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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

When I got Stadia, I set my dad up with it to play Red Dead 2, because he knows nothing of games, and I wasn't buying him a PS4 just to play 1 game. It was great. When he got stuck, I logged in across the country and advanced the story for him, and he took back over. Spectacular product.

I told my dad, day 1, "You'd better enjoy this now, because in 2 years, Google will kill this and you'll never be able to play again." I was off by about a year, but I was 100% right. At least they gave me back 100% of my money and game purchase $. Still, standard Google.

Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

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>Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

Apple is the only one even in that market, really. Everybody else is so focused on getting each "segment" of the market they miss the whole picture. Apple wants to slather you in Apple devices so thoroughly you don't need anyone else's electronics, and if you do it all works really well together. Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

My husband is up to his eyeballs in the Apple ecosystem. Macbooks, iMacs, Apple TV, iPhones, homepods, airpods, ... He has it all.

I feel like the idea that Apple products work seamlessly together is a bit of an exaggeration. He gets frustrated with Apply products plenty of times.

It's a generalization, but the Apple ecosystem is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.

It's kind of a "suffering from success" thing because it is generally so seamless that any disruption is extra-annoying.

yeah when it works 99% of the time that 1% is VERY VERY ANNOYING. When you are in the google ecosystem everything works like 5% of the time and so you just pretend it doesn't work together.

>generally so seamless that any disruption is extra-annoying.

Precisely. If I moving things between my iPhone, iPad and macbook is super easy.

But if I want to talk to/from windows I've been using a one person group chat on Signal, and it's still pretty clunky. I used to use pushbullet but it shut down or something.

In case you're not aware, Signal has a chat called "Notes to Self" that should be more or less the same thing, except without having to create a group.

There is definitely a lot of half-baked stuff in Apple's ecosystem, but relative to the alternatives, it works well enough.

One of the great features is that, typically, everything works again after power cycling. And if that does not work, you can go to Apple's tech support website/app and schedule a call where they will walk you through the troubleshooting.

It is not that Apple's ecosystem is perfect. Far from it.

It is the others are so bad, so poorly designed and handled is what made Apple felt so good. That is both Microsoft and Google.

> Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

Steam is not helping. Any game that only ships 32-bit x86 binaries should not be listed as having Mac support. Apple not only doesn't sell x86 Macs anymore, they don't even do security updates for Mojave. If you have an Intel Mac around, Bootcamp likely makes for a 10x better gaming experience.

I feel like Apple are really dropping the ball here. There's an amazing catalogue of classic games that could run really well under a hypothetical 32-bit x86 Rosetta. But Apple is doing Apple, and asking you to use their Game Porting Toolkit instead... Basically telling gamedevs, if you're not ready to go full Apple, don't go Apple at all.

> There's an amazing catalogue of classic games that could run really well under a hypothetical 32-bit x86 Rosetta

Rosetta 2 is a combination of good AOT/JIT x86-64 translation to ARM, and apple-specific hardware modes to change performance CPU to use the x86-64 memory model.

The x86-32 memory model is much more expensive to support. Doing this in software is why ARM windows has such a terrible reputation for running x86-32 unbearably slow.

Unless Apple suddenly feels the need to make a stronger investment in running an architecture they deprecated before they even switched off Intel, it is unlikely to see any sort of official offering.

Even if they did feel the need to support 32-bit: without a hardware investment (e.g. M4 support), you likely get the same performance you would running under a third party emulator - which you can get reasonably easily via ARM linux or windows running on the hypervisor.

So if there isn't interest in an actual port, your easiest option to run older games is going to be with something like Parallels running a Windows VM.

>Steam is not helping.

Apple's version of Steam could be called "Sauce".

Sony is the company that I feel somehow misses this the most. Possibly Microsoft. The lack of integration that Playstations and XBoxes have with anything is rather surprising. Could be as simple as volume control on the TV. Or automatically turn on the TV. Nothing fancy. But nothing exists.

I think Microsoft depends on what market you are looking at. As far as creating a "Microsoft" ecosystem they are doing pretty bad and seem to be trying to force it to happen for their benefit instead of it being a thing that actually gives the user something in return, like you tend to get in Apple's ecosystem.

However, if you look at Gaming Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job with this. With their "play anywhere" initiative to buy a game once and it works on Xbox and PC (ignoring that publisher support of it has been hit or miss but thats a different story). Game saves, friend list, etc all being synced between PC and Xbox.

I should have put that my understanding was old. I'm happy to see things have come even farther along than I would have expected. But I honestly don't get why this didn't happen early 2000s. The specific thing that always baffled me was how the PSPs couldn't interact with the Playstation at the time. Heck, after the first PSP, I don't know why the next Playstation couldn't take those disks in to let you play on your TV. Why build up a completely separate ecosystem? I see they are moving away from that now, with the PS5 being able to do PS4 games. That is good to see.

Xbox is fun example because they hit some peaks and then actively got worse. The Xbox 360 was somewhat focused on being your living room hub and for many years tried to actually get people to use Windows Media Center, and supported its own and general Media Center remotes. (I used it for streaming some things.) It also had a bunch of support for many TVs that used custom HDMI protocols (pre-HDMI-CEC).

The original Xbox One with bundled Kinect was the peak of their integration attempt before "gamer outrage" crippled and then killed its efforts. It supported HDMI-CEC some but it also truly had "universal remote" capabilities as it could use the Kinect's IR depth sensor as an IR blaster to send commands to almost anything that uses a traditional IR remote. It had a big database of IR commands and also could use the IR depth sensor to watch and try to learn any IR remote you pointed at it. On top of that it also had a port on the back to connect a normal IR blaster if you needed to send signals to hardware that wouldn't catch a blast from the Kinect or just wanted to disconnect the Kinect for a bit but still have TV/sound system/cable box control.

That Xbox One also had an HDMI passthrough and could picture-in-picture with something like a cable box. (It also support picture-in-picture from some apps at the time.)

The original on-device-only voice recognition with the Kinect was great and "Xbox, Volume Up" was something I used all the time on the original Xbox One until Cortana took over the voice recognition and made it far more cumbersome.

The OneGuide was an interesting attempt to show you a mixture of your TV/Cable grids and highlighted content from streaming apps you had installed. It would let you jump to channels on TV or Cable just as easily as launching something like Hulu straight into a show.

Almost all of those features were eventually shutdown or left to slowly break in the drastic post-launch retooling from the "gamer outrage" that the Xbox One was "gamer-focused enough" and their pressure that the Xbox should be "only for games". (The Xbox One and Xbox Series still support rudimentary HDMI-CEC, but in my experience it is hit-and-miss and definitely nowhere near as well supported as the "universal remote" stuff.)

I had a PS5 and an LG television, it integrated just fine. Including the Playstation Media Remote. Could control volume to my sound system, television controls and playstation interaction just fine.

This sounds like a "your television not following standards" (HDMI-CEC) problem and not a Sony one.

Huh, that is news to me. My TV does a stupid "tv will turn on if I power on a console, but won't automatically switch to that input."

I'll have to dig a little on it. Curious what is off on it.

That said, I should probably reframe my criticism. Most of this is me being surprised at how bad it was neglected back in 20002ish timeframe. Went many years with no TV to really see some advances. I'm getting a large "batteries got good without paying attention to them" vibe. :D

My experience - smart TVs tend to be really bad at CEC during power on, because they are booting while the other device is asking them to execute commands like switching input. I usually set the TV to 'last input on boot' if such a setting exists.

I've noticed the Apple TV will ask the TV to switch input via CEC on pretty much any button press, which is non-ideal but is a decent enough workaround.

You may need to check which input the device is plugged into on the TV, as well as make sure CEC is enabled on the TV in question. Even then sometimes support (volume control) is hit or miss.

Get a Sony TV and you can fully control the Playstation with the remote. It handles TV on/off signals and autoconfigures HDR/Display settings. The whole bit.

Isn’t this just HDMI-CEC? I don’t think it requires Sony hardware but I could be wrong.

This has been my experience, though some aspects of CEC are hit or miss, especially depending on the TV, AVR and other device(s). I use an NVidia Shield TV with an AVR in my main living space, and a couple others in different rooms. For CEC, some remotes/devices work for everything, others not so much, others still are hit and miss for say volume control, etc.

I'll have to try a newer device, then. Pleasantly surprised to hear that my view is just outdated. :D

My old Xbox 360 would turn on the TV+receiver and change the input from just pressing the Xbox button on the controller over a decade ago. The Xbox IR receiver worked as a DVD player for the receiver remote as well so I could control the media controls on the Xbox from my receiver's remote.

What you’re talking about is CEC & ARC support.

Unfortunately, that too is a buggy mess, hence why universal/programmable remotes still exist.

My playstations and xboxes all turn on my tvs (and switch their inputs) just fine.

Indeed, a reason why I am still hoping they release a new airport. I’ve tried quite a few and none of them have ever been particularly great. The most recent being Ruckus and my current AP, an Omada EAP670.

It seems a lot of people make a product but don’t use it themselves enough to tell how to make it better so it always feels like v1.

Or they do but they’re not very observant idk?

If Google changes leadership to a sensible business person, I'll put serious money into the stock.

Google is a megacorporation with powerful IP and virtually unlimited resources. It's time to stop the small start-up mentality of chucking things at the wall to see what sticks.

Unify your products/services, assign staff to manage it, commit to your decisions. Offer paid services with support and no user hostile privacy bs.

I'm at the point where I just feel this latent contempt when using google products now. I went from a fanboy darling to someone who actively dissuades people from using anything from the company.

Chucking to see what sticks is fine... it's dropping anything that isn't massively successful, even if it's profitable that I have issue with. Not every idea needs to generate billions in revenue, and with appropriate structure/substructure many of these projects can be kept. Domains is a perfect example of this.

The issue you mention though is huge though, they incentivize "new" over enhancement or better integration. Google hangouts is a perfect example of this... great all in one messaging app, Google Voice, SMS, etc. And they bork it and replace it with, what 3 different chat/voice/video apps so far? It's stupid to say the least.

I do wonder what it would take to get Sundar Pichai out of the CEO spot. The board must like him, but my usage and faith in Google products has never been lower.

GOOG is approaching its all-time highs today, and up well over 100% over the past five years. In a similar time frame the S&P 500 is up about 50% or so.

I hate Google's tendency to cancel products as much as anyone, but as investments go, that tendency doesn't seem to hurt it.

There's a bit of a tipping point to things like this. It doesn't hurt them until it DOES, and at that point, it's almost impossible for a company to gain trust back.

There is literally no incentive for a giant corporation to put anyone competent at the helm. That's a backward understanding of the situation. CEOs don't exist to enrich corporations; corporations exist to enrich CEOs. Anyone who had the power to appoint someone competent has no motivation to do so: they can also appoint their buddies, who can continue to parasitize the effectiveness of the company for their own gain. Why would they make some rando CEO? They literally do not care about the long-term success of the company as a whole, they only care about the portion of it that they can drain of blood in the short-term. Any company with any level of "excess competence" is immediately swarmed by Business Caste parasites (via a takeover or several other means) and that excess competence is drained off into their pockets. In fact laying off support departments and canceling products and reneging on promises is one of the easiest ways to suck out value from the company into the C-layer in the short term. Who cares if the company flounders and fails? They just spread their locust wings and find a new host.

> If Google changes leadership to a sensible business person, I'll put serious money into the stock.

That's funny because that's usually when I sell my stocks in a company, as it usually signals (to me) that enshittification is about to begin and they'll start loosing customers quickly, at least if the company was engineering/R&D focused before.

Ancestor comments think it's already pretty shit.

Google's stuff could be more shit, but also a lot less.

Well, parent seems to consider the stock price and according to it, Google doesn't suck for investing in the stock.

Google should change because its traditional primary revenue stream and profit center (i.e., search + ads) runs the risk of being disrupted (into the ground) by AI and chatbots. Why search of for an answer when ChatGPT can give it to you directly, without the overhead?

I tend to stick with the Thiel inspired lens. That is, Google has (had?) a monopoly on search and ads, just about everything is smoke & mirrors to hide that fact. "Look, business is hard. The market for any given product is very competitive. Look at how many business and products bombed for us..." This interpretation makes sense because Google's best & brightest has to know how these sunset episodes upset customers, undermine trust, etc. and yet they continue.

Either Google wants it this way, or they're too thick to change. It's not the latter, is it.

if that means turning into microsoft, then no thanks

I just tried out Nivida's alternative - Geforce Now - this weekend and I am quite impressed. There is a free version where you que up, otherwise its $10/mo or $20/mo if you want 4k and a dedicated 4080. The main selling point to me is that you can sync Steam, Gog, Epic, Ubisoft, or EA accounts and play any of your purchased games that are compatible. You can play in the browser, via a dedicated program, or with one of their Shield TV boxes. The latter would run ~$150 + controllers or mouse/keyboard, so that is part of the way to a PS4.

FYI, GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade). The Shield is a luxury version that does basically the same thing with more horsepower. I imagine you can use any similar device (like an old Android phone or an old laptop) for the same purposes... if it can stream Netflix, it can run Geforce Now.

The main downside of GFN is that it's a publisher opt-in, and many games aren't available on it . But for the games in its catalog, it works REALLY well -- so much so that I much prefer it to the dedicated gaming desktop I used to have, because it's so much quieter and cheaper (both in terms of an upfront hardware purchase and in electricity costs, between the GPU itself and needing to cool down the room).

There are also services like shadow.tech and AirGPU that let you run virtual Windows boxes with a GPU, cheaper than you'd get from AWS or GCP, but able to run any game you want.

> ...GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV ($30), which you can connect standard Bluetooth controllers to (say, Xbox controllers or leftover Stadia controllers with the firmware upgrade).

How is the latency in this configuration? I thought the main reason Google used the Wi-Fi built into the Stadia controllers was to get around this.

I wouldn't want to play a shooter on it, but (say) Baldur's Gate 3 co-op with Xbox controllers worked great. Latency wasn't an issue.

I think the Bluetooth latency is going to be less than the wifi latency (Chromecast has no ethernet port) plus the roundtrip to the Nvidia servers anyway. (edit: Chromecast with Google TV, that is. Chromecast Ultra, a different device, does have ethernet)

I've also used GeForce Now on a hardwired gigabit fiber connection on my desktop, and even then I wouldn't consider the latency suitable for competitive first-person shooters. But it worked great for most other genres of games. Basically anything will work fine where a software cursor is used (where you don't update frames until a hover or a click), as opposed to a crosshaired 3D game that requires constant frame redraws on every mouse motion (shooters).

That's just me though... as a lifelong PC gamer, many actual consoles + smart TVs (especially when they're not in gaming mode) also have unacceptable latency to me, but I think millions of people wouldn't even notice. It's worth a shot, especially if you can just hook up an existing computer to your TV (via HDMI or whatever) and get a feel for it that way.

The Stadia controller thing over wifi thing was always bullshit. I had their controllers and it was never noticeably better or worse than a standard Xbox controller wirelessly connected to GeForce Now. And once Stadia died they enabled Bluetooth on it and it still works fine. shrug* Stadia's marketing made a lot of questionable, and sometimes demonstrably false, claims.

> Chromecast has no ethernet port

I exclusively used the Chromecast Ultra that had the Ethernet port in the power supply when using Stadia with the controllers.

Yeah, that'd probably work better, but any hardwired connection would vs WiFi.

i.e. it's not how your controllers connect to the device that matters, but how your device connects to the Nvidia servers. GFN works WAY better on a hardwired connection, but it's tolerable on a wifi TV (if occasionally glitchy, in terms of compression artifacts)... I wouldn't call that latency per se, just wifi instability.

>> GeForce Now also works fine on a plain old Chromecast with Google TV

Thanks, I did not know that!

You should get your dad a steam deck! It sounds like he would love it. you could (with some setup) even use Steam Link to log in remotely. latency/throughput would obvoiusly be much worse, enough so that you might not be able to do any fast-moving reflex-required scenarios, but it's playable.

I just cannot rationalize getting him any gaming equipment. He could manage Stadia, juuuust barely. He frequently cannot figure out his cell phone. He is basically a ludite. My mom had to stand there and turn Stadia on on the tablet for him... I was considering Shadow but it's just too complex too.

GeForce now works pretty well. I use it for gaming while traveling and haven’t had too many issues

GeForce Now is working great for me. But for this person's dad, it probably wouldn't work well at all. The interface is cluttered with game icons. Which is fine for me. But someone averse to tech would probably find it confusing & overwhelming.

Those icons are just games, aren't they? The first row is "my library". Make him a Steam account with just a few games and he can just launch them directly from that row.

Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.

GFN is much simpler in complexity. It's comparable to Stadia, though not QUITE as slick because it still goes through Steam. It is, however, a WHOLE lot easier to use than Shadow.

If you get him the desktop app (which is optional) and link it to his accounts and such, from then on he just opens GFN and clicks on the game he wants to play and that's it. No OS or updates or maintenance or anything like that to worry about.

Edit: Be warned though, Red Dead Redemption is not available on Geforce Now. Maybe someday... they just started integrating Microsoft Game Pass games onto GFN, so maybe RDR is on the backlog there somewhere.

For your dad:

I was a Stadia fan until I tried GeForce NOW and some of the "cloud gaming hardware services" (hardware, not platform). They were superior products, and did mostly the same thing. GeForce NOW is particularly slick, but their catalog is limited at the publisher level. I've found Boosteroid to be a great value while not being as limited.

I play on an Nvidia Shield most of the time with a Pro Controller for Switch.

I use ShadowPC. Steam, with Big Screen, makes it console enough. At least until you want to play an EA game.

> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

I get frustrated as much as anyone about Google's product shit show, but I don't agree with this. I own a Pixel, a Pixelbook that I loved and was a great dev machine when running the Linux container (of course, "In September 2022, Google canceled future generations of the product and dissolved the team working on it."), and Nest Home that I got as a sort of door prize at some event. They all worked together really well, e.g. unlocking/syncing the Pixelbook with my phone, or when I say "Hey Google" both the phone and Nest Home initially acknowledge but only one (in most cases the Nest Home) responds, which is what I want.

I guess you missed that generation where they were trying to transition the Google Wifi product into the Nest lineup, while Google Home was still in its adolescence.

That one device needed the Google Home app to set up initially, the Nest app to configure day to day, and Google Wifi for advanced legacy settings and port forwarding and such. Three apps for one device? Was a real WTF moment for me...

Router aside, some of my other devices would end up in Google Home, others in the Nest app. Eventually I got tired of the bullshit and switched to the much cheaper & simpler Wyze ecosystem and never had an issue again.

I was really hopeful for Stadia, too, and enjoyed playing on it for a while. But in the end, remoting from my own computer was better and faster.

Having you considered something like Parsec to do the same thing with your dad? I think it should do what you need. Steam's own Remote Play Together might do it, too.

This is all across the US, one coast to another, so these personally run apps probably wouldnt work, right?

Parsec and Steam's remote play feature support both LAN and WAN. Mileage varies, wired LAN is better than wireless LAN is better than WAN.

You're correct in the notion that running these types of apps relies on your home Internet connection (along with your hotel connection or wherever you're located). This is almost certainly lower performance, lower quality, and higher latency than gaming from a Google datacenter via Stadia.

Across the continent that might be true, but when gaming from my office in town to my house, there was noticeably less lag on Parsec than Stadia. I tried Stadia both at home and work. I used it at home for months before using Parsec instead.

It's hard to know without trying, but I would guess that it'd at least be good enough to do what you were doing before. I think Parsec is still free for the basics, so the only cost would be your time in setting it up and trying it.

> Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

Getting worse too. The Pixel Watch was atrocious on launch, required 6 hours of updates, battery life on my first walk on cell coverage dropped me 80% in an hour. Google does not know how to make a good product.

Strongly concur on Stadia—a product way ahead of its time. As for the Google ecosystem, I don’t have everything Google—I more often go for best-of-breed—but, for the Google things I do have, I love how well they work together. A bit of happiness is taking a photo on my Pixel phone—and then instantly inserting it into a Google Doc right after logging into my ChromeOS device.

> a product way ahead of its time

Ahead of it's time?

The gaming industry is the biggest entertainment sector - millenials that grew up playing video games have the highest amount of disposable income. The market exists.

The technology and networking also works. Streaming has been well established for movies and television, the past few years has put a dramatic emphasis on remote work and distributed collaboration.

Stadias' timing was fine, it's Google that dropped the ball.

Stadia was not ahead of its time. It was a latecomer to a growing field that Google dipped its feet into, but never fully committed to. I'm pointing this out not to be pedantic, but to illustrate just how thoroughly Google dropped the ball on it.

In 2010 OnLive was launched to the public, creating the first version of a public Stadia-like service. It worked the same way; you opened a browser or an app and you could play a game that you bought on it (I think back then it was a subscription model? can't remember)

Around the same time, Gaikai and Sony partnered up to create the predecessor to Playstation Now streaming.

Then Nvidia entered the game in 2012, right around the time they started adding hardware-accelerated video encoding to their GPUs, launching Nvidia Grid with some partners. By 2017, Grid evolved into GeForce Now and could play the user's entire Steam library (unlike today, back then ALL games were available, not just ones opted-into by the publisher).

Stadia didn't come around until 2019, nearly a decade after OnLive. Google being Google, they didn't want to do what Nvidia did (make existing games playable), but instead created their own architecture that was easier to launch and easier to use, but required users to re-purchase existing titles, usually without cross-saves and cross-plays. (Edit: It also required devs to spend time and money porting the game to Stadia's platform, vs a one-click opt-in for GeForce Now). So it sat in its own little bubble, away from the entire rest of the PC ecosystem (which was Steam and/or Games for Windows back then). It also had inferior graphics compared to Nvidia's cards (notably lacking raytracing, ultrawide, etc.) and Google flat-out lied about its capabilities (like Orcs Must Die 3 games being made a Stadia exclusive at launch because "only the cloud" could run it smoothly, except it came out on Steam a year later and was just fine).

They did some minimal barebones marketing targeting casuals. Fast forward a few years and they just completely abandoned it, while GeForce Now continues to grow, gaining EA, Ubi, and now Activision Blizzard games as official partners. Amazon has Luna, Microsoft has xCloud (or whatever it's called now), Playstation has PSNow (or whatever it's called now), Shadow, Boosteroid, AirGPU etc. are all alive.

Google didn't invent game streaming. They didn't perfect it. They launched a slightly more polished experience that was significantly more expensive, had terrible sales compared to Steam and its 3rd-party resellers, and and gave up on it in its adolescence. There was nothing "ahead of its time" about it, it was just another could-have-been that Google toyed with and never seriously invested into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_gaming#History

Is there any other service that allowed you to play AAA titles with nothing more than a Wi-Fi enabled controller and an inexpensive dongle plugged into any TV?

Yes? Onlive had its own console, GeForce Now lets you do that with any browser-enabled phone or computer or Google TV, etc. (Nvidia also has its own Shield device, which is basically a much more powerful Google TV). xCloud worked that way too. I played them on my phone and on my projector by connecting a dongle of some sort. They'd also work on any Android TV or cheap no-name Android streaming stick.

Most of those used Bluetooth instead of WiFi for the controllers, but that never really mattered (I tried all of them, the Stadia wifi controllers made no difference).

The sad part is that Google and Google usually works great via 1st or 3rd party at first but then Google does something to get in its own way. I think the Moto Droid was peak Google in terms of ability to do whatever the hell you wanted.

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