Discussion Google Stadia: your thoughts

M

Misu

Guest
So Google Stadia has been announced. I like the idea how it tries to enhance gameplay experience by increase performance and memory using streaming service but I dont like how it destroys gaming tradition. The fact its just a web stream service on any device makes me feel like its just an ordinary Steam imitation except without the app. I dont feel the patriotism in here however it does sound powerful enough for any device, including low end devices. Seems to be fun to see how far you can create with it.


What are your thoughts about this? Do you think it be a cool alternative to help discover beyond the boundaries of your game development?
 

curato

Member
Yeah just about anything should be able to run it. If it is basically a thin client taking input and showing you output then you could run some intense games without very little hardware, but I still prefer physical games I can play if the internet is down.
 

O.Stogden

Member
Yeah, not a fan of the idea of cloud gaming, never have been.

Played PS Now on a 100mbit connection, it played ok, but it was still dodgy from time to time, and if someone else was downloading in the house, regardless of how fast your net was, it could deteriorate the stream to a quality far lower than playing locally would be. You'd need a router with QoS to force your console to be given priority and restrict other devices speeds, but even then it can still have issues.

I think it'll be the way things go, purely because it's a more efficient and probably profitable method for manufacturers and publishers in the long run (No shipping fees, don't have to have individual console for every person etc.), but I much prefer owning an actual console, because I'm old-fashioned.

If you haven't got a consistently great connection, these things tend to be a disappointment, and won't come near to playing locally in terms of quality. Essentially online-DRM to the nth degree. :D
 
Considering the horrible internet infrastructure in countries like the US and Australia, it's too early for this to even be feasible. Not to mention a lot of extremely popular modern games (Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro, Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry, All fighting games) would be next to unplayable with even the best-case scenario of ~2 frames of lag.

Streaming becoming mainstream for gaming will take a long time. You can currently stream video, music, etc. with almost no issues because the content is exactly the same for everyone and you can just prebuffer the content. Can't prebuffer gaming content, so any connection issues are going to be felt hard.
 
Last edited:
Like most people seem to be, I'm pretty skeptical. I played Stadia like ten years ago when it was called OnLive, and I wasn't super impressed. There was always lots of latency and 💩💩💩💩ty video quality whenever my connection randomly dipped. I'd never play any game I really cared about like that. I also 💩💩💩💩ing HATE the "games as service/subscription" trend, so I hope this fails miserably, even if they do somehow make it work for the most part.
 

woodsmoke

Member
"...highest possible performance and the best experience for players" Errr... no. The cloud may give you access to 10TF for beautiful graphics but at the end of the day you get a compressed image because of streaming. I prefer my pixels sharp even if the graphics settings are lower. And don't get me started on lag. That alone is a reason not the use it for the majority of games
 
Last edited:
I can see this being the future of gaming in an immaculate Black Mirror kind of future where everything runs in the cloud at near-infinite speeds with 0 latency. But we aren't there yet.
 
The cloud may give you access to 10TF for beautiful graphics but at the end of the day you get a compressed image because of streaming.
Ah, just playing a nice 4k streamed video game on my new television.
*confetti flies everywhere*

...ah, just playing a nice 240p streamed video game on my new television.
 

O.Stogden

Member
Ah, just playing a nice 4k streamed video game on my new television.
*confetti flies everywhere*

...ah, just playing a nice 240p streamed video game on my new television.
Haha, absolutely this.

If you've ever watched a YouTube video of GTA V, if you go through the mesh tunnels in the stunt tracks of that game, the video degrades massively because the bitrate has to go through the roof to keep up with the rapid changing.

Having to play like that would be very annoying and definitely mess up the experience.
 
I think the concept is cool, and it makes sense practically. Except for the fact that it depends on the internet connection so heavily. First, a LOT of people (entire countries) don't have internet up to the level that would be needed for this to work. Second, there is a real benefit to being able to play offline. Unless it's a multiplayer game, you should be able to play offline.

However, I don't think this means it will flop horribly. I think there are enough people who will get it and be totally happy with it. I just think that there will still always be a place in the market for traditional consoles, even as we approach 0-latency network connections. Especially portable consoles like the Switch have huge appeal because you can take it with you on a train or an airplane or wherever and you can still play all your games.

Plus, I'm skeptical that Google is going to find enough 3rd party developers willing to make games for Stadia to even make the buy-in price worth it. Who knows though, Stadia could theoretically be super affordable since it doesn't rely on an actual piece of hardware. If the service is free (though of course, it won't), then you have an appeal because you suddenly just have to buy games, instead of a 400 dollar console plus games. And, for many games, the latency wouldn't be such an issue, like with a tactical RPG or something. But they haven't given any information about pricing.
 
G

GM029

Guest
In the future this will most likely be how all gaming is consumed but for now it's probably not ready yet.

It would be neat being able to play very graphically intensive games at 4k/60fps on a toaster lol.
 

JackTurbo

Member
I'm skeptical. I get noticeable input lag when I play pc games on my TV via Steam link. That only streaming across the breadth of my house.

Can't imagine there are many places where the infrastructure is sufficient to allow game streaming to a high enough quality to replace conventional installations.

Also I've not heard anything about the business side of things? Is it like Steam but streaming or is it more of a Spotify/Netflix model? If so how does revenue work for devs etc
 

Mert

Member
Google shuts down Google Plus, a social media website, and opens up Stadia, a social gaming website. (I know, it'll be a lot of social)

Rest assured, Stadia will include a lot of things that Steam, Origin, Epic Store etc. do. There's a possibility that this project may overthrow;
  • Twitch (Game streaming. Stadia is just way more and more powerful than anything in the World.
  • Steam (It's obvious that noone wants to download & fill the disk space. Stadia can do better)
  • Discord (No need to say, highest quality at lightning speed)

If Google can provide quantum quality servers throughout the world, then this can happen. I believe general internet infrastructure is sufficient for such platform. (Again if Google can bring their powerful servers to your region/area/city)
 
L

Lucia

Guest
Only for the contries with a good internet. But very good for a developer. He can developer a game just for PC and to have at the same time a game for mobile.
 

O.Stogden

Member
Stadia runs on a subscription service, so you pay monthly, rather than per game. They could quite possibly run different levels of subscription, like Netflix does, and have a premium service for 4k gaming and latest releases, and a lower subscription for 1080p streaming and releases 3+ months old or something.

I would expect prices to be $20 a month, as other competing services charge the same, and I think anymore would be viewed as unreasonable.

Wikipedia said:
Reviewers reported that the streaming service had low latency and felt as if the game was being played locally.[8][7] Depending on Wi-Fi speeds, however, the game sometimes compressed its screen resolution or lagged.[8] A test by The Verge found no lag issues over a wired Ethernet connection, and occasional stuttering on a shared Wi-Fi connection.[8] However, even on a wired connection, the stream did not output at 4K resolution and occasionally went fuzzy with compression artifacting. The reviewer reported the best experience on Google's Chromebook Pixel.[8] Polygon found the service's audio compression noticeable.[7]
But if tech companies can't achieve 4k over a wired connection, the chances of any of us being able to stream games in 4k to our houses are slim.

Google also definitely need to announce a mass amount of games soon, as right now, they're saying they're launching within the next 9 months and currently have 2 games announced for their system, one of which is old and most people who want it already have it. They probably want at least 100 games on the service at launch to give this a chance at working.

As was mentioned above, turn-based and slow-paced games might work with this, but if you try and play any reaction game or any form of twitch-based shooter (Basically any online shooter), then Stadia is definitely off the table for the vast majority. I think it has merits, you can pay a subscription and basically pay for your console in instalments as it were, rather than paying a huge lump sum. But it also has the disadvantage that PS+ has, in that if you ever stop constantly paying them, they take all of your games away from you.

So do you pay $20 a month (The expected pricing) for 6 years (The lifetime of a console) which = $1,440

Or do you pay $400 for the console (brand new), and get 17 full price ($60) games for it, which = $1,420

And remember that you get to keep your console and games with the bottom option.

It depends on how much gaming you do, whether or not you have owned/paid for that many full price titles on your PS4/XBO. That's full price meaning you didn't get it discounted, and you buy all your games at the $60 RRP, which is unlikely.

I know I've owned my PS4 since 2015, bought it for about $250, and have spent about $160 on PS+ and about $300 on games. So in 4 years I've spent about $700 on my PS4. So in my case, Stadia would be a more expensive choice ($960 for 4 years, not including any hardware), as I don't buy many full price games, I wait for sales and get them for $20-30 or so.
 
Considering Google Chrome has lag for me streaming from my phone to my router to my TV, and OnLive failed, I can't imagine this going well for 100% of the people out there. I'm in America and there's no Internet connection problems.

Somehow games streaming minimal amounts of data vs streaming videos of a computer playing a game seems like an issue.

How's that Google Fiber doing? I'm amazed they threw in the towel on Google+.

There are other services that let you use your phone as a controller and play games on your TV / PC.
 
M

Misty

Guest
I don't see how Google can afford this service. They'd have to purchase 1 gaming pc for every new player that signs up. Also anyone with under a 50mb connection would get lag.
 
N

NeZvers

Guest
I don't see how Google can afford this service. They'd have to purchase 1 gaming pc for every new player that signs up. Also, anyone with under a 50mb connection would get lag.
Are you saying that all players will be playing games all the time?
 
A

ajan-ko

Guest
The only way they can do this is make 100 FREE AWESOME HIGH END SLOW PACED tactic/RPG/Puzzle games, and make it 20$ per month.
Either that or streaming gaming will bound to fail. It just another bleeding edge.

Playing action games on streaming device? I don't need to explain this, we all know what lag is.(=_=)a

Edit: I got crazy Idea, just make an Stadia-MMO Exclusive designed for streaming. I think this might work, because you can play without download and you can use the server as the database.
 
Last edited:
S

sofaspartan

Guest
As a video game collector, I always love having tangible media. There's something very satisfying about being able to see games on shelves and being able to pick them up and put them into a console. I guess I am very old fashioned in this respect. Since all of this is cloud-based, it's sort of weird for me.

Even so, I see how this kind of platform can benefit creators. With essentially no limitations on computing power, game developers can create without worrying about current console and computer limitations.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
Google Glass, Google Plus... maybe Stadia is the next in line?

internet over here in Australia is consistently terrible
As above, yes I think only places with pristine condition could actually benefit from it. Australia and Brazil (where I am from) don't put a dent on most of sales figures, but China and Russia do, and I belive their connection isn't that good either.

For us, developers, Stadia could be good. Hey, another plataform to publish! But for gamers... I am not so sure.
 

dapper

Member
Google Glass, Google Plus... maybe Stadia is the next in line?
Google Reader, Google Hangouts, Google Wave, Google Trips, Youtube Gaming, Inbox by Gmail, Google Allo, Google URL Shortener...and more... have fun.

As a gamer, I prize being able to play old games, and save/backup old games and saves. Why should I invest in a gaming library with a company like Google, which has a nasty habit of killing nearly all of its children? What's going to happen in two years if it doesn't meet their standards?

Don't get me wrong- I like that the company is always trying new things. But, at some point, Google's propensity to kill things starts to factor into the adoption of the things themselves.
 

Roa

Member
>thousands of players for single battle royal game >7000 edge nodes > google's backbone that doesn't get pushed to the internet

all 3 of these things don't match up lmao. I'd like to know how 7000 server clusters are going to be pushing for potentially hundreds of thousands of users, and at 4k 60fps in real time. These guys are 💩💩💩💩ing dreaming.
Pushing the games at that limits is one thing, encoding it and busing it down stream is another, getting that final result from an edge node you are sharing with hundreds of others through the internet to your house is even more of a piss take.

Calling bull💩💩💩💩 on the whole thing. My high end OC i5 can barely record a 4k image at 60fps natively, let alone play a game behind that. When saving files at that rate with 160kb audio and cutting losses in encoding, its still over 90mbs a second! And unless one of these edge nodes are in my back yard supposedly going exclusively over googles proprietary network of connections without going through a single router or ISP, there is latency.

I got an idea google, seems you have so much hardware to throw around, why not just give me a 12core I7, 2 AMD video cards at 10.7TFs each , in my own home for 9.99 a month lmao.I dont even think 9.99 would cover the bandwidth and electric let alone pay off all this infrastructure.

These 💩💩💩💩ty cloud schemes have got to stop. Especially when people are already concerned about the amount of power a company like Alphabet.inc and google have.
 

woodsmoke

Member
It would be funny if 4K is achieved through upscaling and not native.

Personally I don't get streaming. Everything is compressed and doesn't look good plus the extra lag. I'd rather play old games on an dated computer\console.
 

Bearman_18

Fruit Stand Deadbeat
Great. Now if the games servers get shutdown, there is NO way of ever bringing them back. Not even through illegally emulating a server. I don't want to buy something that could be killed at any second. I'm going to avoid cloud gaming.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Roa

K12gamer

Member
Right now, I'm satisfied with playing FREE HTML 5 streamed games from the internet.
Like Stadis...You can play these games from your PC, Phone Tablet etc.
Not concerned that most HTML 5 game are really basic (Retro)...because I like that kind of stuff.

I wish there was a free HTML 5 streaming service that had every game from the Atari 2600 all the way up to the SNES era.
Revenue could be earned from short ads (5 seconds) at the beginning of games.
 
D

debleb

Guest
Eh, I'm not sure about it. More rural places that don't have very reliable or fast internet speeds probably won't find too much benefit from it, and game streaming services like Playstation Now (that was their streaming service, right?) never really caught on. Google would probably be able to market it well though, considering they own like, half the internet.
 
Google slowly pulling out of Stadia? After its rousing success? Who could have possibly seen this coming? 🤔🤔🤔🤔

FWIW, I don't think subscription-model gaming via streaming will ever be a thing. I already mentioned latency killing the experience for entire genres. However, a subscription model that uses downloads to play the games entirely client-side sidesteps all the negatives of streaming. Xbox Game Pass is doing this, and with the amount and quality of games they have up there, it's a phenomenal value. Stadia just can't compete on either the cost nor the experience front.
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
Google slowly pulling out of Stadia? After its rousing success? Who could have possibly seen this coming? 🤔🤔🤔🤔

FWIW, I don't think subscription-model gaming via streaming will ever be a thing. I already mentioned latency killing the experience for entire genres. However, a subscription model that uses downloads to play the games entirely client-side sidesteps all the negatives of streaming. Xbox Game Pass is doing this, and with the amount and quality of games they have up there, it's a phenomenal value. Stadia just can't compete on either the cost nor the experience front.
Good necro! It's being a while since I last heard of Stadia, but that's good info! Thanks @nacho_chicken! =]

I heard that latency isn't that bad as people are talking about. But all this "as a service" thingy is annoying as hell. And sure, Stadia can't compete with the rest of similar products.

Good thing that Google didn't bought YoYo, isn't it? Google's project graveyard is extensive! XD
 
Good necro! It's being a while since I last heard of Stadia, but that's good info! Thanks @nacho_chicken! =]

I heard that latency isn't that bad as people are talking about. But all this "as a service" thingy is annoying as hell. And sure, Stadia can't compete with the rest of similar products.

Good thing that Google didn't bought YoYo, isn't it? Google's project graveyard is extensive! XD
Necrobump > Making a new thread for the same topic 😉

The latency is absolutely as bad as people are talking about. You would have to break the laws of physics to make it deliver a playable experience with some genres. Even in the best-case scenario, it is literally physically impossible for Stadia (Host -> Routing through Google's network -> Your ISP -> Your router -> Client) to have less latency than streaming through a wired connection on a local network (Host -> Router -> Client, e.g. ethernet through Steam Streaming or Parsec), and I found the latter to deliver an absolutely unplayable experience with difficult, fast, twitchy games like Hollow Knight.

I'm seeing a lot of "Guise, i know u r laughing about stadia dying, but think of the poor Stadia Studio devs that were laid off 😢" on the internet. The warning signs were all there from the start, so if it was job security you were after, working at a dedicated Stadia gamedev studio was so obviously not the way to go. Those devs also have a new bullet point to add to their resume. "Position at Google" looks fantastic to prospective employers. That's ignoring all the potential networking opportunities they may have had or will soon be given. I wish them well, but I really don't feel bad for them at all, since their experience there was by far a net positive.
 
Last edited:

O.Stogden

Member
Yeah, not a surprise Google is toning it down.

Stadia is ok for some games. But it is useless for others.

Any form of multiplayer or competitive environment, and it falls down.

On my connection, which is about the average for the UK, I get stutters every few seconds in the connection (might be due to being on 5GHz wi-fi, but almost everyone else will be too, I only own 1 ethernet cable these days), I got about 30-40ms of lag, which translates to being about 2-3 frames behind where I should be, which as nacho_chicken said, is almost unavoidable with the way Stadia works, even with a very good connection, you're still going to be at least a frame (16ms) behind where you should be.

Ultimately, on my connection, most games I'd class as 'playable, but a poor experience'. And games requiring precise, twitch movement, are unplayable.

Compared to playing a game locally, it doesn't even come close, the resolution of local games is higher, the frame rate of local games is higher, the input lag is lower, you can play without an internet connection.

For me personally, Stadia doesn't really have any upsides compared to local gaming. Other than the fact that you avoid the initial lump sum cost of a console. Although you still need a device to play Stadia on, and a decent controller. As well as paying for a Pro subscription, or paying full price for games. (Often more than what they cost on console)
 
which as nacho_chicken said, is almost unavoidable with the way Stadia works
Not almost. It's positively 100% unavoidable. The tech and network behind the tech is impressive no doubt, but in actual usability, other options far outclass Stadia in essentially every respect. Literally the only benefit to Stadia is that you don't actually need to own anything, but that's just a con masquerading as a pro. It really has zero value in the current market against such attractive competitors, so it's not at all a surprise that it's tanking so early.
 
I always think about GameMaker having Google Stadia support at some point, but I'm not a fan of cloud gaming so I don't see myself making games for it.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
The only reason Stadia could work is if Google invented a way to violate causality, and there's a lot of better uses for time travel than gaming subscription services...
 

O.Stogden

Member
I don't think GMS would technically need "Stadia" support.

All Stadia is is a server farm run by Google. The servers most likely run Windows or Linux, as I can't see that all these developers 'ported' their game to another system to run on Stadia of all things. You'd just need to go through the process of submitting to Google, which I don't know how you do.

As for Stadia server specs, they're roughly equivalent to this PC:

GPU: GTX 1080 or RX Vega 56
RAM: 16GB
SSD

Unfortunately, they now need to update their entire server farm, which will cost them a lot, because the GTX 1080 and RX Vega 56 no longer run the latest games at the performance Stadia advertises. (GTX 1080 can't do 4k on the latest games, and it's been confirmed that the Stadia servers do not run Cyberpunk 2077 at 60FPS, due to the now mid-end hardware on Google's side)

I think that might be the make or break for Stadia, when the time comes when Google have to spend an absolute fortune upgrading potentially thousands of computers with high-end GPU's, it will cost tens of millions to do that most likely. That'll be when they decide whether or not to kill it off, if it's not recouping those costs.

It launched at an unfortunate time, when a new console generation started just a year after launch, and the PS5/XSX are more powerful than Stadia's servers now.
 

Roa

Member
They are already slowly killing it. Not taking any new games lmao.

Wow, who saw that coming? :rolleyes: These guy's are dumbasses with terrible money pit ideas...
 
They are already slowly killing it. Not taking any new games lmao.

Wow, who saw that coming? :rolleyes: These guy's are dumbasses with terrible money pit ideas...
Not even that. Sometimes a Google project is great, being used often, and makes money, but they still pull the plug to work on another one of their (soon to be cancelled) pet projects.
 

Roa

Member
Not even that. Sometimes a Google project is great, being used often, and makes money, but they still pull the plug to work on another one of their (soon to be cancelled) pet projects.
Nah man, they took mad losses lol. Couldn't even get the hardware for the services running for the initial promised games and experience, let alone ones down the line. Ontop of the GPU shortages cutting them out.
as @ZigmudLeic points out....
Google fired a lot of Stadia developers in December. Sounds like bad news for players, but good news for employee monitoring software users.
They already started closing studios and outright laying people off, not transferring them.
 
Nah man, they took mad losses lol. Couldn't even get the hardware for the services running for the initial promised games and experience, let alone ones down the line. Ontop of the GPU shortages cutting them out.
as @ZigmudLeic points out....
Wasn't saying Stadia made money. I was talking about their other murdered projects they shut down, regardless of how much money they were pulling in.
 
Bringing this topic back because Stadia hit the news again. Another one bites the dust.

This was inevitable from day one. Especially so now, when multiple game streaming services have popped up that don't require specialized hardware and don't require purchasing individual games. At the very least, Google seems to be completely refunding purchases. My assumption is that it's to avoid lawsuits and curb the massive PR hit.
 

BenRK

Member
I was skeptical from the start. Every single game streaming service I've used has been a terrible experience. Input lag seemed unpredictable at best. Sometimes it would feel a little sluggish like you might expect, to completely dropping input and spinning me off into some random direction in game. Image quality has always been terrible, completely destroying any benefit to visuals offered by the hardware running it at high settings. Stadia was very guilty of this.

Heck, it was the same story back in the OnLive days. It's almost like having an input signal pass through several network layers, followed by processing on the server side just to send the updated image back through those networks to be decoded by whatever hardware is streaming it... It seems like cloud gaming in general simply will never be viable.
 
Top