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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

For me, Stadia was by far the best gaming experience I've had in recent history. I'm a very casual gamer so I don't really want to invest a lot in hardware or buying games. Stadia made it very cheap for me to easily jump into a game session whenever I wanted with minimal upfront investment. I'm most disappointed to see Ubisoft+ on Stadia gone since several franchises I like were Ubisoft and now I have no easy way to play.

I'll probably check out GeForce NOW at some point, but I currently don't have a way to use my only controller (Stadia) with my TV.

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If you don't care about graphic performances or photo-realistic quality then I can't recommend the Switch enough.

Some find find the initial 300-400 EUR investment a bit steep but after you go through that they have sales all the time and you can easily amass a collection of 50+ games for a maximum of 200 EUR. I did that over the course of 2 years -- less than 10 EUR a month. Now I can't decide which game to play because I have so many, lol.

There are several gems - my family easily spent 1000+ hours on Wittcher 3, Zelda, Hades or Animal Crossing - but most of the games are just too bland.

I'm a fan of cloud gaming and have used both Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It appeals to me, as I don't have to invest in a gaming rig and can play on almost everything.

As a game collector and conservationist, I can only hope cloud gaming never becomes the norm.

I really don't care that much about graphics. Sure, I don't want something that looks awful, but I care more about just taking a break and having a good time. The Switch is definitely something I've considered, but the cost relative to how much I would expect to use it makes it a more difficult choice for me than it was to pick up a Stadia controller.

I was in this boat but for a while before finally biting the bullet and getting one. Zelda is easily the best game I’ve ever played, I ended up spending over 80 hours on that when I’m lucky to ever spend over 10 hours on a game. I got the Switch a few months before my second was born and it’s such a great system if you can only squeeze in small bursts of gaming, power button instantly puts it to sleep, then it instantly wakes right where you left it.

Worth picking them up second hand now too, Facebook marketplace seems to have some pretty good deals going at times.

That's certainly an argument in favor of the Switch. And as a big Harry Potter nerd, I'm also very interested in Hogwarts Legacy and the promise that will eventually make it to the Switch.

The price of a Switch got you 3.5 years of Stadia. That's not bad, if they had sales too.

I mostly played free games on Stadia. The rest was paid for with Google Play credits I had built up, so I really only paid for the controller.

> If you don't care about graphic performances or photo-realistic quality then I can't recommend the Switch enough.

Or just performance in general, or a game library not made entirely by Nintendo, or hardware that doesn't have problems after a few months of usage, or, or, or...

The Switch is good for people that specifically want the Nintendo Switch games, for anyone else it's the absolute last choice any day of the week.

Uh pretty sure Nintendo didn't make several thousand of the 4418 Switch games...

The Switch is good for anyone that wants a portable console that can also easily be played on a TV with friends and family. Sure if you're a PC Master Race Snob who absolutely can't stand if a game is remotely under 1080p 60FPS maybe it's not the console for you but IME at least everything is playable except for a handful of awful ports.

> The Switch is good for anyone that wants a portable console that can also easily be played on a TV with friends and family.

For $100 more you'll get a Steam deck, which will be superior in literally every aspect.

> Sure if you're a PC Master Race Snob who absolutely can't stand if a game is remotely under 1080p 60FPS

The Nintendo Switch struggles to run Nintendo games at 25 FPS at 720p. And this is with graphics would be bested by a phone. There's nothing about being a snob here.

Hell you can pick up an XBox 360 for $20 on eBay and it will run better than a Nintendo Switch. Also the controller won't break after 30 hours of usage, unlike the Switch.

Have you used a Nintendo Switch? I kinda doubt it. The Nintendo Switch is way more powerful than the 360 and it shows. Go play something that was on both consoles like Skyrim, Crysis, Doom 3 etc side by side. The Switch versions run better with more effects and run at a higher resolution. Most Nintendo games run well, Mario Kart 8 is 1080p 60FPS (how many 360 games are that like 6?), Mario Odyssey is 900p 60FPS, Bowser's Fury is 60FPS docked, Metroid Dread is 900p 60FPS docked.

None of my Switch controllers have broken either and they've seen more than 30 hours use.

I have both a Switch and Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is good and more powerful but it's also considerably bigger, louder, heavier with worse battery life and I've run into far more issues in the 2 months with it on verified games alone than all my time with the Switch. Using it docked is clunky, ditto doing local play. It's still a PC at heart which is fine but the Switch has an ease of use factor the Steam Deck simply does not have.

> I currently don't have a way to use my only controller (Stadia) with my TV.

Just buy an Xbox controller. I bought mine almost 10 years ago and still use it regularly when playing on a computer.

I’ve never bought an Xbox but having an Xbox controller around is really convenient.

Do you have amazing internet?

These services are basically unusable to everyone I know, and we have pretty decent connections. The input lag is just horrific.

Probably depends on where you live as much as how fast your connection is. Hard to get adequate ping. 100ms ping means the equivalent of a 6 frame input delay at 60 fps. That's very noticeable.

And that's on top of USB input delay (up to 40ms [1]) or Bluetooth 5.0 (20-100ms), plus your monitor (4ms+).

[1] https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/40182/1/On_the_Latency_of_USB...

Yeah dude, if you're playing on a TV as well, one that doesn't have a way of disabling its postprocessing, you may be slapping another 250 ms on that.

It doesn't: the controller uses Wifi, not USB or Bluetooth. It communicates directly with the Stadia servers. It only has it's own internal lag + Wifi.

https://stadiafever.com/why-does-the-stadia-controller-use-w...

Note: if you want to give your Stadia controller a second life after the service shuts down, you can do that using USB. Reportedly rumble works on Steam and Xbox. Bluetooth does not work, even though there seems to be a lot of demand for that.

I've spent quite a bit on WiFi in my house and I can get almost gigabit speeds over 6e. But latency is terrible. I have no idea how they'd manage that.

If the latency is terrible, you might want to try disabling old devices or seeing if you have interference from another network - it’s normally a couple of milliseconds, maybe 4-7 if you’re using a mesh.

Latency isn’t the only issue. Bandwidth is another. MetalJesusRocks has an interesting video[0] on it.

[0] https://youtu.be/01ZTOyx-q7s

It works well for people who

1. Have fiber.

2. Live in a major city that has a direct line to their datacenter.

You can literally get 1-2ms latency from your home to AWS/GCP/Azure with such a setup, as it's all fiber from your home->ISP->IX->datacenter and there's no additional inter-city routing. This is compared to DSL/Cable which pretty much has a ~10ms delay to the exchange in perfect conditons, and the even larger delays involved in routing a packet over multiple hops across the country.

Would you happen to know how I can easily figure out which cities would satisfy those 2 conditions? Hopefully there's a list somewhere instead of having to manually check.

For the first condition, that depends if you're able to get residental fiber service there. Most cities have fiber service in the downtown core but that's not always true in the suburbs.

For the second condition I think that those cloud gaming services publish their available server locations or provide some sort of speed/ping test service to test your connection. Being so dependent on latency it would make sense for them to have this available to their potential customers. You can also check for IX peering info and the like but there's no guarantee that having a presence there means your game server is located there (e.g. Google may have a datacenter in the city and peer with your ISP but the Stadia servers may be somewhere else).

I tried Stadia several times, and it just never worked well.

In my case I'm pretty sure it was wireless congestion despite only having a low tier cable service. I live in a town home right beside some condos and the throughput sinks like a stone as soon as I move away from my router. If I stood right beside the router it actually worked fine despite the relatively slow nominal performance of my internet connection.

I imagine this wouldn't have been an intractable problem. I could have spent the time and money to optimize the networking in my house. But the fact is, everything else I want to do works well enough for my purposes - except Stadia. I can't imagine a non technical user would bother to diagnose this class of issue before just giving up and buying a console.

Eventually my Steam Deck pre-order shipped and I never looked back.

You don't need amazing internet. I played Stadia (and other game streaming services) in 8+ different places across Europe.

OTOH, what really kills the experience IME is the jitter. Even if you have decent latency with Wifi, a brief spike in latency can ruin the race that you've been competing in for the last 5 minutes, for example. Wired internet obviates this, and powerline adapters are cheap and fix this for good.

My neighbors constantly complain about the connection quality in our neighborhood. We almost all use the same provider since there aren't many options in our area. During most gaming sessions, I didn't have any real problems. Of course, part of that has to do with the fact that I'm not a very skilled gamer, so I'm not as likely to notice lag.

GeForce NOW is really good.

Good selection supported of games tied to your Steam/Epic/Origin purchases. They suport Ubisoft+ and EA Play (for at least some of the games). Played through a bunch of Ubisoft titles I'd missed this way.

I use a Playstation 4 controller with my Macbook Pro and it all works nicely. Not sure how that would work with TV.

> Good selection supported of games tied to your Steam/Epic/Origin purchases

Also some GOG purchases (like Witcher 3 or CP2077).

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