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Comment by mariusmg | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly bad experience when compared with "local" copy. In Stadia it loads for ~3 minutes and then it fails with a "The game couldn't start, but try opening it again now."

With my PC copy, i'm playing in around 15 seconds.

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I was playing in Chrome within about 30 seconds, with graphics looking better than my integrated-graphics-only Macbook can manage. It's quite impressive when it works.

I was impressed at first too, but after playing for 20 minutes, I hit multiple instances of lag and the slight delay in controls was annoying.

You're glossing over the 30 gig download and install.

If your internet connection is fast enough to use Stadia, downloading a 30gb game probably isn't a big deal.

Out of curiosity, I opened up Steam and downloaded the game to see how long it would take. I started the download at 12:36PM and it completed at 12:43PM, so it took ~7 minutes, with Steam reporting peak speeds of 83.2MB/s download (fast.com reported 960mbps before I started the download). I think the download might have even been limited by my hard drive since my Steam library is on a regular old HDD rather than an SSD.

You can stream games on a 25 Mbps connection if your latency is low enough. Now imagine downloading not a 30GB, but a 90GB game, and on this 25Mbps connection instead of your 960Mbps one.

I've seen this kind of issue with people who have a custom firewall setup. You probably need to configure your firewall to allow playing.

Then what the heck is that error message? I’d expect that error message from a junior developer.

It's not the kind of thing Google's internal metrics for job performance cares about. It's a generic/useless error message because there's no incentive for their developers to improve UX. It's probably been there since the first MVP they made.

Worked great for me on a Macbook. The game binary doesn't even run on macOS.

Of course it's shit

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

(in reality it never opened)

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