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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> (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.

The “perfect” timing window in Festival is +/-5ms from gem position (10ms total afaik). Harmonix has always been exceptional with their beatmatching code. There are physical limits to the black magic of latency compensation, however. If your input has to travel over the wire before the game can see it, then it’s unavoidable without heavy compensation

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.

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.

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.

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