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Comment by admax88qqq | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I gave Stadia it's first try as a result of this post. Tried the Worm Game. It confirms exactly my concerns about cloud gaming in general. The input lag.

The classic "worm" game is timing sensitive, gotta turn before you hit a wall or yourself, but also gotta turn as late as possible to ensure you don't leave empty space.

The input lag was noticeably bad, doing precise turns requires correctly guessing the input lag and clicking the turn command early.

I guess I see why it's being shut down.

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Stadia isn't being shut down because it wasn't successful; it was no less successful than other services that are still up (like GeForce Now, or, for that matter, PS Now.)

Instead, it is my understanding that the point of Stadia was to give Google Cloud GPU instances a first-party "spot workload" to run when otherwise underutilized, since Google were building that instance type out ahead of confirmed business demand. They had all these idle GPUs just sitting around; may as well let people play games on them!

The moment the first GPU-backed generative AI models were open-sourced, though, there was suddenly tons of business demand for cloud GPU instances, to back all the "this[whatever]doesnotexist"-type services that were popping up. And "actually renting the GPU time to people with a business use-case for it" is much higher-margin than letting people play games with them. (That was the original intent of building out the instance class, after all.)

Stadia accomplished its purpose. The demand for the instances arrived, so Google didn't need Stadia any more.

This sounds like a retcon at best. Google wouldn’t have had to build a first party studio of the intent was to turn if off all along. I know the Eng VP that was there from the beginning (not to the end, tho!) and this is not his story at all. I think they honestly are trying to find new “surfaces” to give people access to compute.

Cunningham's Law at work. I've asked whether my hypothesis was anything like the truth numerous times now, but never received a knowing response. Phrase it one time as a bald statement of fact, though, and someone who can cite primary sources as to why I'm wrong will be summoned! :)

I suppose they burned a small fortune building two game studios to make use of "spot money": https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/1/22260803/google-stadia-gam...

Do we think Stadia during its lifetime earned more money than it cost though?

They recently refunded every purchase made on stadia when they announced it was going to close down, and they created 2 first party studios for it (along with deals with rockstar games etc.)

Did stadia itself make any money? Probably not. I'm sure the money they made from re-using those servers for their cloud/ai departments certainly paid of the dept though.

But derefr's explanation is the other way around. Google built the servers for the cloud/ai department and crated Stadia to reuse them. To me it seems that it couldn't have been profitable even if we say Stadia got the servers for free.

afaik stadia used custom built hardware from amd's instinct line. Almost all of their cloud offerings are nvidia based or utilize their own TPU's.

I can't say for certain that derefr's explanation is wrong, but from what it looks like they did create bespoke hardware for stadia instead of reusing their existing infrastructure.

derefr admitted to making that up in order to elicit a response.

ah the ole' Google voice trick. Maybe?

I’ve played input-sensitive games with friends on GeForce Now for several months at this point — no major issues with lag.

I was skeptical on cloud gaming, but I also tried GeForce Now and had a great experience. No time spent downloading and installing, instant access to thousands of games, playable on older laptop without fans spinning up. I do think you need a solid internet connection for it to work well.

Unless the GeForce now servers were co-located to your local ISP, it's hard to believe. Even then, you're adding quantifiable jitter to the equation on the order of a few milliseconds. It's noticeable.

I played CP2077 few days after release date, no issues with input lag. On the other hand my ISP had trouble to keep stable 40Mb/s - so in peak ours it wasn't playable at all. It was a bit surprising at first but makes sense - even a second or two buffer for other streaming services is enough to ignore variations in connection speed - but gaming has no such luxury.

I’ve had the same experience. I could not tell the latency for GeForce now, and I’m using a municipal ISP.

I’m not really a casual gamer either. I’m still surprised that GeForce now doesn’t have an app for Linux. I switch to my Mac laptop to play stuff like Fortnite.

> I switch to my Mac laptop to play stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite is about as casual as it gets. You won't rank very high in a twitch shooter like CS:GO (or keep consistent ranking) using a cloud gaming service.

People have won a million dollars playing fortnite, there’s nothing casual about that…

I think the point being made was Fortnite tends to have a wider breadth of gamer than other games (casual to hard core). My partner has a group that plays, but it’s more about crazy fun For them. They’ve tried other games but found they just get dropped and lose too quickly to make it fun.

Plus cross platform.

Ah yes, tell me more about how the exception speaks for everyone. Most folks playing Fortnite are casual gamers.

Most people playing any massive online game are casual gamers. That’s just math.

Just because one game has guns doesn’t make it less ‘casual’, which btw is a dismissive word to use in the context. Why are ‘twitch reactions’ less ‘casual’ than puzzle solving?

casual is the wrong way to gatekeep it. Someone could be a pro motorcycle racer with better reaction times than most professional gamers and still be a casual gamer. What you're really trying to test for is reaction times so just come right out and say that instead. Unless you're afraid of being beat by a filty casual.

I mean, in the case of multiplayer probably a lot comes out in the wash of optimistic updates and such, but it’s still very playable and I couldn’t personally notice the lag most of the time. Occasionally when my connection got bad it would have issues, but that was more noticeable because the resolution dropped significantly.

It really just depends how close you are to the data centre and how your traffic gets routed. A couple ms is probably acceptable, 50ms certainly not.

I think a problem with cloud gaming is that companies are being very secretive about where they have compute resources. Which I think is the wrong approach. they should partner with Comcast and say Atlanta is a Geforce Now hub. If someone is too far, they should just not let them access the service.

Most people put our ability to perceive network lag at 100-150ms. Human perceptual limits in vision is around 13ms, but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. 50ms is very very playable in networked games, I wouldn’t notice personally until 120ms.

50ms works for network games when the input update loop is done locally, and with lots of fancy techniques to correct for the network lag.

50ms of input lag on the other hand is very easily noticeable. And makes games unplayable for lots of people.

I don't have a gaming PC or console atm so I can only use streaming (Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud) and I notice it but somehow you also get used to it like adjusting your gameplay to it. It's really not that bad (and I'm nowhere near any big data centers).

Anyways it wasn't the lag that killed Stadia but the monetization: buy the games full price + pay a monthly sub too. It's just plain bad. On Geforce Now you can use your existing libraries (Steam, Uplay, Epic) and don't even have to pay if you can stand the queues. On Xbox Cloud you have to pay a monthly sub (except for Fortnite) but they give the games too, pretty much a Netflix for gaming. Both has its merits, currently I dig Xbox Cloud more.

The monthly sub was to get greater than 1080p resolution, and some free games.

But a lot of other people also thought you had to pay twice, which can't have helped.

The free tier also came later and wasn’t well publicized: one of the lessons from Stadia’s failure is that Google giving it a bad reputation at launch squandered a lot of what they did later.

Another example was the refund at the end, which would have addressed one of the most common review points had it been policy. Here’s a representative launch review listing that under “The ugly”:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/google-stadia-might-b...

Isn't predicting the input lag like half the "fun" of those worm games? My prototypical experience playing that game involves tons of input lag.

Only if the input lag is static and not dynamic.

Definitely, but only if it's consistent and predictable.

I played 200 hours of endgame destiny 2 on stadia during the pandemic so it's definitely not inherent to the platform.

Same, it was by far one of the best performing games on the platform, and whatever stream post-processing magic was happening it looked stunning at 1440p. Likewise with RDR2. The latency was never an issue for me; granted I live near a major city and have a fiber connection.

The lag on Worm Game is terrible. I've been playing PUBG on Stadia all day with zero lag.

It's being shut down because very few people used it. I think most people were OK with the input lag.

Where "most people" is just the few people who actually used it? So basically, most people who like [unpopular thing] think that [reason that thing is unpopular] isn't a problem.

It didn't reach mainstream adoption because most people who care about games didn't think it was a good deal and input lag was a big part of the reason why. And people who don't care about games... didn't care about Stadia for obvious reasons. The target demo for Stadia was basically people who have a mild interest in gaming but not enough of an interest to already own hardware suitable for running games themselves. That was never going to be a profitable niche.

I've always felt the Game Streaming market was lower powered PCs, or something you can get "for the grandkids when they visit". People who have invested in having wired connections to their boxes (try pinging your wifi router sometime) and making sure their LAN and internet are quick probably also have invested in their actual systems. The cost of the games they play isn't the major driving force of their game choice.

You could equally conclude that one of the reasons that very few people used it was because of the input lag.

The major reason stadia failed was sentiment.

Why buy games full price? All my gamer friends say its crap!

Google shuts things down, why invest?

The tech was pretty good for casual gamers, it also pushed linux gaming in the AAA studios.

I think a lot of negative sentiment also came from gamers thinking that Stadia intended to replace their gaming setups.

I will tell you I 100% refused to buy anything from stadia because I was sure Google would cancel it in a year or two. You can attribute sentiment wherever you want, but Google failed because it was Google, not because it was a bad idea.

I used some nvidia thing that was out years before Stadia and it was amazing. Yes, I’d prefer crisper graphics and lower latency, but it was ridiculous for demoing games or doing casual LAN parties and such.

A lot of “supplemental” use cases for this technology.

I’ve always wondered where that lag comes from, since I experience it even when doing remote play on my LAN.

Like, we’re able to push a lot of other things through the cable in less than a few milliseconds. Is it the compressing that takes up so much time?

I don't think it's the throughput, but the variance. There are so many places for something to go wrong between two computers, so doing something that needs a very tight latency budget is hard. Harder still when you don't have control over any of the parts connecting things. In a DC, everything can be built for qos and latency, but on a desktop you're using a porbably garbage router with a home OS running a million things.

I actually found the lag and compression artifacts between my Mac and gaming PC (which are connected by cable to the same switch) using the Steam remote play thing to be actually worse than Stadia.

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