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Comment by noasaservice | Hacker News Reader

I never knew any real human that thought Stadia was anywhere near a good idea, or even used it.

All of us techies around me thought this was yet another dillettanting around by Google that they were going to dismiss any day now.

And we were not wrong.

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Depends if you mean the product or the tech.

As a product I agree Stadia was dead on arrival, there was no chance people were going to buy games again on a brand new platform at full price with the potential for a poor experience every time your wifi flaked a bit.

The tech behind it though I find fascinating. I would love to have the ability to stream my games to a chromecast that I can attach to my TV downstairs, or take with me travelling. Most of the games I play aren't fast paced so the odd latency blip for the convenience wouldn't bother me personally.

I think the way google should have played it is gotten into bed with Valve. I feel like there is a market fit for steam link without the local streaming faff. Use google's infrastructure to stream your back catalogue of steam games for $XX/month, maybe throw in the odd free game like the game pass and I can see it gaining some traction. Certainly it would have more chance of success than going in to a mature market solo.

It’s always going to a substandard experience for latency sensitive games. Can’t change physics.

I don’t see the problem with owning a physical machine for your back catalogue. There’s no real problems there that aren’t created by greedy companies.

> It’s always going to a substandard experience for latency sensitive games. Can’t change physics.

Couldn't agree more, but personally I'm old and my days of playing quake or CS1.6 are over so I don't care about latency. I totally understand streaming games is never going to cover all gamers though.

> I don’t see the problem with owning a physical machine for your back catalogue. There’s no real problems there that aren’t created by greedy companies.

My physical machine isn't in the same room as my TV and is far from portable.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't wouldn't be a lifechanging experience for me and I don't see this as a huge gap in the market. However if the tech behind Stadia was going to fit anywhere, leveraging an existing ecosystem felt like the best way.

Latency isn't just about having a competitive advantage. Playing with high input latency is mentally fatiguing. Apple understands this; that's why they put so much effort into low latency touch controls. Touch control existed before the iphone but it almost always felt like crap until Apple figured out that reducing latency was key. Latency is the difference between merely usable and comfortable.

> My physical machine isn't in the same room as my TV

Fiber DisplayPort cables are pretty cheap these days and can go across the house with 99%ile latency in the microsecond range (0.7ft/ns speed of light in fiber)

But it was not a substandard experience. It was pretty flawless. Yes there is latency but it was imperceptible. You got used to it after 5 minutes and then you got sucked into the game, totally forgetting you are STREAMING a game to your machine. The tech is amazing, right on time in fact. The physics works out perfectly. Issue is that they chose Linux rather than Windows. Porting games is a pain.

As a digital nomad, Stadia was far more portable than a traditional game console or PC, and I bought and played through a few full-length games. (I did understand that it was likely to get canned, though.)

So- there's at least one real human out there! I suspect there are dozens of us!

What do you think about Xbox Cloud Streaming?

I've tried it but it was a dramatically inferior experience to GFN or stadia. Latency was unbelievably bad. I could put it up side-by-side with Stadia and the xbox, and the latter two had just a hair difference between them responding to controller presses. XCS, on the other hand, had seconds between a button press and watching my on-screen avatar jump.

Maybe its gotten better since then, the last time I gave it a try was back in the spring. But I was far from impressed.

Right now Geforce Now has better offering. Connect it to your Steam account and you can play some of the titles.

When I tried Geforce Now about a year ago, I preferred Stadia (useable on Chromecast, more seamless setup, good latency). I'll certainly concede that Geforce Now is better positioned going forward though!

And I know several real humans that did use it and liked it.

People playing games is a wide demographic, with very different priorities and limits.

I can say as a user, the product was phenomenal except for the lack of games available in their library.

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