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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

Stadia was not good because of physics. Like GeforceNow, it is laggy and artifacty. It’s not a real business because they don’t actually have a significant target audience. It doesn’t matter who runs it. I’ve been saying this for years and predicting this exact scenario but not because of trust. People trust Google enough to be swayed but this product sucked.

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As a GFN user for the past 14 months I disagree. It's more than acceptable performance even when playing competitive multiplayer games like League of Legends and Planetside 2.

I do agree however that Stadia sucked as a product. Nobody was going to buy into their ecosystem if they can't opt to download the games onto their own PCs like Steam. Too much lock-in without that aspect, and without any guarantees that they were going to refund customers if Stadia ever sunk it just made it DOA

But that's not the perception GeforceNow has. If I ask around what people think it would be then most of the gamers I know wouldn't even consider it unless they had no other option.

Games are already fiddly when it comes to latency. Adding another fiddling layer inbetween just sounds more painful.

I can't speak for Google but I've played Geforce Now since December 2020. It was an absolute saver when gpu prices shot up and I could not play some recent games anymore. I do have Bell Gigabit fibre in a small town in Canada so I'm lucky with fast internet but I absolutely love the service. Even Microsoft Xbox pass premium cloud or whatever they call it now did not work properly (and their support for paid product is no existent - they send you to reddit or something), but geforce now just worked and worked well.

Now, different people have different preferences and I imagine if I were a pro online multiplayer guy with 240hz monitor and 10 million dpi mouse twitch shooting against pros, it would not serve as well. But I've played fps games like cyberpunk happily as a single player. They basically have my money guaranteed for foreseeable future.

It's all where you live, and your home network. I had about 15 to 20ms latency to nearest POP, and Stadia honestly played just as well as a PS5 or such.

Moved to a different city, and latency wasn't near as good because of ISP routing, mainly. Still playable, but definite pretiming everything. I think latency there was 50ish ms.

I’ve played PS Now enough to know that the latency is perfectly fine and the artifact count isn’t bad. I’m very happy with those services and they can be done well.

Not sure why you're down voted but this is what I thought as well. What I mainly heard was that thus was aimed at casual gamers. But this felt like an over-engineered solution for casual gamers to make enough money from them while too underpowered to appeal to the hard-core gamers (PC,console gamers).

Yeah, the article is simply wrong, in my opinion. People don’t factor in whether or not Google will support it in n years when deciding to use one or their services. Nobody used the product because it sucked.

What rubbish.

Stadia wasn't laggy or artifacty at all. That is just because you either haven't used the service or you have poor internet.

I played many games on Stadia for a year with zero issues. I perferred over playing the games on my PC as it was just a lot easier / faster, to open chrome and be straight into the game.

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