding, and websites while they are in this tech test phase. If they hit on something great, then they should absolutely fold it in with the rest of the G Suite, but until they know why not sell to people with out the Google connection to see how it does?

Or you can read the large text that says "Test a new way to play" and calibrate your expectations.

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