> I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a long term vision from the reviewers.
In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for.
For example I recently purchased an Oculus Rift. I waited until enough games released so that I couldn't be disappointed by the experience/value, and I haven't been. Anything else added after this is just value add.
> I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia.
Stadia costs $129 with no games. An XBox One S (Digital) on Black Friday, including a game, costs $200 or $150 with no game (e.g. NewEgg). So while your point is accurate, there isn't as much in "cost" as you'd think, and I'd argue that you get far more value with an XBox One S than a Stadia (even the digital one that cannot play BluRays).
The $129 starting bundle gives you a controller ($69), and a Chromecast Ultra ($69), which is... $138. Plus the bundle gives 3 months of "Stadia Pro" which is the 4k streaming support (plus other goodies). So the $129 is more of a starter bundle.
If you just want to play on your phone or PC, it's free (outside the cost of buying games). You can plug a PS4 or XBox controller into your PC, or pair them with your phone via bluetooth and use those. I believe there is also Nintendo Switch controller support.
Of course if you buy the XBox bundle, you pay once and you can play Red Dead Redemption 2 as long as you want in 4k. If I get Stadia and want to keep playing my game in 4k a year from now, I have to sign on to a monthly fee.
I would assume you wouldn't have been paying $0.08/month since 1976 (just like you wouldn't be paying monthly on Stadia when you weren't using it), so the monthly cost for the game would actually be significantly higher if you want to amortize its cost over months you've actually played. :P
Just to be clear the XBox One S for $150/$200 listed above also included a controller, it isn't just a bare console with no way to play on it. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
As an author of a browser game https://bad.city I noticed that over the last 5 years browser performance became 10x faster. The game currently works at 60fps, even on 2 year old Galaxy Note and has 0ms lag. With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device. No need to download 50gb game when you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing and it will not depend on latency. It's already possible to run local wifi game servers on the phones.
I see Stadia working for casual games on smart TVs but not for any competitive gaming.
This process creates too much lag:
send controller input over the wire, render on server, compress 4k video, send over the wire to the client, decompress 4k video, display in the device
> With web workers and web assembly soon we'll see AAA games running in the browser on any device.
I heard something similar to that for the past 10 years at least.
> you can progressively stream the 3d models in real time while playing
People were amazed of the speed at which models loaded using an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive... and that was when games were in the 5 GB range. Loading time is latency too.
> I see Stadia working for casual games on smart TVs but not for any competitive gaming.
Competitive gaming go toward more expensive gear... they won't care about buying an expensive graphic card if that give them an edge, or lower latency screen.
If they are forced to play on cloud, they'll just pay for a better connection to do it. This is just like the stock market where they build datacenter just beside the exchange.
I don't know if you would call me a "casual gamer", I'm certainly not a competitive gamer, but I get quite a bit of fun playing Borderland 3 on Nvidia Geforce Now. The latency isn't that bad, nothing I can really notice at least.
Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there. You already have people optimizing their display & input latency, not to mention GPU buffering tweaks, to shave anywhere from 5-20ms off the final result, and that's in _local_ gaming. Windows 10 1803 introduced a "fake fullscreen" mode to cut around the window compositor lag.
Assuming Stadia really does all these render path micro-optimizations perfectly, you then have the issue of datacenter location and speed of light creating more latency. And because in this case the end user needs to react in real time rather than offload operations or create autonomous behaviour (the stock market example), at some point they'll have to move closer to their nearest datacenter. (assuming the US ISP landscape is fixed by then)
> Streaming will never take off for competitive playing, because the physical latency will always be there.
If they are forced to, I have no doubt they will. It's not because there's more constraint that competitive game play won't happen. A mouse is so much more powerful than a gamepad that crossplay between console and PC on FPS is pretty rare. Yet you'll find competitive fields in console FPS too.
They'll definitely takes any advantage they can, that's including "fake fullscreen" to cut out lag, better display, mouse, etc... but I have no doubt if a competitive game happens on the cloud, the gamer will be there just as much.
Turbofan optimisations, SharedArrayBuffer, Web Assembly really impacted performance of my game engine. With enough assets it's already possible to make GTA V complexity and quality game running in the browser. The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago. It already happened and is possible NOW, even on phones.
"Loading time is latency too" no it isn't. It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay. But in streaming game as a video when the whole gameplay is delayed by 300ms it already makes entire competitive game unplayable.
> The biggest progress in browsers and webgl performance happened in the last 3 years so it doesn't matter what you've been hearing 10 years ago.
There has been some amazing progress in the past 10 years too ...
> It doesn't matter if you're getting closer to an object and in the distance it fades in(or loads higher LOD) even with 500ms delay.
If it fades in 484ms for the other guy, he just saw you a full frame earlier than you (and that's excluding the potential 484 ms remaining ;)). That sound much more like gamebreaking than my 50 ms over Nvidia Geforce Now, but I'm also just a casual gamer.
I'm talking about extreme delay of the object fading in, too far in the distance to be interactive(that's why I also mentioned LOD for objects close enough to be interactive). Your 50ms is 50ms of info provided by nvidia and a fan of game streaming wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 50ms and 150ms of pressing a button and actual reaction on the screen lol
I strongly suspect that if I bought a current-gen console today I’d probably be stuck waiting overnight for it to download and install whatever new updates it thinks it needs, and then if I didn’t use it for a few months it would be downloady-installs again.
Consoles used to be nice and easy, plug and play, but the last couple of generations they’ve started to become almost as much trouble as gaming PCs, and I can’t be bothered dealing with that, so I’ve pretty much given up playing games.
If there was a decent subscription service (Netflix priced) which let me play new games without having to deal with all that crap, I might take it.
Stadia is a service which Google says will be free in 2020.
The $129 "Stadia FE" is a controller ($79 a la carte) and a Chromecast Ultra ($69 a la carte). "Stadia FE" also comes with two games: Destiny 2 and Samurai Showdown.
the fact that google is trying to to use a fighting game to showcase their product should tell you everything you need to know about their understanding of the market.
I feel like they're giving a free fighting game because they understand their market. The biggest worry people have before they try it is latency, but almost everyone that's sat down to play it so far has talked about how it feels nearly indistinguishable from a console latency-wise.
A game that demands low latency (like a fighting game) is a great way to demo how noticable (or not) the latency is on your setup before you buy any other games that need little to no latency to enjoy.
I think I've seen one or two reviews from people that have actually tried it and say they noticed latency/lag, with dozens of reviews from people who haven't tried it saying that would probably be the case. The other reviews so far (that I've seen, I guess) have all been from people effectively saying they might not even realize they were streaming from the cloud if they didn't know otherwise.
Mine gets here tomorrow though, so I guess I'll wait and see for myself.
Now that people are actually playing it instead of speculating, we're probably going to see a lot more of those versus reviews saying there will "probably" be a lot of lag.
I've had 1 lag spike (that resolved itself almost immediately) in almost 2 days of playing on my home network, with zero problems so far. It's honestly pretty mind-blowing.
Fighting games are highly latency-sensitive, to the extent that many fighting game tournaments are played on CRTs (because image processing on flatscreen TVs introduces additional frames of latency). They're practically a worst case for a streaming video game service.
Fighting games are also a best-case scenario for Stadia's latency-mitigation tech, since they often already have a rollback system implemented for online multiplayer.
not only that, but the audience for fighting games and in particular one as niche as a legacy snk title, are people who will buy a 200 dollar arcade stick just to have slightly more consistent inputs & execution. this is not exactly a group of people that will accept latency that ranges from okayish to semi-unplayable. the samsho community is fucking livid right now that snk went through with this deal before releasing a proper pc port.
I get where you're coming from, but go to Stadia's page. Click "Buy Now". You land at $130 plus $10/month with no other options. This isn't a future product or preorder, this is launch. The hardware and service are live right now. If you want to play: $130 plus $10/month.
I think this release structure is pretty daring. They're getting a lot of bad press, it's expensive, it's not a smooth experience. Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.
They don't have to say on their website that it's three-ish months of paid beta access to make that the reality.
> Also, if nobody gets on this holiday season, I'd expect game developers to throttle on putting money into optimizing for the platform, which would begin the platform death spiral.
Google can very easily afford to pay 50 developers to optimize for it. I only see this dying from Google's direct failures, not from that kind of death spiral.
> In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for.
This seems apropos to Kickstarter as well. I've had some successes, but I also funded Animusic 3 and Star Citizen.
EDIT: I've been somewhat disappointed about Star Citizen, but my mistake was telling my kids (unconditionally) that we'd be getting Animusic 3. Back then, that was a big deal for them.
The Xbox One S for $150 is 7 year old hardware. I would hands down pay $130 if I don’t need to be concerned with hardware and can play with the latest and greatest graphics.
I haven’t tried Stadia but just wanting to make the larger point.
Only if you assume Stadia will be around seven years from now. You're essentially talking about spending $60 on game licenses, plus $130 on hardware, that may ultimately no longest exist in a few years.
At least I can reasonably assume an XBox One S digital purchased today will still "basically work" five-seven years from now. I won't assume that about Stadia.
If it’s not around, for me thats okay. I bought a PS3 just before the PS4 came out. I’ve had it since 2012 - about 7 years. I haven’t touched it in quite a while.
In my experience you should should never buy a product for what it might be one day and instead only pay for the what you're getting on day one. That way you're never disappointed/always get what you paid for.
For example I recently purchased an Oculus Rift. I waited until enough games released so that I couldn't be disappointed by the experience/value, and I haven't been. Anything else added after this is just value add.
> I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia.
Stadia costs $129 with no games. An XBox One S (Digital) on Black Friday, including a game, costs $200 or $150 with no game (e.g. NewEgg). So while your point is accurate, there isn't as much in "cost" as you'd think, and I'd argue that you get far more value with an XBox One S than a Stadia (even the digital one that cannot play BluRays).