Stadia Founder's Edition | Hacker News Reader

Stadia Founder's Edition

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183 pointsendorphone407 comments

The fact that you have to pay full-price for games AND rely on a cloud service makes this a nonstarter for me. The only way this could work is with a good subscription gaming model like Xbox Game Pass or PS Now. Or you give me a guarantee that I can take my games to another platform once Google inevitably shuts this down.

You can buy the game and use Stadia without subscription. You are capped at 1080p though.

If you buy the game, do you actually own it though? Or do you lose it when Stadia shuts down? If I'm going to pay full price for a game, then I want to be able to play it 10 or 20 years from now.

To be fair, this is little different to buying a game on the PlayStation Store or Xbox Store. As soon as those go offline, you will no longer be able to download those games.

And so you'll be at the mercy of the lifespan of the hard drive. You won't be able to copy the games to another device as it won't be able to validate ownership.

To be fair, PlayStation and Xbox have a lot longer and reliable track record compared to Google products.

And so, you'll be at the mercy of the lifespan of yet another Google product.

An Xbox can play all games that have already been downloaded and all physical disks indefinitely, regardless of whether you have internet or whether Microsoft's servers are up.

While correct, that was not the point made in my comment. For downloaded games, once the service has gone offline, you are at the mercy of the lifespan of the hard drive.

If I had a physical disc, I could just buy another when it goes bad.

Not sure about Xbox because I haven't owned it in a while but PS4 lets you copy your system drive to a new drive pretty easily. The function is even built into the OS. I switched out the hard drive to an SSD using this technique.

It only works as long as the console is signed into the same account as used on the original hard drive.

This isn't being fair, this is projecting valid fears of a new service and comparing them to other platforms that haven't experienced said fears on any scale to make such a comparison valid to begin with.

We all know when MS or Sony get punched, they come back and swing harder. When Google gets punched, are they ready to dump another billion in to surviving or will they cancel and run? Google isn't known for long tail losess on new launches.

Nowadays it's very hard to own a game. Unless you buy on services like GOG, which offer DRM free installers. You don't really own your games on Steam or Origin and they can remove your access at any time without a warning.

Is Stadia forbidden from changing this pricing model? Lets say I buy 6x $60 games. Is Google going to be able to flip a switch and change it so I need to pay a subscription to access previously purchases games? Am I prorated for downtime?

I would be more concerned about Google discontinuing the service

Wasn't this the concern with Amazon Kindle books? The mega-corporation would discontinue the service, and the media one had paid for would cease to be accessible?

Yes, indeed! However Google has historically shown that they are eager to shut down products, and the costs of distributing Stadia games far outweigh the costs of distributing Kindle books. Competition makes this also less likely to succeed.

I think the concern is fundamentally the same, but the chances feel much higher, which makes it a bigger worry.

the costs of distributing Stadia games far outweigh the costs

Games are just another form of media. YouTube costs Google a ton of money. But the control over media, virality, discovery, and advertisement is worth it to them. So has it been for video. So it shall be for games.

YouTube is profitable and brought an estimated 15 billion in revenue for Google last year. It’s not operational because of some other motive, it’s operational because it’s successful.

The same can’t be said for this new business model. The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.

YouTube is profitable and brought an estimated 15 billion in revenue for Google last year.

Through ad revenue?

The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.

Not exactly. I thought the point of YouTube was to control media to control ad revenue. If Google is now directly makes ad revenue off of YouTube, that doesn't contradict my position. It means they're more successful and farther along than I was aware of.

Google bought YouTube when it already dominated the video sharing market. Stadia might not dominate the gaming market in a couple years. Google likes to kill products that don't consume all, at least, that's what it looks like to me.

Stadia strikes me as an end-run around the competition of Twitch game streaming. One way to beat the competition is to reduce the friction around your own offering. The big draw of Stadia is the reduced friction between streaming and gaming.

You can create a backup of all your Kindle books, and continue to read them even if Amazon's service disappears. The only thing you won't be able to do is download them again from Amazon's servers.

B&N discontinued their 1st gen "nook" devices like this, I believe.

Still a no deal for me, if my purchases in Stadia cannot grant me access to the game on other platforms. Who knows when Google decides Stadia isn't worth it anymore?

And with Google's legendary support quality, will you even get an answer to your questions when something is wrong?

Isn't the cold, heedless authority a trope of fiction? Doesn't it signify, "the authoritarian power that everyone agrees is bad, so can be used as a villain without offending anyone?"

Isn't that a trope of future dystopian Sci-fi? The cold, heartless, amoral mega-corporation, uninterested in any individual's plight, only in efficiency?

We no longer own our entertainment purchases. We no longer hold the data. We no longer own our communications with our friends, relatives, and coworkers. The very fabric of our relationships and our most intimate and valued expressions is now wholly contained on the servers of mega-corporations, to be traded and sold to other corporations, to be mined for information for profit.

Medieval peasants no longer owned the land they worked. There was another level of status in medieval England, the villein: a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land. The villein didn't own his land. He was a chattel accessory to the land.

Isn’t it very similar to Steam?

Not quite. I can play steam games offline, I can share them with my friends/family and the most important part being - steam's platform has been reliable with top notch support since 90s while Google hasn't gotten that even in 2019.

You can only play them offline as long as it can check in to Steam every few days. If (once) Steam is turned off, it will no longer be able to do that.

> If (once) Steam is turned off

Big if, and if Steam doesn't provide an alternative method or change their DRM before turning off.

Something unprecedented for Steam over 20+ years, but not so for Google.

Pretty sure he was referring to exiting the Steam application; not Steam as a service being shut down. I might be wrong though.

Steam, one day, will disappear. Not tomorrow, but perhaps 100 years from now. On that day, you will no longer be able to download or even play those games for more than a few days.

Will I be alive to care?

owning things means that people then inherit things when you die

The cynical reply to this is also "Will I be alive to care?".

A more realistic reply might be "will any humans even be alive to inherit my game library?" or "will anyone even be able to run any of my games on the hardware and software available 100 years from now?"

That's a sad response. Video game preservation efforts are ongoing for games older than the NES right now, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case in the future for the current generation of consoles.

This is only true for games using Steamworks DRM (which, granted, is most modern games). Other games you can just run them from their folder.

Can Stadia be offline?

Nope. Depends on a fast, reliable, low-packet-loss network connection at all times. The game is running on a cloud instance and being streamed to you chromecast.

Steam is Valve's only business, if Steam shuts down that mean whole company is in trouble or about to go bankrupt or bought out.

Google can shutdown Stadia because VP changed or Director got promoted to another part of business and nobody is there to sell this product internally - which means it gets shut down.

I can play NES games from 35 years ago despite the fact that Nintendo has ceased manufacturing the console and publishing the games.

As soon as Steam decides to shut down (and it will one day, be it tomorrow, or 30 years from now, those games are no longer playable).

Nothing lasts forever.

Except Valve could issue a final update that disables the DRM Check, and the game is still playable locally, right? More likely than Stadia developing a local client to sync game content/licenses to.

Valve doesn’t have the right to do this. They have an agreement with publishers that they will supply it.

Is there any sort of survivability clause in that agreement? Genuinely asking - not directly familiar with it.

They actually do have the right to do this and a technical implementation. Essentially they've escrowed enough cash to run the drm for many years in the future even if they went out of business so they keep their agreements and their customers happy.

Also, having worked in game sales, it turns out that buying "drm free unlocks of long tail" games is not expensive. How do you think things like PS Plus Free Games works? Essentially game devs book revenue now for possibl future revenue lost. It's a smart trade for most games unless that game is say skyrim.

Do you have a source for where Valve have the rights to remove DRM on third party games?

Also, PS Plus games are still DRM'ed, and you only have access as long as your subscription is valid.

That's not true. Not all games on Steam have the DRM requirement.

Valve already promise that in the unlikely event the were to shutdown, they would cancel DRM on their platform game to become DRM free

Doesn't that also apply to Netflix? If Netflix shuts down (and there is a real chance of that), what will happen? People will lose all those TV shows and Movies forever.

Yeah, but Netflix doesn't ask you for more money to see a movie on their platform. Whereas you do have to buy your own games on Stadia.

Maybe, but that wasn't the original argument I replied to.

To your argument I would say that Stadia is not the "Netflix for games". So I don't see why you expect to pay $10 and play any game you want like Netflix does.

If steam shuts down some cracker/hacker will find a way to disable the drm.

Almost every game has a pirated version in some torrent site.

The difference is that 90% if not more of Valve’s income is from Steam, so unless they feel like killing their company they won’t turn it off.

If Steam truly shuts down, I doubt it will even take a full day before there's a conveniently-packaged crack that disables the DRM, with links spammed everywhere.

Steam was launched in 2003...

I think the primary worry is that A. Google has a long history of shutting down products that seems erratic. and B. the economics of this seem precarious, thus pushing on A.

Where Steam has proven to be very profitable and Valve has a longer track record, and this is their primary business.

Tell me a mainstream (for Google scale) service that shut down. Offline Trips, Reader, Inbox, etc do not count. A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough. If bigger things shut down they either have a replacement or they are Google+. And no one complained when that was shut down.

Also Stadia has a subscription basis. Cloud gaming is just too important to let Microsoft win. Just like cloud in general.

Regarding the primary business argument. This is exactly what they are hedging against. Google knows ad revenue can‘t grow forever. Regulation might be coming. Cloud and stuff like this will have to take more and more of the load.

> Offline Trips, Reader, Inbox, etc do not count. A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough.

What if Stadia under-performs their financial expectations? What if it under-performs those expectations for 2-4 years?

I'm not certain that Google will shut-down Stadia in that time-frame, but I'm absolutely not certain that it will also be running at that point.

I'm extremely confident that Valve won't shut down Steam in that time-frame, though.

What if Google takes away enough revenue with Stadia? Then Valve may no be able to keep Steam up in the time frame.

> A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough.

Are you taking it as self-evident that Stadia will have more than a couple million users?

> Also Stadia has a subscription basis.

So did fiber.

Fiber is still serving customers. Not sure what you're referring to.

I believe he's referring to something like this: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

I believe there is a pretty big untapped market of gamers that are more than casual mobile gamers but not enough so to buy their own hardware. 120.- a year means you‘d have to play for 20 years until you reach the cost of top line gaming hardware. And a subscription doesn‘t depreciate.

Fiber is different I think because of shitty regulation that favors incumbents and the insane cost of financing a physical network.

Not at all? You can (indeed, have to) download your purchases from Steam. Many of which are DRM free. Valve has also said they'll remove Valve DRM from the games that use it in the unlikely event they shut down.

There are, in other words, obvious contingency plans.

With this, the game you "own" lives and runs solely on Google's servers. If they decide to shut those servers down, you're fucked.

But good thing Google isn't known for suddenly EOLing popular products, right?

DRM doesn't matter for most video games, only servers matter. If steam shuts down you won't be able to play most games regardless of DRM.

I don’t think “most” games are multiplayer only

Not at launch, this is promised for 2020.

Until then you will have to buy the game and pay the subscription fee.

AFAICT, to participate in Stadia at all you have to buy 3 months of a subscription that starts in November. That takes you into 2020.

The founder's edition is just to pre-order the countroller (and Chromecast + few more goodies), but at launch you'll be able to buy the subscription until the free tier becomes available

I can buy the game on Steam and play at my 4K laptop or stream it to my 4k TV. Am I missing something?

edit: sorry slowpoke here replying to himself: I get that you are "renting" a gaming hardware for that price, so you don't need to own a gaming computer. So at $120/y it is not bad, if the service is as promised. And then if they shut it down in 3 years then, you spent/lost $360 toward a gaming device. But what happens to the games you purchased? How about renting the games also, like an additional gaming subscription?

As your edit says, the whole point is for people who don't have computers that can run high end games. Also, once you purchase the game, you can play one any device (phone, laptop, chromecast, etc). It also has all the usual perks that comes with cloud games, such as seemlessly jumping from one device to another, instant launch into the game (no update/download time), etc.

It definitely has its pros and cons, and it all comes down to your specific gaming pattern and situation. If you already have a gaming pc or console, this may not be for you.

It fits in the niche of people who want to play AAA games, can’t afford a dedicated console and TV, and have a consistently fast internet connection.

Sarcasm aside, in the longer term there is probably a business model here where anyone who wants to play a subscription game like World of Warcraft signs up and gets a $100 tablet sent to them for free.

There also might be a model where very high performance rendering combined with ML does stuff where the consumer would otherwise have to pay thousands of dollars for. Not sure that would work in an AR-VR - competitive gaming future.

I saw a demo of Stadia in person a while ago. It was ok, but hardcore, competitive gamers aren’t going to accept the latency gap.

I play one "AAA" game: NHL. I buy a ps4 pro for $400 and then every 12 months I have to buy a $70 game and a $60 ps online membership. For this money I also need to wait 5+ minutes to get my ps4 out of sleep mode and into a multiplayer game. The service experiences pretty consistent downtime where I am locked out. The ps messages mobile app is terrible for trying to chat with a player. In game experience is even worse. I am also restricted to playing on my sofa at home when I spend a lot of time traveling for work with my laptop, iPad, etc. I would love to play NHL in my down time there.

If Stadia got EA Sports to publish NHL, I'm sold. The end to end product experience is just going to be miles better. I imagine certain games unlock Stadia for certain people.

Traveling with Stadia would be difficult imo. They already mentioned it's going to be pretty brutal experience on 4G while 5G should be good (but is barely available at all). However every hotel WiFi I have experienced is generally abysmal. So not sure how you are planning on streaming this service seamlessly on the go.

5G, if you want to only use it outside while standing right by a 5G antenna.

And ensure you have a massive data plan to go with it...

I can imagine Pokemon Go like scenarios of people standing around 5G radios playing Stadia... Except for much less people.

I was thinking good hotels with good wifi.

1080p games should be able to run on a low spec PC. Why not buying the actual game?

What modern game can run at 1080p/60fps on a low spec PC?

What kinda of cost are we talking about when you say "low spec"?

the free one is 1080p/30fps, not 60fps.

The free Stadia tier is 1080p at 60fps. Ctrl+F "Stadia Base" at stadia.com.

Honestly? 4ish years of a stadia subscription will run any game released in that time period, and also the entire back catalog of PC gaming, minus some annoyingness around early 2000s games and permissions. My $500 PC runs VR at 1.7x supersampling with zero issues, and can 1080p60hz any game at all with zero trouble.

Exactly.

Four years of a subscription you can pay month-to-month (and cancel if you're not using it) is much more doable for many people than a $500+ upfront investment in a gaming rig. Presumably you also built this yourself at that price point, which is another thing other people are not as willing to do.

For me personally, I travel a lot so I like the idea of Stadia because obviously I'm not going to travel around with a gaming rig, and you can pry my 2015 Macbook Pro from my cold, dead hands.

it'll probably end up covered in ads too once Google's revenues hit a downturn

> The fact that you have to pay full-price for games AND rely on a cloud service makes this a nonstarter for me.

I'd say it's not an issue. Why should cloud service equal subscription (renting)? Imagine a game that uses too much computational power to run on any local PC (a game using some complex AI that requires a cluster of servers for example). Cloud service is a good target for it. Why can't it be offered with "pay once, play as much as you want" approach? If it's just for pushing more pixels per second, then I agree - there is no need for cloud service for that.

Because your purchase is at the mercy of Google continuing to support it. Which they have a horrific track record of.

What's the alternative, are you going to build your own cluster for such kind of things? As I said, for something your PC can manage, I don't see a need for such stuff. But for something more complex, it has interesting potential. The downside of course is that you can't just run it locally, unless you can match that computational power.

> What's the alternative, are you going to build your own cluster for such kind of things?

Are there any such games that require a cluster of computing power? I don't see any listed in the launch offering.

I think it provides potential for them. At least I see it as the main point, where it can differentiate. How it's used in practice is of course up to developers.

What's listed is indeed not a good example of how it can provide unique features. Most games are too focused on pushing graphics, instead of pushing complex simulation.

It's possible, but complex simulations have a lot of room to grow before they stop fitting on desktops. Go from one to ten threads and you still fit on a mid-high end CPU.

That's the point. If they are pushing it to the cloud, they can at least use it for something desktops can't handle. If they have a cluster, let them make some game with AI that can utilize it, instead of making it a replacement for something desktops can already do well.

What I mean is, they could vastly expand it and still not need a cloud. They would have to vastly vastly expand it, which is possible but much less likely.

And for AI you can already handle that in the cloud if you actually want to. The innovations you can get on Stadia are mostly tied to rendering capabilities.

> The innovations you can get on Stadia are mostly tied to rendering capabilities.

Which is my point exactly. They should have focused on innovations where cloud really can differentiate. Instead they run for "push pixels from the server, because your PC isn't strong enough" idea, which will be obsolete tomorrow, since PC hardware is getting better at pushing pixels every year.

Probably just buy a PlayStation

Good luck running some distributed AI algorithm on it.

Ah yes. I remember a Google Play Music product. I still have music on there. Never trusting Google again for these stuff.

Isn't Google play music still around? At least, it's on my phone.

It is being decommissioned.

> once Google inevitably shuts this down

Can you stop with the trolling? The "Google shuts everything down" meme is getting really tiresome, especially when it's mostly false.

I’m sorry, but the meme would not exist if it was not a reality. Google has a history of shutting down products that don’t reach a critical mass they find appropriate - regardless of how good the product is, or how essential it is to the users that adopted it. Inbox, anyone?

It is perfectly sensible to be mistrustful of Google services, especially new ones. It’s also pretty disingenuous to accuse someone of trolling when they clearly have been burnt in the past by Google’s practices of decommissioning good products all the time. I myself have used many products that Google arbitrarily decided to decommission. I do not trust any new services they create.

Saying Stadia will "inevitably" be shut down is an exaggeration and trolling regardless. It implies every single product Google launches shuts down, which is obviously completely incorrect.

Obviously it is exaggeration. Exaggeration is a common form of rhetoric used in normal conversation. Exaggeration, however, is not trolling.

And it often has a kernel of truth behind it. It makes perfect sense to be skeptical or hesitant to use a Google product, especially a new one, especially one with no guarantees made with regards to longevity. In fact, I think it would be reasonable for most users to err on the side of caution here.

This is great, I don't like subscription. I prefer to pay upfront price and play the game how long I want for free.

Last time I used a subscription bases streaming service for 6 months until I finished Witcher 3. When I saw how much I paid I started thinking that it would be better to create a gaming rig.

But with such proposition from Google I can't wait to have it available in my country.

Discussions around Stadia always fail to mention the alternatives.

I've been using GeForce Now with a Nvidia Shield for over a year now and it's been a great experience. The hardware costs are the same as the Stadia ($130), it's free to use while the beta period lasts, and you can play all the games you've already purchased on Steam, BattleNet, Epic etc. in 4k.

Why would I buy all the games AGAIN on Stadia when I can access them on GeForce now? The social/streaming aspect of Stadia is not a big draw for me either, so I really don't see the advantage from my perspective.

Stadia can be played on Chrome though which runs pretty much everywhere, with an Xbox controller. The Google founder's edition is just buying some extra stuff for 30$ worth of sub time for free basically.

The advantage to buying the Stadia controller, as I understand it, is that it (the controller) connects directly to the game instance and doesn't get proxied through the system streaming the game -- which can decrease latency.

The big advantage Stadia has over GeForce Now is that for GeForce Now you have to have a machine capable of playing those games in the first place. If you have a great gaming PC, then Stadia probably isn't for you.

Edit: I was mistaken. i was thinking on nVidia GameStream feature that allows you to stream from your PC to Shiled in your home.

GeForce Now is streaming like Stadia. You don’t need a great PC. You don’t need any PC.

This. You don't need a PC at all, I don't have one, just a TV and a Shield, and GeForce Now works great for me. I just buy Steam games through their website and it works perfectly.

It does not look like I can use it from either my Chromebook or my TV (Roku or Chromecast), where as Stadia indicates that it will be playable on my Chromebook, Android phone, and Chromecast.

Wrong, GeForce Now is a streaming service -- https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/

You’re mistaken about GeForce Now - it streams games running in nVidia’s servers. If I remember correctly, based on Intel Xeon and their own Volta GPUs.

GeForce Now has its own library of streamable titles for purchase, but it also allows you to link your Steam (and others) account to authorize streaming of games you already own and happen to be available in their library. But they run remotely.

I was very impressed with it, and my comparisons between streaming from nVidia’s remote servers or my own gaming PC yielded negligible differences in visual performance and latency. Your mileage will naturally vary.

THis is cool to hear about, since I've been considering an NVidia Shield TV for awhile now for some other use cases. But being able to play my Steam collection, without having a PC around would be awesome, too. In fact, I really don't have much use for my PC anymore, then.

It works surprisingly well but not great for FPS. I can't recommend the shield enough though. The thing is 2 years old still gets constant updates. I have it streaming 4k HDR content off server and it works great.

I wanted to use it as a Plex client and a retro video gaming machine.

It works well as a Plex client. I'm guessing it would have no issues with emulators

Exactly. I moved coasts and sold my gaming PC, bought a Shield in the meantime, and haven't felt the need to shell out for another PC build because the Shield does it all for me.

Have you tried any multiplayer FPS games where latency is very critical? I'm sure both Stadia and GeForce would perform reasonably well for single player and networked coop games but am a little skeptical about real FPS multiplayer games being as good as local games because there are too many variables involved such as other players on the server also need to have as good a connection as you. Very interested in hearing about your experiences.

These days I'm mostly a couch/casual gamer, and I don't play latency critical games so much anymore. That being said, I've played many PVP matches on Destiny 2 and the experience has been fine.

I'll try some more latency critical games tonight and see how it is, but your assumption that single player and coop games run well is correct. You do get some resolution drops every now and then, but I would imagine this to be the case with any game streaming service.

Stadia can have $0 in additional hardware costs (assuming you already have a computer that runs Chrome).

The fact that you already own the games on other platforms doesn't necessarily apply to potential Stadia users.

Plus, you're comparing Stadia's release price to GeForce Now's beta price. Not really a fair comparison

> Stadia can have $0 in additional hardware costs (assuming you already have a computer that runs Chrome).

I think this also applies to Gefore Now.

> The fact that you already own the games on other platforms doesn't necessarily apply to potential Stadia users.

True, but as long as you have a computer you might be better off buying games on steam because you can always play them offline if you want to in the future, even if the service stops existing.

> Plus, you're comparing Stadia's release price to GeForce Now's beta price. Not really a fair comparison

Stadia isn't even available yet. I guess when Stadia is out and GeForce is out of beta it will be possible to do a better comparison?

Agree with your points. Just think the OP was being misleading about the hardware costs for either platform.

"Release price" is a bit strong for a Google service. "Launch price", maybe. Google launched their reputation on launching services as "Beta", it does seem entirely fair to compare a Google service's "launch price" as a "beta price", given that reputation.

Isn't the difference also that Stadia is streaming from Google servers or nodes while the Nvidia Shield and Steam Link just stream from your computer via LAN? I would assume that would create more possible vectors for high latency which is the main worry for most people.

No the games stream from Nvidia's servers, no LAN and no computer needed.

Thanks for clarifying!

Nvidia does both. The online product is just called Geforce Now (previously Nvidia GRID)

I'd be glad to pay a 'match' fee, where they match my library for a small fee per game. But buying $60 games again is not going to happen. This might mean I purchase future games on Stadia.... Maybe. But not games I already own.

I feel that's a huge advantage of Nvidia's solution. I'd probably rather pay $10/mo to play my existing Steam games and continue buying games on Steam. Then I'd own them. If Nvidia closes their streaming service, I still have my games. If Google closed Stadia, you'd lose everything!

I enjoy using GeForce now in the private beta for free, but from what I heard their pricing was going to look something like 25$ a month or something ridiculous like that.

Compared to that, Stadia is free at 1080p, and 10$ at 4k, that's much cheaper. They also have in my experience better latency, and support more devices (any pc/laptop with a browser, chromecast, phone, etc).

Google's standard business - Give it for free or almost free, push competitors out of business, then use your data for ads.

Good points. I think the value of each offering greatly depends on whether you already have a Steam (or similar) library of games.

$10/mo was pretty much the only way they could price the service; however I didn't expect 4k to be the base resolution for the paid service. (thought it would be $10/1080p, $15/4k; having 1080p for free is interesting).

Google needs to be more transparent about device support though. The stream highlighted Chromecast Ultra/Android, but not much else (e.g. if there is an iOS client, or compatibility with a base $35 1080p Chromecast/Chromecast protocol for smart TVs) [EDIT: the FAQ is more clear: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946]

From their site, as far as phones go only Pixel devices will be supported at launch. Support for other devices would be coming "later".

It's free after you pay for the games though. There needs to be some kind of free plan when you're making people buy (licenses to stream) games.

Sure, but compute isn't free. The fact that you pay for a game once, and you get a dedicated console rendering and streaming the game to you for as long as Stadia exists is not a given. And the game costs just as much as normal retail, so whatever cut they are taking has to account for the cost of computer.

I doubt iOS is going to get access to Stadia. One of the primary perks for going with Android is that you’ll be have access to mobile gaming through Stadia that you can’t get with an Apple device.

Google isn't a company that restricts their services in such a coupled manner. I fully expect it to be supported on most devices where it's possible to support it.

In my opinion, restrictive would be keeping Stadia to only Google specific hardware. Making it available for all Android devices feels pretty good to me.

I would actually suspect more of the opposite. Their biggest hurdle, at least initially, is fighting the perception that the service just won't be performant enough to be a good experience. I would not be surprised if they start with a limited set of high-end devices (Apple ones included), just so people don't blame device limitations on the service instead.

I don't think so. Google has announced it would be coming to more phones and devices in the future and they consistently say "tablets" instead of ChromeOS tablets. It's a service, it would be silly to ignore literally a billion possible customers (or whatever the iOS numbers are now).

Considering that iOS users, on average, pay a lot more for software, games and services, it’d be stupid for Google to ignore a paying customer base. In any case, Google will not ignore iOS, like it hasn’t done so far in a big way.

There are things that were released on iOS first by Google, like the Gboard keyboard, for example. So Google is not at all averse to iOS or in the habit of avoiding it in any way.

This is right up my alley being a pretty casual gamer. I have a 1GB Fiber connection at home so streaming shouldn't be an issue, the cost is fairly minimal, and not having the worry about downloading or updating games and just being able to pick up the controller and have a quick gaming session will be perfect. And the cost to entry is very low, so even if the service is a bust and I leave after the 3 free months, I'll still have a Chromecast Ultra that I've been looking to pick up anyway.

A 1 Gbit/s connection is a great bandwidth (you probably mean 1 Gbit/s and not 1 GB), bit the latency is even more important. If the game movements and actions lag behind your physical input, this can ruin the whole experience, no matter if the stream has a great quality (few compression artifacts, high resolution) thanks to the bandwidth.

I only used the Shadow gaming VM service so far and the servers are in a neighbouring country, with 100 Mbit/s bandwidth and 30ms ping to 1.1.1.1, so not optimal conditions, but GTA IV, Minecraft and other games were not fun to play due to the input lag.

Yeah, you need to be next to a PoP where the game servers are running for an optimal experience.

With fiber he's probably getting 1ms pings.

Yeah according to Speedtest.net I'm getting 2ms ping.

http://www.gcping.com/ to the closest Google data center puts me at 12ms median.

This all depends on where you live and the infrastructure. I have 1 Gbit fiber, but in my country nearly all the infrastructure is concentrated in one of 2 cities, so I still have minimum 15/30ms (IPv6/IPv4) ping to everything since it has to travel across the country.

edit: gcping.com puts me at 40ms

Not sure if you already accounted for this, but the monthly subscription only includes a subset of their catalog. For any game outside of that you’ll need to pay for the subscription plus purchase the game.

So yes, if the game(s) you want to play one of the included games and the service goes bust you don’t lose much. If you purchased a title and service goes bust then you likely lost that money.

I don't see that any different from my current PS4 setup.

Except I had to pay for the console $400, pay for PS Plus to play online $60/yr, and pay for games that I want to play $60/game.

But with PS4 I'm locked in to playing on my 1 TV at home or a small catalog of games I have very little interest in with PS Now.

With Stadia, if I can play the latest AAA games anywhere for $10/mo and the experience is rock solid 99% of the time, I'll be all over this.

$10/mo * 12 = $120/yr and still paying $60/game for AAA. Alternatively, there is supposed to be a "basic" option coming in 2020 with no subscription fee where you just pay for each game but then what happens when Google gives Stadia the axe? Will users be able to claim licenses or local copies of games they paid for?

As opposed to paying $60/yr for PS Plus + $60/game for PS4 or next gen PS5?

The basic version is also free, which is something Sony isn't going to be able to offer me. But with Stadia I can play on my TV, on my desktop, on the go, etc.

I buy most of my games digitally whether or PSN or Steam. If either of those go out of business, I'm pretty much SOL. I don't see Google allowing you to claim your license for local copies as the Stadia hardware is specialized and custom, not something you can emulate easily outside of it's infrastructure, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Honest question now, you say you're a casual gamer, do you have a pc with a video card? With a gigabit connection, updates are really a non-issue. I can't see why people with even moderate gaming rigs ($150 gpu) would bother with this service? Is 4k really that big of a deal?

I have a pretty beefy gaming PC that I almost never game on. 4K isn't a huge deal for me. Convenience is.

I'm tired of updating my GPU drivers and experinece (5-10 minutes), then launching Steam, waiting for it to update and restart (2-3 minutes), then picking the game I want to play, waiting for it to update and install (5-10 minutes), then finally launch the game and have it spend more time connecting to servers before I can game.

The value prop of seeing a game trailer or game video that seems interesting and being able to say "play with stadia" and it just throwing me right into the game is the feature that speaks most to me.

If Stadia does this and it works well enough, i'll gladly get rid of gaming PC.

>I'm tired of updating my GPU drivers and experinece (5-10 minutes)

I never understood this complaint. You can be perfectly fine running GPU drivers from a year ago. You don't need to update them every day.

With Steam, it "updating" every time you run it seems to be a lie really, but I think most people who run Steam just leave it always on.

The games, I have 400 on Steam. Maybe 1-3 update per day on average, and there's lot's of overlap ie 90% of my library hasn't updated in a year, and 9% of the leftover updates maybe once a month.

I just don't see how they are going to compete with Microsoft on this, or Sony for that matter. I can't help but think this will be killed off in the next 2-3 years due to low adoption. Microsoft and Sony already have their foot in the door, and xCloud is supposedly going to be an E3 topic...and I'm sure they will bundle it with existing Xbox Live services for a bump in price.

Google has proven me wrong in the past, but they've also killed a lot of products like this.

Uh, cross-platform gaming will be huge. It says it will work in a Chrome browser. This is running on Linux and using Vulkan as well, so I imagine the open source community will want to try to adopt these technologies more and more since it is clearly scalable and efficient enough to run a live streaming service of this magnitude. I'm happy to see less games developed in proprietary frameworks and to be supported on more operating systems than Windows.

There's no denying the underlying idea is big, the question is can Google actually penetrate the market, or have the grit to see it through when adoption is low in the beginning. I'm betting no, but we'll have to wait and see.

First time someone gets bored at Google they will drop this like nothing with a month or two notice and any games purchased will be vapor. Google doesn't care about it's users. It's just another platform to extract data mining or ai from. Google makes massive unilateral consumer unfriendly changes before breakfast. They barely care about business customers. If you're not ads or ad related and bringing in money you're not worth anything.

You’re being downvoted, but you shouldn’t be, because you’re absolutely correct.

Didn't notice I was being downvoted. Legitimately don't care about it either. I'll be dead most likely within a few years and I can't take internet points with me or cash them in to take care of my family when I'm gone. Thanks for the kind words though.

Just because the platform is running Linux and Vulkan doesn't mean that Google won't wall that behind their data centers. The PS4 runs on BSD.

Microsoft came out of no-where with the original XBox. You had Playstation, Nintendo, and Sega. It can happen, just need the right motivations for customers.

And if 5G lives up to it's promises, this will be one of those first great products to take advantage of that extra bandwidth.

And when Sony launched the PlayStation no one believed they could compete with Nintendo and Sega..

The Playstation was originally supposed to be the next Nintendo console...

Microsoft Xbox persevered only because of Microsoft's deep pockets not because they necessarily did anything different enough to attract gamers. It was not a successful console.

Above all the Xbox had Halo, google doesn't seem to have anything unique up their sleeve.

Funny, I know someone else who has deep pockets.

Google has deep pocket, but has a habit of abandoning projects that aren't immediate successes.

I'm pretty sure Xbox Live had something to do with MS's success.

Success? You mean they saw it as one area they did better? Microsoft considering killing off the xbox after the fist iteration because the sales figures were not where they hoped it would be and it was costing them.

To add on to this, I remember Gates said _something publicly like "I expect to lose about a billion dollars on it before it pans out" when launching xbox. I remember that it just seemed a very genuine "I think we should be in this market long term, and I know we'll lose a lot of money to get there. But we can afford it."

The XBox also had the luxury of amazing timing, although it's unclear whether it was intentional or luck.

Sony dominated generations 5 and 6 against weak competition. The Dreamcast was an outright failure that was discontinued a few months before the Xbox's release, and the Gamecube was a commercial disappointment; which practically handed Microsoft a #2 showing.

Right now all three incumbents appear strong and evenly matched, which may not leave Google much of a hole.

To me this seems like xCloud is in response to Stadia. Google has the infrastructure and Microsoft and Sony need to work together to compete. This would be similar to how Microsoft and Sony responded to the Nintendo Wii.

Because Microsoft does not have the infrastructure? Azure has more DC and compute power around the world than Google Cloud.

The problem is that Microsoft can't really be taken seriously in the gaming market, or in any consumer space where they might have good or great products but little to zero traction, and Sony doesn't have the network infrastructure.

>Microsoft can't really be taken seriously in the gaming market

But they are in this market for a long time and are taken serious.

Microsoft has the Xbox, a major gaming console and Sony has the PlayStation Network. It's not as clean cut as you say.

Are you saying Xbox has little to zero traction in the gaming space...?

XBox has like 35% market share vs %65 of Sony. I wouldn't call that not taking Microsoft seriously in gaming market.

From what I understand, Sony and MS are literally throwing xbox's/ps4 hardware into racks and streaming from them. Doesn't seem very scalable or cost effective.

Google built their game platform from the ground up for the cloud, including specialized graphics hardware. Sounds like it will be able to scale up to meet demands of games, while the other services are just renting a console-in-a-datacenter to the user.

Maybe it will matter, maybe it won't.

Microsoft certainly isn't just filling server racks with Consumer model Xbox Ones, if that is what you have pictured. They have rack-mount servers that share the Xbox Architecture.

The Xbox One and PS4 are modified PC architectures with slightly specialized graphics hardware. All three are doing the exact same thing: building traditional server racks, just with with an added focus on GPU power/performance. Google doesn't have a leg up in their datacenters, and if anything has the detriment that both Microsoft and Sony can run Consumer-targeted software builds directly on their racks, whereas supposedly Stadia needs new game builds, customized to the new hardware.

From a full-system integration might not be cost ineffective:

    1. Single SKU for Server & Client (volume reduces cost)
    2. Games target & optimize for this hardware already (nothing new) 
    3. Microsoft & Sony are essentially *the* targets (no platform integration cost)
    4. Proven user adoption (approximate ROI known for these projects) 
    5. Brand recognition (xbox and playstation are household names)
    6. Price (Microsoft is doing subscription for service + catalog)
    7. Bought publishers (Microsoft & Sony "own" many dev shops)
    8. Primary library vendor (DX11)
    9. Network Effect (I bought an xbox because all of my friends owned one)

The only new components Microsoft needs:

    1. Mount Game (iSCSI)
    2. Output (HDMI to RTMP transcode) 
    3. Input

I'm not saying either solution is better (I prefer Google's approach) but they're only doing it if they've run the numbers.

> Azure has more DC and compute power around the world than Google

Interesting. Do you have a source for this?

Last I heard, Google's products are responsible for a significant proportion of all internet traffic e.g. in 2013 - 6 years ago - Forbes reported that it was 40% [1]. I think I heard more recently it was getting close to 50+% now but I cannot find any sources.

I'd be surprised to learn that MS is handling more traffic than Google and so has more DCs and more compute... or are they pissing money up the wall and just building data centres that are sitting 99% idle purely for bragging rights?

1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/17/fascinat...

You're confusing Google's main services vs GCP and Azure. Stradia will be running on GCP, xCloud will be running on Azure. Azure has more data centers than GCP by a large amount.

Where did you read that Stadia will be in GCP only? From the looks of it, they are sharing a lot of infrastructure with YouTube which implies otherwise.

I have not read anything that suggests this is running on GCP?

Microsoft has been working on xCloud for a lot longer than that. And Microsoft has more cloud data centers than Google around the globe.

While I agree Microsoft is going to be a major and probably the biggest competitor to Stadia, I don't think number or size of data centers makes any difference here. Microsoft has traditionally not been a "cloud" company while as Google has lived it's entire life as one. Google definitely has an advantage here given it's technically their turf. Not saying MS are incapable of delivering cloud workloads but Google definitely is considered the better of the two when it coming to cloud infrastructure and talent. This might be changing now rapidly though.

What are you talking about? Microsoft has Azure and before they had that, they had numerous Internet scale services like hotmail. Microsoft has vast experience with building and running internet scale applications. Just like Google has.

It's one thing building Azure in response to AWS and GCP and another thing innovating to support something like Google search for decades and then using the same knowledge and tech to build other cloud services. Of course Microsoft is totally capable of delivery cloud workloads but they can still be considered the underdog here when it comes to Google vs MS

I'd say MS is pretty well positioned to compete against Google: they have the infrastructure plus an actual good catalogue of games. Sony may not have the infrastructure on their own, but by partnering with Microsoft, they'll become a solid competitor too since they have an excellent games catalogue.

Google are the ones who will have to prove themselves here, IMO.

By being a click away on youtube, android, chrome and chromecast.

OnLive tried this, failed, and got acquishutdown by Sony: https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8337955/sony-buys-onlive-o...

Other players who could do this fairly naturally are Valve (steam link) and Nvidia themselves.

They're putting a big emphasis on the "frictionless" aspect.

If they can get people impulse buying subscriptions/games, they'll get some traction.

Its not exactly breaking most people's bank to have a $9.99 subscription for all you can eat gaming.

For those who don't already have consoles, its a no brainer.

It’s not all you can eat. They have some free games but you have to buy your games still.

I don't think it's as hard as you'd imagine. Gamers are the craziest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts. They'll flock to you if you give them a great product. Unlike other areas (messaging, social media), you don't need the critical mass to have a successful product especially with cross-play becoming more and more common/acceptable. Even if you need the critical mass, it's much easier to get it with a great product in the gaming industry compared to others.

If Google delivers a great product here, they'll for sure have a huge number of users IMO.

Go on a number of the gaming subreddit and you’ll see Stadia is being met with distaste and hesitation. Gamers are increasingly tiring of the games-as-a-service model, and this is a step even further in that direction.

Personally I think this will have the same lifetime as a lot of other google products: it’ll launch, have some success, and then be killed unceremoniously a couple of years down the line.

People viewing gaming subreddits most likely already own a console or gaming PC and aren't the target audience for Stadia. Google's aim is to open up gaming to new markets of people who only have low end PCs, laptops or mobile devices.

But those people certainly do not fit the mold: > Gamers are the craziest of early adopters and tech enthusiasts.

Those are the herds we all profit from. Not whales but cows. Why would I want to be on the bleeding edge and get a shit experience?

People have said exactly the same thing about:

1) software as a service

2) streaming music

3) streaming video

4) digital games

There just isn't enough people caring about physically owning something these days.

People (mostly) already don't physically own games on PC. Steam can in theory shut right down and most people's games would just be gone.

the games would be patched to ignore the steam check, or the steam API emulated to bypass it entirely

and since most games use the same steam stub this would be a pretty easy thing to do

Go into gaming related subreddits, even for beloved and succesfull games and products - and marvel at the toxicity and negativity you'll likely see all over the place.

Game reddits (and other forums) are legendarily toxic.

> I don't think it's as hard as you'd imagine.

I think it's very hard. The best article ever written on this subject is "So You Want to Compete with Steam" [1] and it applies as equally well to Playstation/Xbox.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...

Don't forget too that:

1. They are also targeting people with no gaming pc / console

2. A big part of the plan is the leverage Youtube to bring people in

3. Most of the infrastructure is already there for the rest of Google, so this isn't too much of an overhead for them

Put all this together, and it doesn't look as crazy as some think it is. #2 is really the crux of the strategy though.

I wonder where the ads come in. I can imagine creating an ad network and placements in-game, which would then let them offer the product for free/cheap to users, and pay a cut of the money to game creators who hook up the placements.

And the betting on when this product will be shut down by Google has already begun...right now 3 years is the choice with the most money behind it. Some fools are guessing Google may give this as much as 5 years.

Given Google's abysmal history of supporting its software and hardware products, see e.g., the Nest fiasco from a few weeks ago, only a fool or someone with cash to waste would invest in a Google hardware device before it's proven popular by the market.

I couldn't agree more. After Inbox, I've been burned for the last time. Won't be buying into new Google services again.

How did you buy Inbox? Wasn't it free?

Seems like a false equivalence "free skin on top of Gmail" != paid-for service like this one.

"Buying into" isn't only about money. A lot of people put time and effort into Inbox, Reader etc. and they were badly burned when Google decided they weren't making enough millions of dollars.

The biggest difference between Stadia and Inbox, Reader, etc is that people pay for Stadia. That alone seems like comparing apples to oranges.

And the other big difference is that Stadia is a lot more expensive to run.

Certainly a concern for the games purchased on top of this platform. If Stadia gets shuttered, your access to those games would just vanish.

The hardware would be a weird thing to be worried about though. Chromecast won't be going anywhere, and the controller is still usable even if Stadia ceases to exist.

Google has a habit of getting bored of a service or, if it's not doing too well, just switching it off. Can you assure people that if they spend money on Stadia games, they are still going to have access to them in the coming years?

I completely understand the question. I think there's a couple of things I would answer to that. One is our commitment to this business is extraordinary. If you look at the list of games, and crucially, the list of game companies that are backing Stadia, you can see the level of interest and support. Google is committed to this for the long term, we have made very significant financial investments in this. And we have an incredibly dedicated team who is helping to make Stadia reality.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48525703

Words are cheap, though.

"If you look at the list of apps, and crucially, the list of developers that are backing Android wear, you can see the level of interest and support. Google is committed to this for the long term, we have made very significant financial investments in this. And we have an incredibly dedicated team who is helping to make Android Wear reality." Google, 2014, probably.

Words are very cheap.

That seems unfair - Wear hasn't been abandoned. It hasn't been an overwhelming success, but it's not been a complete failure either.

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44901819

I can't see Google dropping it unless Apple abandons theirs first.

Google's words are free and ad supported

Yeah, that's a concern I have with paying $60 for a game on there. But I'm pretty interested in the $10/mo with accompanying handful of free games. If they shut down the service in that scenario it doesn't bother me, since I'm getting my money's worth each month.

Yeah, but that will depend on the quality of games they offer with the subscription.

Where are you getting these numbers from? Do you have something to backup your words, or are you just pulling them out of thin air?

Even average the numbers from a site like gCemetery gives you > 5 years, and that number is already biased because it doesn't count the lifespan of products that are still alive.

I think that an underestimated benefit of game streaming is anti-cheat. It would benefit a lot games like Fortnite and Pubg.

Competitive games, at least competitive shooter games, are really the worst application for this though because they suffer the most from input-to-display latency. Games like League of legends might be fine though.

But assuming that the latency gets reduced to acceptable levels for competitive games, I see this distribution model as the only one to effectively fight cheaters. I would love to hear alternatives, though.

That's a really big assumption. For a lot of genres the latency is just not going to be low enough.

Based on some rough, early estimates the input lag with Stadia is incredibly impressive. I originally thought it would never work for many types of games like you say but now I'm reserving judgement. It's not impossible at least.

They suffer from uneven or inconsistent input-to-display latency. If Stadia can give everyone the same, (hopefully) modest amount of latency, the games remain as fair as they ever were

It might be fair but that doesn't mean it will be enjoyable...

I'm not entirely sure, but you may have misunderstood my point. It's not about fairness, it's about whether it is physically possible to play the game on the same level of skill.

Talking about shooters, in the traditional multiplayer setup input-to-display latency isn't actually a concern, because input-to-display doesn't go over the network at all. When you move your mouse, the display update loop doesn't contain a network roundtrip. There is only the concern of latency to the server for resolving which hits actually connect, and I agree with you that having this latency be roughly the same for everybody is probably quite a bit more important than how low it is.

With game streaming, the input-to-display loop does include a network roundtrip, which makes it harder to aim.

If you've ever tried to play a shooter with <15 fps, or suffered from the mouse input lag that some games used to have on Linux in the past, you should know what I mean: aiming with the mouse crucially relies on a feedback loop where you correct your hand movement based on what you see on the screen. The longer that feedback loop takes, the harder it is to aim.

That's what the concern is with competitive shooter play on game streaming services. (And it's why I wrote that other types of competitive games may not be affected as much, but it's been a long time since I've played a lot of games, so what do I know...)

If you have <20ms latency (possibly a bit higher), I don't think it will inhibit the skill cap for most shooters.

If it creeps up into the 40's and 50's though, it will for sure.

I don't think so - the reason I don't use VSync for first person shooters is because it introduces 1 frame (8ms ~ 16ms depending on your frame rate) of input lag. It really feels laggy when I try to move my mouse and aim.

And mechanical keyboards make you type faster and gamer glasses make you aim better and a tincture of molybdenum in your star-water will cure your cold

I'm not sure you understand fairness. If the game is harder for everyone (in whatever metric suits you to contrive), it's just..harder

How so? There are very common aimbots based on computer vision that will work just fine on a PC with Chrome running Stadia games.

Sample naive algo:

-Get a color range (RBG) of the enemy model's head.

-Take screenshot of screen and scan for pixel in that range.

-If match, get the x,y pos of that pixel.

-Set mouse(or controller) pos to that x,y pos.

-Click

E.g https://github.com/Dewep/POC-AimBot-Overwatch

The sample code worked well enough for Blizzard to forcibly take it off the internet.

Not every game outlines the enemies in red like Overwatch. Many times, the player model heads don't have their own exclusive pallette.

That's for aimbots. Streaming would remove a ton of other exploits, like wall hacks.

However, for the aimbots, since you are sending your input to Google's servers, they could detect the input patterns of cheaters.

> However, for the aimbots, since you are sending your input to Google's servers, they could detect the input patterns of cheaters.

Isn't that exactly what happens today on a console or a PC?

On individual boxes, with games having their own versions of anticheat detection. Not at Google scale looking for patterns across all games.

Ah, I see what you mean. That's interesting. I feel for people who'll get banned because they are too good given Google supports reputation :)

Except for the part where it appears you'll be able to play from a computer just using Chrome. This allows for all sorts of botting (artificialaiming.net for example has been making PC aim bots for at least a decade as I tried it out on Battlefield 2142 and it was eerie at what all they could do including the settings to make it even believable so you were unlikely to get reported. Sure that was using a lot of client-side data but that was a long time ago and now you can probably do sprite-recognition type stuff effortlessly on the user side of a streamed game.

Similarly fishing and mining bots and the like for games like WoW would translate to repetitive farming type activity.

Arguably I think being in a browser window would make it easier to do.

Client side input could always be messed with. I think what the anti-cheat feature refers to more so is the direct communication with the server part, where cheating programs can e.g. modify UDP packets in transit to teleport your characters to new locations or give themselves inventory items. If all you're feeding into the system is controller input, there's no way for you to do any of that. Conversely, backend developers for exclusive Stadia games can iterate more quickly knowing that their client input is completely trustworthy, which is an INSANE win.

Imagine building a REST API and not having to worry about request validation, sanitation, authorization, data scoping, etc. because you can 100% trust that the input you're processing is from your own client. Wouldn't that be perfect?

There are undoubtedly major benefits in the war against cheaters by completely removing user access to the underlying system. However I think there are two fundamental points to keep in mind on why it's not going to be an ultimate solution.

1) Unless cross-platform play is forbidden or the game is exclusively streamed-only, the cheaters will just use a different platform and will still ruin your game the same old way. It's the cheater's platform of choice that matters.

2) Games are some of the least security conscious pieces of software out there [1], primarily written in C++. There are bugs, lots of bugs. Process-takeover enabling bugs. I'm sure Google sandboxes the game to protect their systems, however cheaters only need access to the game process to enable most of their desires. Yes this would raise the bar in how easy it would be to cheat. Average Joe Cheat Engine users would be gone, but more skilled cheat makers will continue business as usual and their released cheats will do the exploits hidden from the actual people doing the cheating.

Bonus: See this cute hack that injects flappy bird into Super Mario World. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

[1] Even AAA developers are clueless about threat models. Games like Tom Clancy's The Division [2] and Fallout 76 [3] are multiplayer games that put extreme trust into the client. Trust that nobody would modify their script files, trust that the client is always telling the honest truth.

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20170611084112/http://gafferongam...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/9u71m1/get_ready_for_...

Anyone know of a "how will Stadia perform on my ISP" check (all I see is a bandwidth check, which is not the same)? I'm not expecting anything (I'm on average 50ms ping to servers, 120ms ping if you include processing on the remote end), but it would be good to have confirmation.

I'm also disappointed by the dramatic extension of the "you don't own the games you buy", since there's not even an option to download the titles and play offline. It gets more worrisome based on Google's demonstrated "go to HN" form of customer support.

Check out Fast.com. If your loaded latency numbers are high, it's possible you won't do well with Stadia.

The best test is going to be using it. There are too many factors to have a good predictive test.

Last mile times are always going to cause lag. 5g won't be rolled out for years, then you'll need a phone to take advantage of it so that's not going to help. Last mile in US performance is really poor unless you're on full fiber which isn't offered in most of the US. Even with direct peering to the ISPs, which they don't have, this isn't likely to be a superior experience compared to a local machine. They'll have to push the entire video stream along with the intelligence. That's a lot of data that can't be lagged.

> which they don't have,

Can't directly refute this, but wouldn't you think GCP is peered with the vast majority of local ISPs (in America and maybe the EU)?

No. I don't not believe they've done this. They don't peer easily or often and peering with local partners is not something most people want to do, even Google. It takes trust on the part of the local service provider, which Google hasn't built as Google is often a direct competitor to their local products. Peering at the ISP level is really hard because it's all relationship management. Google couldn't manage their own fiber and built up a good deal of animosity with other networks in doing so, especially in the US.

https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure send to say otherwise. It's in the best interest of both parties, so not sure why they wouldn't have done this.

Interesting information. There's definitely a bit of marketing going on there, but it seems that they have at least some peering. Without concrete public evidence otherwise I'll concede that Google must have great peering.

Google/AS15169 has an open peering policy.

From a network administrator's point of view, they're an absolute joy to work with too.

If you're share any IXes with them at all, they'll peer with you. Private / appliance based peering has additional requirements, but that's par for course.

Most of the pushback is on the ISP end.

What's high? Mine is 36ms loaded according to that site.

They have an official speed test - https://projectstream.google.com/speedtest

Does anyone have any numbers on how well they perform on average to above-average connections? I'm on Google Fiber now so obviously the test passes with flying colors, but I'm thinking about going back to moving often (between big cities) that probably won't have as accessible fiber, and a "portable console" like this sounds perfect -- as long as it still works well on first-mile, average connections.

They link to https://projectstream.google.com/speedtest

Doesn't look like latency is taken into account, which is probably more important than bandwidth (when bandwidth is >10mbps).

I’m in Australia, so precluding anything else, our terrible internet means this product is more or less dead in the water for me.

... Does Google not have any data centers in Australia? (Granted, it isn't a given that Stadia might run out of those DCs, but with Borg, I don't see why they couldn't.)

That won't help. The connection to your house in Australia is using ancient copper lines that is all rotted out and stops working in the rain. In absolute best case conditions you could use this service but most of the country would struggle to stream 1080p reliably.

The internet upgrade in Australia (NBN) is well known as the biggest government fuck up in the last 20 years.

> and stops working in the rain

For anyone who thinks this is hyperbole, I assure you it's not, my internet quite literally grinds to a halt when it rains too much.

This is not a joke or an exaggeration, thanks to the NBN being switched from fibre to copper, my parents now have no internet when it rains, is windy, or there is lightning in the area.

All to upgrade them from 13Mbps to 17Mbps. Yes, I'm being serious.

I don't know why people aren't more concerned with the fact these giant companies are so large that they're able to take over entire markets extremely easily.

I keep hearing "man, this <insert_product_here> by Google is absolutely awesome!" but it's getting more and more to the point where Google is taking over markets...

It's getting concerning when silicon valley companies are getting large enough to be their own governments, with their own micro-countries built into their campuses (Google HQ, Apple HQ, etc. etc.) It's almost like the vatican in terms of size at this point.

The product isn't set to launch for another half a year.

How can you claim that it is already "taking over the market"?

ThE maGic oF GoOglE!

Wait what, Baldur's Gate 3? And DOOM Eternal at 4K/60, they must be pretty confident about the latency... OK, I have to admit it's a pretty compelling alternative to upgrading my aging computer. I'll still wait for the reviews / Digital Foundry analysis, but I'm interested.

There's a GDC talk by id Software porting DOOM to Stadia [0]. The speaker says that in the latest demos, the difference is basically not perceptible. They had a setup with two computers, one running Stadia and the other locally, and most people couldn't tell them apart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdz4b5psrhE

As a (slightly) more than casual gamer, this is a hard sell. I have a deep catalog of games in Steam & GOG, and having to re-purchase them is a non-starter, especially given alternative streaming services that let me use my back catalog. It's even more surprising that Google doesn't have some way of accounting for this because GOG does: at least for a limited selection of games, GOG let's you link to Steam and get the games into your GOG library.

I think you are not alone in that opinion. It seems like a bad choice to say to consumers "You have to buy those games again to use with Stadia.".

What is the alternative?

They could have figured out a way. Other games systems do (see other posts).

You could import your Steam/Origin/Gog/etc library of stadia compatible games.

I think this is a pretty reasonable price and I fully expect to pre-order, but I'm disappointed that the games must be purchased a la carte. I'd much rather pay a higher monthly fee and be able to play any games I wanted. I'm not sure how much more I'd be willing to pay, but I just think that purchasing titles that I don't own doesn't fit well with the streaming paradigm.

Yeah agreed, I was expecting streaming to be streaming - I don't purchase individual titles on Netflix. Maybe if it was transferable to PC or another platform I'd be more open to it.

> A free tier will be available some time in 2020, as will a paid subscription tier that doesn't require the upfront purchase.

Wonder if the paid sub won't require a payment for games in the future.

Even with a console you still have to pay to play online, so I don't see this as necessarily a huge problem if I have to pay $10 to get the online aspect and still pay for the games

Makes sense, I went to their site to look more in depth and it seems with the Pro subscription you get some free games periodically and also a discount on select titles. That feels like a good middle ground actually

It's not like any of this is new territory either. Xbox Game Pass works like that (minus the streaming) and OnLive worked exactly like that (streaming + unlimited games). It's not an unreasonable demand.

For me that's an immediate 'nah', because I entirely expect it to suddenly shut down at some point in the future (because, you know, Google).

This. I got the preorder email a half hour or so ago and have been sitting here thinking "ehhhhhhh" I want to check it out but I'm expecting the quality to be exactly like it was from the first Amazon Fire (the controller even looks like a cousin of the Fire controller, the button orientation is slightly different and they've swapped the position a stick and the dpad) except instead of downloading titles to the Fire you'll buy the controller and randomtimelater Google will shut down the service leaving you with nothing to play at all.

130$ (probably more with shipping) is a good deal of money for me, I'd feel a lot better pulling the trigger if Google didn't have a history of abandoning stuff.

I expect to pre-order the hardware, but I'll probably hold off on a subscription until I see the games and have a compelling reason to pay a monthly fee. I don't really mind the difference between 1080p and 4K, so buying the games standalone seems like a nice fit for me personally, with the subscription sitting as a nice "premium" / improve-what-you-have option.

I don't really see a compelling case for this for 1080p gaming. You can achieve that on very cheap hardware already. The Xbox One S is $200 right now.

Personally, I already have an Xbox One that I lug around with me when I travel. The most compelling aspects of this are it feeling a lot more mobile (since you only need a chromecast and a controller, or just the controller with your phone), and feeling a lot more future-proof since it's effectively just a thin client running on beefy hardware elsewhere, that I expect to be upgraded to meet current game demands over time.

I think it would be nice if they had a demo/preview feature. With the streaming model, they could allow you play X hours of a game per day, or per week, or per month, or whatever, and lock you out or force you to purchase.

Or they could bill you at a slightly higher price per minute, up until you reach a maximum, where you are charged full price for the game.

There's a lot of room to play with pricing models with streaming (if they can get game publishers to agree).

Really not seeing how they pull this off. Even a couple of congested wifi channels is enough to put latency jitter into the connection that's noticable.

Back in gamedev we did all sorts of tricks with dead reckoning and the like to hide/compensate for it. With the current architecture I don't buy that you'll be able to make those same saving adjustments.

Maybe a different class of games will do best on a streaming platform.

>We aren’t in your country yet

Sounds about right. By the time it comes to EU it will be abandoned by Google and shut down in a year or so

> The Founder’s Edition will launch in United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

Disc: Googler.

Still the same, I'm in Poland and they are not there yet :(

From the list I see that they don't have any new EU states and they don't have even Portugal.

Which is quite strange, because internet speed there on average much better (fiber is quite popular) than in the old EU.

I think the issue is lack of google servers in those countries.

If you are not seeing the page with OP link (which shows a region-specific page), try this direct link to the US store page:

https://store.google.com/us/product/stadia_founders_edition

I've bought google products before by shipping them to a middle man in Germany. I wonder if this would work with Stadia, as it requires recurrent payments and online activation.

I guess in terms of game development, Stadia will be like GitHub. As a service though, we'll see. Their reveal stream kept crashing, and there was noticeable lag during their initial GDC presentation.

Could you explain what you mean by "like GitHub"?

https://www.xkcd.com/624/

I'm guessing lag will depend on how far from the data center you are and might not be great initially but then could prove to be awesome in a year or two as more localised render farms appear.

The problem with clown gaming is latency.

Maybe it can find a place, at the right price (perhaps free), location, game type, mechanic and implementation.

Here, google says the base will be free, but you have to buy the games. But will publishers drop their price enough? Would a low-quality version damage their franchise/brand? Second, will publishers modify their mechanics and implementation, to hide latency?

The other way is with low-latency internet - so would need to be geographically close, like a city-sized LAN party. Perhaps Seoul?

Both need to begin as disruptions, selling their strengths (cheap, convenient, simple, easy), in circumstances/usages where their weaknesses don't matter (latency, bandwidth), starting small and growing as work it out. e.g. a fun game that only really works as a cloud game. (is that possible?)

Can someone explain the tech here? Obviously the brains of this is a Google data center beaming the game through a Chromecast to your TV (or in-app on your Pixel/ whatever). Is there any tech in the controller? What "costs" $129 if there's a subscription model attached to this?

If the controller is indeed "dumb" (just sending inputs), why wouldn't there be compatibility with Xbox or PS4 controllers?

If the history of non-main consoles has taught us anything (Nvidia Shield, Ouya, etc), you have to have games and a controller. Seems Google has games covered, but why try and reinvent the wheel with a new controller?

That's $9.99 x 3 (3 months of Stadia Pro) + $69 (Controller) + $69 (Chromecast Ultra) = $167.97. Just with that, it's a 30% discount, roughly.

I'm not counting the cost of Destiny 2.

And it appears as though it will be compatible with other controllers. (Probably not the Chromecast version, though.)

Destiny 2 is going F2P, so it's $0

If Destiny 2 is F2P, will they have stuff you need to buy? And will Stadia Founders get that for free? I don't know, do you?

It sounds like the base game will be free, but this offer also includes the Year 2 and Year 3 DLC, which probably will not.

Only the 1st Year content is going F2P; The Destiny 2 included with Stadia has all the content.

"And it appears as though it will be compatible with other controllers. (Probably not the Chromecast version, though.)"

May I ask how you arrived at this conclusion?

From http://stadia.com/faq:

> Do I need to use your Controller? (Stadia Controller)

> No, you can use many popular HID compliant controllers when playing via USB cable on Chrome or mobile. To play on your TV you will need to use the Stadia Controller and Google Chromecast Ultra.

My understanding is that the controller supposedly connects directly to Google through WiFi rather than going through the device you're playing on.

Hmm. Does this mean that the controller is the "brains", and after sending and receiving the game play data, then needs to beam it to your device? Or do the two devices (controller + screen) work together to handle some of this?

I fear for the latency in general.

Neither device is the brains. The controller uploads inputs. The Chromecast downloads outputs.

The brains is Google’s cloud.

I would think it's just sending data on your inputs to the data center directly to reduce latency, but otherwise has no other brains.

Right. The idea seems to be that the controller directly talks to Google via WiFi to minimize the input latency, while the display device also directly talks to Google to minimize the output latency.

> If the controller is indeed "dumb" (just sending inputs), why wouldn't there be compatibility with Xbox or PS4 controllers?

The controller is not dumb, it connects to Google.

Also, as I understood it other "supported" controllers can be used (per https://youtu.be/k-BbW6zAjL0?t=683) but then you need to use another device/platform that does the connect-to-Google part, e.g. Chrome on PC.

edit: http://stadia.com/faq says USB HID controllers are supported on Chrome and mobile.

edit 2: and https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338852 explicitly says PS4 and Xbox One controllers are supported.

Yep, I played assassins creed on chrome on my mac with a usb xbox 360 controller and it worked great.

Sounds like they will support other USB controllers on Chrome.

> or in the Chrome web browser with the standard HID controller of your choice.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654632/google-stadia-pri...

> Is there any tech in the controller?

Yes. The controller connects directly to your game instance over WiFi. It doesn't need to go through a box first and be relayed (this can shave a significant amount of latency off controller inputs).

> What "costs" $129 if there's a subscription model attached to this?

For $129 you get a controller ($69), a Chromecast Ultra ($60), 3 months of Stadia Pro ($30), the full Destiny 2 game with all the DLC ($?? I forget).

You may be confused with how Stadia Pro works. It's just like PS Plus, you occasionally get a free game or two and it enables you to play at 4K in 5.1 surround sound. Without Stadia Pro you can still play any Stadia game you own, without a fee.

> why wouldn't there be compatibility with Xbox or PS4 controllers?

But there is compatibility with XBox and PS4 controllers. It was in the video and in their original announcement. You just can't really use them with the Chromecast AFAIK but you can with any computer and some tablets / phones.

> but why try and reinvent the wheel with a new controller?

You can bring your own or use theirs for the best latency / game experience possible on Stadia.

> this can shave a significant amount of latency off controller inputs

How on earth would it do that? WiFi alone is a significant part of the latency here! Not to mention the huge jitter it brings. Screw in your smart cheap-ass 802.11b light bulb and watch your game feel off.

No, they want this stuff to work with Chrome out of the box and so they needed to cut out the middle-man anyway, and people aren't exactly prepared to put an Ethernet cable into it. But let's not pretend WiFi is somehow an improvement over connecting it to a PC that just blasts your input out through Ethernet (where it then traverses all the same boxes that it does "over WiFi" anyways, minus the shared medium that is used to stream 4k to your TV)

However much latency a wifi network has, making the controlled connect to another local box and that box to relay the signal through the same wifi would definitely by the latency of the wifi + T right? They are shaving off T.

I think where this gets tricky is when the display is plugged in via Ethernet.

But the Chromecast Ultra they're selling with it doesn't support USB or Bluetooth (or Ethernet), which makes it not really an option for that. The controller I believe works through Bluetooth and USB if you're using a device that has those.

> How on earth would it do that? WiFi alone is a significant part of the latency here!

Today there is input and display lag. You send the input to the box for processing. In streaming you send the input to a box who then relays that to a server. If you can cut out the server you can reduce a bunch of latency. It won't have lower latency than a locally played game but you can make it close enough.

> Not to mention the huge jitter it brings. Screw in your smart cheap-ass 802.11b light bulb and watch your game feel off.

Your knowledge of WiFi seems to be about 8 years out of date. Not only is it really difficult to find 802.11b anything anymore (even stuff buried in a basement; seriously 802.11b devices started coming out in 1999) but this is pretty much a non issue in almost any router made in the past decade. The majority of routers (especially the better ones) use dual or tri bands to better handle interference and backwards compatibility with older standards.

If you have issues with your WiFi I'd suggest upgrading your router. Seriously, they're pretty great nowadays especially if you get a triband almost anything :)

This is astoundingly cheap. In fact its too cheap, €10/month works out to €360 + €130 over a 3 year hardware cycle which is barely enough for a not-really-capable 4k GPU as it is, without costing all the additional services/hardware. And to put it bluntly, these games are second-rate titles from the last year. From this announcement I guess that this is mostly just another data farming play that will never generate a profit on its own and has a very high chance of being shutdown within 3 years.

You are not taking into account for the fact that the hardware will be used constantly by multiple people on and on. I play on average 1 hour of video game a day, multiply that by 24, or 12 or 6 to be more conservative, you are still getting a good margin on hardware cost.

He's right though, 10 is not enough. For fractional gpu use, bandwidth, electricity, and engineering, service support, business dev, and marketing salaries at the google level? Even if we assume that they can run 100 users on each GPU, that wouldn't be enough. (They can't run 100 users on each gpu, but even if they could.)

There's some other play here? Not really sure what google's strategy is, but these prices make it clear they don't need to make money.

They are also operating a game store... they take a cut there. Also likely will be ads.

I wonder if they will use high-end servers with GPUs that can be used for serving stadia gaming users during peak gaming hours, and then for tasks like number crunching and machine learning during off hours?

I would imagine they start using spare capacity for big number crunching tasks as well.

From what I'm aware the Stadia boxes are dedicated units, though elasticity to me is Cloud's bread and butter so I can't imagine why.

> too cheap

I'm astounded at HN's ability to spin anything as a negative.

> these games are second-rate titles from the last year

since when were games like AC: Odyssey or BL3 "second rate"?

Of course they aren't going to have all games (out of the gate, we can assume they are working on licensing) or have exclusive titles (for obvious reasons).

>I'm astounded at HN's ability to spin anything as a negative.

Usually I'm right there with you, but Google doesn't exactly have a good public perception around products and services without good profit margins. If they're not making money from it, it could be shut down at any moment (even for paid physical hardware, like the Nexus Q). "Too cheap" is a real fear.

Let's assume the worst.

You buy in at $170. You subscribe for the 4k offering @ $10 / month. They shutter the service after 1 year after you've paid $120 in monthly fees.

In total, you're out $290. You got a "free" Chromecast Ultra ($60), so you're only out $210.

That's honestly not that bad. Sure, you could have just bought a new XBox One S, but the value of those degrade over time, as well and, as much as MS wants you to believe it, the One S is not a 4K system. It's hard to measure the value of the entertainment you got using it. In my case, I definitely would have achieved $210 in entertainment value out of the system over the course of a year.

Maybe they'll revisit the pricing in a year instead of just cancelling it...

So you've paid $290 (plus the cost of the games) for one year of service, and that's not that bad? I don't know about you, but I have an Xbox One and it's lasted me more than one year for the $300 I paid for it, 4k or not.

I'm not even entirely sure what you're arguing... that it's okay to pay $300/yr for a video game system plus the cost of video games? That if you paid $300 for an Xbox and Microsoft discontinued the system after a year you'd be okay with the price?

Assuming the worst like you have, you paid $300 for a video game system that didn't include any video games and after a year you weren't allowed to play it anymore. That's pretty fucking awful. Even if Microsoft stops making the Xbox One, you still get to keep playing the games you bought.

Also not sure if it'd just a licensing issue. I think all the games might very well be modded to run on Stadia servers. May be the renders are optimized to send out compressed video over the wire instead of a video output. Totally speculating but I think it's likely that the games need to be integrated into the Stadia platform somehow.

iirc they support games made with certain engines out-of-the-box. Ironically, I think I heard that it's the Unreal Engine (sorry, Epic Games Store...). AC:O and BL3 seem to support that theory.

Neither of those games are UE games, though.

For comparison, Hetzner is offering dedicated i7-6700/64GB/1 TB SSD/GTX 1080/"unlimited" bandwidth for €94/month (no installation fee) [1]. Due to their business model, I assume this is a price that also generates them a healthy profit.

The stadia pricing does not sound completely unfeasible when taking into account the 130€, another 70€ from the extra controller, cut from game sales and the fact that casual gamers do not spend their days play the most computationally demanding titles. Some extra €€ would come from family plans and there might be some synergies with their cloud computing business (for example using spare capacity from GCE for Stadia).

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu

By definition every game requires 'decent' internet. The fact they will still charge full price for the games and games you could've bought on disc or steam before are now 'internet required' ... means I'm out. Not just for the premium version but for the hardware and free versions as well.. After Google Wave and Google Reader ~ I'm not going to invest solid dollars vs hardware on premises.

I am surprised by comments that seem to give Google the benefit of the doubt or do not show concern just because of how other services operate.

It is up to Google to demonstrate they are capable of keeping an 'innovative' service running long-term, not customers wearing the risk (well it should be anyway).

Really the only long term products Google has provided are those dependent on their Ad behemoth. Imagine all the games full of Ads...

> Buy games whenever you want: Yes

Not sure why a company like Google can't make a deal that will include AAA games in their subscription fees.

The architectural idea behind Stadia is interesting. The tacit assumptions here seem to be that the only games worth playing are multi-player, and also it's a real PITA to build a good gaming rig these days. The first assumption allows that there must be some shared state; and with the second, you extend the shared state to include the entire UI, and you use a video codec to ship it.

Lots of benefits to Google and game authors in terms of DRM - players no longer even have access to the game code. Nor do they have access to the "low entropy" network messaging stack. There will be literally no opportunity to write low entropy bots (although Sikuli style keyboard/mouse bots will always be possible, of course).

It's interesting to compare/contrast the trade-offs with traditional shrinkwrapped and more modern Steam/Blizzard style game distribution. It seems clear that Google wants to leapfrog Steam here, and go toe-to-toe with Netflix.

> also it's a real PITA to build a good gaming rig these days

It's like as hard as putting together some legos. For $800 you can get a great setup these days.

Do you really believe this? I've actually looked into buying a gaming rig recently, and the amount of choices one has to make is impressive. Plus, even if picking and assembling hardware is easy (and it isn't for the average person), there is the aspect of system administration. I haven't admin'd a Windows box for a long time, but it's not a responsibility I'd take lightly.

Yes, if you are even the least bit technically orientated it's extraordinary easy. There are many incredible resources online with prefab builds and suggestions. It's the easiest time in history to do so.

All of my clan friends none of whom are programmers or even in the tech industry all managed to do it fairly easily with help from guides and friends online.

IME, every time I go to buy a new PC (haven't bought a new PC since 2006!) I'm told to "wait" until the next, better buttkicker or core i13 comes out. I end up not buying anything.

LOL... well as soon as Ryzen 3000 series drops on July 7th, then get that, or see if they have some good deals on previous generations at that time. If you need something now, just go with a Ryzen 5.

Yes, I really do. Just because there are a lot of options, doesn't mean it is difficult, just that you didn't have enough knowledge at the time that you felt comfortable with to make a decision.

I'd encourage if you're going to buy to build it yourself. It is really easy, and pretty much everything is color coded. There are thousands of great videos you can watch too. Figure out what size of mobo and case you want, grab a Ryzen (my preference) CPU, and one or two Samsung M.2 drives. If you don't pick a case with a power supply, then add that to your cart and figure out what kind of graphics card you want. The RX 580 is a great deal, especially if you plan on using Linux. Grab some RAM and a compatible motherboard and you're good to go. All this for $800 or less, depending if you just stick with one hard drive.

Installing Windows is super easy. You just plug in a USB drive and startup your computer. I'm not sure what kind of system administration you're looking for. If you're looking for a bunch of bloated unnecessary spyware, then yeah you'd prob be better off buying a computer at Walmart, but then again I am surprised you're on Hacker News if that is what you're after.

It really is that easy.

In 10 years, we are going the have the Netflix, Prime and Hulu for games but unlike movies I think most titles will be available on all platforms. Not sure whether Stadia will be a success or not but someone will be the winner in this market and become the next Netflix for games.

> Stadia is not available in Hawaii.

> Stadia is not available in Guam.

Is this a bandwidth issue? Alaska is Ok though?

I was disappointed to see that as i'm in Hawaii ...i guess they don't have a data center in Hawaii or Guam?

Most likely they don't have data centers in hawaii and thus the latency would be too high to stream it from the continental US.

I'm guessing this is probably walled garden approach, Stadia without multi-platform functionality, cross play.

I doubt many AAA game Devs are ready to go all-in on Stadia, unless they are getting subsidies from Google so Stadia will compete with the Consoles, and PC elites.

What would be great though is that if a really liked an played a game i played on my Hardware PC/Console, what would be great is that i could simply invite a set friends to play onetime through the cloud anywhere and all the friends would need to do is login to Stadia and get to play instantly through chrome.

So you order some thin client for 129 bucks, pay 10 dollars a month for the service and buy the games? I was assuming Stadia to be like a sort of Netflix for games. I could just as easily buy a console and buy the games.

You get some games free with the service like Destiny 2's expanded content (same as PSN Plus/Xbox Live Gold).

Or you just buy a controller and buy the games you want and that's it. You don't need to pay $10/month. You don't need to spend $129 right now. For free, you won't get 4k, you won't get discounts, and you won't get free games, but you you don't need to pay monthly.

Strictly speaking, the minimum purchase is just one of the games on Stadia if you are going to be using Chrome on your PC and already own any HID-compatible controller.

The $10/mo gets you 4K streams (you get 1080p without a subscription), and occasional free and discounted games (like PS+ does). At launch, the free title will be Destiny 2 + all expansions (including the one releasing later this year).

The $129 gets you a Chromecast Ultra ($60), and the controller ($70), and 3 months of the subscription ($30) for you and a friend. Both the Chromecast and the controller are usable outside of Stadia.

Seems pretty competitive if you care about graphics fidelity and plan to play on more than one screen.

How are they overcoming the jarring effects of input latency? Even 20-30ms in input lag would turn a lot of people off, or is this primarily for casual games where this won't matter too much?

I played the AC Odyssey Stadia/Stream beta -- at least for that kind of single-player experience it felt comparable to console input lag with no jarring effects. I'd be interested in how it would be in twitch shooters though.

I played the beta too, but never a local copy of AC: O. I couldn't tell whether it was the game or Stadia or my connection (Google Fiber, no wi-fi), but it felt like walking through mud.

If that's was just the nature of the game, that's not a very honest choice of game. Every game I've bought for myself is in recent memory was more responsive.

I doubt twitch shooters would be playable. I've used steam's in home streaming, and platformers that require precise jumping accuracy are basically unplayable because even a fraction of a second hiccup in latency can get you killed. Even simple platformers like Crash Bandicoot can get frustratingly difficult to play over a stream. If the service gets popular enough, we might see developers making changes to help out players using Stadia, the same way that they add auto-aim for most console shooters, but disable it in the PC version.

even a fraction of a second

This is meaningless unless you can be more precise.

I usually notice input lag in first person shooters when I have V-sync / fast sync on. V-sync introduces about 1 frame of input lag (0.5 frames for fast sync), so 8~16ms is just enough to throw myself off. I would guess platformers and fighting games would have similar kinds of input lag problems.

Maybe lots of edge datacenters--that should be able to bring latency down to the single digits for most metro areas.

30ms is gigantic when most people are accustomed to sub-1ms input lag.

Do you know any console/pc setup with <1ms (or even 2-3ms) input lag?

If if there was, would it matter? 144Hz monitors draw a frame every 7ms. What does it mean to have sub-frame latency? Human reaction time is about 250ms. So from the time you see something and ate able to react, over 30 frames have rendered.

> What does it mean to have sub-frame latency?

As someone who used to play fighting games competitively I know that it makes a huge difference if it's sub 1 frame input lag or not. It's the difference of being able to execute certain combos with 1 frame links (basically the time between inputs) 100% of times instead of <50% of the time.

Which is huge in a competitive environment.

It's a typo. I missed a 0. My setup tests at about 9.5 ms input lag as do similar monitors in its class. Some monitors measure a little lower.

I think it's worth trying it out before saying 20-30 ms is jarring

I know that 20-30ms is jarring because I've experimented in doing everything possible to reduce input latency while playing competitive shooters over the years, as has any serious FPS competitor. 20-30ms is highly jarring to many. Even playing SSB Ultimate over wifi on my Switch is super annoying for me to deal with.

Here's a recent HN thread on the revolution of compensating for network latency in QuakeWorld: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19915698

You can simulate ~instantaneous input with this kind of approach, but not if the input has to travel to the server and back before it's registered locally.

Most people won't care about this, but it will certainly put a ceiling on serious people (e.g. streamers) trying to play popular, competitive games on Stadia.

I played Witcher 3 with ~45ms ping. I didn't feel any side effects, it was like playing locally (except for compression artifacts).

Does MS have a patent on offset joysticks or does noone care that you can't strafe right and look left without smashing your thumbs together? Switch the dpad and left joystick.

The current Stadia controller layout matches the PS4's controller.

It matches all typical controllers so I can see why they did it, but the normal design is flawed. The joystick has to be offset to fit all hand sizes and thumb movements properly.

Which is not a good thing IMO. The Xbox One controller has been much more comfortable for longer sessions for me.

I feel like I'm missing something in regards to how this will work. I've already got a Chromecast Ultra and I already have PS4 controllers. I will be satisfied with 1080p gaming quality. Can I try this out for free or do I have to purchase a title? Do I need a laptop/phone that is casting to my TV? Can I use my PS4 controller? If so, what would it be connecting to - my laptop/phone?

As far as I know, the Chromecast Ultra has no Bluetooth or USB support. That's why the new controller has direct Wifi support.

If I buy a game on PS4, I can be reasonably confident it will continue working for as long as my PS4 physically continues to work. And then I can sell it when I'm finished playing it.

I don't understand why I'd want to buy a game on stadia instead for the same price, not have the opportunity to resell it, and be at the mercy of Google shutting down the stadia servers whenever they feel like it.

Is there a risk that they increase the subscription price and hold all of your games hostage if you’re unwilling to pay the new premium?

Yes. That's always a risk for something you're renting.

You don't need to have a subscription to buy or play your games.

Without a subscription you can stream the games you buy at 60fps 1080p with stereo sound.

With a subscription you can stream the games you buy at 60fps 4K with 5.1 surround sound.

There's a risk that they increase the subscription price and hold _higher quality_ versions of your games hostage. Or, of course, there's the suicidal option of changing their pricing entirely such that free users can't stream the games they've bought (because what are you going to do about it?), but I'd imagine they'd shut down the entire service before trying to pull that off.

If you're concerned (or curious) about the effects of latency on things like mouse movement, here's a simple little tool to test it:

https://codepen.io/crummy/pen/YboVMQ

Personally 30ms seems fine, 50ms I can begin to tell a difference.

Why aren't licenses transferable cross-platform though? They give you the right to _use_ the product after all. One license should normally allow you to play on any platform you wish (xbox/pc/ps4/stevia) ans even transfer across platforms.

I thought Google was just search and a few services like Drive, Docs, Gmail etc Shouldn't Stadia fall under the branch of Alphabet and omit all instances of using 'Google' in their marketing? Why use the Google name for something not remotely related to search?

Because the Google brand is still orders of magnitude more recognized than Alphabet especially in mass market. I would wager a decent chunk of their target audience doesn't even know what Alphabet is

I'm not even sure why they tried to brand a conglomerate holding company anyway.

They didn't. Alphabet has zero branding, barely even a web site. The stock itself is still called GOOG.

Google is much more than that; think Google Cloud, which I think this falls into. Also even hardware (Chromecast, Pixel) falls under the Google umbrella!

Brand identity, I suspect. They're the only folks in the world who are allowed to (legally) prepend "Google" to a service or product, which is essentially free marketing.

Google is way more than search. YouTube, Cloud, Android, and Pixel are all part of Google.

$170 base price is a bit odd. Chromecast Ultra is $60, which means they are selling the controller for $110? For comparison, you can get an Xbox or PS controller for ~$60.

Where do you see $170 base price? It's $130 and includes

Ultra - $60 Controller - $60-70? 3 month Pro Subscription - $30 3 month Pro Sub for a Friend - $30 Destiny 2 Complete Edition - ~$100

So even without taking the game in account you're saving 30% of MSRP

Never mind, I was on the Canadian site for some reason. $130 is more reasonable, but I would still have expected them to sell the hardware at a discount to get more monthly subscribers.

Also, you don't get to own Destiny 2, just play it while you have the pro subscription (i.e. similar to Xbox Live Gold benefits).

You are getting the hardware at a discount, and besides this is just the founders edition, you won't need a chromecast ultra to use Stadia in 2020. You'll just need Chrome.

Good option for people with low spec pcs, mac people, linux people and people without a computer (mobile users)

Plus steam already killed fisical media on pc anyways

Overwatch support and it'd be an instabuy for me.

You can sign up for GeForce Now -- it already has overwatch. I played it yesterday on my macbook. Felt like local.

This website is a complete rip off of the Apple.com/arcade website

So what’s the line on when google shuts this one down?

Hotel WiFi will never be usable again.

Doesn't work on Firefox

Probably cause Firefox is much slower than Chromium-based browsers, especially when it comes to hardware acceleration support for video streaming in Linux.

Without including all the games in the subscription price, this feels like a really bad deal.

Lossy video over IP is the Pink Slime of gaming.

Is it just me or is google very good at a set of core products, but always puts out poor offerings when they try to expand into other spaces (G+, Glass, Stadia)

I read on another forum the best description of Stadia - "imagine if netflix charged you for each movie on top of your subscription fee"

Surprised by the lack of an ad supported free version. Seems like applying the lessons they've learned from conquering internet search might be helpful, but apparently not.

I'm not sure I follow. You buy your games like you would with any console. It's just the console is "in the cloud" and you only pay the monthly subscription if you want the higher quality stream and the occasional free game (think PS Plus).

How would an ad supported version fit into that model? I thought it was a fantastic model!

There is a free version that's limited to 1080p/60fps coming in 2020.

Games on the Pro subscription aren't free by the way either. Pro subscription just allows 4k/60fps streaming and some limited free games like Xbox Live and Playstation Plus. Most games whether on the Pro subscription or Free will still have to be bought by individuals.

I don't like the Google account being tied to everything, email, youtube, stadia, analytics, photos, etc. I won't use it because of this

You can create multiple Google accounts.

That google will associate and ban together.

Won't work. The reason multiplayer games work over the internet is game engines compensate for latency by prediction. But when I move my mouse I don't want to wait a third of a second for the view to change. The problem with Google is they test everything on local 10G networks with near zero latency and the servers are walking distance away. Then they produce these abortions of products that are killed off 2 years later.

Yeah basic input lag is about as enticing as a 2KG chunk of a plastic helmet strapped to my head.

I bet in 10 years time we will still be playing on a PC with a GPU and a monitor on the desk.

Yup, as someone who wrote action networked games when I was in gamedev this is pretty on point. You're not going to get any chance at latency correction so jitter(which tends to be bursty) on the connection is going to really hurt you.

You made me laugh when you said "servers are walking distance away". That's a lot of very long walks, friend.

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