Comment by drusepth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drusepth | Hacker News Reader

I know it's cool to hate on Stadia still (but less so than it used to be, now that everyone seems to just use it as a Cyberpunk console...) but this move makes sense to me.

1. First-party AAA games are a huge investment (in time and money), especially for a company without any experience in building them. Starting a first-party game studio is a huge risk (financial and planning) that I'm not surprised didn't pan out.

2. Stadia has a reputation as the "indie game streamer" platform in a lot of circles after such a large % of their first games were older and from smaller dev cos. The unpolished first-party AAA game (if it ever came out) wouldn't do much to help this reputation; focusing on partnerships and getting new releases on the platform seems like it'd do far more for the service's future.

3. Unpopular opinion but I don't think exclusives should exist for any platform. It may be good for business but it's bad for most gamers.

4. Politically, it feels like we're about to move into a period where companies need to be way more careful with monopolistic moves into new markets. "Owning the platform and the content" seems to be a wedge-prone position that a lot of companies are worried about (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc) and this kind of just clears Stadia/Google from having to worry about that on "their console".

FWIW I have almost 100 hours on Stadia and 49 friends online in Stadia at the time of writing this comment, but YMMV, I am most definitely in some kind of Stadia-bubble, I probably have some confirmation bias, and this may also be wishful thinking based on the fact that I want Stadia (and cloud gaming as a whole) to succeed.

I get all the doom and gloom about this announcement, but it's exactly what I would be doing if I ran Stadia. Don't waste money trying to build first-party games when you don't have scale, spend all your money on scaling. Specifically:

- Spend budget on getting more AAA titles released on Stadia on launch day. (like they did with Cyberpunk)

- Spend budget giving huge discounts on AAA titles to attract more users.

- Spend the money to get integrated into every Smart TV platform (Roku, Google TV, LG Web OS, Tizen, Apple TV, ect.). TV Boxes should include a Stadia controller in their box and a few months free.

- Advertise that you can play AAA console games on the TV / Streaming box you already own.

These are all things that consoles and existing game stores do extremely well already, and the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job.

Amazon Luna, GeForce Now, Shadow, running Parsec in the cloud and paying by the minute, xCloud, and PS Now all better Stadia by offering game subscriptions or more features or are more sustainable by being cheaper in the case of GeForce Now for 4K.

If Amazon Luna/GeForce Now can succeed as upstarts, it says Google should've likely focused on a game subscription service or offering a standalone game streaming platform. They're closer to being the later with this announcement, but not until I can play my Steam/GoG/Itch/Epic libraries on it.

I have a few hours in AC:Odyssey and BL3 on Stadia, it's a good service that has improved a lot too. It's still tough to recommend if you're not the most occasional gamer.

>the last two are net deficits for Stadia if you have an ISP or router that's not up to the job.

If we're speaking in net good/bad, I'd wager the last two end up being net positives when you consider how many people think their ISP/router isn't up to the job (and therefore don't try Stadia at all) compared to how many actually aren't up to the job.

The minimum speed Stadia requires is 10 Mbps, or 35 Mbps for 4K streaming; I'd personally recommend at least 20 Mbps without 4K though, since it's "playable" below that at the cost of graphics artifacting. To put these numbers into context though, Speedtest/Ookla reported an average USA broadband speed of 135 Mbps and an average worldwide broadband speed of 64 Mbps for 2019 [1], rising every year.

It's a lot harder to measure latency, though, which is the biggest variable IMO for whether Stadia works for you. It doesn't work well on my parents' HughesNet satellite internet, but I regularly got <4ms ping when I lived in Kansas City and rarely go above 10ms round trip here in Oregon (on Comcast, even!). They seem to have done really well with their edge node placements, because even in small cities like Joplin/Bentonville (both around 50k pop.) and in Netarts (800 pop.!) the latency feels on par with native games. Luna latency here in Portland spikes to multiples seconds at a time on occasion, and GeForce Now was pretty much unplayable in many cities/towns outside of Kansas City back in the Midwest (but seems to work fine most of the time here). In my experience, Stadia's been by far the most consistent experience wherever I went.

I'd wager that the the subset of [people Stadia would work well for but they think their connection isn't good enough so they don't try it] is larger than the subset of [people that would try Stadia but don't have a good enough connection for it].

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/global-index-2019-in...

Latency is important as you say, and I would say that it's highly variable depending on the router and ISP you have. This Google mesh WiFi update made a huge difference for me: https://support.google.com/wifi/answer/10087384 and it was only made last September.

Connection speeds have improved since Stadia launched, but you will almost certainly go through a 1TB cap before the month is over if you have 2 TVs streaming 4K. This is really the main reason people considering Stadia might still say no, and there aren't a lot of ISPs left without caps: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/at-le... People could just pay an extra ~$30/month for unlimited internet, but that will pay for a console in a year or two.

> I know it's cool to hate on Stadia still

What is up with the Stadia people thinking anyone on Earth gives them a single moment of thought whatsoever? No one who doesn't use it cares enough to Stadia to hate it, trust me.

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