I travel for work or for vacation. If for work, I'm there hitting "Spit money out for me" at an ATM. Not gaming. I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan to enjoy home time more. End of days is visiting restaurants/bars and either socializing or schmoozing clients. If none of that, I read a book, do work on the laptop or enjoy a movie.

Vacation... I mean... seriously, I can game at home. I go somewhere to do NOT home stuff. Why would I travel somewhere and spend money to... play video games like I would at home? Even not vacation, I go to the beach on the weekend to... hear me out... walk on the sand, sun bathe and go in water.

These excuses for a subpar games as a service are pretty ridiculous. It's an obvious "We found a solution to a problem that doesn't exist". That and the controller looks so bottom barrel generic. It's like the knock-off to a knock-off of an Xbox controller until they realized it was for a ps3 instead and did a late night change to it.

Edit: I get it, everyone vacations differently. But playing video games while out on vacation is like bringing a Subway sandwich to a 3-star steakhouse restaurant. You are there to not-home. But I also don't get the japanese restaurants where they expect you to cook your own food. Mofo, if I'm going to cook, I'll cook at home. I go somewhere to pay a premium for food, it's so I don't have to cook it. I'm 32, stop making me feel like the old man yelling to stay off my lawn!

I'd rather play a game, most of the time. And similarly, when I've had enough of the sand, sun, and water for the day, why not wind down with an hour or so playing something fun? If I'm on vacation, I might even be with other people I don't see all that often otherwise, and get to play some multiplayer games. (Board games on family vacations work for this too.)

But I don't disagree with anything in the thread about this product really searching for a user. Nearly 100% of my gaming is on PC. If I had a gaming laptop, why wouldn't I just bring that along wherever I go? Not a big deal. And consoles + one controller aren't really that much more space either. There's also the Switch, and even the GPD Win if you want PC games in a very mobile form factor.

I've lately started bringing my Steam Link (which I got for $2.50) and a controller with me when I travel, since Valve opened it up to support remote play. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. It works better than I expected though. When I can access my full PC library remotely with no monthly subscription and the base hardware was only $2.50 (remote play also works with your phone, if it's powerful enough, so it can cost literally nothing), why would I ever pay Google money. Stadia is useless to me.

I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet. Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

Also, even when you're at the beach all day every day, you still come back to a place to sleep where you might enjoy some gaming or Netflix. And if you are living there for weeks, you'll find that you don't need to visit the beach every single day to enjoy your time there. It's nice to merely do something you love in a place you love. :)

I'm generally happy with the few games I have on my Macbook Pro. But even on a $2000 two-year-old machine, I have to play almost everything at minimal gfx settings and I have limited SSD space. Even a game like Civilization 5 becomes a stuttering mess. I don't see the need to dismiss Stadia without trying it.

But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about your experience with mobile internet, but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going. With remote gaming, you're now adding controller input to that datastream, outbound, and then rendering those actions and transmitting back to the device to enable anything remotely approaching a good gaming experience seems like science fiction.

The people who will be most interested in this are those without a "home" setup, and the less "home" you have, the more appealing, but also seems like it would in turn be the most frustrating experience to try and use. Which is sort of what this piece is getting at:

- Gamers don't want it, because we already have our libraries and such tuned to existing platforms and devices

- Casual gamers may want it, but they're already spoiled for choice in a massive mobile market, where games just happen on their already very powerful phones

This puts Stadia in an awkward position of in theory being the worst of both worlds: the limitations of console, with the network requirements only high tier residential internet can deliver, over devices with limited network capability.

You'd be surprised how better internet can be outside of USA. My LTE can probably keep up four 4K streams going.

only problem is it only works in north america and I'm in southeast asia right now.

Just because you can't see how a trap will be sprung, doesn't mean the trap doesn't exist. This will bite people in the ass a year or two down the road. Then everyone will cry, "How could this happen? We need legislation to protect us!" No, you just need to be quit being a baby and start being an adult and understand that minor comfort and convenience can come at a heavy cost.

Ps now (I have a ps4), 10 bucks a month to play how many different games when the hell ever I want. It totally works out for me because I normally don't care about most games after 10 hours of gameplay. I don't want to buy a game for $60 bucks and not actually have it. Generally, I don't buy a game until it's down to like $30, because I don't have to play anything immediately. At 32, I'm over the whole "ER MY GOD, I have to play this game right meow!"

Right there. For lots and lots of people, gaming is in the same class of activity as reading a book or watching a movie.

It genuinely feels really weird for me to write that, it feels so obvious.

This isn't a defense of Stadia, mind you. Just that vacation can mean different things to different people. Video games already let me escape reality on demand, I don't need vacation for that. Vacation can just be me wanting a change of weather.

I do spend quite a bit of time escaping from reality and I do agree it's a problem.

The greater SF Bay area suffers from a large amount of empty virtue signaling and shaming others into their morality while remaining apathetic to others plights. Work, while having the potential to be exhilarating, often descends into the myopic and uninspired. Passion projects I want to work on could potentially be wrenched from me by the company I work for via employment agreement which stifles creative desires outside of work. Friends and loved ones aren't available to me on-demand (and I respect that they have their own respective lives to live).

Meanwhile, there are virtual worlds that I can still explore. Mechanics I can break. People I can meet. Adventures I can have. And if I feel like slicing someone down as an seductive shade-lady on a magical battlefield I can do so with the comfort of knowing I'm not actually hurting anyone else in the process, ego notwithstanding. When life starts offering me these opportunities for near-free (or around $1500 for around 4000 hours of entertainment, I suppose) I'll take them gleefully. Until then, reality can stand to evolve a bit.

mormons

You say you get it, but...

I like home. When I'm on vacation, I mostly staycation, because that's the time I'm not out seeing people and doing activities to perform "happy" and "fun".

> I'm not home so I can make much better money in a short timespan

I'm not sure business travel is the same for everyone, either...

I often take my personal laptop (as well as my corp laptop) on business travel, and if I were a gamer, I could totally see bringing a game system. It's not like my salary is higher when I'm traveling, so after the purpose-of-trip all-day meetings and catching up in the hotel on the normal work that still has to be done after that, I typically just want to veg for a couple hours before sleep.

If you need a comparison, the mobility of the Nintendo Switch is analogous, except needing an internet connection and rendering triple A games.

How do you think playing video games is different from those activities?

Other than your ability to relate to them.

> You are there to not-home

Some people take multi-month long vacations. To expect them to give up video games is a bit much.

Could I do that with my laptop? Maybe, but I'd rather carry just my work laptop (heavy XPS 15, has everything on it, but can't/shouldn't install games) or a personal ultraportable that might not be powerful enough

Fun fact: the Subway I had while vacationing in Reykjavik (where I brought my Xbox One) for 3 months was the best Subway I've ever had in my life. Sometimes having something familiar in a new location is just what you need to spice up your vacation. :)

I think most people who like playing video games would have some sort of video game playing hardware, yes.

So, they might have opinions on what a good gaming experience is. And, if they have issues with Stadia (incl latency, graphical fidelity, and library), then it might be coming from an informed place.

You need to be able to reliably hide ~100-200ms of latency for any number of reasons. If you're talking about something that runs over wifi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.

The way you do that is with client side dead-reckoning and/or lock-step simulation with a pre-shared seed. Streaming video eliminates any opportunity to do that and you don't get to buffer frames ahead like Netflix can.

There's a reason OnLive folded and I wouldn't be surprised if you see Stadia EoL'd in the next year or two.

>If you're talking about something that runs over WiFi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.

Signal propagation speed (velocity factor) over air is only a bit slower than cat7 copper, and on-par with fiber optic. From memory:

In a vacuum: VF = 1 (equal to speed of light)

Over copper: VF = .75 (one quarter speed of light)

Over air or fiber: VF = .66 (one third speed of light)

Wi-Fi is measurably slower than wired copper cable for a few reasons but I don't understand physics to be one of them. With the distances relevant to last-mile connectivity like we're discussing here, that difference in VF appears to be immaterial.

Then again, you could argue that the air being a contended medium is by it's very nature a physics problem, and that does seem to be the root of most of the drawbacks of running low-latency workloads over wireless. Not necessarily an insurmountable physics limit though, with spectrum allocation, code division, and beam forming already doing a lot to mitigate the issue, there's the potential for further developments that might bring things to parity.

Still, you're not going to get past the VF limit I described above but again, if we're only talking about in-home WiFi rather than across the entire service-to-consumer run, it doesn't play a large part.

Channel congestion in dense urban areas approaches the same limit, heck Ars was just talking about a technique today[1] that because it doesn't respect channel slots drops throughput of any router within 60m by 20%.

100-200ms is an upper bound, however they were reliably doing client-side latency prediction back in '96[2] over 300-400ms dial up connections with little fidelity loss including servers supporting 200+ concurrent players.

I'm sure there's a niche of people for which streaming is usable, however we would design games with latency in mind(and how we'd deal with it) as a part of fundamental mechanics of the game. Here they're just slapping them on a video stream and hoping it works.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/where-the-wi-fi-suck...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

Your point still stands though, on a wireless network, it only takes some interference from other devices to cause latency spikes that make latency sensitive games frustrating to play, even if the actual upstream connection is of high quality. I've had quite a bit of issues with playing games on wireless networks in urban areas that go away magically by using an ethernet cable; the stuttering that happens when ping spikes from 30ms to 400ms is very jarring.

If Stadia is used for games that are not latency sensitive, such as deckbuilding games or turn based strategy games, it's fine. Using it for competitive first person shooters is likely to be very frustrating on anything but a wired network with good upstream connectivity or a wireless network with no major noise sources.

At the end of the day the internet is a packet switched and not circuit switched topology despite telecom pushing hard for circuit switched in the early days. Preference is given for throughput and not latency(although network-next is working to address some of that).

This estimate is waaaaay off. Nobody has been shipping video encoders or decoders setup to pull 1000fps nor tuned for latency.

Realistically it's 8-14ms to decode if you're lucky (low latency hardware+firmware), and comparable to encode. And these streams are made entirely of key-frames, which is a hyper unusual scenario for video systems.

That all adds up to maybe something like +30ms over baseline. Which is a lot. If you have a console try playing it on a TV with and without game mode enabled. That's about a 20-30ms latency difference in general.

Well, I'm in one of the 10 largest cities in the United States. Pinging 8.8.8.8 shows an average of 20 ms RTT, which is just over one frame. So is the total a 2 frame delay? No. Think about how Youtube works: they choose to introduce more latency than exists in the raw connection for reliability. My ping time shows a std deviation of over 10ms to 8.8.8.8. So if Youtube ran at a 20 ms latency (the true network latency), just about every other frame would have to briefly pause to wait for the next frame to arrive over the network. So you introduce latency. Youtube introduces about 3 seconds of latency on my network (a very rough estimate).

With a video game, the situation can't be fixed like that. You can't just run your video game behind your inputs by 3 seconds to iron out network latency spikes. So you've got to pick a percentage of packets that are going to arrive late (briefly pausing the stream), and just hope that you never get huge latency spikes of a second or so. (This actually happens all the time on busy networks due to buffer bloat.)

If you pick 95%, 1 out of every 20 video segments are going to have to pause for the network to catch up. Given we're expecting 60fps video, I'm assuming that's considered unplayable. So lets make it 99%. Assuming latency follows a bell curve, that means you have to introduce 45 ms of latency to allow smooth playback. That rounds to 3 frames of latency.

So all together, the "ideal" experience in my major city is to play a video game with 4-5 frames of latency, and realistically my developers are probably asking for a 100ms input-to-paint window. That's TERRIBLE to the point that it's probably only really usable for "clicker" time-waste games and turn based stuff. And the thing is, latency doesn't follow a bell curve. In my test lasting less than 30 seconds, I saw ping times well over 60 ms, and hardware associated with gaming will have its own latency issues too. So I expect even a stream running at 100 ms latency will still have brief pauses and jumps every few seconds, and probably noticeable ones every few minutes.

(LA Noir, Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders 2, London Olympics 2012, Deus Ex Human Revolution.....)

There's margin no? I mean, right now I get 3ms ping to Google from my wired computer, and 10~15ms from my phone on wifi. Wifi doesn't add that much.

And I'm in a large European city, not in Silicon Valley.

Beyond the overpriced hardware and monthly fee there's a lot being sacrificed for the ability to game anywhere. Another thing you give up is your privacy as this will simply be one more way to track you, your location, what you're playing, when and how long you play, who you're talking with online and what you're saying. All of that will be tracked and logged and analyzed by google.

I disagree, in this age of phones/tablets, I'm pretty sure total amount of time played on these devices is greater than consoles/PCs.

That said, I don't need 4K HDR 60fps <10ms ping (nor should any reasonable person expect this from a streaming service).

The fact is that Stadia makes it possible to play games on devices where it previously was impossible is pretty compelling. (even if it's at 720p).

It makes it possible to play modern AAA games on devices where it previously was impossible.

That's a dramatic difference. There are plenty of incredible gaming experiences you can have on low-powered hardware, without needing a clunky streaming-as-a-service infrastructure to back them up. They just won't be the latest FIFA/Elder Scrolls/Call of Battlefield: Modern Duty.

Honestly, I tend to think that having environments that don't have full fat AAA games available is good for the gaming market as a whole. It opens up markets for indie developers and new formats. I'm thinking of the Wii and Switch for comparison-- if they had been built with the same spec hardware as their competitors, they would have been flooded with ports of the big multi-platform franchises, rather than the unique experiences they're known for.

Sonme of my favourite gaming experiences include playing Zangband on an already-obsolete Pentium II in 2003, and Cave Story on a pre-Atom netbook starring a 900MHz Celeron-M.

The real opportunity is for games where latency isn't really important. Beautiful turn based games, cinematic choose-your-own adventures.

The second path is for games to be developed with appropriate tolerances & latency-forgiving mechanics. Take a modern platformer like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, where you are given a window of frames in which you can jump/react before failure. Even modern games like Mario Odyssey accommodate input latency of wireless controllers/HDMI displays. Similar accomodations can and will be made for games targeting streaming services.

False. Almost everyone who owns a smartphone plays videogames now. The mobile game market is huge. A lot of people dont own hardware specifically for video games, but still like to game. Its very possible stadia will work on android soon . Xbox has a similar service in brta that already works on phones.

I'm playing 4-5 games a year. Currently, I buy a few year old games from Steam that can run on my laptop. there is tons of great games out there for a less than $10 https://xkcd.com/606/ This would be a perfect solution for me if I didn't have to play full price

* downsample when connection is poor * extrapolate future frames from past frames, either locally or by sending bonus frames from server.

I mean Persona 5 was a pretty big game that AFAIK has turn based combat. It would be nice to stream since I won't own a Playstation any time soon.

Regardless, they are definitely less latency intensive than FPS or other genres.

There are all sorts of seemingly low-resource-intensive, low-latency, even old games of that "calibre" that stutter on my Macbook Pro.

They're also great at running Metal-based (e.g. Apple Arcade) games natively under macOS.

That is for the premier founders edition. The free one is coming next year [0].

[0 ctr-f base]: https://store.google.com/product/stadia_learn

(Or you've got a lot of disposable income I guess)

Really though, my "gaming computer" winds up getting used more for CAD than gaming (by me) at this point.

I'm probably a casual gamer.

Maybe their catalog should be more casual/indie oriented? It's hard to imagine too many people who want to play a loud shooty game like Red Dead Redemption 2 but don't have a console or PC already. On the other hand, the price point seems kind of high for someone who wants to play card games or Words With Friends style games.

Also it's not gonna work for fast-paced games without turning those games into the stupidest skinnerboxes at some level behind the scenes. In order to make it possible to send precalculated results for latency hiding, a lot of freedom needs to go.

Heck, I'd shell out the $130 if was in the form of prepaid credit or something else. I don't want 2 more devices - and I'm not interested in playing on my TV.

>The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you don't need dedicated hardware to play games?

I might be wrong on this, but $130 was for the controller and a Chromecast Ultra (which retails $70), so I'd assume controllers will run $60-70 after launch.

I already own a ps4 and a switch so I guess I count as a gamer.

I still preordered Stadia because the tech demo was on point and it sounds like a good way to run games with high requirements.

It is probably not going to happen (at least not in the first years) but the ability to handle mods would be the killer feature for me.

It is currently not possible on consoles, and I just don't want to invest the time/space to build a pc.

A chromecast and a PS4 controller purchased separately today would be closer to half that much.

so I am going to stand by my original comment ;)

So $79 vs $130/136. That's quite a lot to many people. You can pick the more expensive options to make a point I guess, though I'm not sure what that point would be.

You can pick the options that won't work to make a point I guess, though I'm not sure what that point would be.

Maybe google is only willing to sell hardware equivalent to the ultra for use with stadia, but I don't see how that's a technical requirement. It seems like a business decision, and as such, is fair game for criticism.

Hopefully, most of this artificial requirements will be gone in a coming year, but it's still far from its true vision. Clicking a "Play now" on Youtube does make a lot of sense, but the important question is "when".

It's only for early adopters. They said they want to limit availability until a wider release in early 2020 (where you won't have to pay for anything at all except the game if you want).

Make barrier of entry like $20 with subsidised controller and then millions will jump in.