Stadia. Basically you have no hardware, other than your TV/monitor, and either a controller or mouse & keyboard. Your choice. Every game is already preloaded on their servers/databases, you pick and choose what you want to play, and it plays. No download, no install, no updates, it will all just basically stream to your device. Newest games with highest spec requirement: No problem.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for google, or am advertising this product, though this post would suggest that I am inadvertently advertising it… This is just crazy. Will see at launch if it’s as huge as I think it will be though… It may be the end of consoles and possibly gaming PC’s altogether.
I mean, why spend money on new consoles or new PC’s for gaming when their value deteriorates daily and their effectiveness becomes obsolete within weeks or months, when with this new product by Google, no hardware will be required at all, and that whole gate-entry bypassed entirely?
Cool but, somehow I feel really weird about that happening. It’s like a really big push (again) to get everyone connected to the internet. When we’re all connected, then what happens? The conspiracy theorist in me is screaming right now…
Aspects of this sound appealing, but I don’t hear much opposing speculation about what value is lost with distributed services.
Something similar happened with professional software going from outright ownership towards cloud subscriptions, which enables all sorts of pricing and versioning shenanigans while also taking away your ownership of the product. This was not a well-liked change by a substantial portion of users.
I would also worry about latency issues with certain games requiring fast consistent input. And what would be the requirements for one’s internet connection for different picture qualities? Internet quality in the US is as spotty as a leopard atm. Might feel bad if you’re in one of those Crime Warner monopoly zones or can only get potato internet. Local hardware has its benefits.
With these things it’s worth thinking from a glass half empty perspective when marketing is pushing a glass completely full narrative. Otherwise it seems like a neat innovation that probably won’t unseat hardware for some time.
In the video around the 6:30 minute mark, it goes over all of that. Minimum 10mbps for 720p, 60fps, 5.1 stereo, recommended 35mbps for 4K 60fps
And I can also agree, wouldn’t want to play with less than 10mbps, but that bare minimum would suffice just fine. As long as you’re hardwired into your router, and not sharing that internet data with anyone else or other devices in your household at the time.
I’ll wait until they fix the fundamental flaw with all streaming services: The lag.
Anything that requires any form of quick reaction will be damn near unplayable. Even in the exhibitions they did FPSs had serious latency issues.
And multiplayer… If you’ve complained about lag before, wait until they add an entire new layer of lag.
I would be surprised if this wasn’t one of the main drives behind the streaming push. “We don’t like piracy so in turn you will only able to access your library when our service feels like running”.
I actually just got a really interesting reply in another forums about this same subject I posted in, that opened up a whole new perspective I hadn’t even considered yet, I’ll post what this person said:
"I was a tester for this playing Assassins Creed Online through this streaming service. It works well with one big exception, if you have a data limit expect that you will go over the limit. I played hard for about 5 days and used about 1.5TB of data.
I do not have exact data usage, but while playing this that was how much I used over my average. "
I didn’t even consider data usage. If you’re streaming 1080p or 4K and everything, you really would use a TON of data. And little do a lot of people realize but, EVERY SINGLE ISP in the U.S. has a data cap. It’s around 1TB/month. Most people never come anywhere close to that. But I can definitely see using a service like this, for a regular everyday gamer, going over it.
With most ISP’s once you go over that limit they just start adding on $10 for another 50gb data for the month, but it adds up really fast at that point.
Agreed. History seems unequivocal about corporations with shareholders more or less always going for more profit and control at the expense of the user experience, if not immediately, eventually.
I’d rather own my games.
And besides, it will be many years until connection speeds are high for the common folk across countries for Stadia to be worth it.
This technology is nothing new.
CDProjekt Red is going to be doing the same thing with their GOG Galaxy 2.0 launcher, but without the lag of a streaming service. They’ll act as an intermediary for all the out-of-game stuff, like buying, reviewing, or launching games, but once the game runs they step out entirely.
Adobe does this. Now, I have to pay a subscription in order to work??? I’ll stick to an older version, thank you. Or I’ll leave it to hackers to give us a version that is offline.
Might as well, go back 40 years, and photoshop the old way. Unless they put a subscription on my x-acto knife and loupe too!
Nvidia has had the Nvidia’s GeForce Now- service for years. It is the exact same concept, it allows you to play very hardware intensive games at maximum details even on an old laptop, if you pay a fee. All you need is a fast internet connection.
Guess what? It’s not popular. And it’s horrible for competitive gaming. Why? The latency spikes are horrible. It takes tons of bandwidth. There is significant screen tearing and loss of entire frames due to network congestion.
And if you want to play at maximum detail plus 4k resolution, you better have a 100+mb/s connection. Even then, when your network is congested and lots of users are streaming at once, your screen will become a pixelated mess while it buffers incoming frames.
Imagine Netflix buffering during peak times. That’s your gaming experience on Geforce Now or Stadia. And it will never go away unless everyone on Earth has access to gigabit speed fiber optic connections which are only reserved for your personal use.
So basically everything as a log-in live service instead of a game you can actually own and play on by yourself? That sounds utterly awful to me to be honest. I don’t mind online for multiplayer games (since it’s obviously required there), but I absolutely loathe having to rely on internet & service provider being fully available when I just want to play something myself. When I buy something I want to own that thing, I don’t want a membership card for a library that doesn’t even let you borrow books.
This kind of service has existed in one form or another for nearly two decades. Almost all are considered failures. There’s a reason companies like gog exist now. DRM vendors like steam and any cloud gaming service is highly anti consumer. You don’t own anything you buy. If your internet goes down you’re screwed. Steam has proven on multiple occasions they can and will remove games from the store and your library without moments notice. There’s no reason why a cloud gaming service wouldn’t spontaneously curate their collection of titles either.
