Google Stadia General Discussion - Like any other gaming platform, but worse.

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Big Hoss said:
Wouldn't put it past them to attempt to outsource machine learning grunt work through "games".

"Solve this Captcha to respawn!"
"Test your reflexes with our precision drone strike simulator!"
"Sift through emails to find suspicious communications in our new text-based adventure!"
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That's what I've figured the whole point of this is. Google tracks absolutely EVERYTHING, so of course they'd track gameplay data from people. How they react to certain situations, what they notice, what they don't, anything you can think of.
 
Piss said:
That's what I've figured the whole point of this is. Google tracks absolutely EVERYTHING, so of course they'd track gameplay data from people. How they react to certain situations, what they notice, what they don't, anything you can think of.
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Imagine your adventure game on the Google console where your decisions will not only affect your fate but what ads Google Analytics will dump during your game, email, and browser.
 

tl;dr - 4k60fps HDR gaming on a 25mbps line.

Tech giant Google is getting into gaming in a big way with a direct challenge to the giants of console and PC gaming. It’s called Stadia.

Former Sony and Xbox executive and current Google gaming boss Phil Harrison detailed the platform today at an event in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference, saying it would link all the ways people play games. The core of it is that it’ll be a gaming platform that runs via streaming, no console or PC needed and no games downloaded or running on a disc at the users’ end.

Harrison and a host of other presenters boasted of high-end gaming running in 4K and 60 frames per second, streamed across Google’s network to any screen you can think of.

“This new generation of gaming is not a box,” Harrison said. It will launch later this year, first in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe.

Crucially, Harrison and the other assembled presenters did not say how fast users’ internet speeds would need to be to get the sky-high performance hyped throughout the event, let alone to enjoy multiplayer games that run entirely via streaming.

Previous game-streaming services such as OnLive have offered similar hardware-free or hardware-light propositions but didn’t hit it big in part due to users’ discomfort, distrust or dissatisfaction with connection lags. Google argues that its custom hardware network can offer high enough quality gaming to satisfy and even convert people used to buying games on disc or downloading them. The company prototyped the Stadia tech last fall by allowing users of a program called Project Stream to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in a Google Chrome browser. We had tested it ourselves and were impressed. That service had required users to have download speeds of at least 15 megabits per second and latency of 40 milliseconds or less.

Update - 7:25pm: A Google PR rep tells Kotaku that Google’s Project Stream was able to provide 1080p, 60fps gameplay for users with 25 megabits per second connections. “When Stadia launches later this year, we expect to be able to deliver 4k 60 fps at approximately the same bandwidth requirements,” they said.

Kotaku readers have shared their own experiences with Stream in the comments to this article, some saying performance was superb, others saying it was lacking. Download speeds are just one factor for having an optimal connection and those speeds and the latency of connections will be a key factor for Stadia’s viability.

At the event, Harrison walked through an example of how Stadia might work. Someone could be watching a trailer for a game, click the option to play now and be playing within five seconds. “No download, no patch and no install,” Harrison said. “Stadia offers instant access to play.” He said it reduces the friction between being excited about a game and playing it.

Stadia will work on TVs, tablets, laptops, and phones. It’ll work with existing controllers when playing on a laptop and PC. Stadia will also have its own controller. The Stadia controller, which is optional, connects to Google’s streaming data centers directly over WiFi, for limiting latency. It has a capture button that shares to YouTube and a Google Assistant button that’ll activate the controller’s microphone to provide help in a game.

Harrison said that Google has already shipped Stadia development kits to more than 100 studios and announced the creation of Google’s own first-pary development studio, Stadia Games & Entertainment. It will make exclusive content for Stadia and will be run by Jade Raymond, the longtime game producer whose credits include the creation of the Assassin’s Creed franchise at Ubisoft. Raymond said her team will also work with external studios to bring Stadia’s features to their games.

“I’m actually not a big gamer,” Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said at the start of the keynote. But he said he leads a company full of people interested in solving hard technology problems. To that end, the presentation of Google’s platform today was angled as a way to offer an approach to gaming that is based on streaming games over a low-latency network.

Pichai showed off the company’s custom server hardware and connections.

The idea, he said, is “building a game platform for everyone,” removing hardware barriers.

Google is saying that is thousands of edge nodes and racks of powerful hardware can offer significant technological muscle to provide games running at high specs. For launch, they’re promising 4K gaming at 60 frames per second.

Stadia is being built with the help of PC giant AMD, which is offering a custom GPU for the platform’s server-side processing (remember, nothing is really happening on the device Stadia gamers use to play games).

In an interview with Eurogamer, Harrison confirmed what we’d reported yesterday that you’ll need a Chromecast dongle if you’re using Stadia on a TV.

Crucially, at the event the Stadia team didn’t immediately clarify how fast a user’s internet needs to be to get the best performance, a make or break element of Google’s plans.

As for the games? The first game announced for Stadia turned out to be the upcoming Doom Eternal, which Id Software producer Marty Stratton said took a few weeks to get working on Stadia. Stratton said the game would run at 4K and 60 FPS.

Harrison noted that Stadia would support cross-platform play.

Some proofs of concept shown for Stadia include things like allowing couch co-up through streaming that doesn’t tax the performance of a game, the ability for multiple people to view the same game world from a range of perspectives, again without a hit on performance.

Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert (of PixelJunk gaming fame) introduced a Stadia concept called “state share,” which enables the game to code a particular moment (where the player is, what they have, a specific moment int he game) that can be shared via a link. Cuthbert said his team is making a game that is based all around this concept, but couldn’t unveil it yet.

Another Stadia feature demoed today is something called Crowd Play. They demoed it by letting people watch a stream of a game and the queue up to be next to take over the game and play it. This, YouTube Gaming’s Ryan Wyatt said, would allow YouTubers to curate a group gaming experience.

Harrison said Google will reveal more about the platform’s launch line-up this summer. For what it’s worth, sets of icons shown on Google’s event stream even before the game began hinted at some of the games that could be on the service.

Red Dead?

Civ?

We’ll share more as we find out.

While we described Google’s Stadia as a competitor to traditional console and PC gaming models, it’s also worth considering that one of those bastions of traditional console gaming, Microsoft, is also prepping a streaming-based service. Project xCloud, revealed last year, is intended to also enable high-end gaming experiences on a wide range of screens, freeing people from needing to own a PC or console to play games that would otherwise only run on those devices. In a company blog post a week ago, Microsoft said that users would be able to “test it in real-world scenarios later this year.”
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kotaku.com

Google Unveils Gaming Platform Stadia, A Competitor To Xbox, PlayStation And PC

Tech giant Google is getting into gaming in a big way with a direct challenge to the giants of console and PC gaming. It’s called Stadia.
kotaku.com kotaku.com

Note: This story was updated throughout the day with more details about Stadia and its competition.
 
This has many things against it.
  1. Many people still have shit internet and in many countries a download cap is a thing.
  2. Will have input lag, this may not be a awful thing for slower games, but faster one sure even casual gamers will feel like something is off
  3. 4k means fuck all if the image quality isn't good
  4. They use linux, a platform that currently lacks games so unlike if they used windows it means devs will have to port games to it which takes time and money, also means google will have less games than PS Now and Xbox Game Pass both of which currently trying to improve and expand to other devices. Also worth noting lack of linux games was one of the downfalls to the steambox.
  5. Currently no support from EA, Activision, Epic Games, Capcom, Namco, Sega among other, No Fifa, CoD and Fortnite really cuts down on the casual gamers that would buy it.
  6. Is it like netflix, or do you buy the games then stream it, or does it do both. Google really didn't give any info on how to buy the games which is honesty the first thing they should have talked about after they said it was a streaming console even if they weren't ready to give prices yet.
  7. Mic sounds creepy

Few good thing for it
  1. Price, doubt it will cost much
  2. They are doing first party games, why they didn't show any off no idea but even if they put out good first party games they just don't have the numbers to compare to xbox.sony and nintendo first party output unless they put in a big investment into which it honesty doesn't sound like they are.
  3. Was nice to see Dylan Cuthbert after Sony fucked him over on the Tomorrow Children,
 
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Poiseon said:
It'll be like if EA built it's own console.
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you mean the 3DO?


this is just stupid. 2 clones are already enough. nintendo is the only company able to make enough good games to support their console alone.
 
Stoneheart said:
you mean the 3DO?
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Well, no. The 3DO Company was founded by Trip Hawkins (who founded Electronic Arts, when it was a very different company than what it became), and had EA as a franchisee making a few games...but that was just about it. They also worked with a number of different companies (with deeper pockets) to release the original 3DO console, including Panasonic, AT&T, and Time Warner.
 
I dunno why everyone is so down on it, clearly this was made by gamers, for gamers. Classic Google. Very nice.

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eh, i thought when they did assassins creed odyssey it played pretty well despite my rather crap internet.
 
Freeman said:
I dunno why everyone is so down on it, clearly this was made by gamers, for gamers. Classic Google. Very nice.

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I would post the "How do you do" meme but seriously, even Steve Buscemi convinces me more than those 80 years old CEOs.

That's worse than "Pokémon go to the polls". I want the designer of this shit to fucking die.
 
I already shit on this but I wanted to come back to it.

People are hyping this up even though there are huge details missing; specifically how much any of this is going to cost and what games are going to be available.

They're using Assassin's Creed : Odyssey as a marquee title, when it really isn't one. Can you buy games? Can you rent them specifically? Or is it a shared library that rotates every so often (like Netflix movies).

People are suggesing it's going to be cheap, but there isn't a way they can have the games run on thier own hardware and not reasonably pass that cost onto the consumer. XBOX Gamepass/PSNow are ~$100/year (depending on sub length and sales, whatever) but those games are being leveraged by hardware that you already bought (PC, XBOX 1, PS4, whatever) and not being hosted by google's new hardware setup. The specs they listed for the GPU sound similar to a $600-800 card that AMD already makes, meaning that if they use one of those per stadia instance, it's going to add up to huge cash amounts. I would wager it would have to be $40-50/month at a minimum for them to try and make their money back at some point.

The library is going to be horrendous because publishers/developers want to sell the game, not to rent it. On Xbox Game pass, the third most recent and "marquee" game on there right now is fucking Fallout 4, which you could just grab used for $9 at gamestop or $4 on ebay. PSNow just added Metal Gear Solid 4, which can be had for $3 from a gamestop. There isn't a huge value and unless Google is going to write hilariously huge checks their library is going to be god awful. Even if they do write hilariously huge checks, there is no way it will be worth it to them.

I honestly don't think that Google is going to be able to do it. They can't monetize YouTube properly and most streamers/would-be-streamers have likely already invested in stream hardware (capture card on a separate PC) so having "easy" access to streaming it doesn't stand out as a selling point. Even if you wanted to do the "easy access to streaming thing", Microsoft already tried that with Mixer/Beam a few years back, and the XBOX already had an install base.

It just seems like Google is trying to do too much all at once. They're trying to have youtube overtake twitch, while starting up a game development studios after Sony/Microsoft/EA/Activision have been ransacking studios for the last 5+ years, while starting a game streaming service and a digital game library service a few years after Sony and Microsoft started thier's.
 
Imnotretardedimjustme said:
Again why not just use the fucking nvidia thing? You get a nice little tablet with basicly the same specs as a switch for what proably will be a comparble price.
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Shield tablet has been discontinued for a while, which is annoying because I want one.

You're talking about Shield TV.
 
At the GDC. Hardware company called Ciara was about to break into consumer markets. Stadia's hardware agnostic approach sets their plans back a bit. Which just means they'll continue selling to big company data centers (like Google lol)
 
They should not have canceled Google Glass. It was useless for personal use but had great potential for inventory management. But no, they just had to have a hit, rather than a niche product.
 
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