I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the * lag * and meet * lag *" and then I had no idea what I had to do next. Lag was still a rare thing during my experience. It's just that when it occurred the timing was unfortunate.
Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content.<p>Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model.<p>The cost per user will vary drastically by the amount they play and how computationally demanding it is. I just don’t see it being feasible without personalized cost. Looking forward to paying minimum cost for minimum graphics too.
I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real underlying principle of this service.
Google has captured the education and cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web browser.<p>The entire reason this is happening is because Google has successfully captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing things like this to keep people on chromebooks.<p>ChromeOS could be as important than Android. Especially with the Windows 7 extended life support coming up, Google has less than 4 years to convince people to transfer to their platform instead of Windows 10. I know it seems heretical to imply that it will happen but I think this is a good example that Google considers it not only a real possibility but something that they might actually have a good chance of being able to pull off.<p>The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of Windows 7 since they can't pay for extended support even if they wanted it. They can then continue this into the workplace. This is a brilliant move by Google.
Cool.<p>Unfortunately, any and all trust I had in google maintaining its services for more than a few years is long gone. I have games from ~10+ years ago I can still download, update, and play via Steam; What are the chances this lasts more than 3 years?
In addition to that obvious concern, I'd also be very hesitant to let Google have any control over my gameplay experience. The downsides of the gaming as a service just have no appeal to me, although I'm sure it would be functional in certain generes, for a certain type of gamer.<p>Regardless of how many streamers are playing Skyrim in their browser, I don't think I'll be joining them.
Some may remember an earlier streaming game service, OnLive, that crashed and burned spectacularly: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report</a> plus HN discussions here: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefi...</a><p>I saw the OnLive demo. It was very slick, and the concept seemed more than viable, it was inevitable.
Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical.<p>Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially competitive games the streamers play).<p>Heck, even streaming in your local network isn't such a great experience these days.<p>I love the idea, but realistically we are still very far away from streaming games replacing consoles or PCs. Many companies have tried (Nvidia, Sony, etc) but no one has succeeded for the simple reason that latency is not there yet.
So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.
The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a real problem or issue.
The average Joe doesn't need another subscription just to play some games. Having a console where you buy games is more than enough.
I also silently hope that Google will fail hard with this one. Since they are the worst publisher on earth with absolutely no compassion towards its developers relationships.
I played with Project Stream during the technical beta and I would say it cleared the hurdle of "good enough." The resolution was good and the input lag was normally small enough to be compensated for or go unnoticed.<p>Since the majority of this venture's hardware appears to be in-house and, I assume, easily re-purposed for other core services I'm less cynical about the half-life of this product.<p>I have no intention of buying the controller but if this let's me stream to my existing hardware with minimal friction I would be interested. If they structure it as a monthly subscription with a robust catalog they would probably get my money.<p>I'm curious to see what happens.
Google is really flexing on people here. With 5G this will be the future of all computing and only google and amazon have the data centers to make it work.<p>Sundar opened up the event talking about deep learning, I wouldn't be surprised if they used this platform as a way to train their RL models against humans or on data generated by the users.<p>The youtube integration is also a shot at twitch.
Other comments have suggested this might fail like OnLive/Nvidia/PlayStation Now because the economics of streaming on the business end don't work out.<p>This case is different. Stadia is the first video game streaming product <i>made by a cloud computing</i> company, and also a cloud computing company which developed a video codec (VP9) just for high quality/low latency streaming.<p>The economics are much different on all sides; it all depends on how Google prices the service. (it'll be curious how Microsoft's xCloud competes. Maybe Amazon will get in on the fun too.)
I also participated in the beta and was quite impressed. In my case, there was no lag and instead, when connection was poorer, the stream quality would get lowered (i.e like Youtube - 1080p to 460p). I think this can be completely resolved with a solid connection.<p>Speaking on Google leveraging Youtube for Strada, I also think this could be an amazing affiliate opportunity for game developers and content creators. Imagine watching your favorite streamer (or I guess game reviewer) and with a click of a button, without having to download, play the game right from your browser (demo or full game). Great source of income for content creators, great frictionless experience for viewers/consumers, and great tool for developers.
More details are available here:<p><a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands-on-with-google-stream-gdc-2019" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands...</a><p>They have benchmarks and go into detail on how well it runs. I found this interesting:<p>> "[It's] a complete port," Google's Phil Harrison told me. "[Ubisoft] built the game completely for Stadia and they're actually doing a talk at GDC about how they got their game up and running."<p>> In our earlier analysis, our impression was of a game that very, very closely mirrored the PC version running at 1080p resolution, with some elements upgraded beyond the console quality threshold defined by Xbox One X.<p>> "Correct, but they started from their main line on the consoles, it's not that they took the PC version and ported," Stadia VP Majd Bakar explains. "You can see that as the UI changes according to the controller you connect. I wouldn't call it a console port, I'd recommend going to the talk. It's going to be run jointly between Google and the team that did the work for Project Stream and they will talk about how they did it and the work stream they followed."
> Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout.<p>This is a fascinating testament to the rate at which deep learning can run. If you think back to 2014-2016 (less than 5 years ago), one of the common things people said was that style transfer would be really cool to apply to video games or video, and then the middlebrow dismissal was 'style-transferring a single frame Gatys et al 2014 style takes a Titan hours so [simple math] shows we can't style transfer in realtime for decades, duh'.<p>But, GPUs got better. Deep learning got better. Style transfer got better. Now, here in 2019, realtime style transfer is not just old hat (Facebook launched a realtime style transfer video app for smartphones years ago), but Google is announcing a service to stream countless hours of style-transferred video games to potentially <i>millions</i> of players.
Does anyone even consider playing on the go anymore? I will be 200 years old by the time you can stream 60fps to a device sitting on a bus on my way to work.<p>Streaming may have a place in the future, but if it's the only option, then consider me a full-time retro gamer.<p>I already despise the fact that the masses voted to kill ownership of games, and now it's going straight to killing "rental licenses" as well, putting all of the power of entertainment and commerce in the hands of, essentially, two companies: Google and Amazon.<p>Ya'll voted for these massive monopolies, really looking forward to the dystopia.
I'm concerned about how this will work for game libraries.<p>If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware target does not change.<p>Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine) of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built? And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more popular games?<p>This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-installed and run on my own new hardware.
I really hope the latency we've seen in the live demo was due to the venue's poor internet connection because otherwise this will make some games unplayable. They mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available and that it would be a good benchmark for the service's latency but I'm waiting to see some independent reviews to believe it.<p>Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices (of games or subscription) are extremely competitive.<p>The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.
Google really promoting how it's better to develop for than anything else since they can constantly upgrade the hardware. How long before Stadia exclusive content?
This is not a first service that tries to do that. And as before it all ends up with how close the gamer is to the server node, how stable user connection and whether connection is metered or not.<p>I just pinged my google.com server node - and it's over 16ms. Which means no 60fps.
As someone who participated in the beta, it's not as good as they make it sound. The compression of the video stream is quite bad in any slightly intensive scenario, the latency is certainly noticeable, frame drops every once in a while, and in general it's nowhere near as fluid as a local gaming experience.<p>I have gigabit fiber and quite a good machine, so I'm certain that's not the issue. Maybe some of these issues could be solved by closer edge servers, but it'll be a while till it reaches the level where you can play FPS', etc.
From a preservationist angle, this would be a terrible path for games to go down. Any exclusive games released using Stadia would be impossible to play once the servers shut down because users don't have any access to the software.<p>Even if MMOs shut down, there is usually an opportunity to write a new server by reverse engineering the client. I can't really support anything about game streaming unless it was tied into an actual game you could install or play without relying on their servers to exist.
I'm skeptical they'll be able to overcome the latency problem. At some point there's a hard cap that only infrastructure can help with - not software - and Google's already given up on rolling out their own infrastructure.
I did the beta, and I think the service is great, but I used 300GB of data in two days of play. There's no way this is going to fly when most people are under a TB cap.
Former PSN eng here.
So, it will be very interesting to see what is going to happen. I feel we were not very successful with Playstation Now. It requires a lot of money to even start scaling, you need a powerful (read expensive) machine which can be fully utilized by just 1 AAA game. And for any competitive gaming experience - latency is a big one. If you want to play multiplayer as you going to have latency to Google's machine and then to the game server.<p>Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve), but maybe this time...
Honestly, there's got to be a better solution than full-on streaming. Has anyone seen the demo where there's >2 seconds of input lag? Even with around a 0.1 input lag, what can I play comfortably? Any kind of action games or platformers are out of question. Ironically, those games are the ones which usually demand high processing power. Most other games are toaster-compatible and I can run them without paying(?) Google a streaming premium.<p>I also like being able to play games when on the bus or the subway, so the whole always-online thing is a bit of a bummer.
One of the biggest reasons to install windows is gaming. If this takes off (or enough games are released on linux as a byproduct) linux could gain a larger install share.
I participated in the beta. Everything was great except the graphics became super grainy and pixelated when you rotated the camera or during high motion scenes.<p>My download speed is 50 mbits and I had about 5 ping to the google servers.<p>I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this unless you live downtown with 100+ mbit speeds.
So, uh, the controller has a microphone, and connects directly to the Internet over Wi-Fi. I guess it's nice this time they told us upfront?<p>Really curious what the network performance requirements would be for 4K or 8K game streaming. Haven't heard them admit to that.
It's a smart move for Google to leverage their huge captive audience on YouTube to drive adoption. With Amazon's similar position with AWS and Twitch I'd be surprised if we didn't see a similar offering from them.
Any indication on how this ties in with the Google/Improbable deal for big-world games? Those work better if all the clients are in the same data center, a few microseconds apart.<p>This only works with Google web clients, such as Chrome, right. It may turn out that all this is just a ploy to force everyone to use a Google web client, giving Google total control over the online user experience. ("Browser" is so last cen.) Then Google can exit games, except for putting ads in them and on top of them.
I sometimes casually play Fortnite over nVidia Geforce Now via xDSL over wifi.
And while i do entertain myself lag is hindering overall experience, at least in FPS games.
My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world. Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the infra, and extra capacity could be sold off to GCloud customers.
This is going to be so cool....if it works.<p>I wonder where the instances will be? Will they put them in their regions, or will it be rolled out to their CDN POPs?
In London where the fastest internet available to me at my address in zone 2 is 12mb highly contended in the evening.<p>This isn't for everyone, clearly a bet for the future. But this is why Google Fiber should have gone wider and international, or governments should pressure telcos to build speeds massively in excess of demand.<p>So much is held back by a really bad last mile.
This is what I've seen everything trending towards for almost ten years now. The next step is to build hardware that utilize the full benefits of data center gaming. Vr headsets can shrink and are only limited by the method of getting light into your retina. Same goes with any kind of haptic feedback or audio feedback.
As expected, it's running on Debian [0]. Ubuntu really messed up with their licensing, losing both Valve and Google...<p>I'm also curious why they're not stating the CPU manufacturer.<p>[0] <a href="https://stadia.dev/about/" rel="nofollow">https://stadia.dev/about/</a>
It's funny to see this and<p>"The Cloud is Another Sun" on the front page.<p><a href="https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/" rel="nofollow">https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/</a>
A more philosophical question. If they manage it with a hard, computationally and bandwidth intensive problem like games, does this mean that this kind of computing is coming for good for every kind of activity?<p>Is this is the last time we need to upgrade to an expensive graphics card?
I don't understand giving a keynote like this and then not launching the product for months. Apple figured it out long ago - way more power in "it's available now" than the alternative of forcing customers to wait an indefinite amount of time.
I wonder how much of the gaming market consist of games that requires good latency.<p>I would be perfectly fine playing Civilization or turn based games on this infrastructure as sub-100ms latency probably isn't that big of a deal here. Perhaps google is going after that niche?
Services like this are already in operation, see Shadow and GeForce Now. Developers don't need to do anything to have their games supported on these platforms either, so I don't understand what Google are bringing to the table with Stadia.
I used this in beta on a cheap chromebook. It worked great, and since I don't like putting games on my machines or upgrading hardware or using windows, perfect. Realistically, the only way I could play this game on this hardware.
This will boost pc gaming significantly. Now everyone can experience pc quality game on tablet, phone, mediocre pc. But bad news for mobile games and gaming hardware manufacturers IF stadia's pricing is affordable enough.
<i>Google is also launching a new Stadia Controller that [...] will work with the Stadia service by connecting directly through Wi-Fi to link it to a game session in the cloud. This will presumably help with latency and moving a game from one device to another.</i><p>Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?<p><i>Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout.</i><p>Sounds like another gimmick that nobody has ever, or will ever need. But "Machine Learning!"
Isn't this similar to Nvidia's GeForce Now service? I've been impressed with Nvidia's beta; with a good connection you can play a ton of games at maximum settings with just minor input lag.
Can I buy just the controller? Sure does seem the PS4 controller is about the best out there for most gaming, and I've been hesitant to buy anything else. This controller seems just as well made.
How is this any better than GeForce Now from Nvidia?<p>It seems odd that Google chose to create its own gaming studio. Doesn't that make them a competitor to the folks they support from?
Jade Raymond is at the helm!? Color me very excited, she was running the original Assassins Creed game back in the day. She's a very talented producer!
Strada looks like a game changer, I bet it will be massive by 2025 when internets speeds improve. Only companies with major infrastructure (Microsoft and Amazon) will truly be able to compete with Google. The cost of hardware can even be spread between multiple people lowering prices. Plus it divided monthly via a subscription, meaning a lower cost of entry versus buying a new Console.
reminds me of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive</a> that was shut down in 2015
I give this 2 years before Google removes all references of "Stadia" from it's product lineup. They have never stuck with a product which, relative to rest of their products, has smaller but dedicated adoption.<p>For example, Valve will keep updating/supporting/hosting events of CSGO even if it has <1Mil active users on PC, but I can totally see Google pulling plug on it and burn dedicated followers.
Could this be peak attention economy? I fully expect - no, I demand - that the price to play these games be fully compensated for by the data I generate from playing each game.
Love this comment from earlier today<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw</a><p>TLDR: >60ms of added latency (160ms) while plugged on Google campus connection in specially modified and tweaked game versus unmodified typical Ubisoft bad PC port, compression artifacts
Given the number products and services that Google has shuttered over the years and their focus on learning all there is about their users, I am going to sit this one out.<p>There is definitely some cool work here though: being able to have access to a library of games without lugging around a console or computer is an interesting idea with both pros and cons. The pro that I can think of is not having to be responsible for upgrades. The con is that we continue to move towards a world where we rent more and own less.