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Comment by beoberha | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here use Stadia? Not much of a gamer but very interested in the tech of cloud gaming.

I've been using for about two years I'd guess. I have a pretty fast connection and it worked pretty flawlessly at home. I used it while traveling too, and if the connection was good enough for streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, it was typically totally fine for Stadia. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the highest settings while playing on an iPad was pretty damn cool, and meant I could slim down a ton when traveling.

That said, I haven't played any multiplayer FPS games. The multiplayer games I did play seemed totally fine, though "seems totally fine" is obviously a subjective observation.

The biggest gripe I had was that you couldn't use your Steam library or bring your own games in any way. The fact that they're refunding purchases is kind of amazing. Knowing Google, I assumed that when Stadia shut down, that'd be it, and I was ok with that.

I used it a bit. The performance was exceptional. I enjoyed playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my phone with a Razer Kishi controller. Although I'm not surprised Stadia struggled to find traction, I think this is mostly due to Google's ongoing struggle with entertainment branding, and despite this, I do agree with their sentiment that streaming is the inevitable future of mainstream gaming.

Game streaming struggles because your average American has like four different TERRIBLE networking devices between them and any service. Those devices will not be upgraded just because google wishes the internet was more like home. If you do not have a good streaming experience, there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Yes. I only tried Destiny 2 because no other game (that was available without extra purchase) was of interest to me. It worked very well and I _really_ liked the experience. Just open the website in Chrome, click on the game you want to play and it launches in seconds. Certainly faster than launching Destiny 2 on my own PC, which is also a gaming rig.

For comparison, I also subscribed to GeForce Now. Technologically, it’s basically… remote desktop to Steam? From a dedicated client application. Everything felt hacked-together. Sometimes the language was wrong, sometimes the resolution. Almost every time I had to re-login to Steam. Performance was so-so, sometimes with ridiculous lag and video encoding errors. Oh yeah and waiting times, lol.

I have not tried the Xbox cloud gaming thingy yet, I imagine it could be more like Stadia.

I think Google made a good choice with customized game versions for Stadia. Not using Windows then was good, too. The custom hardware? Probably not so much. Either way, the customized game versions were also what killed Stadia. Establishing a new platform and getting software on it is very hard.

Stadio was awesome. It also never had a chance.

I like GFN and I agree the experience is not seamless. It still takes a long time to launch the game VM, and you feel it; but a lot of these other issues are much better or nonexistent now. In particular having to re-auth to Steam is much rarer now; launching the VM for a newly-purchased game often used to take a long time, with you waiting for the Steam launcher go through some kind of "Preparing" state for a long time (you don't have to be in-session for this), but this hasn't happened for me in some time. I haven't had a problem with any settings like language, resolution or video, and I think performance, while highly dependent on your own network and ISP, is much improved and hasn't been a problem in a while. So I do think, while the "remote desktop" approach is inevitably going to have some clunkiness, it has improved quite a bit and continues to do so.

I was a user from the beginning.

For the casual gamer, cloud gaming is perfect - no large downloads, play from your TV or your PC or your iPad/phone when you have 30 minutes free and don't want to buy/build/maintain a PC or Console.

That said, I haven't played in around a year. The games catalog was too limited and they never got any of the AAA games (Call of Duty, EA games etc)

I use it... and honestly I'm really bummed by this. I've avoided owning a console mostly because I didn't want to drop $500 just to get started. Stadia launched CP2077 with a free Chromecast and controller, so it ended up fitting my use-case rather well.

They released the LG app for Stadia less than a year ago, and so having it on my TV with no additional equipment was a god-send. I could play Jackbox when friends either in my living room, or with my remote team at work. I still had the Chromecast, so then I could spin up any game from basically any room in my house and I just needed the controller.

I mean, this is what everyone claimed was going to happen from the beginning... I'm just bummed because I quite enjoyed the ride.

I've used it almost exclusively for gaming since it was released. I've occasionally had issues with poor connection over WiFi but most of the time it has worked flawlessly. I know the latency is higher than a locally running game but I'm not doing side by side comparisons so I don't notice it. With this news I guess I'll be switching to GeForce Now which supports higher quality and framerates but a worse UX in my experience. In my opinion the business case for GeForce Now makes less sense than Stadia but I guess the numbers of overs makes more of a difference.

I'm a little bit of an enthusiast (tried all of the major platforms). I have shitty rural internet, Stadia is (was) by far the best of the bunch by far, especially with the controller. Near-native for latency and crystal clear image. 40ms ping to Google.

Currently I use xcloud, its "acceptable" with certain games that don't require low latencies but its picture quality in particular is ass in comparison to Stadia. RIP.

Not stadia, but I tried Steam In Home streaming (basically you stream from one PC in your house to another), with ethernet and it was NOTICEABLY laggier (because of input lag). It was probably like 33ms+ of added input lag. From that point I knew cloud streaming (which is basically this plus network latency) wasn't going to be pretty.

I use it and it works surprisingly well even on UK DSL (80/20). I found it useful to play games that insist on anti-cheat systems that deeply embed themselves into your machine. Also my PC is a bit ancient, built in 2015 and running a 4690K, DDR3 with a 750Ti so I get access to games that need a bit more poke.

used it exclusively for gaming the last year and a half. mostly just for Destiny 2, but bought a few other games on the platform as well. worked very well for my purposes. even pre-ourchased the next year's content for destiny as well. I'm very sad.

I tried a bit. I don't have space in my life for dedicated gaming hardware or a PC, so seemed to be a way I could play a game once in a while without commitment. Was ok. Didn't get hooked.

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