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Comment by JadoJodo | Hacker News Reader

I'm still unsure exactly who the market is for Stadia/streaming games.

People with a console/PC are going to just buy it outright. I could see it used by someone who travels a lot, but hotels aren't going to like the massive bandwidth hit, nor will mobile carriers. The most obvious candidate is people who cannot afford a console or PC, but having just played through this demo, the graphics look like last-gen consoles anyway. I'm sure there is a use-case for this somewhere, but I can't think of it.

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For a very casual gamer like me, that likes to try a game or two once a year or so, Stadia is perfect. No need to buy (nor upgrade) consoles or other hardware. Works flawlessy on Mac and a Chrome browser. Or on TV with a Chromecast.

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.

It's not that niche. I grew up playing games but got relegated to the casual gamer category because life brings other responsibilities and interests. I know that much of my friend circle is in the same boat as well.

Wouldn't it make more sense then to buy a console? If you only play a few times a year, it doesn't make sense to be paying a subscription. Sure, you could start/cancel it whenever you want, but you still have to buy the game you want to play on top of managing the subscription. And if the sub fee is cheap enough that you don't care about paying it every month, it would still be cheaper to buy a console, since that purchase will be good for many years. In that case, it'd only make sense if you specifically don't want to deal with having a physical console.

Also, starting/stopping the subscription to play a few games every now and then seems to be counter to Stadia's business model, so that type of customer is probably not who they're targeting.

Subscription is not needed. One can just purchase single titles.

Stadia "Pro" is something like the PlayStation "Plus" subscription - I think. Every month you get new free-to-play games, some discounts plus some perks like 4k and surround.

But that's totally optional, so you can just buy a title and play it whenever you want, without any running subscription.

Besides, even if a subscription was needed to play, maybe I'd still feel that as a better option than buying a physical console that is mostly gathering dust, also considering it will be obsolete within a few years.

But - again - this is from a very casual gamer POV. Once someone spends more time playing, and/or any fetishistic/collectible desire kicks in, then buying your own hardware makes much more sense.

AT&T, a mobile carrier, explicitly asked their customers to stream a game. They brought online a game from the Warner Brothers catalog just for that, using the same technology. So I am not sure of the bandwidth argument holds for all mobile carriers.

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

Disclaimer: I work on Stadia.

The incentives here are great for AT&T right? If the push towards cloud gaming is successful they get to upcharge for bandwidth/bandwidth limits

Just because they asked you doesn't mean it'll run well. What it will do well is burn through their data cap in a heartbeat so obviously they want this to happen.

Hilarious. The same company that aggressively caps their "unlimited" plan, and justifies it with the "limited bandwidth" argument encourages all of their customers to waste incredible amounts of bandwidth on an advertising scheme.

as someone who travels a lot, i just keep my ps4 in a travel case. the whole gaming setup ends up being smaller than my laptop bag or work bag. ps5 looks less portable but ''''next gen'''' hardware like the switch & steam deck are both incredibly travel friendly.

>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.

Right now, I am a little ambivalent on the market as well.

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.

> 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

This is basically never going to happen. Really competitive gamers complain about the most minimal lags in response time that are to most eyes completely imperceptible, will crank down settings to get there, and pay for high-end equipment where necessary. On the other hand, streaming over my local network from my gaming PC to my phone introduces lag that's noticeable to me, very much a non-competitive gamer.

There's a hard limit to how much the lag can be reduced here. Unless it can be essentially eliminated through some kind of AI magic competitive gamers will care.

This person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31693294

There are many significant benefits to streaming games. There's enormous flexibility to streaming, and it strongly lends itself to massively multiplayer online games. Stadia's problem was that Google's management worked out a platform and pricing model that undermined all of the benefits and conferred none of the advantages.

There's certainly a use case for publishers to demo their games to prospective customers. Hell, google is probably quite capable of having you watch a game trailer on youtube and the last frame of the video transitioning to a playable demo.

Currently sitting in a hotel with 282/170 mbps internet connection. I've never streamed a game before, but the demo runs beautifully, better than you'd expect possible.

laptop users

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