Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Using Stadia, I actually can see how it could be the future, but only once internet catches up.

I recently moved, and that's what made Stadia so much better. Now that I have gigabit fiber with unlimited data, and a WiFi 6 router, with less congestion, the quality of the streaming has been superb. I honestly can't tell I'm streaming. And the convenience of just starting immediately back into a game, no download or install, no updates, freedom to change screens at a whim, from PC, to TV to phone, to iPad, etc.

The only thing missing is for it to have much more content, and for some guarantee from Google that it won't be killed off.

I tried other similar services, like GamePass and PSNow, but they don't work as well, the streams are lower resolution, seem to have more artifact and the latencies are higher. So whatever Google is doin seems to be working, that said the game selection is so much better on PSNow and GamePass, and the option to install the games (which gives the best image quality and lowest latency), they still compete with Stadia.

At this point, I'm just hoping some more reliable company then Google comes up with a service that's just as reliable, maybe Amazon Luna will be it, or GamePass streaming could get a lot better, or PSNow, but the one I'm most hoping for is for Valve to get onboard and offer a Steam streaming service.

Edit: I also wish they added RT support, I feel a cloud gaming service should offer best graphic settings at all time, since that's one of the advantage I'm looking from it, paying monthly for hardware that gets kept up to date.

Yeah stadia is magic. I'm a tech person, so most things I see leave me a little unimpressed. "Oh yeah, I get how they do this". With my crappy wifi and slow internet I don't udnerstand how they manage such an amazing experience. Most of the time I get full reoslution, no lag. It's amazing. I'd love to learn how they do it..

Contrast that with AirPlay 2. Locally, between 2 speakers (wifi router in the same room) and I frequently get dropouts. What ?

GeForce Now is great and you use games you buy on other platforms (eg Steam). Unlike Stadia, if the service doesn’t pan out you still have games, and access to much better sales, it’s also $5/mo and can handle Cyberpunk. I don’t see anything stadia offers over GeForce now.

Quick disclaimer, I am a Google shill who has tried both services. Overall I prefer GeForce Now slightly, I think Stadia does have some advantages. Whether or not they're worth it depends on your use case. GFN works great to supplement a gaming PC when you're traveling or laying in bed, but has some deal breakers that keep it from being the main way I play games.

If you use the free version of Stadia, it's the same resolution as GFN. If you're a monthly subscriber, the picture quality is much better than GFN because GFN doesn't support resolutions higher than 1920x1080. GFN is REALLY frustrating if you have a 1920x1200 or 1440p monitor. Because of this, GFN can complement my gaming PC (like when traveling with a crappy laptop) but never replace it. Stadia probably could replace my gaming PC if I was willing to buy the subscription.

No waiting period (its rare, but there's occasionally a wait for GeForce Now even with the founders edition)

Games don't disappear from the service like they sometimes do with GeForce Now (granted, if a game you bought disappears in GFN you can still install locally so this may be a win for GFN as long as Steam's cloud saves don't glitch on you)

Stadia doesn't require you to install a 200 megabyte app (assuming you already have Chrome installed)

GFNs video clip feature is a bit buggy for me compared to Stadia although I haven't used those features enough to tell if GFN is consistently glitchy or if I'm just unlucky with the NVidia overlay

The UI for GFN feels clunkier to me but I suppose that's personal opinion. It feels more like VPNing into a really locked down PC, where you'll hear Windows sound effects when there's errors and if a game crashes you're stuck with a Steam error and you have to restart the whole app and wait in a queue to play again. Stadia feels a bit more well-integrated to me.

I tried Stadia and it worked fine, but I own games on steam and given the size of the Google graveyard there’s no way in hell I’m going to “buy” a game on a service that will get shitcanned in a month. 1080p isn’t great, but I’m not a huge gamer and $5 is a steal.

GeForce Now supports browsers now too. Including Safari on iOS.

> I don’t see anything stadia offers over GeForce now.

One advantage is that you can play Cyberpunk for free on Stadia (after you purchase the game, which you also have to do for GFN too). Also, last I tried GFN, it seemed a bit clunkier (it felt like more of a "PC on cloud" that you managed, vs a built for web service).

Disclaimer: I work at Google, though not on Stadia.

$5/mo is as close to free as you can get and if I ever decide to get a gaming PC in the future I don’t have to buy Cyberpunk again. If stadia could play games I own independently I’d be all for it, but why risk investing in something that will almost certainly get shut down, if only because I’m far from the only person making this calculation.

One thing in the works is game studio subscriptions. UBISoft has this already and I've signed up for 14.99. Right now it is only supported over Luna (Amazon's streaming game service) but Stadia support is coming soon. For large studios this model makes a lot of sense. I would use it for EA Sports as well. I don't need to "own" the game, but I do want to own a relationship with the publisher that will let me play their game anywhere. It'll be interesting to see how major consoles react to this where licensing doesn't really let publishers give their own direct user's access to titles on the console. I can see game streaming being a big win for publishers and a big loss for consoles which are essentally middle men.

Yeah that makes sense. As they start making more money from in game ads and user tracking I suspect that subsidy may make subscriptions more profitable on publisher end as well.

I think they're pretty even now for the user, but Stadia has some pretty big business advantages long term that may already be evident in that GeForce Now has queues and Stadia doesn't. The main thing is Nvidia probably doesn't have as much work it can do on machines that aren't being used, whereas the Stadia machines can probably be doing useful work even when the gamers are all sleeping. Stadia can therefore justify having way more capacity than is usually needed, which means having more machines closer to users (lower latency) and being able to deal with peaks better. For everything cloud-related, scale is such a big advantage it seems like it'll be hard long term for Nvidia to compete with Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.

Stadia also doesn't have to pay the Windows tax

Does GeForce run on nvidia’s own equipment end to end?

All it takes is a neighbor with a router on the same channel as you or a little bit of rf noise(usb3 has a clock rate that tends to do this) and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Back where I did gamedev we designed gameplay specifically for network usage(predictive based design) or had time-rewind, or both(ala half-life/cs). I just don't see how this works unless you're okay with a quality bar well below what a local client will provide.

just use an ethernet cable and youll have no wifi interference

You make it sound like this is an easy option for everyone, but it's not - your router is likely to be where the phone/fibre socket is, and that's not always going to be where your PC is. If you know what you're doing, you might be able to pull a cable and install a new socket, but that's definitely no lt for everyone.

not everyone is going to have wifi interference either

There is nothing complicated about pulling wire. There are tons of videos on Youtube. People just convince themselves there is all this stuff they can't do - and what do you know! When you don't even try you can't do it.

Amazing.

Take a look at Shadow https://shadow.tech/. It's different in that you manage your own gaming PC, but in some of ways that is preferable. With the Steam stream-to-device functionality you can effectively use it on devices that aren't directly supported by Shadow too.

> You can play any Windows game, not just selectively supported ones

This is a big selling point for Shadow vs the other platforms. I was considering doing something similar with an AWS image but if this is custom tailored to “just work” I’ll definitely give it a go.

> It's different in that you manage your own gaming PC

I don't see any mention of this on the site, only:

"After you subscribe, we create your Cloud PC in our nearest datacenter."

Unless I misunderstood in that it's not your own PC, but an instance of one you have full control over.

Sorry for the ambiguity, I only meant that you manage installing games (and sometimes even drivers) yourself, as opposed to having a fully managed service where everything "just works" like Stadia. You're right that you don't get your own specific PC, which is actually part of the appeal. The hardware is abstracted away like in any cloud service, so you don't need to concern yourself with upgrading it or fixing it.

Streaming is the future but the Stadia business model is not. What happens if (or perhaps when?) Google decides to kill it? I'm probably in Google's target market for Stadia - I don't own a gaming PC and have reliable gigabit fiber. But I'm not prepared to drop vast sums into building a library on Stadia if I could lose everything. They need to work on a more sustainable business model (for them and consumers) but in the meantime they need to work with publishers so existing players can request Steam keys. If they did that I would be willing to give Stadia a shot.

I presume they would give you digital copies you could play on your own computer considering that is exactly what they did for the assassin's creed odyssey beta I participated in for stadia a few years ago.

I worked on Google Fiber wifi routers ~5 years ago years ago and got to be one of the earliest dogfooders of Stadia. My personal take at the time was that gigabit internet needed a killer app, and cloud gaming could be it. Glad to see that dream being sort-of realized!

Have you tried Nvidia’s GeForce Now? I would be curious to hear your opinion of it compared to the other similar services you’ve tried. I’ve heard the most good things about nvidias offering in this space.

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