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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think some folks are missing the really neat thing about this: remote play.

Steam supports playing games remotely on another computer. So your desktop is doing the heavy lifting, but you can view the game on your TV in the livingroom. Now you can be playing the game on your Chromebook as well.

Then the next step is that Google Cloud offers you an on demand high end gaming machine, pay by the minute, which runs Steam on Windows x86 and has an instant VPN to your Chromebook.

I set this up successfully once on an AWS machine and a very low end laptop running Ubuntu, but I couldn't get the hardware accelerated video encoding to work right. 3 seconds per frame made the game hilariously unplayable, but it did function.

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> Then the next step is that Google Cloud offers you an on demand high end gaming machine, pay by the minute, which runs Steam on Windows x86 and has an instant VPN to your Chromebook.

I find it difficult to believe they'd offer this, given that they already have Stadia.

I do see how this could be more appealing for consumers, but aside from competing with themselves, I also would be curious about the economics. Considering how expensive GPUs are, is it even possible the prices for an on-demand gaming service could ever make that much sense? With Stadia, they are making you buy the games through Stadia itself, where they would get a cut of the revenue, which probably helps subsidize the actual cost of the service a bit more.

There's also other very irritating issues. For example, a litany of AAA game companies do not allow their games to be streamed via GeForce Now, even though it would be running your own copy that you bought from your Steam or other library. I assume they would fight to earn additional money on game streaming, even though the money simply isn't there.

This is unfortunate, but perhaps it's OK. Lower end devices will be getting more and more powerful and eventually I'm sure even reasonably priced Chromebooks will be able to play games decently. Given this launch only applies to newer Intel processor based Chromebooks, that day is not today... but still, it certainly could be on the horizon.

> I find it difficult to believe they'd offer this, given that they already have Stadia.

Isn't Stadia moving to a PaaS for purposes just like this?

I don't think Google really has a game plan (no pun intended). They never gave Stadia the dev and marketing resources it needed so it just died on the vine. Their "pivot" is more like a surrender, I think, an act of desperation where they hope other companies will pay them for their tech that never really took off with consumers.

Thing is, porting to Stadia is so much work vs flicking a switch in Steam to publish to GeForce Now. And Stadia can't cross play or cross save with anything else by default, making it a very lonely ecosystem.

That is why they are now writing a Windows emulation layer for Stadia, which I think won't convince anyone that isn't yet bought into their Stadia sales pitch. See last week Stadia sessions for developers.

> they are now writing a Windows emulation layer for Stadia

So they are going in the same direction as LiquidSky.

> LiquidSky shut down their service on December 17th, 2018 while they focus their efforts on building a new streaming platform.

> As of 2018, LiquidSky was acquired by Walmart and now focusing on other projects.

I guess that is where Stadia will land as well.

It feels to me like the only logical economic future for game streaming is as a value add for a game subscription service (so like, xgp and xcloud as a logical pairing).

$100 or so a year for a game steaming service is a heck lot cheaper than a gaming PC and a graphics card update every few years. And you can play anywhere, on any device, where you have a fast connection. It was a godsend for me before I could afford a gaming PC (or find one, during the pandemic)

> $100 or so a year for a game steaming service is a heck lot cheaper than a gaming PC and a graphics card update every few years.

You are not going to compete with high end hardware/graphics using Stadia, not sure if that was solved but for quite some time they just upscaled to the promised resolution instead of actually rendering it.

Everyone casual will be kicked to the next set of consumer hardware by Microsoft(Windows 11 incompatible) or Google (required native codec support for some android apps) either way.

That $100 or so (definitely way more) is going to go on top of the hardware upgrade treadmill, not as alternative to it.

Not Stadia maybe but GeForce Now gets you a 3080 and 120Hz (not necessarily fps) at 4k.

But sorry, it's apparently $200 a year now, not $100. My bad.

Google never really tried with stadia. It's just another dead Google product, now changing into some sort of B2B thing. Shrug.

Meanwhile Nvidia kept improving geforce now and it's actually really good now, running on everything from operating systems to browsers with no noticeable lag. Cheap too, like $15 a mo or so, and works with most of your Steam library. Where it doesn't, usually means that the publisher wanted to get off for some reason.

Xbox Game Pass is another great steaming option (via xcloud), Netflix like subscription service that lets you stream games.

There's also Shadow and Luna and such. Many companies are doing this well, just not Google.

Google is even worse than Apple in what concerns talking to game developers, they always focus on the Play Store and KPIs, and seldom focus on the tools.

Even when they really try (see last week Games Development Summit), it is mostly about high level stuff, like PMs talking to PMs, handwaving to lightweight docs and github repos.

Naturally very few game devs ever get enthusiastic from whatever comes out of Google.

Great point. Meanwhile Steam and the other platforms spent years and years making great tooling and ecosystems to court developers. Stadia just feels like an executive's half assed demo...

Stadia was dead on arrival. Working with Valve has the potential of being really really smart, but I’m not sure this develops into anything significant.

Every time I've tried Steam Play, even over hardwired gigabit, it's been laggy, buggy, and crash prone. There was always display switching problems, controllers and keyboards not being detected correctly, graphical issues, etc. Just a PITA.

GeForce Now works much better and doesn't require you to have your own GPU. Do need fast internet though.

I use Remote Play regularly (bed-bound lots due to medical issues) and never had a problem, but have found it’s finicky on your setup. Eg it never really worked on my ISP-provided modem/router but once I got a UDM (for unrelated reasons) it worked flawlessly and has ever since.

The fact I can lie in bed with laptop plugged into bedroom TV and use a PS4 controller to play games running on my gaming PC in another room is truly awesome.

What is a UDM?

And I believe you. I wish I knew what the variables were. I really wanted to like Remote Play and even got special hardware for it (Steam Link, Shield TV, etc.) and still couldn't get it to be reliable.

Unifi Dream Machine, a prosumer router/wifi AP combo.

Roger that, will have to check it out!

Yeah as alphager said, it’s a router by Ubiquiti that solved a lot of my networking issues. I wish I knew what exactly it was that made Remote Play work, but that was just one of the many things that didn’t work before then I realised later suddenly worked with my new router.

Cool, thanks for the tip! I've been having nonstop issues with my Google Router and ISP modem, will have to try that instead.

You can do remote play on a Chromebook right now with Moonlight! Works great (for me). Some other alternatives include Parsec and Rainway, and probably a few others I'm missing.

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