Resident Evil Village in the browser through Stadia

Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand asset pile.

I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it years down the road.

Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had thin terminals that connected to them.

The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of timesharing.

In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at least) a single instance of the server-side game platform available open source, or freely available. Even if the game itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd align incentives for that, though.

I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering, cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in the future.

If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech?

There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often gets ridiculed because of how new the model is.

The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam or any other games store. Very few people have all their games on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates. The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap.

In reality, all you really need to backup for single player games are your save games because if you get banned, you can just download a cracked copy of the games you like.

It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.

I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service, but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.

This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you see?

There's the solution.

I haven't bought software or games in years.

Am I scared? No.

And let's see if games are becoming only available through the cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc.

Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no bank around anymore ;)

EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in London is particular roles because they were more likely to lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command arrive" issue.)

For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better than installing their kernel mode anticheat.

I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important in VR), but it would be perfect for me.

Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but didn’t want to buy a TV or console.

IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store in my browser.

I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine) on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam existed.

Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games.

On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.

!

First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full of GPUs 10ms away from every person.

And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more noticeable.

You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing each year.

Stadia is just one service out of many, like Xbox, Playstation, GeForce, Luna, etc. Some of those operate off your existing libraries (Steam, Epic, etc.), others tie into publisher subscriptions (Uplay, EA).

Most games really aren't archival quality anyway. You play them for a few weeks/months and then forget about it, and maybe come back to it years later when it's either 10% of its original launch price or abandonware that can be easily pirated anyway. And for the games you really really want to keep forever, there's still GOG.com. But really, Steam does a much better job at keeping my games safe than I ever have.

When you think about it, the Web itself is similarly ephemeral. Most services are just subscriptions we use, dependent on the company that provides them. But they are still tremendously useful. Or Netflix, for that matter.

These online gaming services offer convenience and usability, which are way more important to most people than whether their purchases/rentals will still be there 20 years from now. It's just entertainment.

Pretty cool possibilities.

So better not get bad press and directly deny access.

You really need servers to be close by for game streaming to work.

[1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9566513?hl=en

https://more.att.com/playnow/

Disclaimer: I work on Stadia.

I'm also totally ok with the ephemeral nature because I'm just looking for a few hours of fun.

Really don't know if this niche is enough for keeping the lights on. I hope so but at the end, at least for Stadia, it's Google, so people should enjoy it while it lasts.

I think if you can get the latency situation more under control, then I see an opportunity for extremely high-end competitive gaming experiences to unfold. When your gameplay is streamed to you as x264, it becomes far more impractical to cheat at the game. If you never played a competitive shooter, the psychology of this may seem alien to you. There is a substantial impact on the amount of fun many players experience in high-stakes gaming situations when there is even the remotest sense that someone isn't playing by the rules.

>people who cannot afford a console or PC

used hardware tends to run incredibly cheap and i doubt someone who can't scratch up 150-300 dollars over the course of a few months has access to reliable high speed internet. the best use case i have found so far for game streaming is fishing in ff xiv while cooking dinner.

> The game had to close Sorry about that. Reopen the game to keep playing

(in reality it never opened)

It's bad enough having to accept this from streaming services... Now video games as well? It's like we're going backwards.

I hate everything about the idea of purchasing games that you can only stream, but when they were offloading free Stadia Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) to Google Play Music subscribers I grabbed one and committed myself to playing through a game entirely just to say I gave it a fair shot. I chose Superhot: Mind Control Delete which is a game where you go around a kill a bunch of mannequins that are trying to kill you, but time only moves forward when you do (meaning you can stand still and the game is nearly paused).

I managed to make it through the whole game, but there wasn't a single play session where I didn't have multiple spikes of lag, or a several seconds of frozen frames that take a bit to catch up. Thankfully because of the nature of the game I was able to just stop moving and I'd usually be safe by the time the game was working again, but it wasn't a good experience. If it was any other game that required constant twitch-reaction throughout the gameplay, those lag spikes wouldn't be acceptable.

Even if it works well 99.9999% of the time, that 0.0001% where it's not working is frustrating, and not something you have to deal with playing locally. The idea that someone else in your house could kick off a giant download that suddenly makes your game unplayable feels like we've regressed to the days of dial-up where your mom kicks you off the internet because she needs to make a phone call.

Most services also recommend to be connected to Ethernet outright.

From a cynical point-of-view, I actually kinda see the thinking. Aside from latency, this is actually a pretty good demo. If you look at games like gacha games and more recently Diablo Immortal as not video-games, but value extraction systems, getting it in the hands of as many people as possible is the thing you want. If you can deliver a compelling experience without needing the user to invest upfront in hardware, you can immediately start charging them and getting them in the funnel.

Honestly, the chip shortage is a pretty compelling argument for Stadia, on its own. The catch is that Stadia didn't invest heavily in GPU power, so it doesn't deliver quite the compelling vision that's needed to compete with latest generation GPUs. If Stadia was the equivalent of a datacenter of 3090 Ti cards though, I think it would've actually done quite well when GPUs were extraordinarily expensive for people who just wanted to play a couple hours of games every week.

Only high-end mobile GPUs can play recent AAA games. The average laptop still ships with integrated GPUs that don't really work very well, especially with hidpi resolutions that many now come with. Most computer users just aren't gamers, so it doesn't make sense to invest a dedicated GPU (especially when Xbox and Playstation offer similar graphics for MUCH cheaper).

But Stadia, GeForce Now, etc., let you play on any web browser with a reasonably fast connection (10 Mbps? sometimes less), doesn't heat up your laptop or drain the battery, doesn't require semi-annual hardware upgrades, etc.

M1 chips still can't really keep up with the latest games, especially at Retina resolutions. I tried many games and could not run most of them past 720p or so. Nevermind trying to play on a 4k or ultrawide screen. And on M1, you can't emulate Windows games and only precious few Mac titles were/will be ported to M1; the rest will be emulated through Rosetta. It's just a far more complex, and inferior, setup to a good streaming solution.

That's the segment you could target with more interesting games.

I sometimes get bored at work, and want to do something different during lunch. This could be it. I sometimes open quakejs to play for fun. I can't install a 30G game onto my corp laptop...

Stadia ports/limits games on top of underpowered hardware and limits the bitrate to ~44Mbit/s with a “4K” stream, ~30 with 1080p.

It was amazing 2 years ago or so, it’s quite far behind competing services like GeForce Now nowadays with double the bitrate, true 4K streaming, ray tracing, Steam/Epic support etc.

This is on DSL with around 7ms to a major city exchange (there is Google infra there but not sure if it has Stadia servers). Likely performance will be improved if you are on fiber and are in the same city as the game server.

(1) Kill the subscription

(2) Immediate Priority: Biz-dev deals, make sure every major release's early demo is available on Stadia. Expose people to platform without requiring them to switch from a console.

(3) Secondary Priority: Focus SDK development on indie developers. Offer generous streamed minutes for all developer accounts. Charge per streamed minute after that. Let developers pass on the cost however they want.

With open pricing, open enrollment, open SDK, developers could do really amazing things with Stadia: and would figure out the business model.

Google could focus on driving down the cost per streamed minute as low as humanly possible, with the broadest possible access.

Amazon certainly will.

But most likely they're fully aware of the reputation Google has and they'd rather put stadia on life support for a few years.

I have a powerful gaming PC, but use streaming as a console replacement for games not on PC. I've used Stadia and XBox for streaming and while I prefer Stadia's tech, I spend 99% of my time on XBox due to game library (particularly MLB the Show).