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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Stadia is a project that should never gotten off the drawing board and it takes only two words to kill it.

Input lag.

That's not a technical problem. It's physics.

In the very least it should've operated off existing launchers eg buy it in Stream and you can use it in Stadia. But honestly, the games where input lag isn't an issue is such a small subset that Stadia was only ever going to be a niche product.

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Funny then that nobody I know that uses it complains about the input lag. (Similarly to how input lag in TVs etc is not something people outside dedicated gamers really care about. Plenty people are quite tolerant/don't know what they are missing)

How is this not survivor bias?

Have you used it recently? People are definitely blowing the whole input lag thing out of proportion. Sure it might not hold up if you're a competitive gamer, but for the leisure gamer it's definitely not noticeable assuming you have a decent internet connection.

I have a gigabit connection with ~10ms latency and Stadia feels awful even for single-player games.

Yeah but when did you try it? They've made tons of improvements since it was first launched.

Of course it is to a degree (I don't remember anyone I personally know complaining about the latency, but there is very likely a self-selection that those that would didn't try or didn't talk about it). But I'm not sure why that matters when addressing the claim that the product is a priori useless?

Seems like they were just citing anecdata anyway, so calling out a statistical error doesn't seem worthwhile.

I believe their main point is that humans are much more tolerant of latencies than is commonly assumed. I remember reading about Carmack's early work with VR and sensor delays and screen refresh delays on the order of 100ms and as high as 400ms and it still being enjoyable[1]. At 60fps you've got about 16ms per frame to work with, and I'm sure the human mind doesn't need input -> change in image within a single frame (though I'm sure pro gamers would notice).

I even see people using and enjoying shadowpc + vr headsets, where delay between head turn and change in image can be nauseating.

[1] https://www.pcgamesn.com/virtual-reality-john-carmacks-battl...

In my experience, it's indistinguishible from local play.

On average I get a single noticeable slowdown event every 3 sessions, so for me it's worth it

I'm on cable, 200/20 with a ping in the mid ten ms range.

10ms ping is about the best possible case. You're practically living inside the servers if that's the case. What if it's more like 50ms?

I can't answer that but i can say that i'm probably 100+ miles from the nearest google dc.

Not sure if any of the network checkers run on gcp

Yes and no, they made incredible strides to get that lag to a better position. It's much better than expected. I had an actually good experience in a racing game on XCloud.

Have you actually tried it? I didn't really notice any lag at all. I believe the Stadia controller connects directly to WiFi to skip the hop on whatever you happen to be playing on and reduce latency. Was actually pretty surprised.

Input lag while streaming is not that bad on a good connection. It won’t work for online FPS games (at least not if you want to win), but for slower FPS, RPGs, etc, it’s ok. This is based on my experience with Geforce Now, I haven’t tried Stadia.

As for the business model though, you’re totally right. No way I’m going to buy a game and be locked into Stadia. Not only would I be prevented from playing locally, who knows how long Stadia will be around at this rate?

I don't know I'm playing Red Dead Remption 2 on Stadia at the moment and I haven't noticed this issue with input lag.

Have you actually tried it? At least with the Stadia controller, Destiny plays fine. I was pleasantly surprised.

I've lived in three cities, none of them 'big', with no input lag problems. I have no idea where they put the machines, but I'm rather confident it's at more places than the GCP datacenters based on my ping times. They typically would float around the 15-20 range, which generally is forgettable. When you add in TV input lag, and controller lag, it's rather unnoticeable(to me, of course, but maybe I'm old).

Luna on the other hand I tried and you could definitely feel it. They are definitely running those at AWS DC's, as I didn't live near one.

I agree that input lag makes it niche, but niche and experimental can be okay. I think the real problem is their pricing model. Stadia is well set up for a Netflix style pricing model where you spend $X a month to try out an experimental idea that works well for some people but not for others. However, having to pay full price for games on a platform that might not work well for you and might even disappear in the near future is just non-sensical.

While not 'core' to Stadia's pricing model, it does support Ubisoft+ where you pay $X a month for access to all the Ubisoft games on Stadia.

I literally have less ping on Stadia than the latency of a wireless controller. I’ve had several friends play on it and nobody noticed any lag.

I doubt you have tried it. It's completely impressive from the latency side. There is a certain budget you have to work with before latency is detectable by most people. More important is your display latency or Bluetooth input latency. Bluetooth latency was a big part of the reason for the wifi pro controller.

GeForce Now has shown that when you depend on existing launchers like Steam, your service's library is can change based on the whims of 3rd parties

That was mostly Stadia's fault for tying up exclusive streaming rights. If they die all the better for the industry.

The steam games that I'm thinking of (chiefly MS Flight Sim) aren't on Stadia

I really hope that there will be a court case that tells the game companies to stuff their objections where they belong and makes it clear that every game I've bought on Steam can be played on Geforce Now. I bought the game. I play it on a computer. The game companies should have zero rights to decide whether that computer sits under my desk or in a data center.

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