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Google Stadia: Thread 01

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    #31
    I was going to to post the Digital Foundry analysis video. Some of the advantages the tech has really offer an opportunity for something different (jump in with streamers, play from a point of a YT video, instant loading etc.). I love the fixed 'virtual spec'. It feels like the first of the next gen systems has launched with similar specifications to Sony and Microsoft's next machines.

    It will be interesting to see where this goes. I think the reaction to pricing is telling. On ResetEra the vast majority will only consider a subscription based service, however I'm not sure that will work for publishers. Consumers are going to have to get used to paying for full price games on these streaming services, in a similar vein to how you buy movies on Amazon Prime or Google Play store. That said very few on ResetEra (or here) are probably the target audience. Margins on this service are going to be worse for publishers unless I'm missing something although some industry veterans leading this.

    However I do think that the advantage Microsoft (and Sony) has are their trojan horses with established console and brands. MS can build xCloud into Game Pass, Xbox Live Gold or Play Anywhere if it wants to. Certainly run lots of offers via those even if it is a seperate premium subscription.

    The whole thing feels a bit early though. Very little detail; unclear on hardware platforms (i.e. no iPad), no pricing, no exclusive killer app and a new studio that appears to be in gestation or infancy. I think having this would have been more impactful. It still makes me think Google are reacting to Microsoft xCloud rather than the other way around.

    Originally posted by Superman Falls View Post
    Yeah, I just read Eurogamers article about it where they talk about Stadias latency and compression issues being offset by the benefits of things like not being bound by disc size limitations but that's a false statement. Unless Google plans to create AAA content or sign up such exclusives (no signs of that) it's dependent on third party software that could only ignore those limitations in their game design if they opted not to release on console which in most cases they're not going to do. I think once you factor in the realities of most markets and devices eco systems and user bases you have a much more advanced version of Ouya... but still Ouya all the same.
    But the games being instant (or near instant) is definitely one of the main advantages. No 92GB day one 'patches' or system updates. And each developer can eat into petabytes of storage rather than be worried about install sizes.

    Comment


      #32
      It's a perk but it's one of those things that I e4asily imagine is an irk for gamers but not something that they care so passionately about that they're going to dive in on something like Stadia to avoid. With anything like this, for me, one of the biggest red flags is the commonly used attempt to use an Assassin's Creed game as a tool to show it off. AC is a series that even at its best feels sluggish and low in response so it's incredibly suited to showing off visuals whilst hiding ill effects. But at the same time, gaming has a glass ceiling in its appeal when it comes to traditional gaming experiences and that audience is already well catered for, if Google thinks rolling this out will attract seas of casual audiences, mobile gamers etc then I expect they're in for the same disappointment countless other efforts have experienced.

      It also brings up the same curiosity about Game Passes long term pricing model I have. Low priced subs seem unsustainable but people paying £50-£60 a game to stream? Nah, a chunk will but that's market erosion or Stadia's death right there. They need a sweet spot middle ground right away but in any eventuality, even if Stadia runs AC or NFS etc well... why would anyone interested in gaming possible choose to buy on this over any other option out there?

      It'll definitely be dust on the wind before market attention changes to next gen systems.

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        #33
        It seems like we can't go through a 3-4 year period without someone trying this, blind to the reasons it was a bad idea the last time - reasons that haven't changed.

        In the 1980s, David Bowie and Mick Jagger recorded a version of Dancing in the Street. Most people have probably seen/heard it. What you might not know is this:

        ... to raise money for the Live Aid famine relief cause. The original plan was to perform a track together live, with Bowie performing at Wembley Stadium and Jagger at John F. Kennedy Stadium, until it was realized that the satellite link-up would cause a half-second delay that would make this impossible unless either Bowie or Jagger mimed their contribution, something neither artist was willing to do.
        As a result, the idea was shelved.

        I love fast-action games. I love racing games. I love titles that are rapid, 60fps affairs; dodging enemies, executing perfect combos, and formulating strategies on-the-fly under constantly changing circumstances, snatching victory at the very last moment. I love fighting games, I love arcade titles, retro games...

        But I also love to try out new technology, so I spent a fair bit of time playing on the older services, like OnLive and Gaikai, and they "worked", insofar as that it was interesting such a thing worked at all. OnLive actually had some really cool features; it was very easy, for example, to "take over" someone else's game at their request, to watch or stream others who flagged they allowed that... Even when you booted up a game, it played this animation where the camera zoomed into a huge panel of a thousand monitors until it found your monitor... But after a few goes, you realised that wasn't just an animation, and those were actual views of people playing.

        Very clever, very sci-fi.

        Until you actually started to play something "in anger".

        Not on a stage at E3, where the OnLive box on-stage is probably communicating with a server in the same room, but rather a server somewhere miles away, perhaps at the other end of the country.

        This happens every time. Someone gets up on stage, waxes lyrical about how broadband bandwidth has improved, and reassures everyone it's going to work this time. The killer for cloud gaming isn't bandwidth, it's latency. The industry says broadband connections have gotten "faster and faster" but that's just marketing bluster; they're pretty much the same "speed" they were in 2006. It still takes the same duration for you to ping Amazon, or Yahoo, or practically any site that it did back then. I mean, it's marginally faster but not to the degree people believe.

        For cloud gaming like Stadia, Gaikai or OnLive, to work, you're making joypad inputs that are being fired off to a server. The server receives them, processes them in the game, and streams the result back to the user. This involves two degrees of separation; lag is introduced between the user and the server, and on the way back - so the maximum speed at which a game can react to your inputs is 2x the latency.

        Then, this assumes your internet connection operates at its fastest, all the time, in a uniform manner. This is simply not the case. Connection quality varies, both day-to-day and moment-to-moment. Have you ever ran a trace-route on an internet connection? Your data packets are at the mercy of whatever route they take to the destination, which is not under your control, and can simply change.

        People then cite PC gaming and online gaming, and how when you play games like Team Fortress 2 or CS:GO, how the game feels so responsive, but here's the kicker - it just feels that way. The amount of fakery going on in online games to make them feel "synchronous" to every player is immense. If you feel that, it's because you've been hoodwinked by the very good work PC devs have done ever since the likes of QuakeWorld in order to make that feel as good as it does; it's not a comparison you can bring up here without looking foolish.

        The next recourse they probably took to sell this to slightly more savvy investors is probably the Human Benchmark, and pointing out that humans have a reaction time slower than 100ms. This is true, in theory, but not in fact. It works in a controlled, specific scenario, and serves as a useful benchmark, but videogames aren't simple, paced reaction tests - they're a constant flow of information to which the user is reacting, anticipating, and most critically, responding to the events of the last few seconds to guide their actions in the next few seconds.

        In a racing game, if you steer one way a bit too far, then the other to correct, with display lag, you'll find yourself starting to oscillate, and recovering becomes extremely difficult. In a platformer, you'll consistently misjudge timings for jumps. Just forget about fighting games.

        The thing is, I'm not totally against cloud gaming as a concept. Some games do work. I played a lot of Civilisation V back on OnLive, using a crappy Android tablet, as a test to see if it would work. Playstation Now works, but as a side-show to the main Playstation brand, not as a replacement - plus the PS1 etc. are celebrated for their RPGs and various other games which will work well on this kind of service. Ultimately, also, PSNow is about retro games, which people may not really play all that much; sometimes playing a retro title is just playing 20 minutes to "scratch the itch", and for that, this is fine (hell, I tend to just boot up a YouTube video every time I miss Guardian Heroes or Gungriffon).

        What concerns me more, however, is that this could lead to an altogether different problem. I'm going to sound dismissive an obstinate here, for which I apologise in advance, but you know that stuff above, that I said won't work with cloud gaming? I like that about videogames. I like 60fps gaming, I like games to feel fast and responsive. I love Splatoon, Virtua Fighter, games which depend on responsive movement and split-second reactions.

        If this kind of cloud gaming does take off, it makes me wonder if developers would be forced to just accept that to make games for the service, they can no longer make titles that depend on this stuff. You might say I'm exaggerating, but that did happen on the mobile platform, where years ago, you got a much broader variety of price-point and less money-hungry games, which though often simple, were responsive and fun. Compare something like Angry Birds, the iPad XCOM or one of Squaresoft's early pricepoint iOS RPGs to a contemporary freemium game and you'll see what I mean. Publishers/Developers gravitated to that kind of thing because they tried alternatives, and those alternatives never worked. They can only make what works on a platform, because they work to the market, which is only natural.

        The freemium game comparison is pretty good, because a big part of this change came due to the games being free. It came from giving people a choice between having a game they could play for "free" at the start, or a game they could pay for and own in its entirety. As it happens, most people chose the "free" option, because of course they did, but did mobile gaming get better as a result?

        That, above, is intentionally left as an open question. I'm not one of those old-school gamers who dumps on all mobile freemium games; I play some of them! You might love them, and that's fine! They offer something distinct and different, and there are some great games hidden amid the sea of iOS clone-ware. But I think most people can agree they exist at the expense of price-point games on the mobile platform, and if I had a choice, I would love for more price-point mobile games to exist.

        So to sum up? Stadia could take off, but if offers me nothing to look forward to, and I think there's a chance it'll negatively impact gaming for me (and people who like what I like, I guess). If it's the way things go, then it's what people want, but I'm not convinced it'll be a change for the better.

        Just another flashy proposed solution to an unsolvable problem, with a ****-looking controller.

        Close the thread. Mic drop. Peace out.
        Last edited by Asura; 20-03-2019, 10:26.

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          #34
          There's one point you left out of that and that is with a streaming service you completely lose any aspect of ownership - you will be completely at the mercy of the publisher. No deciding if you want to patch, no deciding if you want to mod, no deciding if you want to keep playing a title a publisher decides to withdraw, no backsies.

          I can't see likes of EA or Activision wanting to let their £50-120 game (I'm looking at you DoA6 + season pass) profits shrink by having to charge less. It does fit in with EA's premium EA Origin, but that's close to £15 a month, maybe they'll add a streaming option to that.
          Last edited by MartyG; 20-03-2019, 10:27.

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            #35
            Originally posted by Asura View Post
            Close the thread. Mic drop. Peace out.
            Yep. I agree with all of this but especially this part.

            And yeah, I think the "if this does take off" part is very relevant because, unfortunately, I can see it taking off at some point. I don't know if this is it (probably not yet) but I think it will. Because I think people in general are okay with a cheap, quick, worse experience. I mean, we all love Netflix even though, like with games and digital subscriptions and streaming, we could find our favourite film or TV show is gone the next time we go looking for it. And the quality is not up there with blu-ray and is very connection dependent. People were happy to jump on to music streaming services even though all the same things apply - often worse quality (at least it definitely was at the start - not sure about now) and at the mercy of licensing deals. No ownership, a drop in quality but the immediacy and cheap price tag wins out.

            So yeah, I can see games going there too and we likely won't be better off as a result and, yes, devs will then have to build that in to how they make games.

            But it doesn't feel like we're there just yet.

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              #36
              Originally posted by Dogg Thang View Post
              And yeah, I think the "if this does take off" part is very relevant because, unfortunately, I can see it taking off at some point. I don't know if this is it (probably not yet) but I think it will. Because I think people in general are okay with a cheap, quick, worse experience. I mean, we all love Netflix even though, like with games and digital subscriptions and streaming, we could find our favourite film or TV show is gone the next time we go looking for it. And the quality is not up there with blu-ray and is very connection dependent. People were happy to jump on to music streaming services even though all the same things apply - often worse quality (at least it definitely was at the start - not sure about now) and at the mercy of licensing deals. No ownership, a drop in quality but the immediacy and cheap price tag wins out.
              I think, sometimes, it has to do with what you're trying to replace with the new service. Music and TV streaming don't offer the best quality audio, or ownership - but I see Netflix as replacing TV, and music streaming as replacing radio. Especially in recent years, where I've been renewing my DVD collection due to stuff vanishing off Netflix.

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                #37
                You're never going to eliminate the lag of physics, even with fibre to the premises you're going to need without a contention ratio for this to work at 4K60 (or 8K120 as they claimed for the future).

                I do like Spotify, it gives me access to a music library I could never dream of owning for £9.99 a month (or free with ads), but I wouldn't give up my vinyl or CDs - it's a supplement, not a replacement.

                And yes ads, the very reason Google exists.

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                  #38
                  Originally posted by MartyG View Post
                  And yes ads, the very reason Google exists.
                  Microphone in the pad, too. Bet they'll incentivise developers into putting vital functionality on it too to make sure people don't remove them.

                  Comment


                    #39
                    Originally posted by Asura View Post
                    It seems like we can't go through a 3-4 year period without someone trying this, blind to the reasons it was a bad idea the last time - reasons that haven't changed.
                    Isn't this just wave 2, a few years on from Nvidia, Onlive and Gaikai/Sony?

                    With regards to lag I'll just leave DF's findings. I don't think the target audience is here, but for more casuals the service might suffice. Particularly where you remove expensive barriers to entry. I remember early video sites in the 1990's and people laughing off the idea of streaming once too.



                    Originally posted by MartyG View Post
                    There's one point you left out of that and that is with a streaming service you completely lose any aspect of ownership - you will be completely at the mercy of the publisher. No deciding if you want to patch, no deciding if you want to mod, no deciding if you want to keep playing a title a publisher decides to withdraw, no backsies.

                    I can't see likes of EA or Activision wanting to let their £50-120 game (I'm looking at you DoA6 + season pass) profits shrink by having to charge less. It does fit in with EA's premium EA Origin, but that's close to £15 a month, maybe they'll add a streaming option to that.
                    Originally posted by Superman Falls View Post
                    People paying £50-£60 a game to stream? Nah, a chunk will but that's market erosion or Stadia's death right there. They need a sweet spot middle ground right away but in any eventuality, even if Stadia runs AC or NFS etc well... why would anyone interested in gaming possible choose to buy on this over any other option out there.
                    Why is buying a game for £60-90 on Stadia any different to buying it on Xbox Live, PSN, Steam or the Epic store etc.? You don't own jack all on those either. And a lot of new games do mandatory online. Obviously cloud streaming has it's price but it has its advantages too.
                    Last edited by Digfox; 20-03-2019, 10:43.

                    Comment


                      #40
                      Originally posted by Digfox View Post
                      Isn't this just wave 2, a few years on from Nvidia, Onlive and Gaikai/Sony?
                      I think this is the fourth.

                      The first was when stuff like PCAnywhere boasted you could use it for anything you did with your computer, even gaming. May not have been that specific software but I remember a few attempts from the late-90s through to early 2000s.

                      OnLive/Gaikai were the second.

                      PSNow and Steam's user-setup solutions were the third.

                      Comment


                        #41
                        Originally posted by Digfox View Post
                        Why is buying a game for £60-90 on Stadia any different to buying it on Xbox Live, PSN, Steam or the Epic store etc.? You don't own jack all on those either. And a lot of new games do mandatory online. Obviously cloud streaming has it's price but it has its advantages too.
                        I can play them offline, I can mod them, I can archive them. Hell, if I want to I can run a steam crack and not have to bother with the Steam client at all.

                        Comment


                          #42
                          Originally posted by Asura View Post
                          I think this is the fourth.

                          The first was when stuff like PCAnywhere boasted you could use it for anything you did with your computer, even gaming. May not have been that specific software but I remember a few attempts from the late-90s through to early 2000s.

                          OnLive/Gaikai were the second.

                          PSNow and Steam's user-setup solutions were the third.
                          Sorry [MENTION=5941]Asura[/MENTION], that feels like tenuous opinion at best.

                          Onlive launched in 2010, and PS Now in 2012 after Gaikai (successfully) were bought out by Sony. I think most would accept those as the dawn of Cloud Gaming services, in a similar manner to how Amazon Prime Video and Netflix heralded popular entertainment media streaming.
                          Last edited by Digfox; 20-03-2019, 10:54.

                          Comment


                            #43
                            Originally posted by MartyG View Post
                            I can play them offline, I can mod them, I can archive them.
                            But when PSN/Live/Steam et all are switched off - how will you bypass the DRM?

                            GOG or Humble are the only seller of legal PC DRM free software. Any even that is a very small selection.

                            Comment


                              #44
                              I won't, which is why I rarely buy PSN/Live.

                              As I mentioned, Steam cracks work perfectly well however.

                              Comment


                                #45
                                Originally posted by MartyG View Post
                                I won't, which is why I rarely buy PSN/Live.

                                As I mentioned, Steam cracks work perfectly well however.
                                But you purchased The Division, did you not? How will you play that when Ubisoft turn off the servers?

                                I do think Google have a challenge on pricing, particularly margins. But if people are happy buying games, music and movies online I'm not sure that one pricing is the barrier we think it might be.

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