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

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
"It's just Xms more latency guys! Would you notice that in an online game?"

Not at all comparable. Online games (at least ones with decent netcode) cheat to provide a lag free experience. When you press the jump button you jump on your screen asap. It doesn't wait around to send the message to the server and get a response back like Stadia is forced to. In order to make this work the jump message that's sent also tells the server when the jump button was pressed and the server will allow you to take actions half a second or so in the past. That's why if you get disconnected you can still walk around for a while. This means that every player sees a slightly different version of the game world but the differences are small enough and get corrected by the server fast enough that nobody notices.

The Overwatch devs do a decent talk on the subject without getting too technical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ

Google claimed they were going to do something with "negative latency" where it would predict all of actions you could possibly take (or use AI that could help predict likely actions) and calculate the result of all of them and so be ready for anything. Crock of horseshit from like 20 different angles. An AI like that is just sci-fi. Calculating even a few outcomes would mean massive amounts of extra work porting games to do this sort of stuff and massive amounts of extra computing power (way more than x times extra for x different possible actions). It's possible that Google could have made Stadia in such a way that it wasn't massive amounts of porting work but then it would be even more computing power. $10 a month doesn't come close to cutting it and even if they did do all of that extra processing it would only help eliminate processing latency which is dwarfed by the network latency.

From a technical perspective the whole thing was ridiculously :optimistic:. The only way it was ever going to work was if they really had that sci-fi AI. That speaks to the culture at google as well. They're meant to have some of the best engineers money can buy but somehow they managed to take this pile of crap all the way to market. Either the engineers are afraid to tell the managers no or their diversity hiring has been going terribly and their engineers are complete morons.
 
Where Do You Find Them? said:
"It's just Xms more latency guys! Would you notice that in an online game?"

Not at all comparable. Online games (at least ones with decent netcode) cheat to provide a lag free experience. When you press the jump button you jump on your screen asap. It doesn't wait around to send the message to the server and get a response back like Stadia is forced to. In order to make this work the jump message that's sent also tells the server when the jump button was pressed and the server will allow you to take actions half a second or so in the past. That's why if you get disconnected you can still walk around for a while. This means that every player sees a slightly different version of the game world but the differences are small enough and get corrected by the server fast enough that nobody notices.

The Overwatch devs do a decent talk on the subject without getting too technical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ

Google claimed they were going to do something with "negative latency" where it would predict all of actions you could possibly take (or use AI that could help predict likely actions) and calculate the result of all of them and so be ready for anything. Crock of horseshit from like 20 different angles. An AI like that is just sci-fi. Calculating even a few outcomes would mean massive amounts of extra work porting games to do this sort of stuff and massive amounts of extra computing power (way more than x times extra for x different possible actions). It's possible that Google could have made Stadia in such a way that it wasn't massive amounts of porting work but then it would be even more computing power. $10 a month doesn't come close to cutting it and even if they did do all of that extra processing it would only help eliminate processing latency which is dwarfed by the network latency.

From a technical perspective the whole thing was ridiculously :optimistic:. The only way it was ever going to work was if they really had that sci-fi AI. That speaks to the culture at google as well. They're meant to have some of the best engineers money can buy but somehow they managed to take this pile of crap all the way to market. Either the engineers are afraid to tell the managers no or their diversity hiring has been going terribly and their engineers are complete morons.
Click to expand...
Negative latency is just a robot playing the game for you, and that sounds pretty cringe bro.
 
Google Stadia causes violence against womyn - domestic abuse cases projected to triple within 2 months of Stadia release - a clickbaity title for any vlogger trolling KF for ideas.

Google has stated, that video streaming should not be used at the same time, when playing Stadia. What effect on marital harmony, will the fact, that rest of the household can't get their Hulu/Netflix fix, while someone is playing Stadia have?
 
Last edited:
CheezzyMach said:
This guy reminds me of the types who insisted the Ouya and Steam Machines were going to kill consoles.
Click to expand...
Isn’t the steam machine just a prebuilt PC, but marketed like a console?
 
Secret Asshole said:
The thing is since the games are on the cloud, once the servers go off, that's all she wrote. Its not like Steam or GoG, where if Steam goes down there's probably a way to download and have them forever. Same with GoG.

Not so with Stadia. The law hasn't caught up to digital copies yet, its barely even considered it. Cloud services with streaming is a whole other ballgame. With Netflix and Hulu and such, you're basically paying for the service of streaming and licensing. Its basically like your own personal blockbuster, where you can watch unlimited with a membership. If the store goes down, technically you aren't owed, because the thing you were paying for was the ability to rent all this content.

On the other hand, with Stadia, you're basically paying to own something that you're effectively renting. Each game is full price or equivalent to a digital or physical copy. Its not actually renting, because you're paying full price to own something. So you technically own the game. The Stadia fee is renting out the Google servers to play something that you own. That's why Stadia is a fucking idiotic concept.

For example, I pay $10 bucks a month to PlaystationNow and Stream PS games on my PC and Sony decides to shut down the service, I'm not owed, because I'm technically renting their entire library. Its also highly, HIGHLY unlikely that they shut the service down since they're probably using their own servers. So I can safely subscribe to PlaystationNow and be confident that the service is going to last for a very long time. Not so with Stadia. Google is not a videogame company like Sony or even Valve.

With Stadia, I'm not only paying to own a game, I'm paying for their service. So if their service goes down, there's simply no way to play that game anymore. Yes, technically I own it, but you don't really. You own a license to play it on Google's Servers. If those servers go down, too fucking bad. Digital is much easier to make a case for that you bought a product on your PC and it is yours. For example, even games that have been removed from purchase on Steam due to Steam losing the license or copyright conflicts or whatever, if I bought that game, I can download it in perpetuity and play it. Nobody else can buy it, because the license is no longer offered. As long as I bought it, I own the license to use it on a PC. So as long as you own the hardware, you can use it. Very simple.

What happens if you are buying a license to use on someone else's hardware? You are shit out of fucking luck, that's what you are. With the way Google cancels and stops products, you're an absolute fucking moron to even touch this thing with a ten foot pole. The argument that Google can make is very simple: You own a license to play those games on Google's servers and the fee you pay is the rental of that equipment. If they no longer chose to rent equipment, you still have the license, but they are under no obligation to offer the hardware to play them. Like if I own a license for software for defunct hardware, I still have the license, but since the hardware is no longer being sold, I better pray that my shit doesn't break or you're fucked. The company is under no obligation to continue producing or offering that hardware if they cannot afford it. That's what Google is going to argue if they shut it down and I think they've got a pretty good case for that. Caveat Emptor.

The whole concept is fucking idiotic unless you're paying for something like PlayStation Now or a Netflix equivalent for games. Where you just pay a flat subscription fee and get access to a library. Cloud gaming as Stadia is doing it is not the future, because there is absolutely no guarantees that whatever you purchase will exist in four or five years time.



Nobody is. They're lying to themselves, just like every single person that bought an Ouya.
Click to expand...
TBH though is Stadia really any different than buying a movie off Amazon in that regard?

I really hope the law deals with digital soon since DVD's dying.
 
CheezzyMach said:
TBH though is Stadia really any different than buying a movie off Amazon in that regard?

I really hope the law deals with digital soon since DVD's dying.
Click to expand...

True, but movies are often cheaper. This is like buying a season or something like that. I'm not sure how the licensing works.
 
Tanner Glass said:
I would imagine Google (realistically or theoretically) is able to pull together metrics of Stadia games and provide them to developers, who generally speaking have very poor player feedback mechanisms (they rely on Achievements as progress markers). It's probably amazing for bug fixing/recreation and version control, meaning you can force players onto whatever version of a game you need to.
Click to expand...
Developers need metrics across the market, not those of Stadia players. If Steam players are abandoning my game three hours in, I want to know why, but I won't get that data from Stadia where my game has no competitors in its genre and both players saw it through to the end. Similarly, I want bug reports from all versions on all the hardware, not just from the Stadia port on Google's standardized hardware.

I need metrics from a sample representative of my audience. Stadia will only be representative of my audience when it's the only mass-market videogaming platform in existence, but then Google will take a 70% cut, so fuck that noise.
 
Secret Asshole said:
True, but movies are often cheaper. This is like buying a season or something like that. I'm not sure how the licensing works.
Click to expand...
It's probably pretty straightforward. Google collects a fee from people who pay to obtain a license to play a given game on the Stadia platform. They pay the publisher a good chunk of that fee. I'm willing to bet the "discounted price" people can pay if they subscribe to the "pro" version reflects Google giving up their slice of the action on that fee.

I won't use words like "buy" or "sell" to describe this stuff because this is literally renting a product with no expectation whatsoever of being allowed to keep, modify or sell it. No ownership at all. No matter how much someone pays into this service, they'll never own a damned thing (besides the Chromecast that overheats if it's run at 4k for too long and the controller that doesn't work with anything else, not even PCs).

It's digital Pay-Per-View and now that the industry is getting a taste for it, they'll never stop trying to pull this shit. It's also part of the reason why the broadband companies (owned by the country's cable conglomerates) act so butt-hurt about the bandwidth all these streaming services use. They're pissed that despite being paid on both ends already (by the customers and by the network peers) their precious lines are being used to transmit what they see as a PPV service that they really, really want a piece of.

Streaming is also the reason broadband providers are so fucking stingy about upload speeds on home broadband services. It's bad enough to them that companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon can stream stuff over those lines to customers without having to share any revenue with the broadband companies. The prospect of home users being able to stream things to each other at high speeds utterly terrifies them.
 
Stadia has apparently sold under 200k units based on the amount of downloads that the application required to set it up has.
gamedaily.biz

Report: Google Stadia app was downloaded only 175,000 times at launch [Sensor Tower]

Given that the app is needed to set up Stadia, this could be an indicator of Stadia's launch performance. Meanwhile, Amazon is strongly rumored to be ramping up its own cloud gaming platform. (Image: Pocket-lint)
gamedaily.biz gamedaily.biz
 
Kikkoman said:
Stadia has apparently sold under 200k units based on the amount of downloads that the application required to set it up has.
gamedaily.biz

Report: Google Stadia app was downloaded only 175,000 times at launch [Sensor Tower]

Given that the app is needed to set up Stadia, this could be an indicator of Stadia's launch performance. Meanwhile, Amazon is strongly rumored to be ramping up its own cloud gaming platform. (Image: Pocket-lint)
gamedaily.biz gamedaily.biz
Click to expand...
I downloaded it just to see how far you can get in the app, and it just brings you to an "enter your invite code" screen. There's no reason to get the app if you didn't buy the Founders Edition and don't have a Google Pixel phone, so I'd imagine a whole lot of those app downloads were from confused people who thought that Stadia's launch meant you can finally log in on your phone and play something.

Because, you know, a video game launch generally means it becomes available to play. Even I didn't know that it'd all be limited to the Founder's Edition at launch. I figured they'd at least have demos to try, that I could load it through my TV with a built-in Chromecast, and play it with my Xbox One controller.

Conspiracy theory: I wonder if Google was banking on all the cucks who actually bought the Founder's Edition set to give it universal praise, since they're the ones loyal enough to Google that they'd preorder it, and go on to praise it no matter what because of blind loyalty and sunk cost fallacy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom