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Comment by robben1234 | Hacker News Reader

Ask Google, Microsoft or Nvidia why it's not in fact the future of gaming. You need to be rich enough to have fast internet and pay an expensive subscription yet poor enough to fail to afford a GPU at home, all while accepting low bitrate and high input latency. It's not a large addressable market.

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Stadia played Cyberpunk at max settings when none of the home systems could do it. I played it on a Retina iPad, and thought it looked fantastic.

I've heard people play Fortnite Festival (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive) over Microsoft/Amazon cloud streaming.

"low bitrate and high input latency" is what you'd expect rendering offsite, but in practice, it seems to work surprisingly well.

I tend to think that Stadia (like many things Google) was killed before its time.

It didn't seem any worse than cloud gaming on Xbox/PS Now/Luna/Nvidia/etc.

> (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive)

I contest that rhythm games are the least latency sensitive. You'll automatically adjust to (consistent) latency and not notice it. You also don't get much feedback unless you miss a note.

Festival tells you how far off you are in milliseconds, and gives you extra points for perfect timing.

But that's still not an across the wire latency.

Also super fast loading times. Playing e.g. RDR2 on a physical console, by comparison, is painful.

Stadia worked absurdly well. One of the beta games was Thumper, a demanding rhythm game (I might be the reason why it was in the beta lineup actually). How well did that work out? Well, the latency made it hard to play... until I switched my TV to so-called "gaming mode". And then it was fine.

No kidding. The TV was introducing more latency than Stadia itself.

I also once tested it on hotel wifi. It worked great.

(Mind you, this was in Europe. YMMV.)

The business model however was terrible and killed the product IMO. Which, honestly, good: Stadia would have killed video game archiving efforts. If a publisher folds and Stadia and similar platforms stop streaming its streaming-exclusives, then those games are gone. Not worth it, no matter how well it worked.

yeah i felt so dumb with how constantly bad in home streaming was for me with latency and i just could not pinpoint the issue until one day i swapped my tv into gamemode and boom..... felt like i was playing on my desktop

Even if it worked for some games and users - this still demonstrates the fatal flaw of cloud gaming. Total vendor lock in and no user control.

If they decide one day to fuck you over, there is nothing you can do about it.

This is only a fatal flaw to you and me.

If Sony and MSFT decide to go down this route and it's the only way to play blockbuster games, it'll happen whether we like it or not because the market cares far more about playing the latest game than it does maintaining control over its own destiny so to speak. Very few consumers will eschew the Latest Thing and just happily play older games on their own PC (or console) to make a point to the publishers.

I still thing that if you burn enough people there will be pushback.

Pushback like there was to making Office 365 or Adobe subscription-only? Or pushback like there was to Google mostly killing AOSP? Or pushback like there was to ads in Netflix & friends? Or pushback like there was to <pick a subscription service> price hikes?

You'll note that all those things are still there, and their competitors are either not there or not significantly bolstered by people disgruntled by those changes.

Well I am sure the subscription shenanigans helped Krita and Libreoffice. Graphene OS seems to be gaining traction & Sailfish OS exists as well.

And making media subscription more expensive will just push more people to piracy, so they will just loose money due to their greed.

How do you pirate GTA:7 when your console never even gets the whole thing in its own memory? That's the point: piracy as we know it becomes largely impossible. Jailbreaking a console won't help. In fact, the publishers could open source the consoles and allow rooted consoles to play, because who cares?

The other point is cheaters. Knowing someone's running an aimbot makes it a whole lot less fun to play online.

> If Sony and MSFT decide to go down this route and it's the only way to play blockbuster games, it'll happen whether we like it or not because the market cares far more about playing the latest game than it does maintaining control over its own destiny so to speak.

Maybe, or maybe it'll live a giant gap waiting to be filled in by a new competitor in the console market.

We have had very... different experiences with stadia. It was not at all useful gor low latency games..

It is not suitable for competition ranked players. The average player will stomp over high ranked players.

Most people are not competition ranked players, they’re people who like to play a few hours of a game now and again.

I played the entirety of Assassins Creed Odyssey on Stadia. It did works surprisingly well. Xbox cloud gaming also worked well for me. It's great for non competitive games.

GeForce Now is doing much better.

Stadia had other issues beyond fast Internet, like asking a community focused on Windows/DirectX to add support for the Stadia/Vulkan stack.

At the last Stadia developers conference, a few months before it was killed, one of the talks was about doing something like Proton for Stadia.

EDIT: Here is the talk,

"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-N7wDCRohg

At least GeForce allows you to play games you already own, unlike Stadia where you have to rebuy everything. IIRC in GeForce Now its just a matter of signing into your Steam account.

I don’t know much about gaming GPU workloads and how they differ from LLM inference workloads, but I’m definitely rich enough to pay for an LLM subscription and definitely too poor to afford the GPUs it would take to get anywhere near that level of inference.

Gaming is less expensive and more latency-sensitive.

That makes sense. But is the price difference between doing it on home hardware versus cloud hardware less significant than it is for LLM inference? And if so, is it mostly because LLMs need much more VRAM (or more exotic memory architectures)?

Nowadays the average person can just buy a Steam Machine or something similar and stream to anywhere seamlessly, no subscription required. Most ISP's offer good upload speeds now compared to 10 years ago making it very viable.

>You need to be rich enough to have fast internet and pay an expensive subscription yet poor enough to fail to afford a GPU at home

that sounds like a broadening market to me.

I wonder if this will maybe change in the near future or possibly already has? With things like starlink and fiber internet and data centers everywhere absolutely packed full of GPUs it seems like one or two more big players will try at least and possibly succeed with this model.

Why do you need to have low bitrate?

There are lots of techniques to hide latency.

I don't get the thing about the GPU: even rich people don't necessarily want to bother with owning a GPU thing. And whether fast internet is expensive depends on where you live. Here in Singapore 10 Gbps fibre to the home starts at around 20 USD per month; and we are in a really high cost of living country (we usually topped charts of 'most expensive city to live in').

You're conflating internet prices with cost of living when it's almost entirely unrelated. You live in one of the more densely populated areas around, that is significantly more important. I pay more than $100usd for 100mb bonded DSL because there are probably fewer people in my county than a Singapore city block.

Well, the comment I replied to suggested that cloud gaming wouldn't work at all, because of these economics.

Thanks to your refinements, we know that remote gaming like this might not work for the hillbillies, but perhaps it might work in the centres of civilisation?

Stadia worked great for me on a typical 100Mbps cable connection in the US. Online multiplayer was okay with latency, not wonderful but not bad either.

This has little to do with whether you can afford a GPU and everything to do with whether or not the publisher even makes the properties you want to play available on disc (hint: they won't).

Global access to high speed home Internet is growing not shrinking, there are plenty of ways to creatively manage latency especially when you control the endpoints, and at the end of the day the publishers can effectively force the transition by only making the latest blockbuster games available on the cloud model.

You and I will bitch and moan but the vast majority of consumers (really their parents who pay for them) will be happy their new console is small, light, potentially cheaper, and silent. No more boxes of games to store makes Mom happier. Eventually much of the hardware could be built into televisions from affiliated manufacturers so all you have to do is buy controllers and sign up for the subscription(s).

I still remember the outrage from Half-Life 2 requiring an internet connection to play due to the DRM. Similar arguments were made about games being rented instead of owned, objections about the internet requirement.

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