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Comment by supergirl | Hacker News Reader

Stadia just doesn't make sense. it's only a matter of time until Google ends it completely.

Assuming they give the controller kit for free, Stadia costs $10/month, so in 4 years you'd have paid $480, almost the same as a new console. plus, the price of the console likely isn't an issue if you can afford buying a couple of games that cost $60 each.

then you have the latency problem in Stadia and the fact that you can't really play it from everywhere (even though it's in the cloud); you still need the chromecast, right? they might as well beef up the chromecast and make it a regular console. the newest chromecast already can play android games I think.

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$10/month is just for the 'Pro tier' which gives you ""4K""

But the implementation is shitty and it depends on the game and the devs on how "4K" the title is. Some games have no pro tier version, and some have like 1440p30. The free tier is 1080p60ish and you pay for the games you want.

Input latency is really a non-issue. I don't think there's more to it. It's just not something you have to think about — until you do, but it's been pretty rare for me.

Also you can play it on every desktop platform via Chrome, and via Safari on iPads and iPhones. Works on Android too.

And of course Google is going to kill it probably soon :)

I have to wonder where you live if you had no input latency.

It seems to me that statements like that are reserved for people who live relatively near a datacenter or have extremely high internet speeds, or sometimes both.

The latency issue seems to be a bit of a myth; every discussion of Stadia is filled with people who assume it's a problem, and multiple Stadia users saying they've never encountered it.

Selection bias, not myth.

Right. I would never even bother trying Stadia because my internet connection does not pass the minimum requirements. And because I'm in Canada, buying internet that would be fast enough would be pretty expensive.

So I have no idea what the input lag would be, but I can't imagine it would be any good.

I live in Finland, I don't think we are a priority country when it comes to Google's datacenters. We have geniunely unlimited data caps though which helps for sure.

I've been playing on wifi with a 100/10 Mbps connection. There's sometimes these lagspikes if I play in browser, but the general input latency has never been something I've noticed.

I'm a casual gamer at most, and maybe I'm not noticing it as much as some CSGO-pro would.

Bandwidth, data cap and latency are orthogonal to each other

There is a large Google datacenter in Finland.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/

Stadia doesn't cost anything per month to use. I can see how their horrible wording on the website and insistence on signing you up for the 10$ a month Stadia Pro can make it seem otherwise. I actually signed up and paid for a month because I thought it was necessary. I asked for a refund the next day and they refused me.

You can play it on any device (no chromecast necessary) with basically any input method. I'm a huge fan of the tech and would use it more often while traveling with a laptop if it had more than a handful of games. Or a search bar in the ux.

As usual Google does 80% of the work and gives up when it realizes the last 20% is the real hard stuff.

> I asked for a refund the next day and they refused me.

If they misled you into paying, that seems like straight up theft.

Fundamentally the responsibility is my own. They did not make my job discerning what I needed to use the service easy though.

Aren’t there refund laws that should require them to refund you 1 day into a month ling subscription?

No idea. It was $10 and I ended up using the Pro discount to make it worth it, so really no hard feelings!

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