Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses
kotaku.com.au
kotaku.com.au
Not just marketing but greater business strategy. I knew it was over when you still had to pay for the games would not be the “Netflix of gaming”. I double knew it was over when I watched Microsoft buy Bethesda for $7.5 billion. If you can’t make moves like that, you aren’t going to outcompete
License management isn't sexy, but it's the most important thing behind somehow getting my DSL connection to not have more than one frame of latency to start with.
As a business model I'd much rather have an all you can eat Netflix model like Xbox Game Pass (decent library, bad streaming tech) or a cloud gaming PC that I could install and run anything (Like Shadow but not bankrupt). Stadia had the worse business model of them all. Special hardware costs, subscription fee, pay for games at prices higher than retail, a tiny library, and know your licenses will be lost once Google inevitably shuts down the service.
[1] - Existing "founders" can keep their current price, under the caveat that apparently if a single billing detail changes the price goes to the current market price, presumably to avoid account transfers or sales.
My laptop doesn't handle monster hunter well (my desktop does), i wanted to play with my wife, but the game was pulled out.
This make it challenging: I have a steam library, but I can't trust what I can and cannot play. In the end it's easier to buy another desktop.
Well, unless crypto fucks up the chip world. Sigh.
I meant to get into GCP in this thread with regard to how it's part of Google's pathology. They have a hammer and everything looks like a nail ala Stadia even when the industry is pushing compute for experiences to the edge, Google is always looking to centralize.
Support is absolutely urgent. If you don't seem to be taking your platform seriously by doing things like day 1 support for your own hardware, you shouldn't be surprised that consumers don't take it seriously either.
I think the engineering vs. marketing dichotomy oversimplifies things. Many companies with a lot of engineering talent a poor at product development, partially because they don't really internalize it's not the same thing. Putting a world class engineering team on the wrong problem isn't going to end up somewhere great.
Even if Google absolutely nailed the marketing the usage would still be far too small to justify the outlay. Unless Google invests massively in expanding the service it will die. There's just no way to make the numbers work.
By launching and abandoning products, users are rightly skeptical of investing any capital (time, money) on Google products. This notion of 'fail fast' is a myopic approach. Yes, if a product doesn't make a huge impact then 'fail fast' prevents you from throwing good money after bad. But the user base you build gets pissed off, doubly so when you build a good product and then yank it away. So on the next go around, first adopters are hesitant to even bother. It's better to just not launch the product in the first place.
Stadia is so bad, I have a founder’s edition controller sitting in my living room unopened. It’s not marketing that’s the problem. It’s that if your games can barely do 1080p on a 350mbps WiFi, maybe your product is complete garbage.
With Steam I guess I'd be able to find a crack to get the games to work if Valve goes bankrupt, and with GOG I don't even have to worry about that because the game installers are DRM-free.
Personally I don’t care if they pull the plug: it’s unlikely I’d want to play the same game again, and if I do, I have no problem purchasing it again.
They would have made more by developing or buying a game engine and tying their services into it.
At this point google is to greedy for it’s own good. It wants the whole vertical from day one. A consistent Google scale hug of death.
I would disagree here, they are the largest advertising company...
I doubt Stadia suffered from a lack of exposure, I just think that many don't like the model they are offering.
There are other such services from Steam or NVidia and I don't think they are lacking compared to Stadia. And those did even get less exposure while Stadia was held up as a revolution.
I hope Google doesn't neglect the tech in favor of marketeers. That industry is overheated as it is.
It worked really well, but I was instantly disappointed by the game selection. When you advertise being able to play the latest, coolest games to me, I expect there to be a selection of the coolest, latest, games. I was really thinking I'd be able to play the latest, Doom incarnation and such. If I recall correctly, Doom was there but at a separate additional cost that made it very unattractive to me.
I think I did the free trial plus one addition month of paid before I gave up on it.
But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution. The indie folks couldn't be wooed away from Steam, because Google just isn't going to match Valve's creator services community. Google isn't willing to drop the kind of cash MS or Sony do to buy themselves exclusives...
Frankly the best thing for the industry would be to spin it off and sell it to Valve. A Steam/Stadia would rule the world.
It helps that Steam also works offline, or on an alleged DSL connection out in the sticks, or when you're visiting your parents who still have the same awful wifi router you told them to get replaced 15 years ago, or …
Even games with components that have expired licenses are kept on the account, your access is never really revoked -- even a VAC ban won't lose you your library.
You can't mod a Stadia game...
Ehh, I prefer to buy from GOG when I can for that exact reason.
Stadia, meanwhile, works like Netflix. Stop paying, or just anger the Stadia gods in some way, and all your games go away. I like owning things I pay for. Many other people do to. So it's gratifying to see that this one time, we don't have to have our rights trampled on. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
People get banned on Steam and lose access to games too. I know Valve promised you that they aren't renting those games, but if you look at the contract you'll find all you have is a license. And there have been multiple circumstances already where Valve has kicked users and/or lost licenses to its content.
A long time ago, there was an official statement to the effect of "if steam goes down, we'll release a patch to unlock your games" or something to that effect.
I think that was before third parties could even sell on Steam.
Could also be apocryphal, or photoshopped emails and screencaps and the like. It almost certainly doesn't hold true today.
But at the very least, you can download your steam games today, and if it shuts down at some point in the future, you can modify or crack those local files and executables to be playable; multiplayer systems notwithstanding. There's a path forward. With Stadia games, there is nothing without original publisher or developer intervention.
Is it, though? You're really renting a server. Other companies who rent you remote game servers have gone broke, because it wasn't cost effective. Google can afford losses to get market share, but at some point the price has to go up.
Outside of some AAA RPG and adventure games, most of the rest of the truly big games feature PVP content as their main selling point. Fifa, Call of Duty, Madden, Halo, Destiny, Fortnite, Apex Legends, DOTA, League of Legends, etc... they all live and die on network latency. They are the biggest of the big and if your platform doesn't have them AND run them well, you're dead.
Hard to get someone to invest in your product knowing that your product is going to suck for the games people really want to play.
I'm still not sure why Amazon hasn't bought Discord and Valve. Discord makes perfect sense as a complement to Twitch, and Valve would ensure that they basically own the entire PC gaming space.
Look at No More Robots titles on Xbox Games Pass (which is also on PC).
The problem is that Google just didn't put any money into buying up rights for titles. Plus, as other mentioned, the outdated pricing model. It should have been $20/month for unlimited gameplay of any title with maybe a discount tier of $15 for 900p.
Of course, modern games are built around expecting a lot more latency in the system, but having your input a frame behind to start with, before adding render time, encoding time, decoding time, and then display processing makes for a tough experience.
I think this is the most important part of the ordeal: lower latency/shorter input-stimuli loop feels better and games are all about feeling good.
I wonder how Google of all players missed it because back in 2010s they were talking how fractional second delays hurt click metrics.
Or - and this is the kicker - in an area that has lots of Stadia users. Which makes sense - more load, more demand = service gets worse. But that means that you end up with a messed up "regional playability" curve, where the best experience - if not the only good experience - is had by people in areas close enough to the servers, but where Stadia is not too popular as to be overloaded.
That particular caveat has gotten better over time, from what I understand. Throw more hardware at the problem, open more datacenters in the same region, and that helps deal with load. But it certainly left a well-deserved poor first-impression for many people.
Pro FPS players consistently choose monitors with the highest refresh rates available.
This informal experiment is quite convincing
Does High FPS make you a better gamer?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA
A 60hz refresh rate corresponds to 16.67 milliseconds frame time, and a 240hz rate corresponds to 4.2 milliseconds.
The issue here is not reaction time, but "feel". Even a moderately skilled player can test this for themselves by switching between refresh rates. Specifically the "feel" is the relationship between moving the mouse and the shift of perspective on the screen. Low refresh rates cause players to over correct their aim as the gaps between frames are larger, and the motion on the screen is less smooth.
Even then, if the market is restricted to non-competitive players, that's a huge majority of the market.
People compare it to Netflix. It is convenient, true, but I canceled that just recently anyway. It is probably me, but it did incentivise me to watch crap.
The others all die a dramatic and fiery death.
Capcom had RE Village on there same day as the other stores.
EA are also releasing games on there.
So it seems at least some of the big publishers aren't that against the idea.
Assuming that the industry would do all of their work for them, and that 99.99999% of the responsibility lied anywhere other than Google themselves seems like a very Google thing to do. It is, predictably, the kind of arrogance that begets a (perceived to be) floundering product like this.
The system launched with a pitiful fraction of the features they advertised that it could and would do. It launched with many important questions unanswered - often purposely, because everyone already knows the answers and those answers are bad and answering them could only hurt Google further.
It still lacks many of those features, too.
The story of how their reveal event's gaming history display case came to be - the one that showcased several great failures and blunders in gaming history, with Stadia as the next in line - is an excellent microcosm of the kind of decision making that went into the Stadia project as whole.
EDIT:
> But... the big studios don't want it because they don't want to lose control of distribution.
There have been many games on streaming services that did not make their way to early Stadia. Many that may still not be on Stadia - I haven't done the research lately, so I can't say.
Moving to a pure streaming solution - one where they don't have to provision and manage the hardware and all that sticky ugliness - is an absolute dream for many game publishers. Console hardware control is a small part of that dream, and it's less important than the rest. Stadia very well could have been the mass-accepted vehicle that delivered on the rest of that dream, had Google executed well.
To this day, I'm still astonished that they've dropped the ball, the slam dunk, this hard. They're limping along when they very well could have had their revolution, had they done a better job.
I know folks at AAA game studios/publishers and the primary reason I've repeatedly heard is: Stadia requires that we port to Linux.
Completely insane requirement. Steam, meanwhile, is making Linux gaming better than ever with their investment in Proton (which is incredible, wine has never been so good) and Nvidia's game streaming service "just works" and you bring your own games (just log into steam).
Stadia is screwed from the get-go by thrusting inane requirements onto their potential partners. If they had huge market power, maybe it'd fly, but it's effectively a new console as far as publishers are concerned.
Instead it should just work with PC games. End of story.
They purposefully hamper the systems though. So even a game like Destiny 2 is running at Medium settings on a datacenter. Just to be able to containerize it and all that noise.
You're right that it should just work from the devloper's perspective. I personally think this is all possible with existing tech, but Google failed to deliver. Game devs have weird gripes about porting to Linux.
They're doing ports to Xbone and Switch and PS5 already, and that's fine. But running on Linux is somehow insane?
No. Porting engines across complicated SDKs and build environments is what these studios do every day of their existence, and virtually all the backends run fine on Linux already.
Again, the reason the big studios aren't on board is because they don't want to be part of an app store ecosystem. It's not a technical thing at all.
Depending on the engine it can be quite a lot of time. Especially if you don’t already have a Vulkan backend.
Therefore if you don’t think the additional sales are worth the expense, including the opportunity cost of your devs, why bother?
Ports to Xbox, Switch and PS5 have a long established record of making money, those devices have huge established userbases and they have very good toolsets for doing the ports. The engines will have already been ported.
None of those are true for Linux, and the toolsets for doing so are not mature in the slightest, for a completely unproven market.
They aimed for 4K out of the gate, but the sorts of people who care about 4K gaming are going to own their own high-end hardware. Stadia's potential customers don't care about 4K, they care about 1080P working really well. Here, Stadia loses to the competition. 1080P gaming from GeForce Now looks a good deal better than 1080P gaming from Stadia. The graphics settings can be adjusted to be higher than those of Stadia (where the settings cannot be adjusted), and there are fewer compression artifacts, especially in dark scenes which look awful in Stadia.
To return to the payment/ownership model, GeForce Now is better not only in that it doesn't ask the customer to buy the games a second time, it's also better in that the customer can freely switch between GeForce Now and their own hardware, through the magic of cloud saves. Constrained to your laptop for a while? No problem, use GeForce Now. Stadia, on the other hand, has made a conscious effort to separate itself from the PC gaming platform. Cloud saves won't sync between Stadia and your own machine, as Stadia tries to present itself as a whole new platform, separate from PC gaming and from the various consoles.
> geforce now or the various smaller players where it's basically just renting a windows VM with a low latency connection, so they can just play their existing library
Not quite, as GeForce Now will only run officially supported games.
> or a maybe slightly better latency
Not in my experience. I've found GeForce Now and Stadia to both be very good in terms of latency.
Looking forward to playing Resident Evil 8: Village once I finish Biohazard.
That's an entry-level feature on a phone, let alone a tablet or laptop.
The gaming industry has >$100 billion of revenue per year. Surely these kinds of costs are/were expected. Microsoft famously lost money on every Xbox sold for many years.
According to a Bloomberg article from January 2017 (just before the release of the Switch) concerning Nintendo's yearly earnings report,
> While game consoles are usually sold at a loss early in their life cycles, the Switch will be profitable from the start, Nintendo said.
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170131084504/https://www.bloom... (the URL also works without web.archive.org, but the current version contains a paywall)
You are correct, the most technical correct. However a more closer to reality is > dozens of trillions USD. Remember, gaming industry is bigger than both movie AND music industry combined.
As of 2018, video games generated sales of US$134.9 billion annually worldwide.
But my approach to games is very similar - once I play it through I rarely go back to it. Outside of some strategy games like Civilization, of course.
It really feels like Stadia could have led to a new kind of gaming market, but they didn't. And they don't seem to have the leadership to make that happen.
If Google is (officially) that confident Stadia is doing well why don't they officially commit to support the product for the next X years?
The way Google communicates does not help, on one hand they say everything is fine, on the other hand they just closed their dev studio days after telling their employees everything's fine. It's hard for them to make Stadia seem even riskier than it looks right now.
Maybe it's just my bubble (HN, tech twitter, like-minded friends) but it certainly seems like everyone in it is loathe to adopt new Google stuff, precisely because they have a reputation going back 15+ years of mercilessly killing anything they release, no matter how great it is.
I would bet if they commit to maintaining a product for x years (and continually extend that timeline) they'd see a lot more use.
That community is full to the gunwales with people who will complain endlessly about framerates and dropped frames, both in console space and PC space. Seriously. People piss and moan endlessly about this stuff. I find it pretty hard to take because I've been playing games since the 8-bit era and, back then, your typical 3D game had rudimentary wireframe or filled polygon graphics (if you were lucky enough to own a 16-bit machine), polygon counts were incredibly low, and texture fills were practically non-existent. And even with all these simplifications they'd often run at low double-digit frame rates, often dropping down into single digits. Nevertheless for the kind of games they were they remained playable. So I find the contemporary over-obsession with framerate and slowdown a little grating. Even so, I can absolutely see why it's an issue for - particularly - online shooters and racers.
Why do I bring this up?
Google stadia streams games the way Netflix streams films and TV shows. I'm right now looking at a ping trace for a server at a data centre in London, about 60 miles from where I'm sat. Mostly it's in the 16 - 20ms range, but there are quite a few ~30ms packets in there. At 60fps that's typically 1 - 2 frames of latency. This is over a BT fibre broadband connection.
If I switch to tethering to my mobile phone, where I can get a strong 4G connection, my ping time to the same box goes up to, at best ~50ms, and varies wildly peaking all the way out at around 180ms, with the odd outlier packet in the 200 - 250ms range. At 60fps that's typically 3 - 11 frames of latency, and 15 - 16 frames of latency in the worst case.
Now you could argue that for casual, and possibly even some less casual, single player games that doesn't matter. And that's true. But that's not the marketing for Stadia that I was exposed to, where Google were touting a lot of more "serious" or "hardcore" games. For shooters or racing games those latency figures are just way too high, and even on my more stable broadband connection the low ping times aren't stable enough for a great playing experience.
Going back to the Netflix analogy, I generally get decent resolutions, and for at least some of the time (where content supports it) I can view in 4k. But there are drop-offs. I'd expect to see something similar with Google Stadia but, whilst this is tolerable for film and TV most of the time, it's going to make for a pretty annoying gaming experience.
Maybe one day a service like Google Stadia can be a success but it's too early: right now the connectivity isn't nearly good enough for it to sell in the kind of numbers that it would need to in order to be that success. This service is like one of the dinosaurs in The Sound of Thunder: it's already dead but it's too stupid to realise it.
3 frames of latency borders on unplayable if you want to make a game that flirts with human reaction time - one popular sweet spot of "fun" in the design space.
You can definitely feel 2 or 3 frames of added latency at 60fps. No matter the game. And the games of old did run at 60fps and there's definitely value to the ones that do nowadays too. Even if the AAA games moved away from low-latency gaming in general.
A ton of people will run mental calculations, assert it must add at least x ms of latency so it can't possibly work, but just try it. It's free. It works.
I have been PC gaming for 25 years. I have a $3k+ rig with a 3080. I'm very attuned to input lag and fidelity. Is Stadia as good as playing locally? No, of course not, but it's far far better than I imagined it could be. You might be surprised.
So what did we see with that genre on Stadia? Well, Stadia not only adds different input/response latency for both players in a fighting game, but it also doesn't colocate the matches to the same server in between players (or same running game instance); so the matches have the standard lag between Stadia data centers on top of the user <-> stadia delay. Unsatisfying for both players, and inferior to alternative ways of playing those games.
Ironically, player-led initiatives for that kind of hosting - to deal with poor netcode of older fighting games - have shown that the very idea is sound, and can deliver a better experience e.g. Parsec game tournaments. Not optimal, but better. Google has simply failed to deliver.
Part of the problem is up to the developers to solve, but the buck stops with Google. Stadia needs to deliver a world class experience on its merits, and it needs to give developers the tools and guidance and working examples - if not real games - showing how to do so. And it needed to be doing that on Day -1.
Or they can just say "Stadia is for genres X, Y and Z", and only spend their time and money courting games and developers in those genres, and everyone involved would probably be better off for it. They could have - and still can - set grand but realistic expectations and deliver on them.
For most games and most users, you'll get the feel within a minute and forget you're not playing locally. I played quite a bit of Destiny 2 streaming and it was quite playable. Again, no comparison against my powerful local rig but I don't think Google/Amazon/NVidia are targeting 3080 owners for their streaming services.
Theoretical concern or not, if that can't work flawlessly over my broadband connection then I don't see how Stadia can: it's not magic.
Sadly it doesn't actually matter how well it works for other people because it has to work well for me on my internet connection. The evidence I have so far suggests it's not going to be that great, so I'm not going to pay for it.
The reason this doesn't bug the heck out of me already is because I don't actually play that many online games: I'm a fan of single player story driven campaigns, and (to a lesser extent) single player sandbox experiences, as well as arcadey racing games with couch and online play. Finally, I also play a lot of more retro titles.
These are all experiences that work really well when played on local hardware that absolutely aren't going to improve via any kind of streaming experience as those services currently exist.
Stadia plays Destiny at 60fps (pretty sure Xbox One is 30). So it sometimes actually feels as good or better than on consoles imo. In any case, since it's free it's worth checking out just to see what the tech is like. You might reaffirm your opinions, but you might reconsider them too.
Sadly this has made them go bankrupt - but have been bought out recently so the future is uncertain.
Point being the market is more than ripe for this tech to accelerate - and shadow has had 1 year waiting lists, for years, so it's weird to me that more money isn't poured into this space.
It seems inherently complicated to provide the required CPU and GPU resources in an elastic way, when most gamers play at the same peak hours.
Then I found out that if I wanted the 4K streaming it'd be an extra tenner a month!
At which point it is cheaper to buy a 2nd hand PS4. And, that way, I can buy 2nd hand games if I want.
I am far more comfortable with the traditional players in this space: Sony, Steam and Microsoft not to f* gaming like Facebook and google f* the web
Now imagine when you can stream those apps through Stadia such that essentially Chromebook + Stadia => every PC
Which is to say, Google can always pivot enterprise apps.
I couldn't find how much Google has spent on Stadia, but it doesn't seem to have approached it as the long-term, expensive investment that it required.
If you've got a gaming rig with an NVIDIA GPU Moonlight performs much better.
I don't 100% grok this, i.e. it seems like good news where the article implies bad news, but other media outlets mentioned there's a 4x spike in gamepad usage in last 6 weeks on the web, and it correlates to Stadia's free tier release: https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popula...
Give people a 'Halo' exclusive, or go home.
80% of the business plan relies on hard hitting amazing exclusive titles.
And of course massively subsidized hardware.
And a long term vision.
It's sad because the model looked kind of cool, I'll never get to try it out ...
Stadia flat refused to give me a refund.
It's really sad. If Stadia was like Netflix I'd be cheerleading the hell out of it to everyone I know. The technology is incredible but Google executives don't live on this planet anymore.
Where? In the HN bubble? Ok.
The relatively tiny tech community's opinion doesn't matter at all to the general public who just want to accomplish their communication and search tasks. HN isn't even a blip on the radar.
I cannot comment on the early years of the search engine since I was about 8 years old at the time, but I find it likely that it was similar back in the day.
View a Reddit thread. Not exactly representative I know, but pretty normie imo.
The other issue is that their advertising is so bad that most of the regular gaming audience has no idea what it even is. My housemate is a casual gamer with a doctor-level education and I asked him if he understood what Stadia was or did and he had no idea.
Which is a problem in the way that selling out a concert venue is a problem.