Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service
theverge.com
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There's a lot of us out here who are curious how this thing works and the design tradeoffs.
In my experience the game would drop graphics before I would experience input lag. There were a handful of times that I did experience input lag. This was on a wired connection 100mbs down 20mbs up through Xfinity.
I did notice in the Google demo, that when the person was using the game pad, he experienced input lag when he was trying to jump up on top of that steeple on top of the building.
I'm still of the opinion that Google shot themselves in the foot here by having a bunch of wireless controllers in one room. Its like they've never talked to a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament organizer before: Wii Nunchuks over 2.4GHz Bluetooth have dropped packets / dropped input issues when you get to ~20+ participants.
Don't do mass wireless in one room. It always ends poorly. I'd expect that local wireless in a typical living-room setting would be a better experience actually. After all: the major issue is whether or not the wired-connection / fiber backbone of the typical city is up to spec for this kind of thing. (A typical living room user probably doesn't have to worry about clogged 2.4GHz connections unless they're in an apartment I guess...)
lag is the least of your worries. Encoding artifacts will get to you and completely ruin the experience on anything that is not a simple puzzle game.
It was night and day, both in terms of latency and graphics quality. I don't have high hopes for this service.
I can't imagine trying to play something like a fighting game this way.
Anything more specific than that, i.e. lag would occur every 10 mins on avg?
If this were an entire room of WiFi controllers hitting the same WiFi frequencies all at the same time, it could have been a local problem.
All in all, we can't read too much into the demo-conditions. There are too many variables at play here.
No lag at all on my end. I am in the USA, so I have a solid but not amazing connection.
I should note that I have only played for half an hour because AssCreed was extremely boring. The tech itself was very solid in my experience.
I tried to catch some streaming artifacts, like parts of the screen not updating or a visible lag, but I could not see anything. In a blind test, I doubt I would have been able to differentiate this from running the game on my home console.
In any event I think that if you are a casual gamer and want to get off the graphics card upgrade train every couple of years, then this is a no brainer. It probably would not be a good match for multiplayer shooters, but for solo games, even AAA titles, it's a great option.
My feedback was that if they paired up with Steam they'd have a killer product. They might still have a killer product if they convince all those developers on Steam to also put their games on this service.
> Your approximate location is determined using information from local Wi-Fi networks, and is collected by Location Services in a manner that doesn’t personally identify you.
The idea that one can retune the radio into a different channel for 100 milliseconds or so and not impact user experience is absurd.
As someone who plays through DOOM on Ultra Nightmare, this kills the game. There are times when, if I were to miss even 10 or 15 frames, there would be a good chance that will be the end of my run.
It will instead, expand the audience to a lot of casuals who just want a little demon-slaying power-fantasy on a low difficulty. Nothing wrong with that, and it is a damn big addressable audience. Just like how mobile didn't "kill" any other platform, it just added a whole lot of candy crushers.
I could see games being able to signal "there is no input during this cutscene, so it can be buffered at the client." But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?
They may already be doing something similar (halt rendering on congestion) but when this kind of lag happened to me it felt like the rendering had continued without pause on their end.
It happens occasionally when I drive (bad LTE zones). On bad days (ie, if I'm tethering at hotel to join a conf or using airport wifi), I sometimes hear "robot voice" as the tool attempts to deal with signal attenuation.
This may not work as well in video games, but I would like the option.
I imagine most music, and some during-gameplay dialogue, could be buffered at the client. I'd expect sound effects to be the only audio that needs to be super low latency. Maybe certain dialogue too, if the speaker is visible on screen.
This alone might alleviate a lot of the GP's problems, since most audio wouldn't cut out. That can make a huge perceptual difference.
In essence, you need a fat cable to a datacenter very nearby for shooters/fast action games.
Regular wi-fi is more or less sufficient for everything less (you might get video degradation from time to time).
OnLive was the first and it was just insanely awesome. Too bad it was shattered.
I also tried LiquidSky, and it was insanely awesome. At one point you ended up having a virtual PC where you could install and play any game from your Steam library. Too bad they’ve changed the service and monetisation a few times, and it’s unclear if yhey are alive.
Haven’t tried others.
That's annoying.
Now, as a technicality specific to ACO, the goals should still appear in the mission's description, no matter whether you hear the NPCs stating those goals or not.
Slow connection speed? Run these tests, etc. Or, switch to a faster more secure browser. Sound familiar?
Google was just today fined 1.49 billion Euros for their ad strategy - this is reality: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228
Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model.
The cost per user will vary drastically by the amount they play and how computationally demanding it is. I just don’t see it being feasible without personalized cost. Looking forward to paying minimum cost for minimum graphics too.
Microsoft/Sony are NOT going to sit back and let Google win here. Expect replies from them (especially with Microsoft's Azure).
The streaming services of gaming is coming.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/08/project-xcloud-g...
It's already failed multiple times. OnLive tried & failed. Nvidia's has been in beta for years. Sony has one.
Everyone in this area has tried this. Nobody has seen what could be described as "success", and the cost models so far have been ludicrous. Turns out renting Xeons and Radeon MI Instincts in a professionally staffed, maintained datacenter is way, way more expensive than a handful of consumer chips in a box in the living room with nobody on-call to monitor it.
The GPU here looks to be basically a slightly cut-down AMD MI25. That'd make a single GPU in this stradia cloud gaming service costs more than 10 xbox one x's. How do you make that price-competitive here?
I'm sure they got bulk/promotional pricing from AMD, plus they're very good at both running hardware with low overhead and packing it efficiently.
You can't really pack the hardware here since it's latency sensitive. It's straight dedicated resources to an array of VMs. Dedicated CPU cache, even, hence the odd 9.5MB L2+L3 number.
Bulk pricing only gets you so far here. You're still talking gear that's categorically way more expensive than similar performance consumer parts. Not to mention all the other costs in play - data center, power, IT staff, etc...
Making this price-competitive is a big problem
The other costs (power, people, etc.) are amortized over Google's array of services.
Last but not least, it would be very dumb of them not to run batch workloads on these machines when the gaming service is idle. I bet $1000 these puppies run under Borg.
Power doesn't really amortize, and neither does heat.
And capacity still had to increase for this. They didn't just find random GPUs under the table they forgot about, and now that they have a massive fleet of GPUs it's not suddenly going to start handling dremel queries.
This all still costs money. A shitload of it. Someone is going to pay that bill. More ads in YouTube won't really fund gaming sessions. So will this be ad breaks in the game? No way that's cost-effective for the resources used. Straight-subscription model? This seems most likely, but how much and how will you get people to pay for it?
I know from experience that Google is very cheap. You tell Urs you saved a million dollars and he'll ask you why you didn't save two. Or five.
If this takes off, the pricing of the service will pay for the hardware (assuming they did a reasonable job there of baking it in). Even if it doesn't, organic growth from other, much larger Google services can make use of the idle hardware.
For the record, I was involved in a couple of projects that required a lot of new hardware. One of them even ended up saving the company a lot of money in a very lucky, definitely unintended way.
This strikes me as rather amusing. Google was having such trouble getting their hands on enough GPUs that they decided to build custom hardware accelerators (TPUs) to fill the gaps.
I'm sure they'll find a use for these.
Could they be using these GPUs for other purposes during idle times (AI model training, cloud GPU instances)?
There's also an old paper by Murray Stokely and co. about the fake market that was created to make the most use of all hardware planetwide.
HBM2 memory is super expensive. Like, rumors are 16GB of HBM2 is $320 expensive. Toss in anything custom here and there's zero chance this is under $600/GPU.
Even in the hotly contested consumer market the 16gb HBM2 Radeon VII is $700. And that doesn't have any high speed interconnects to allow for sharing memory with CPU or multi-gpu.
Maybe I'm super negative here but I don't see any pros to this development. Today's games are already dumbed down and steered towards profits only. The only games I play these days are indie games made by 1 person up to a handful of people.
We really don't need more but we need better. (This applies to many other areas too)
Pay-per-hour would lead to shorter, more thoughtful games, rather than long grindy ones.
Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
I'm not sure about that. Currently tons of people pay monthly for grindy MMO games. Expanding that sort of revenue scheme to single player games would encourage devs to create more Skinner boxes to keep players "engaged" over the long run.
Players aren't going to spend hours grinding if they know they're paying extra money for each of those hours.
Or it ties money directly to length, so you need your game to be 60+ hours to justify it's existence. Or people won't pay that much so we don't get any new dark souls or RDR2 length games.
Pay-per-hour means developers have an incentive to build addictive games that keep you just engaged enough to keep playing for an extended time.
> Similarly, monthly subscription where you get access to a list of games actually helps indie games. Being able to jump into an indie game you already own within seconds, compared to having to buy and install a small game you've never heard of before.
Monthly subscriptions mean that the platform has to choose what games to include and promote based on what is most likely to make users find value in the platform—which means focussing on those with widest appeal, unless their recommender engine can get enough signal to reliably predict niche interest.
Most games would be developed for Playstation + XBox + PC + Cloud service to maximise audience (unless one cloud provider gains a monopoly, something so far nobody managed to do in either game platforms or cloud computing).
Of course you can decide to develop only for the cloud platform of your choice, but that's nothing new. Microsoft and Sony already pay you good money to make your game exclusive to their platform (if you're lucky even if you're indy).
The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past winter. It worked well and was impressive, but I have a good internet connection with a 1TB cap. I have friends with much worse speeds and harsher caps and I am not sure if this would be viable for them.
I am more concerned about 'physical' gaming being phased out. I doubt Stadia will do this soon, but I like building a new computer every 4 years for playing games. Maybes it's something I won't actually miss(like how I don't miss CDs for music), but it remains to be seen.
The trap that you should avoid falling into is assuming that's the only way games can thrive. F2P games are huge and dominate the conversation, but I think indie games are the best they have ever been. My favorite game last year was Into The Breach, and by all accounts it sold well in the same market that Fortnite dominated in.
Games are evolving in weird ways, but it's in a multifacted and diverse way.
Is the grind a way to slow progression in order to make micro-payments more desirable? Fuck. That.
I really enjoyed it for the first 20 hours or so.
Also, it doesn't have that high of a playerbase.
It is kind of another beast altogether for Google, Shadow, Microsoft (xCloud), etc. to dedicate actual hardware for your usage. Shadow and others like it are essentially remote VM w/ GPU that you rent by the hour. Stadia, xCloud, etc. we don't know what the business model is going to look like. The only positive here is that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all cloud infrastructure companies so in theory, they could price their offerings cheaper than a company that is a tenant on their systems.
Microsoft has made clear that they want Xbox to be a platform independent of the physical box they sell to people. They are 100% going in the direction of Stadia. The big question is how they are going to do it in regards to their next console.
That would be considered unfair competition and they would probably be fined by EU, I guess
The vast majority of your support department can be let go.
Indie developers don't get a cut of console sales, but they do care about how many people buy/play their games, and if this widens the market it seems like it'd be a win for them to me.
That’s just speculation mind you. Things like Stardew Valley would probably do even better.
Also, this will fail miserably if Google thinks it can continue with its current attitude toward user support, so there is hope.
So it could result in a renaissance of the classic AAA 3D single-player games, perhaps.
This is going to be an alternative for some types of games.
And quite on the contrary I think it would awesome for indies, since they tends to be pretty short. And it is much easier for them to gain consumers, if they went viral over streaming, many of which are, like horror games.
No, they didn't, and every single thing you've suggested about their gaming platform is also true about every other streaming platform, and yet none, literally none, of those platforms have tried any of the things you're complaining about.
You basically just made up a bunch of things to complain about because nothing in the actual release was objectionable. Yours is not a helpful way to react, my friend, though it is a popular one.
I’m open to debate about how this could be priced, but I’m pretty comfortable pointing to existing cloud computing business models or streaming services as a precedent.
I would invite you to come up with an alternative business model for serving people who like to play high end graphics games for many hours a day.
Why are you this comfortable? Netflix, YouTube TV, Twitch, Sling, Amazon Prime Video -- basically all streaming services offer flat rates, not per-MB ones.
Further, all existing game library services tout unlimited gaming as a primary selling point! That's the primary reason you opt into Gamefly or Nvidia Shield, at least according to their own marketing.
And this offering is not for high-end gamers. It's taking the benefits high-end gamers get for their investment into their hardware, and making it available to the millions of more casual gamers. This isn't for high-end gamers, so creating a business model for them using Stadia makes no sense.
Finally, you're not thinking of this at the right layer if you're thinking in terms of things like s3, ec2, lambda, etc.. This is the product that's built on top of those, and the single price problem has been present for hundreds of years. It's a solved one, just ask any current MMO or hell, any clothing manufacturer. You're basically saying that an XL t-shirt is going to cost the same as a S t-shirt, despite tens of thousands of examples to the contrary.
YouTube (and Google Play TV & Movies, which appears to carry the same for-sale/rent content in a different storefront) and Amazon Video also both offer purchase of individual content items as well as a common flat rate subscription to certain content.
I don't agree. Anything is scalable.
This does benefit from economies of scale, but it’s not something you can just solve with infrastructure and fixed cost. No matter how many computers you have, you’re still going to do multiple orders of magnitude more calculations to render high end games than stream a song. And you’re going to deal with difficult load balances because every twelve year old gets home from school at the same time (exaggeration but point stands). GPU time costs money.
GPU time costs money but it's a fixed cost, doesn't matter what the GPU time is being used for, therefore it won't be per-game. The end.
For similar reasons, you’re not just going to rake in the money mining bitcoin because you bought a bunch of computers.
Or maybe to make the point even stupider, you could make a game about training neural networks same as you would on a real cloud service provider. If you can understand why google doesn’t charge a simple monthly flat fee for cloud computing of neural nets, you can understand why they can’t charge a simple monthly fee for computing neural nets in a game.
Not sure how would that affect game developers though as there won't be any attractive way to programming for young people; before, making an own game was quite an attraction to jump into programming and a motivation to study hard.
These huge companies will keep throwing money at streaming because they see gold at the end of the rainbow, but I’ve seen no indication that they have a plan without giant question marks before the “profit” step. Look at YouTube, something Google acquired in 2006, is dominant in its space, and still doesn’t make them money. Yet somehow games, which are more finicky and reliant on universally good internet connections is going to work for them?
This is trend-chasing, once again without any real new ideas to overcome existing challenges.
It's apparently deeply tied to YouTube, and particularly to help provide an onramp for more (often ad-opportunity-generating) gaming content on YouTube a service that is both an ad-platform and the venue for at least two distinct revenue generating premium services (the older of which is ad free) that Google has not strangled in the crib.
If it runs for 4 years and makes money, that's a success for Google. It doesn't need to be permanent to be useful.
1. As subscription services take over, the upfront revenue game studios see will drop. This is just simple math: Xbox Game Pass costs $10/month, which means its the total cost of a AAA game over 6 months. In a traditional model, many gamers would expect to buy, lets say, 2 AAA games per year. In this new model, I can play as many as I want. And even if I only play 1 or 2 every year, I'm almost definitely going to be "dabbling" in the collection for other games I may want to play, ESPECIALLY if they're instant-on like Stadia. Even if they pay-out to studios based on some metric derived from time spent in game, there's no way studios will get the same level of income as they did before. (note: this is exactly why Spotify is having such a hard time, and why they're branching out beyond music. royalties abstracted behind a subscription service suck for the bottom line)
2. So upfront revenue drops. How do studios make that up? In-game transactions. They're already huge, and they'll just keep getting bigger.
3. So what, micro transactions (mtx) are the "new normal". Well, the top 5% of games can afford that decreased upfront revenue by making it up in mtx (think: Fortnite, Apex Legends, CoD). The trailing 95% can't (think: Indie titles).
4. Beyond that, you can bet your bottom dollar that Stadia will pay out tons to the AAA studios just to get their names on the platform, given that Google has no first party studios to speak of. Assassins Creed gets enough upfront revenue to make it worth their while, meanwhile the next indie darling is left out to dry, further balkanizing the gaming industry
5. Switching gears: A massive number of software engineers in the industry entered it because of gaming. Games, even back in the 90s, were such a clear application and value of computers that it was obvious, even to children, that they'd be something huge. It inspired a generation, to not only play, but to mod and even make their own. Now, we're moving that all off into the cloud, hidden from the next generation. Google wants you to own a Chromebook and consume their products, not understand how they work.
6. Speaking of modding: Its literally the source of the world's most popular games. Battle Royale? You can trace its roots back to mods for ARMA and Minecraft. MOBA? Dota, a mod for warcraft. Creativity happens in environments that large corporations can't recreate, and traditionally a great platform has been starting with a base game, a great game, that some studio created, then exerting your creativity on top of that platform. It benefited everyone, including large AAA studios who could then copy your idea and make millions. Yeah, good luck modding on a blackboxed server a hundred miles away.
7. But fine. I guess we're moving into the future and this is part of it. Except, there are millions, even BILLIONS, of people around the world without the internet capability to even join this service. Google tried to help solve this with Fiber, and gave up. Its fucking hard. They'd rather do easy, cool things, like cloud gaming. Modern consoles are bad enough; my brother, who lives just an hour outside of a top 10 US city, recently told me that he downloaded Fortnite on Xbox for the kids. It took a week of 24/7 downloading. Most games drop with day 1 patches in the dozens of gigabytes, even if you buy the disk in-stores. The sheer arrogance of Google, to get up on stage and claim this service is gaming for EVERYONE, the apex of accessibility, is disgusting to me. They're stuck so far up their own ass they've become the ouroboros.
8. Well, streaming games have taken over the world. Let's say you want to compete with Google on this streaming game front. All of the top three cloud providers now want to get into game streaming. So, no way can you compete on cost there with them; they own the data centers and give their game streaming divisions nice fat discounts. They all have the pockets to design nice custom silicon with AMD specialized for the task. And, oh by the way, all the latest games are now optimized for this silicon (whether its the custom AMD chips in the PS4, or XB1, or whatever cloud streaming service we're talking about, they're all custom). You're stuck with off-the-shelf cards. Ha! Nvidia won't let you deploy their cards in a datacenter [1], because they ALSO want in on this big cash pile they've all convinced themselves exist. So, basically, good luck. The world has balkanized, and penetrating it becomes harder every year.
I hate this. I hate it so much. The only saving grace is that it is inevitable that this will fail to realize the results Google wants, and they'll pull the plug. And maybe the rest of the industry is smart enough to recognize how short-sighted a streaming-first/subscription-first strategy is, for literally everyone involved except the people who rent the metal.
I want to go back to the 2000s. This new world sucks.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/239994/nvidia-forbids-geforce-dr...
To that last point; it is impossible to understate how fundamentally important Nvidia's Pascal architecture has been to the development of both gaming and AI. In my mind, its the most important computing chipset invented in the 2010s, and belongs among the "world's greatest" chips next to the Intel Core architecture, Apple's A-series, Pentium, and the 8086. It put Nvidia, quite literally, 5 years ahead of the competition almost overnight; AMD is still catching up, three years later, to the perf-per-dollar and perf-per-watt of the GTX 1080.
That chipset, and the cards that were made with it (GTX 1080/1080Ti namely) were the first indication that DC rendering with a stream-to-client architecture was actually possible for video gaming. Before that it was hard to make an economic case for it.
OnLive was purchased by Sony, and its easy to conclude that they repurposed their tech for their Playstation Now service. So it lives on.
Also, to point 7. guess what billions of people can't afford a console or an expensive PC rig. Yet, in developing countries data is already very cheap if not free. So, this DEFINITELY is a big step closer to unlocking games for them.
By comparison, shipping "edge devices" (aka, uh, COMPUTERS) running an 845 Snapdragon or Tegra (like the Switch) is cheap and getting cheaper. What makes more sense: asking someone in a developing country to pay $200 one time for a general purpose computer useful for everything including 1080p gaming, or $10/month in addition to, uh guess what, some computing device they'd already have to own to access Stadia.
The adage goes: never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barrelling down the highway. I mean, the follow up is usually "but never forget the latency", though in this case that doesn't apply. Point being: the internet isn't the answer to everything, but if the only tool Google has ever known is a hammer then every problem is going to look like a nail.
Reminds me a bit of the 30/60 fps fights a few years ago. Sure, 30fps games look more "cinematic" and 60fps movies look uncanny, but 30fps games feel less responsive.
Google Cloud has regional US DCs in western Iowa and central South Carolina. A midpoint between those two locations roughly lands on Nashville TN, which is ~600 miles away from either. Light could make a roundtrip of that distance in 6ms. Of course, the internet doesn't allow for latency at the speed of light, but that's the physical limit, and that's plenty; a typical internet browser alone has input lag of 10ms [1]. In order to achieve 60fps, frames have 16ms to be rendered.
But the regional DC is only the worst-case, because they've said they're deploying these things in 7500 locations around the world. That's unprecedented scale for a tier 1 cloud provider at the edge. They know that they have to be close to consumer populations.
Also consider this: Once cloud streaming takes off, we're going to see deeper integration into the frameworks and game engines themselves. Imagine a game engine which is built for streaming. It could do input prediction, doing a "light rendering pass" of frames for N possible inputs the input buffer might receive on the next frame, before it receives them. These custom chips they use have plenty of headroom to do this at 1080p, and most controllers have, what, 12 buttons + all of the joystick states? Depending on the game this might be possible (example, hard to do in multiplayer). Combine that with the natural advantage a cloud-hosted multiplayer game would have in networking with other clients to resolve game-state, and you can see that its not just a strict downgrade; it might be possible that we'll see improvements in the performance of games beyond just the typical "new year better graphics" cycle.
Time has shown that the best revenue model for these kinds of services is finding a monthly price, or multiple tiers of a monthly price, that adequately cover the costs incurred from heavy users and light users alike.
The entire reason this is happening is because Google has successfully captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks.
ChromeOS could be as important than Android. Especially with the Windows 7 extended life support coming up, Google has less than 4 years to convince people to transfer to their platform instead of Windows 10. I know it seems heretical to imply that it will happen but I think this is a good example that Google considers it not only a real possibility but something that they might actually have a good chance of being able to pull off.
The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of Windows 7 since they can't pay for extended support even if they wanted it. They can then continue this into the workplace. This is a brilliant move by Google.
I've got a school age stepson nothing there either.
It's only been in the last two or three years that the ecosystem around them has really matured enough that they can compete with Windows machines and iPads on anything other than price. With the way schools' budgets work, we've really only just passed the early adopter stage.
Most schools aren't buying fleets of Pixelbooks. They're buying chromebooks from companies like Acer and Asus which make devices that retail in the $200-400 range.
And right now from the outside it feels like there is a ramping internal politics going on with ChromeOS, Android, PWA, Flutter, Fuchsia, Kotlin, Dart teams, with upper management giving free reign and let the best win kind of stuff.
I really, really doubt that. I don't think you understand how ubiquitous Chromebooks are becoming to the education space. Last I heard, in the US, 60%+ of all school provided computers are Chromebooks. School SysAdmins love them because they're dirt cheap and can be provisioned quickly.
From Google's perspective it's great too. Between Google Classroom and the way chromebook device management works, students have to have a google account to be able to go to school. There's rules on what data can collect, but still, kids are forced into the Google ecosystem at a young age.
ChromeOS doesn't need the pixelbook to survive, it provides an enormous amount of value on its own.
> And right now from the outside it feels like there is a ramping internal politics going on with ChromeOS, Android, PWA, Flutter, Fuchsia, Kotlin, Dart teams
100% agree there. I've been hearing for the past 3 or 4 years that Android and ChromeOS were going to be merged and nothing has yet to come of it. It seems like even Google doesn't know what is going on there.
Being only king of US school system isn't something that holds long term in a product roadmap.
Dude... I'm sorry but you are so wrong. Like I said originally, I literally just left this industry after working in it for years.
US spends more money on education than pretty much any other nation, both per student and as a total dollar amount. The reason the numbers are so low world wide is because chromebooks in education are a relatively new concept. Everyone has been going after the big fish, which is the US.
Additionally, they way you need to handle student data in the US is fairly consistent across state lines, which means you don't need to customize your solution very much to be able to sell to all 60 million students. Once you go overseas, you'd need to sell across multiple country lines to be able to find a pool of students that big (unless you're targeting China, Russia, or India which all have their own issues).
If you don't believe me, here's a blog post from a few years ago where google literally say ChromeOS is here to stay and then they focus heavily on it's benefits to education. https://blog.google/products/chrome/chrome-os-is-here-to-sta...
Even if you want to ignore all of that, I don't think you realize how much of a PR nightmare it would be if Google just stopped supporting ChromeOS right now. Schools have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying into this ecosystem. For schools that buy at the district level, it's in the millions. Most schools/districts don't have the budget to just replace all their computers overnight. Shutting down ChromeOS would pretty much fuck all digital learning in a lot of school districts for years to come.
PS. I'm pretty sure iOS's adoption numbers US & worldwide (not in schools, just total consumer adoption) match up pretty closely with Chromebooks, so there goes your idea that only dominating the US market isn't a viable business strategy.
Furthermore, the source didn't exactly do a great job with their research. This is a direct quote:
>Pixelbook is a Chromebook, meaning it runs on Google's Chrome OS software and is only capable of using internet-based applications.
Google is not just trying to win in console gaming space here - it's trying to establish itself as the browser monopolist and it seems to be doing it without much subtlety.
Monopoly laws exist for a reason and hard experience and I'm of the opinion that a single large player having complete domination even if they also have technical superiority is something that probably should be broken up.
I think this can be read in two ways:
1. You're the only product, therefore you're the best (and the worst too, at the same time I guess). In which case I want to point out you can be a monopoly without controlling 100% of the market. There are usually always smaller competitors around— you just happen to have a share large enough or the assets necessary to control what happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. De Beers, for example, was considered a monopoly when it controlled 90% of the world's diamond production.
2. You're the one that came on top in a market with other competitors. Therefore, you must be the best.
This is assuming the only way to eliminate players off the market is by being "better" than them, but that is sadly not the case. For example— in Mexico there's a monopoly over the telecommunications business, and part of the reason it happened and stayed that way was due to support from the federal government and political corruption. Microsoft has had monopolies over several software markets— not because they were "better", but because if a better product came to be, they'd either buy it or build one that was built-in to Windows. IE was pretty bad, in many ways worse than FF, but also came built-in.
Democracy and a free press in theory should act as a retarding measure but somehow that’s gone off the rails more (or I’m more aware of it than I used to be and it’s always been that way), social media and the internet has changed the landscape, We have a sitting president screaming fake news at news where they have incontrovertible proof..often his own words from previous speeches and interviews.
The world has gone haywire and at a time when globally we need more unity to address the issues facing us as a global society the very bastions of that global society are getting beaten with a stick.
I wonder what the world is going to look like 2050, I’ll be 70 if I’m still around.
I mean, this doesn't stop competitors, but it's quite the moat to climb.
Google uses open standards and business practices to appear like the good guys, but make no mistake they are abusing their market power.
I mean when will you see ads of Stadia on the Google homepage? What happens when you will search for Assasins Creed in future? Oh, look we have it right here at Google, no need to leave our ad platform.
>>The entire reason this is happening is because Google has successfully captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks.
Care to share how this tidbit is true?
>>The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of Windows 7 since they can't pay for extended support even if they wanted it. They can then continue this into the workplace. This is a brilliant move by Google.
What gamers are still on Win7? Most are already on 10. Most legit gamers care about input lag, which a streaming service will never solve vs. having hardware wired to your monitor. Most legit gamers use a wired mouse for gods sake because of input lag introduced to wireless mice.
Care to share how this tidbit is true?
Lots of filthy casuals just care that they can game. If they can, somehow, why shouldn't they buy the Chromebook? Hell, if that's what they had in school, they might have grown up to like precisely the genres of games that are easy to design around the lag.
Most legit gamers care about input lag
The majority of people don't notice < 40ms round trip lag, though "legit gamers" often do notice. < 30ms, round trip lag, and few people outside of hardcore FPS players will notice. Get to < 20ms, and you get down to rounding error levels. Don't just ask me. (Hobbyist game dev.) Ask gamedevs and companies who have conducted testing.
40ms roundtrip lag for most of the world seems pretty achievable to me.
Pinging google.com [172.217.5.110] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 172.217.5.110: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=50 Reply from 172.217.5.110: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=50 Reply from 172.217.5.110: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=50 Reply from 172.217.5.110: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=50
Ping statistics for google.com: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 6ms, Maximum = 10ms, Average = 8ms
I'm on GDC public WiFi.
--- google.com ping statistics --- 12 packets transmitted, 12 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 74.750/75.566/76.724/0.587 ms
I'm on 1GBit Google Fibre in Orange County which should be as ideal an experience as could be expected. Now, considering there would be additional time on top of the pure ping, I image there would be 80-90ms of latency for me. No way lol.
I could totally make RTS and other real-time games work with that.
Pretty sure both of us have a Google datacenter nearby, but could the result of your ping be due to a bad configuration on your router?
Care to share how this tidbit is true?
Sorry to use your words against you, but I'm not so certain. I'd like to see real statistics from a few sources. I agree that Windows 7 is surely phasing out, but anecdotally (which is where most conjecture like yours and mine come from), I know a number of people who specifically stayed on Windows 7 for two reasons: 1) Compatibility with games; and 2) No telemetry (or at least it's considerably minimal compared to Windows 10).
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I would say 60+% qualifies as most. On the other hand, ~25% is not negligible. So you both win ?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I expect the number of Windows 10 players to increase as DX 12 becomes a common requirement, but we're not quite there yet.
Unfortunately, any and all trust I had in google maintaining its services for more than a few years is long gone. I have games from ~10+ years ago I can still download, update, and play via Steam; What are the chances this lasts more than 3 years? In addition to that obvious concern, I'd also be very hesitant to let Google have any control over my gameplay experience. The downsides of the gaming as a service just have no appeal to me, although I'm sure it would be functional in certain generes, for a certain type of gamer.
Regardless of how many streamers are playing Skyrim in their browser, I don't think I'll be joining them.
Mario Kart on the Wii still works. Online play is broken though because Nintendo has no interest in running old servers to keep a service in a long discontinued game running.
If any games are developed solely for Stadia, will they disappear if the platform disappears? Even if it doesn't, will they be playable in perpetuity, or will Google shrug breaking changes if it's for games that are over N years old, and have under K users?
Now if a shoe only works for a week, I'm not going to buy it. If it works for a year, sure I'll take it.Similarly for a digital good (phone, computer, software) we need to come up with a baseline on what the acceptable number for life is. It cant be Infinity, but it should be reasonable.
This all ties into ownership. If I own something I have control over it, so I can re-sell it if I'd ever like to re-coup some value or let someone else make use of it. I can lend it to a friend, and have it back to use or lend again. I can give it as a gift to a friend or family member. I can keep it indefinitely as a memory. All of these are reasons why some people still have a NES, GameCube, etc. It's probably not that they've been playing on the console for 30 years. They either kept the NES they owned as kids, or bought one second-hand for the nostalgia, or got it as a gift from someone who knows how much they like classic games, etc.
There are still have tournaments for games on old consoles. Old games are perfectly good games— they don't have the same wow factor, but they are as fun today as they have always been. Will future "classic games" be lost to history, or available only when a publisher decides to monetize the nostalgia of the public with a re-release?
The better analogy is: when you buy a book, do you expect you can read it again in ten years? People who bought 1st pressings of Beatles albums 60 years ago can still play them with their grandkids. I can still play old SNES with my siblings at Christmas. But imagine a 2019 being unplayable in 2029. It's reasonable to be concerned.
I saw the OnLive demo. It was very slick, and the concept seemed more than viable, it was inevitable.
I suspect that Google will have better infrastructure than OnLive, and that their customers will have better Internet.
Unfortunately for me at least, what I want is more akin to a cloud VM where they can host my games and I stream them wherever, which this isn't it. I've already got games between Steam, uPlay, Origin, etc. I have zero interest in buying a game 2x just to be able to have more portable play.
It'll probably be a mix of pay-once games, lots-of-games-for-a-subscription, and pay-once, play-until-Google-shuts-the-service-down games.
However, a gaming session means to have a dedicated daemon running for you somewhere. I doubt this can be deployed anywhere on the spot, but perhaps they have some amazing technology for that.
CDNs aren't helpful if every stream is unique.
It's not the edge cache itself that matters; it's that many ISPs peer directly with Google.
Google Cloud can route the audio/video/keyboard packets mostly over Google's private network and then only use the public internet once it gets to your ISP (or their transit provider). This provides Google with more control over how the packet gets to the end user.
Google provides a similar service to Google Cloud customers as the "Premium Network Service Tier".
It's the challenge of edge computing datacenter design.
EDIT: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaikai-founder-blames-onlives-pc-foc...
> the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide
They were burning through all of their money because they highly overestimated the audience. That's one of the main problems the cloud was made to solve.
Traditional GPGPU customers, and machine learners, usually use CUDA instead of OpenCL / VulkanCompute / DirectCompute. At least from my position is looks that way. I’m a freelance developer and my clients are picking CUDA in ~75% cases. The rest is DirectCompute, if computing on client PCs and hardware compatibility is required.
Furthermore, there are other technological advances that have come even in the past 2 years that help facilitate this, like Secure Reliable Transport protocol (https://www.srtalliance.org/).
Things were just too stacked against OnLive at the time to make it work, but most of those barriers have since been removed after they had gone under.
Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play).
Heck, even streaming in your local network isn't such a great experience these days.
I love the idea, but realistically we are still very far away from streaming games replacing consoles or PCs. Many companies have tried (Nvidia, Sony, etc) but no one has succeeded for the simple reason that latency is not there yet.
And games already have latency from input devices, inputs registering, the game calculating the next frame, the monitor displaying it, and the user perceiving what has happened on screen. Every millisecond of network delay gets sandwiched between all of those.
The latency is good from my experience. There are occasional resolution drop but that happens <1 per hour. Mind you my experience was based on playing ACO which probably is not sensitive to latency.
I also played Nvidia Shield Now on Mac while it was beta. I would say Project Stream is a much much better experience (no need to signup a new account is a plus, no client required a HUGE plus).
Nothing can deliver the ~25ms input latency that local gaming can, but when you can't game locally it'll do.
I work for Google, opinions are my own.
I agree but I don't consider this service to be for hardcore enthusiasts. The enthusiasts will continue to buy their powerful gaming machines because they really care about having the best experience.
I think this is great for someone like me, who likes video games, but doesn't want to spend that much money on a computer. Before I would not be able to play the latest titles because my computer is 6 years old, but this would make it so I could.
There are probably tons of kids out there whose parents would scoff at the idea of giving them a $1000+ computer but now would be able to play the latest games with this technology.
All that assuming it works, of course, which is no guarantee.
> There are probably tons of kids out there whose parents would scoff at the idea of giving them a $1000+ computer but now would be able to play the latest games with this technology.
Isn't a console affordable enough in that case?
It's a niche market overall, and each is a different segment you can target independently.
The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're circle strafing around a target and the entire screen is constantly redrawing). I thought it was great for playing a game casually: i.e. story mode. Lots of people use that phrase as a put-down, but the system is well suited for a game like ACO where you are mostly being tactical, planning, exploring, and moving the story forward.
I think of a game like 2016 hitman: i hesitated to install 30G of it to my ps4, but if you told me i could drop into the demo/prelude in less than a minute, even at 720, it's a very appealing concept for somebody like me that plays video games the way other people watch netflix while they're eating dinner: basically whenever i have some downtime and want to dip into a story or mechanic i like for ~30 mins.
Note that even Steam Link over Ethernet is too laggy to play KB/M FPS at any serious level - the input lag makes FPS almost unplayable.
I can see the growth of services like these, especially with more gamers being unable to access dedicated hardware, but there will always be a niche for dedicated hardware. The only way I think they could solve that problem with streaming is using some sort of hybrid streaming approach where some of the UI is remote and some is local and they could do client side simulation somehow for input.
i don't doubt that consoles will remain useful, but i think that services like this will satisfy a pretty legit niche for a vast swath of games that aren't really dependent on low latency input (i.e. puzzle/turn based/rpg/simulators/board game conversions) and that are often 'discovered' by people finding letsplays on youtube.
for some variety of mmorpgs, i can imagine devs being excited about the reduced surface area for cheating/exploits. for somebody like me that uses a mac, i'm looking forward to playing a version of Civ that doesn't cause my laptop to sound like it's about ready to take flight. i don't think the idea is meant to replace consoles, though more, it seems like a way to grease the wheels of commerce and get people playing (and buying) games that they've been traditionally priced out of because of the not-insignificant startup cost of building and maintaining a gaming pc/console.
Every game has an extremely high number of potential combinations and outcomes, so it's effectively uncacheable. Fan that out to Steam level popularity and diversity of games and it sounds a bit nuts.
Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it, casually changing course on a whim and leaving masses of people spinning in their wake. Just look at how they've managed YouTube and its guidelines, bans, etc. Or the Play Store and all of its debacles. Were I a game developer, I would never want to be beholden to a Google gaming platform.
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
That's because states, entrenched providers and in some cases local governments made every inch of work cost a mile of time. The cost was making Fiber a non-starter... ISP's benefited from nationwide networks largely funded by governments, then used their monopoly influence to prevent any competition, and "hired" state governments to enforce their monopolies.
But we can hand-wave all of that away and claim it was Google's lack of commitment.
This is closer to their existing product portfolio, it doesn't have nearly as a difficult upstart cost relative to Fiber, and the business models are pretty clear. I think a closer analog would be the rumored reductions in their hardware division, but given that they're still making successful hardware + software, it could be more about reorganizing around priorities than it is an indication of their reduced investment
It’s not like a photo site where you can just download your content. Whatever is built to run on Stadia will not run on your home machine or anywhere else.
1. Release a product, make it decently good.
2. Kill it in a few years after it has gotten widely adopted.
3. Release an alternative product that does the same thing, but, a lot of times, worse than the original and/or with missing functionality from the old one that people actually care about.
4. Bonus step: make it really confusing (looking at you, Hangouts => Allo/Duo).
5. Repeat the cycle.
Notable examples of it that come to mind:
* Messaging: GChat => Hangouts => Allo/Duo => I got tired of keeping up with that they are pushing now
* Music streaming: Google Music => Google Play Music [just a rename, I think] => YouTube Remix => YouTube Music
* First party Android experience: Google Play Edition => [I feel like I am missing something in-between here] => Android One + Android Go
GPE -> Android Go does not fit the mold of the "cycle" you're talking about. Further, Android Go is substantially better than Android One.
Do you have any other examples?
As for others, I personally stopped using non-essential google products (i.e., the ones I believe that Google is unlikely to screw up without completely destroying faith in the company, like GMail or Maps), so I can't come up with anything. If you are curious, you can check out https://killedbygoogle.com/ and see if there is anything there that might fit the bill.
Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with that website. I found it by trying to look up a list of killed off Google products, hoping it would bring up some memories. Then I realized that there are way too many products on the list for me to parse through, and the website has a nice and clean UI/UX that I am not ashamed to share here.
Cloud gaming needs a killer multiplayer game that requires massive parallel compute (thus it can't be run locally) to make a case for sticking around.
It's not like we're talking about charity here.
I have the feeling this is peak microtransaction. They've found out that people are likely to spend small amounts over time then one big sum at once and now you don't even own the game. It became the microtransaction.
If you mean to keep a copy and be able to play it again anytime in the future, then yes I'm with you. However, most of the games are either thrash or doesn't offer much replay value, which means that once you're done with it that will stack up somewhere and collects dust.
One point though is you can trade games that you own, which has some appeal.
People used to bring the same argument for music streaming vs buying a CD or digital copy. See where that brought us.
Convenience wins most of the time.
I would like if someone else handled all the hardware upgrades, so I don't have to spend so much money every year just to keep up.
One of the appealing aspects of South Korea gaming cafes is that all the computers can be rented for a few dollars and tend to be maxed out. That environment creates a great place for everyone to get into gaming.
I'm not sure how that fits into Google's long-term interests, but it definitely fits into mine.
> The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a real problem or issue
> Having a console where you buy games is more than enough.
I think that's the problem though. This opens up "real" gaming to a much wider audience. Even though games are mainstream now, most people are not willing to spend big money on gaming PCs or consoles.
If this technology works, they won't have to.
Since the majority of this venture's hardware appears to be in-house and, I assume, easily re-purposed for other core services I'm less cynical about the half-life of this product.
I have no intention of buying the controller but if this let's me stream to my existing hardware with minimal friction I would be interested. If they structure it as a monthly subscription with a robust catalog they would probably get my money.
I'm curious to see what happens.
Sundar opened up the event talking about deep learning, I wouldn't be surprised if they used this platform as a way to train their RL models against humans or on data generated by the users.
The youtube integration is also a shot at twitch.
The opportunity for Google is huge, but it will require sustained, strong, cross-functional execution that can be challenging for such an engineering driven, compartmentalized organization.
With Android, Chrome, Chromecast, Youtube and GCP they have all of the pieces in place.
Still a great thing for Linux and Vulkan. Too bad Sony refuses to support them on its PS consoles.
Plenty of extensions to choose from.
Stadia's specs per Google:
Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units capable of 10.7 teraflops
16 GB of RAM with up to 484 GB/s of performance
Radeon MI25's specs:
16GB of HBM2 memory at 484 GB/s with 64 compute units capable of 12.29 TFLOPs
12.29 * (56 / 64) = 10.7.
So this is almost certainly just MI25 chips with 1 or 2 bad 'cores'. Aka, the reject pile. From last generation, at that, since the current gen MI50 & MI60 are both 1TB/s HBM2 memory.
The multi-gpu part maaaaay be custom using the Instinct's extra interconnects instead of what used to be consumer Crossfire. But multi-gpu in consumer space is almost entirely dead, and nothing seems to suggest any developer would do anything for multi-gpu in this platform, either.
Much like web apps, YouTube, Netflix etc. today already work flawlessly on Linux, so will gaming too with this development. For most people, the browser is already the only "native" desktop application they use on their computers.
Web apps and web video finally made the Linux desktop viable, but also irrelevant in the bigger picture.
This case is different. Stadia is the first video game streaming product made by a cloud computing company, and also a cloud computing company which developed a video codec (VP9) just for high quality/low latency streaming.
The economics are much different on all sides; it all depends on how Google prices the service. (it'll be curious how Microsoft's xCloud competes. Maybe Amazon will get in on the fun too.)
I doubt pricing can change the underlying fact that you need really good latency and being close to a Stadia server.
I don't think google does something new here, and I don't think most of them failed because of financial side. Most just failed to acquire users, even giving games and subscriptions almost for free. Or, even for free, like GeForce Now. But I don't use it. For me gaming via cloud feels like a bad experience.
May be Google would put pedal to the metal on its PR and advertisement, it would attract enough users.
P.S. Just tried GeForce Now again. After playing on PC even if lag is barely detectable or noticeable, but it is very irritating. Like, there is delay between action and reaction.
Speaking on Google leveraging Youtube for Strada, I also think this could be an amazing affiliate opportunity for game developers and content creators. Imagine watching your favorite streamer (or I guess game reviewer) and with a click of a button, without having to download, play the game right from your browser (demo or full game). Great source of income for content creators, great frictionless experience for viewers/consumers, and great tool for developers.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands...
They have benchmarks and go into detail on how well it runs. I found this interesting:
> "[It's] a complete port," Google's Phil Harrison told me. "[Ubisoft] built the game completely for Stadia and they're actually doing a talk at GDC about how they got their game up and running."
> In our earlier analysis, our impression was of a game that very, very closely mirrored the PC version running at 1080p resolution, with some elements upgraded beyond the console quality threshold defined by Xbox One X.
> "Correct, but they started from their main line on the consoles, it's not that they took the PC version and ported," Stadia VP Majd Bakar explains. "You can see that as the UI changes according to the controller you connect. I wouldn't call it a console port, I'd recommend going to the talk. It's going to be run jointly between Google and the team that did the work for Project Stream and they will talk about how they did it and the work stream they followed."
This is a fascinating testament to the rate at which deep learning can run. If you think back to 2014-2016 (less than 5 years ago), one of the common things people said was that style transfer would be really cool to apply to video games or video, and then the middlebrow dismissal was 'style-transferring a single frame Gatys et al 2014 style takes a Titan hours so [simple math] shows we can't style transfer in realtime for decades, duh'.
But, GPUs got better. Deep learning got better. Style transfer got better. Now, here in 2019, realtime style transfer is not just old hat (Facebook launched a realtime style transfer video app for smartphones years ago), but Google is announcing a service to stream countless hours of style-transferred video games to potentially millions of players.
Streaming may have a place in the future, but if it's the only option, then consider me a full-time retro gamer.
I already despise the fact that the masses voted to kill ownership of games, and now it's going straight to killing "rental licenses" as well, putting all of the power of entertainment and commerce in the hands of, essentially, two companies: Google and Amazon.
Ya'll voted for these massive monopolies, really looking forward to the dystopia.
In other words, we have the technology (and it'll get better, I mean) to have handheld gaming devices. Even if they are digital only, it's extremely inefficient to generate video hundreds/thousands of miles away and beam it down to a device.
To me, this sounds like mailing a letter to your next door neighbor, going through the entire US Postal system, vs. just walking over and putting the envelope in their mailbox.
We are a long, long, long way away from having constant, fast, reliable, high-bit rate connections for mobile devices.
(Note, I am on an IPhone XR in OC on ATT)
The quality of this is only likely to improve with 5G coming in the next year or so.
This technology consolidating in the hands of only two companies implies there aren't going to be any competitors. Nvidia is already establishing a foothold in this space, and I imagine AMD will also do so eventually. If the technology is actually interesting to consumers, there will be a competitive ecosystem that springs up to serve them. The future isn't as dystopian as you're implying.
But paying a monthly fee and having my gaming time leased out to me by MegaCorp is not anything I'm interested in. I want to pick what I enjoy, buy it, and play it. I'm not crazy for thinking that way, collecting is part of the fun of gaming for me and many others.
Speaking of the 4G/5G, I cannot fathom a world where you can be on a subway underground and somehow have a perfect streaming connection. And subways are only in major cities - what about the rest of the entire country? The current infrastructure, heck, the infrastructure of 10 years from now isn't built to handle this kind of bandwidth for constant streaming. It's not even efficient - always-online services have been vilified by the gaming community, and now somehow we're celebrating being stuck on 1 TV, playing at home.
Sigh. I feel like this whole industry has left me behind, and nothing makes sense anymore.
As for the subway thing, wifi networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous and advanced, I know my local subway has it's own inbuilt wifi, obviously it's not going to be amazing any time soon but between that and 5g and the hotswapping connections to keep uptime, idk it can work.
Every day of my life I am in all of those above situations, and I almost exclusively game on the go, either on my Vita or Switch.
5G doesn't make these problems just vanish, the US is a massive country and the middle of the mountains just won't have 60fps streaming capabilities in 5 years, it just won't. Why would any company want to spend the money on that infrastructure outside of a few major cities?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...
Google isn't a name that people associate with gaming or gamers, buit they do have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two. I wouldn't trust Google to still be supporting "Stadia" in 5 years time, whereas I do know Steam will still be there.
Also, Google's reputation for "do no evil" has been rapidly eroded in recent times and people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data than they already do. Contrast this with Steam, a private company that gamers trust with their data.
I think Google is once again reaching here into a space too late and without anything really compelling to make people switch away from existing Xbox/Windows/Steam ecosystems.
Edit: One other additional aspect to this: it doesn't really matter how fast Google's servers can stream the data, most people's ISPs do not have great consistent connections. Hell, I have Google Fibre at home and occasionally I get issues streaming 1080p Netflix (stuttering etc). Most people have services with bandwidth caps and do not get consistent enough speeds to support streaming games. At my parent's house in the UK, the situation is even worse with lower caps and very often there are disruptions in the connection and so the Netflix stream will turn into a blocky mess for 10 seconds or so.
I also don't like the idea of games-as-a-service in the sense that I only own a license to the game for as long as I pay a monthly fee. I'm okay with licensing content within the game (i.e. DLC), but I shy away from subscription games services like Xbox Games Pass or EA's Origin subscription.
A streaming game product like this doesn't solve that issue. Additionally, the latency issue, like you pointed out, is too much for me to consider _not_ owning my own gaming hardware.
EDIT: A "Stadia store" was briefly mentioned shortly after my comment, it looked like it was tied into Google Play.
I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)
I'm very curious about the expenses game developers will face too, which definitely wasn't brought up. Id Software bragged about just using one Stadia instance, but then later demonstrations showing split screen gaming "without compromise" was shown running each screen on a different Stadia instance. While Google suggests this makes split screen gaming possible again, my guess is that split screen gaming costs the developers twice as much to implement as a service cost, since it uses twice as much hardware. Making it probably mostly a nonstarter anyways.
Even for people that don't have gaming computers or consoles, you can put a decent one together that costs less than one of Google's phones
I want this to work.
This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.
Of course, the hardware you have to throw at it to do that quickly becomes ridiculous, unless you can come up with a way of efficiently rendering the multiple versions.
[1] https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-2%E2%80%8A-...
That said, I had my Bootcamped MBP with a XB1 controller connected over Bluetooth and any input lag was negligible with the Assassin's Creed Odyssey Project Stream demo.
No matter how good Google's CDN network is, you can't compete with sub-1ms in-network round trips. There's not really any clever "latency compensation" you can do here.
Even if you rewind state to apply input, which games probably won't support anyway, that still only helps you close the gap added by internet latency. A gap that in-home doesn't even have in the first place.
You still have an idle graphics card, but you can enjoy the benefits of it from any laptop in your home network. My gaming desktop is wired, my Linux laptop is wifi, and I get 4K @ 60FPS flawlessly.
However, I would prefer not to have to upgrade in the future and offloading the intensive parts to Google would be highly preferable.
Unless you have unlimited budget I find that buying cheaper cards more often will give you better average performance.
What makes you think games would just be included in Stadia?
Competing streaming services here are around $10-20/month without any games included. Origin's game access is $15/month without any game playing hardware included.
So... what will stradia end up being, and at what price? Would you pay $30/month for this? When a PS4/Xbox is only $300-400 in the first place, and has a lifespan of ~5 years?
Origin isn't relevant to this conversation.
$15/month for a streaming service + $15/month for game access service equals, drum roll, $30/month.
What are you not getting here? Origin is relevant as a reference point for what the games themselves cost on a subscription.
Stadia still needs to actually pay for games, after all. Either as a subscription (reference origin's pricing), or you straight up buy them at the normal $60/pop.
So instead of spending $1500 on that piece of gaming equipment spend $250-300 instead. That's what you're actually getting here. A very slow CPU with a mid-range GPU. It's a budget build that's not going to drive 4k@60fps with the bells and whistles. Not remotely close. It'll be fine for 1080p gaming, though, but that's realistically it.
They haven't fundamentally solved the latency issue, 50-100ms of ping is brutal and the people who could be a target for this generally won't have a fiber internet connection.
Network gameplay works via misdirection, predictable simulations and knowing how to converge a divergent state(including rewinding in time to re-play hittraces and the like). Streaming gets you none of that.
It'll work for high-latency sensitive singleplayer games but not seeing it scaling out wider.
Now you can program your clients and server like they’re all on a LAN. And now you can trust the client. (The client, not the inputs.) Those are huge reductions in complexity. This makes delivering good multiplayer easier, not harder.
But I do agree that input/display latency is going to be a thing. Results may be highly variable and you’ll probably know two people in the same city who have very different experiences with it.
At my day job I'm working on a AAA multiplayer game, and making a properly server-authoritative game with significant client-to-server latency mitigation imposes serious costs in dev time and complexity and security review process. And now, at least in theory, they mostly disappear.
The input/display lag problem is different from what we have now. It's new. We don't, of course, compensate for lag from input to client. (Between client and server, yes, but that's actually a different beast.) And yes, you won't be able to do much about it. You'll be relying on Google to keep your latencies down. They said they're deploying to 7500 nodes, so there's hope. Time will tell. I'm hopeful a lot of people will be reporting single-to-low-double-digit latencies.
But this is much, much more than just moving around the same problem.
I'm used to designing systems and games that work in 100ms+ latent environments since that's what you see in production(or try mobile where it can be 2-5x that).
We were doing 250ms ping times back in '99 with games like SubSpace and the like where you had a predictive game model/design. Yes you lose the overhead of designing for latency because it just won't fundamentally work in those scenarios.
This does, however, leave VR high and dry. Wonder if they have any ideas about that angle.
Wifi for instance is completely out. All it takes is someone turning on the wrong blender/micowave/power adapter and just the smallest bit of RF pollution will put you into unusable territory. Gets harder as your population density rises.
You can already see this with in-house streaming today. I can stream Netflix but my local LAN XBOne streaming is pretty unusable for things like Monster Hunter.
As your population density lowers the chance of you having the sub-30ms latency w/ 0% loss decreases significantly.
Like I said in the root, they'll able to get this to work for non-action(~200ms window) singleplayer titles, the idea that you could use this for multiplayer is laughable.
Will it be a worse experience than a 2080 Ti on your desktop? Sure. But will Stadia be good enough to win over the expense and hassle of the alternative? Maybe!
Regarding your last point, I'm not sure Id would stake their reputation on delivering a game that is going to be "laughable" on Stadia. They might know something we don't.
We'll see how it works out.
But what do you do when they don't? This can happen in multiplayer games with low population or during "bad times".
You might have less trouble because latency is more predictable, but you still need the whole rewind stuff.
That level of lag definitely makes some games implausible. (Part of why I bought a big-ass OLED is that newer TVs, but particularly OLEDs, seem to have generally consistent display lag; being able to play Tekken 7 on a 55" screen with only 21ms of lag is nice, but to do it on my old LCD is like playing underwater.) But I think it's going to be more practical for more games than the current conventional wisdom suggests.
When you're stuffing the pipe w/ 4k encoded content that puts a lot more pressure on the connection and added packet loss or delay is brutal in that case.
All of this stuff is subtle but it compounds in the same way that the average gamer won't be able to immediately spot 30 vs 60 fps but they'll know that the game "feels" better at 60.
Totally a concern. When OnLive closed people lost all their games, no refunds. While if you went to the store and bought a physical disk. It'd still be yours.
The average console quality game is about 50 or 60 bucks nowadays. If you are an active gamer, you could lockup and lose hundreds or even a thousand dollars when they decide to close it.
Most of Google's services are free, but paid ones I'd hope they wouldn't as easily abandon too.
I haven't bought a game on physical disk for a long time. My impression is that in many cases, you're still going to be downloading a big release day patch upon installation. And for multiplayer-heavy games, it doesn't matter if you have a physical disk when the servers are shut off.
Also Microsoft or Sony weren't companies known for gaming when they entered this space and now they are the leaders.
Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.
Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive.
With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers.
All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.
To have the data of every choice and move in every second of every game would be quite useful to calculate the model of the particular user with the level of accuracy barely existed before.
Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release.
Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.
- drastically lower power requirements
- no worries about hardware refreshes
- no waiting to download a 50gb game
- can play anywhere (steam link is getting there, but it's not as easy as opening a new chrome tab)
> hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency
cool, they don't have to.
I would definitely try this on some quirky little games that I love to watch the streamers play, but too lazy to download. If the play could start in minutes, I would try it.
At this point I see comments like yours in here (from "games industry" insiders) and I see horse breeders decrying the car. "It takes gas instead of grass, it'll never work!"
Please.
Apparently it's a Goldman Sachs estimate. The last time that number was explicitly listed (in court filings) was $1B in 2014. The more apt metric would be what YouTube pays for original content, though I've only seen estimates/projections (a "few hundred million"):
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/23/youtube-red-original-pro...
Why? What part of this is interesting?
If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware target does not change.
Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine) of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built? And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more popular games?
This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-installed and run on my own new hardware.
Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices (of games or subscription) are extremely competitive.
The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.
Target audience: Probably people who used to own consoles/gaming rigs, but no longer do for a variety of reasons. The fact that you can play anywhere and on any device (chromecast, phone, laptop), makes it competitive with devices such as Nintendo Switch of Nvidia Shield.
There are certainly games out there which would respond poorly to latency and jitter. Play Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, but randomly jitter your inputs by 10ms to 20ms here and there, and that would make it far more frustrating experience.
Its bad enough that those punishing games can kill you quickly with a single mistake. But when you're fighting the controller and the lag, its that much worse.
I think streaming would be definitely fine for games like RPGs, or slower-paced adventure games (ex: Skyrim). But this will never be acceptable for Cuphead, Overcooked, Hollow Knight, or Touhou (or Jamestown). I'm willing to be proven wrong of course, but I've generally felt that even TV-lag is enough to make me rage-quit some setups when playing these games...
And TV-lag is consistent. WiFi based internet lag is jittery by nature. The question of what to do with dropped packets or delayed packets is an important design choice, and I don't think there's a correct answer for these twitch games like Cuphead.
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Fighting game players are so crazy about latency that they don't even use local Bluetooth controllers (!!) The serious fighting game community will likely never accept something like this solution.
The more casual, but still relatively twitchy, "hard games" players (Cuphead) is what I'm curious about. Whether or not the latency is acceptable for that community.
I would suggest checking your TV against a latency database: https://displaylag.com/display-database/
Its very possible that your issue is in the TV, as opposed to a network issue. If your TV latency is below 30ms, the TV is probably fine.
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For whatever reason, computer monitors consistently score around 10ms, maybe 15ms in the worst case. Its TVs that have all this processing that kicks the latency to 50ms or 100ms+. Especially on larger TVs.
FWIW, I frequently stream PS4 and PC games, wirelessly, over 802.11ac and it's more than playable. Dark Souls III, and even Overwatch, is playable over my network.
Stadia might be a lot easier for devs to code against since everything is in the "cloud", rather than having to split where the processing happens specifically, and so we might see more exclusives there because of that, but MS and friends aren't going to just fall over and give up if this ends up working.
Is that true though? I remember in the early Don Mattrick days of Microsoft they were heavily pushing the whole cloud physics thing but ever since then that has been swept under the carpet or heavily downplayed.
The link below from late 2018 talks about it a bit
https://www.windowscentral.com/inside-crackdown-3s-azure-clo...
Digital Foundry's opinion:
> Crackdown 3 doesn't deliver much of the promise previously showcased from the power of the cloud.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-crack...
I just pinged my google.com server node - and it's over 16ms. Which means no 60fps.
Besides - low input latency means you get response that is not exactly what you are doing in the moment.
So if they can do something fancy with rendering frames to the network to sync with your monitor. We might see a minimal increase in actual overall latency.
you no longer have to deal with all the other networking problems between the client software, and server software.
So there might be a slight visual glitch but you won't be missing your targets.
There will be a visual glitch every time you press a key.
Actually I don't even think this will work properly at all. You can do some prediction, but latency still kills you.
The moment we're talking about CSGO or any decently fast paced shooter and it's a no-go for sure.
Surprisingly, a platformer that works decent on Steam Link is N++. It has more fluid controls than Hollow Knight though.
I have gigabit fiber and quite a good machine, so I'm certain that's not the issue. Maybe some of these issues could be solved by closer edge servers, but it'll be a while till it reaches the level where you can play FPS', etc.
Even if MMOs shut down, there is usually an opportunity to write a new server by reverse engineering the client. I can't really support anything about game streaming unless it was tied into an actual game you could install or play without relying on their servers to exist.
Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve), but maybe this time...
Simple and genius.
I also like being able to play games when on the bus or the subway, so the whole always-online thing is a bit of a bummer.
My download speed is 50 mbits and I had about 5 ping to the google servers.
I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this unless you live downtown with 100+ mbit speeds.
This is a very fair point and should be emphasized. It's not only the infrastructure, but the lack of Net Neutrality, the monopolies of many areas to a single ISP, and data caps -- they're all hurdles in the US.
...sorry.
Really curious what the network performance requirements would be for 4K or 8K game streaming. Haven't heard them admit to that.
Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move where it happens.
The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority).
Sure, some games where local timing is everything won't work as well (Super Smash Bros probably won't be able to be played on this system at the top tier), but the vast majority of players and games won't ever need that kind of millisecond precision.
I'd imagine a big part is that games which are written for a system like this can do some compensation if they know the latency is between controller and the system (vs games which expect the latency between the client and the server).
I'm also curious if there is anything else going on here than just "streaming video to the user", like allowing some "smearing" to compensate like how VR headsets will do some fancy stuff to compensate for head movement faster than the round trip communication time between the sensors on the headset and the PC.
I know things like the Oculus Rift does some fancy processing to kind of "smear" frames to compensate for head movement while the PC renders a new frame. I'm wondering if this service is going to be doing a bit more than just "streaming video to the user". Like including some metadata and allowing the client to make cheap adjustments to various parts of the scene to compensate for lag?
Either way, I really want to see some people play things on this and talk about how it feels, because I can't imagine Google would just release a gaming platform that's nothing more than streaming video. Especially since it's been tried multiple times before.
That is, in fact, how video compressors work. It's called motion estimation.
Some games like Rocket League and many fighting games are primarily played on a controller or some kind of gamepad at the top tier.
This only works with Google web clients, such as Chrome, right. It may turn out that all this is just a ploy to force everyone to use a Google web client, giving Google total control over the online user experience. ("Browser" is so last cen.) Then Google can exit games, except for putting ads in them and on top of them.
- GCP - AdSense - Gmail - Internal CDN Needs
Then I don't think that Stadia would be a big push for doing so.
Has Google needed to run code physically closer to the user up until now? Likely not. Gmail/AdSense/etc. probably don't have [many] use cases where putting compute physically closer to the user (versus physically closer to a database replica) adds a ton of value.
With the advent of AI/ML, that's changing. Accurately recognizing speech, recognizing people and objects in streaming video, translating text, etc. likely don't require access to other resources, but the latency between the server and the user is super important. Video games are essentially the epitome of the use case: you're not going to need to bang out many queries across the Google network to play a round of Splatoon, but every millisecond of lag you can shave off, the more valuable your service becomes.
I could see Google selling cloud functions that execute within shouting distance of the user. What would the round trip be? 30ms? This could be a play by Google to take on Cloudflare workers.
I wonder where the instances will be? Will they put them in their regions, or will it be rolled out to their CDN POPs?
This isn't for everyone, clearly a bet for the future. But this is why Google Fiber should have gone wider and international, or governments should pressure telcos to build speeds massively in excess of demand.
So much is held back by a really bad last mile.
I'm also curious why they're not stating the CPU manufacturer.
"The Cloud is Another Sun" on the front page.
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/
Is this is the last time we need to upgrade to an expensive graphics card?
I would be perfectly fine playing Civilization or turn based games on this infrastructure as sub-100ms latency probably isn't that big of a deal here. Perhaps google is going after that niche?
Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?
Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout.
Sounds like another gimmick that nobody has ever, or will ever need. But "Machine Learning!"
It also improves latency.
Clearly the latency advantage is the main benefit. Just as stated in the quote you used. Can you explain why that is a horrible design choice?
Adding wifi to a device for no reason is horrible, I don't suppose it needs explaining.
Adding WiFi to the controller removes all those potential issues and allows them to tweak things to be as good as they can be for latency, power consumption, range, etc. (at least in theory anyway).
I'd be very interested to see some latency benchmarking of the stadia controller vs an xbox controller. I'd also be curious if a future version of this controller could connect directly to an even lower latency 5G connection, bypassing the wifi router and cable/fiber modem and removing yet another latency question mark. Even when playing locally, input lag can be considerable, so this might be a very smart hack to make this streaming service playable with a larger range of games.
How about a controller with an RJ-45 so I can plug directly into my router :)
"for no reason": I can think of a variety of ways it will be beneficial to the overall utility and simplicity of setup. Seems like an odd thing to be so negative about.
[0] https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-now/ps...
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/
It seems odd that Google chose to create its own gaming studio. Doesn't that make them a competitor to the folks they support from?
For example, Valve will keep updating/supporting/hosting events of CSGO even if it has <1Mil active users on PC, but I can totally see Google pulling plug on it and burn dedicated followers.
Bad example because CSGO has been sitting at #2/#3 on steam's active player charts for years and years. Consistently ~10x the player count of, say, Rainbow Six Siege. Continuing to invest resources into a game with CSGO's player count is just all around solid business strategy, particularly since it has ~500k concurrent users at any given point. Active player count would be way, way over 1Mil.
TF2 would be a better example, but I don't know how much (if anything?) Valve is still doing with the small TF2 community. It still has a respectable 50k concurrent user population, but has Valve been ignoring them? Are there still updates for it?
Google Books (14 years old), Google Finance (12), Google Scholar (14), Google Fonts (9), etc.
broken and abandoned http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-is-go...
>Google Finance
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-know...
TLDR: >60ms of added latency (160ms) while plugged on Google campus connection in specially modified and tweaked game versus unmodified typical Ubisoft bad PC port, compression artifacts
I've used most of these applications in the past and I'm pretty salty they died. So yeah. I don't have a lot of faith in google keeping services it doesn't find profitable, my guess is the cost of compute will exceed the profit from selling games/game streaming/whatever and then, yes, they will shut it down. Don't act like its not something they don't do or wouldn't do. It's certainly not like making fun of the fat kid at the gym. Or are we turning into hail corporate over here?
There is definitely some cool work here though: being able to have access to a library of games without lugging around a console or computer is an interesting idea with both pros and cons. The pro that I can think of is not having to be responsible for upgrades. The con is that we continue to move towards a world where we rent more and own less.