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Google responds after Stadia owners accuse it of breaking promises over game performance
- Thread starter Kenzodielocke
- Start date
It's bad faith because he was pretending to not know what I'm talking about when I know he does. And yes he was ignoring that reason, like explicitly and purposefully ignoring it.. hence why I got annoyed.
And how is it irrelevant? It's not irrelevant to Google and it's not irrelevant to the consumer. Google incurring that cost is a core part of the service and it's value. It's why you can play Destiny 2 on a Note 10 phone in Chrome... and it's likely why Google isn't putting F2P Destiny on the service, at least not until they figure out their business model.
Sounds like a load of bullshit. If the server blades they have going really do have the kind of power they said they'd have (all them teraflops), then simply porting the games over should result in so much better performance that developers really should have no problem at all cranking up the resolution, framerate, or graphical fidelity. Name me one time where a developer released an existing game on a system with about twice the power and didn't even improve anything? It never happened. So what's more likely? That most every single dev on Stadia cheaped out, or that the power Google advertised was bullshit?
Then again, that's the "beauty" of it: We don't have the exact specs, and we can't analyze them either because everything's hidden away from us in their cloud. Hell maybe other components of those systems (architecture, ram speed, etc.) are so bottlenecked that the faster GPU doesn't even matter? We'll likely never know...
Then again, that's the "beauty" of it: We don't have the exact specs, and we can't analyze them either because everything's hidden away from us in their cloud. Hell maybe other components of those systems (architecture, ram speed, etc.) are so bottlenecked that the faster GPU doesn't even matter? We'll likely never know...
Don't think it really matters right now since only Pro members can play any of the games and they would have got Destiny 2 for free. Maybe visit the issue later when it's open to everyone.
Stadia brings the fever out of people!!
Some of the stuff that has come out reminds me of issues I have with my own employees speaking with confidence about things they have no experience with. Meaning some of these interviews and tweets make me think that the people commenting (meaning industry people not ERA members ;P) have not actually USED the service but are going off of what they were told.
I preach it constantly at work... do not share your two cents unless you understand what you are talking about and can back up what you say. Otherwise you just make things worse.
Some of the stuff that has come out reminds me of issues I have with my own employees speaking with confidence about things they have no experience with. Meaning some of these interviews and tweets make me think that the people commenting (meaning industry people not ERA members ;P) have not actually USED the service but are going off of what they were told.
I preach it constantly at work... do not share your two cents unless you understand what you are talking about and can back up what you say. Otherwise you just make things worse.
I didn't pretend anything, I just contrasted Google's communications about their service with reality, and found a mismatch. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Google.
How did they start charging people for their services when they haven't even figured out their business model? How does their business model not already account for F2P games, some of which are the most popular games in the world, and also the kind of games most likely to entice people who don't want any console start-up costs? I can't wrap my head around that.
Stadia is trying to compete as the storefront where you purchase your games, so I think it's fair to compare with other existing platforms & services. The difference being the vehicle for how you experience the game (stream vs local download), but ultimately, they are competing in the same market. I think it's fair to point out the differences, but as others have said, it isn't the customer's job to worry about Stadia's business model or lack thereof. It's their job to figure that out if they want to actually gain a foothold in the marketplace.
From a consumer stand point we shouldn't need to give a shit that Google didn't put F2P destiny on their service because of that. They're selling a thing, it should have its business model figured out. Especially given it's not a new or unique idea and it's making the same mistakes as all the previous ones did at launch.
Hence why I said the tech is irrelevant. Consumers don't care "Oh it's being streamed" they care "I can play the games" but not having F2P stuff on there cuts out a massive chunk of audience, in particular an often more casual audience who Stadia would ostensibly be a better fit for than the more hardcore gamers it seems to actually be trying to court.
Edit: Moirayn's post above me is much better worded than mine.
Poor Google Stadia & Google another Google product that got killed before it can take off. Plan and simple the people have spoken. People don't want a full blown cloud gaming services as they already have consoles and PC's. Would've been a good deal if Google didn't make their own phone the exclusive way to use their services as a mean to play mobile. I personally think if they allowed more phones instead of just a Pixel phones to use it mobile similar to what Xcloud and now PlayStation I think Stadia would've had a bigger momentum.
Google doesn't know for a fact if $9.99 a month is even enough to charge for Pro; they don't know if the free version will be profitable yet, etc. Throwing a popular F2P game on the service this early would blow it up for sure.. but could set a bad precedent if Google can't actually afford to run F2P games on the service.
We have GeForce Now running for like 2 years now and they are still in beta/figuring out pricing. These services are UNPRECEDENTED as far as the resources required, so it's not shocking that Google isn't rushing to flood their service with people who can use it endlessly without giving them a dime.
I think so. It's at least a variant of it as it has 56 CUs and the same TFLOPs, but higher memory bandwidth iirc?
That's the problem with this, not many people want another Store front to play their games they already played. It's the same way with streaming services. Many people are tired of all these companies coming out with all these services you have to subscribe to just to get the content you want to watch. It's why millions of people got rid of cable and that's exactly how cable started and why it's dying and it's the same way gaming will become if these companies keep on making their own services. (But I could be wrong about it all)
Has Bungie said anything about D2 on Stadia? Do they plan on addressing the graphics and performance? Maybe the plan was to launch with settings at a certain level and then boost them over time once everything is stable? All I know is that if Google expects a monthly fee for 4K 60FPS I better get some 4K 60FPS soon...
As of right now, I think D2 and Samurai Shodown look and play fine. But not 4k 60FPS fine. I'm not buying anymore games until this shit is addressed.
As of right now, I think D2 and Samurai Shodown look and play fine. But not 4k 60FPS fine. I'm not buying anymore games until this shit is addressed.
You can use pretty much any Android phone with a chrome browser.
Touché. Though I would exclude such old systems. Their CPU architectures were so wildly different that porting jobs were nowhere near as easy as they are in recent times.
All they needed was streaming to be available in the iOS & Android app at launch.
Users would've been so hyped that most people wouldn't have given a shit about the 4K / 60 not being optimized for their paid beta launch.
Instead; Goggle's going to Google.
Users would've been so hyped that most people wouldn't have given a shit about the 4K / 60 not being optimized for their paid beta launch.
Instead; Goggle's going to Google.
Every single person that had Stadia atm can get a 100% refund.
Again although I know it falls on deaf ears is the system is working great for many people.
It's Google's marketing that needs a reboot
If I am not wrong, the one game that seems to clearly underdeliver is Destiny 2, I wonder if it is related to the fact that it is a 'free' game (and on top of that, a "live game"), meaning people are not paying a cent for it (technically) and are supposed to play it for a long period of time. So they might just be using less resources to save on energy consumption... Not sure if this is possible but they might be using one GPU to run more than one instance of the game?
Because for me it seems quite obvious that the dev/publisher negotiates with Google the use of their servers to run the games and I'd guess that the more resource intensive it is, the bigger the share for Google, same for 'how long are people supposed to play the game?'. They wont charge the same for a game that uses all the TFlops and people will play for hundreds of hours and for, say a game like Inside that is quite short and probably won't come even close to using all of the power of the GPU.
Because for me it seems quite obvious that the dev/publisher negotiates with Google the use of their servers to run the games and I'd guess that the more resource intensive it is, the bigger the share for Google, same for 'how long are people supposed to play the game?'. They wont charge the same for a game that uses all the TFlops and people will play for hundreds of hours and for, say a game like Inside that is quite short and probably won't come even close to using all of the power of the GPU.
There is far more to talk about here.
You can't say to people your system is more powerful than the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro *combined* and then deliver less than PS4 Pro performance, however playable and lag free the end result is.
Another way of looking at it, is what can a 10.7 Teraflop GPU do on a PC running Windows 10. For a dedicated gaming platform like Stadia, you shouldn't be getting LESS performance out of that part than you do on a PC running a full consumer OS.
Either the software environment or SDKs needs a LOT of work, and Google need to acknowledge that (rather than putting all the blame on the game developers) and promise to do better, or those numbers they touted are extremely misleading and they need to come clean about them.
The real world performance of this platform is nowhere close to what Google's numbers and claims suggest. You might say it's 'working great' but to me, and something being outperformed by something else with less than half the promised power isn't working great at all.
Yeah, this is the weird thing. Google have a window of time between now and late 2020 when people start buying next generation consoles to put up a convincing argument to persuade those people not to buy those consoles.
There are not many opportunities for them do to that and one of them (launch) has already passed by without any notable success and with generally bad word of mouth. That means that their remaining opportunities are the big games next year that will hit Stadia - games like Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, Watch Dogs Legion (if it releases before the consoles) and I guess also the Avengers game. The best case for Google would be if Stadia was a showcase for those games, easily outperforming the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, making it so that anyone thinking about getting Cyberpunk on console would consider the alternative of buying it on Stadia.
Instead...we have this scenario where not only is Xbox One X outperforming Stadia in general, but in side-by-side comparisons it's not even an immediately obvious improvement over the base PS4 (which seems silly because Stadia should be blowing the base PS4 away but....anyone doubting it can check some DF screenshots of RDR2 PS4 vs RDR2 Stadia or Tomb Raider PS4 vs Tomb Raider Stadia - if you zoom in and compare at close range it's clear that the PS4 image is worse overall, but at normal viewing distances it's quite close). For some games Google can at least claim a framerate advantage over the enhanced consoles, but they kind of needed to be in a position where they were claiming unambiguous tech victories in every key aspect of performance and instead they're struggling with comparisons.
Unless that changes in the near future, that's one of Stadia's selling points just thrown away.
Exactly Google for some reason felt the need to over hype a launch that they were only planning to sell a limited amount of units for.
It makes no sense and overshadows the underlying technical achievements.
They should have announced it as a beta or waited 6 months to have all of the features and give the devs more time
Yes, a limited beta with muted promises - to keep the buzz going and lower expectations. And figure out the kinks/give developers time to adopt to their platform's unique requirements (UI scaling etc).
Release next year when Sony and Microsoft start their next-gen marketing machine.
That's when they could potentially promise to run next-gen games with the only cost being the price of the game. And that's what can make this an exciting proposition to some people not looking forward to spending $599 on a PS5 or Scarlet.
Whoops ya I got him mixed up with peter moore. Still though the guy hasn't had a great track record as of late.
As always it doesn't matter how good your hardware is if devs either can't or won't take full advantage of it.
They should have never promised 4k60 for everything because there's always going be games that need compromises, especially when the streaming aspect comes into consideration.
They should have never promised 4k60 for everything because there's always going be games that need compromises, especially when the streaming aspect comes into consideration.
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I found this post on Reddit and think it perfectly sums up Google's shadiness regarding the 4k/60fps debacle:
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Google poorly communicated what 4k60 meant and people assumed wrongly what it meant.
No, they didn't. They outright lied, there was no "poor communication" or "incorrect assumption".
1080p/60fps medium settings upscaled or 1440p/30fps upscaled isn't 4k/60 gaming. That's not up to debate or for Google or any other Stadia apologist to decide. By any other definition my old Super Nintendo is equally capable of 4K/60fps gaming when I hook it up to my current 4k TV.
Straight from Phil Harrison, Vice President and GM, Google. In charge of Stadia.
https://twitter.com/MrPhilHarrison/status/1181739544783097858
I hope we can agree that e.g. RDR2 is not capped at 1440p/30fps for "artistic reasons" because it actually targets (but often fails to deliver) 60fps at 1080p.
I hope we can agree that this statement explicitly mentions bandwidth and TV hardware as the limiting factor in Stadia rendering quality, not Stadia's "10.7 teraflop, but infinitely scalable" rendering performance.
I hope we can agree that this statement (and many like it) has been proven a big, bold lie by Stadia's launch titles by now. And not "poor communication".
And then, of course, there is this glorious tweet from the official Stadia account that has since been deleted:
https://i.imgur.com/ZFQOK1q.png
RDR2 on Stadia isn't even close to "highest settings", it isn't even close to 4k and it certainly isn't 4k/60. It's significantly below Xbox One X and even a lower mid-range gaming PC in quality. It doesn't even come close to either. Heck, you'll see more "glorious detail" on pretty much any other platform but Stadia.
"Play 4K/60" doesn't mean 1080p medium settings and heavy video compression, just because it's upscaled somewhere along the line. Nobody is paying 120$/year for upscaling, something every 4k TV is already very capable of for free.
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I was stoked on Stadia pre-launch, but after launch, I'm very very indifferent.
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Google poorly communicated what 4k60 meant and people assumed wrongly what it meant.
No, they didn't. They outright lied, there was no "poor communication" or "incorrect assumption".
1080p/60fps medium settings upscaled or 1440p/30fps upscaled isn't 4k/60 gaming. That's not up to debate or for Google or any other Stadia apologist to decide. By any other definition my old Super Nintendo is equally capable of 4K/60fps gaming when I hook it up to my current 4k TV.
Straight from Phil Harrison, Vice President and GM, Google. In charge of Stadia.
https://twitter.com/MrPhilHarrison/status/1181739544783097858
I hope we can agree that 1080p or 1440p upsampled is not 4k.
I hope we can agree that e.g. RDR2 is not capped at 1440p/30fps for "artistic reasons" because it actually targets (but often fails to deliver) 60fps at 1080p.
I hope we can agree that this statement explicitly mentions bandwidth and TV hardware as the limiting factor in Stadia rendering quality, not Stadia's "10.7 teraflop, but infinitely scalable" rendering performance.
I hope we can agree that this statement (and many like it) has been proven a big, bold lie by Stadia's launch titles by now. And not "poor communication".
And then, of course, there is this glorious tweet from the official Stadia account that has since been deleted:
https://i.imgur.com/ZFQOK1q.png
RDR2 on Stadia isn't even close to "highest settings", it isn't even close to 4k and it certainly isn't 4k/60. It's significantly below Xbox One X and even a lower mid-range gaming PC in quality. It doesn't even come close to either. Heck, you'll see more "glorious detail" on pretty much any other platform but Stadia.
"Play 4K/60" doesn't mean 1080p medium settings and heavy video compression, just because it's upscaled somewhere along the line. Nobody is paying 120$/year for upscaling, something every 4k TV is already very capable of for free.
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I was stoked on Stadia pre-launch, but after launch, I'm very very indifferent.
None of that addresses the specific figures we were given. They gave us hard numbers and made claims based on them that were logical given the numbers.
Its not just a matter of overhype. They need to explain why performance is below a PS4 Pro in some titles.
If I'm selling you a ten cylinder engine, and it is a ten cylinder engine, but it's being out performed by a four cylinder engine, you are going to want me to explain that. If I answer 'well some people can drive cars faster than others' its a not satisfactory response.
I feel 'overhype' understates what Google have done here. You give GPU terraflop numbers for three systems all using AMD gpus, and the end results are this... We aren't being told something.
It really is a shame that they're lying to their base. The service itself works great. It's the most consistent and lag-free game streaming service I've used by far. They just really overpromised (lied about) what their servers could handle. Don't say everything's going to run at 4k/60 if nothing runs at 4k/60.
If they could fix that, this service would be great.
If they could fix that, this service would be great.
Oh, I didn't missed Phil, but that one is priceless. Phil is capable of understanding what he said (and the lie), but the official Stadia account isn't technical, it is PR. That means, internally, they failed to explained it... to their own team. I mean, what a debacle.
In the case of RDR2: 2080Ti + OC'ed 9900k cannot do RDR2 60/4k. RDR2 probably runs as best as it can on Stadia's hardware, but Destiny 2 seems to be a little underperforming.
And it will only get worse once the next-gen starts. Stadia is going to be the weakest platform (PC, Xbox 4, PS5)
this is just hilarious and needs to be reposted everywhere.
Good find by the user above.
I know companies overpromise, but look at the image OP posted. 10 TF. It wouldn't do miracles. It was just mid to upper range since the announcement.
With those specs and price, I would never recommend it for someone who cares about both graphics and performance.
With those specs and price, I would never recommend it for someone who cares about both graphics and performance.
Oh God, this will be legendary forever.
That reads as one big attempt to throw Rockstar and Bungie under the bus. Nevermind the fact that Destiny 2 benchmarks at about 60 fps on 4K/High settings on a Vega 56, a far cry from what they ended up with here.
So sure, maybe that all comes down to Bungie's inability to port it to Vulcan and Stadia's framework, but if so, then what good did that six months of Google engineers embedded at Bungie even do if the best they could come up with on similar hardware as 1080p/Medium
Prety much. Stadia would be very attractive especially at HFR where they can further minimize the latency. But 1080p medium Destiny 2 is outrageous with >10TFLOP hardware.
Out of curiosity, what month was that posted? I have no idea what language this is.
To be fair, the developers are the ones configuring the game and choosing what settings to run the game at on the system.
if a dev goes in an sets the max res to 720p and caps the game to 30fps as a mistake, it's not because Googles systems couldn't handle the load. It's because the dev screwed up.
This is coming from a person that thinks this whole business model that Google has setup is laughable.
Of course it can. You just need to optimize your settings. It can do 4k60 on X-like settings and still have headroom->
Google Translate from my phone shows October 16th, 2019. I think it was Polish.
That pic is a much better quote than the other tweet. At least there he says it will run at 4k/60fps... in the other tweet people are quoting he just says that Stadia "supports" it.
Have any developers commented on this response from Google yet? Curious what they think..heh
My polish is a bit rusty, but it should be pazdzernik = October.
This isn't the first time something Phil Harrison touched has stumble out of the gates.
People should have been weary of their marketing terminology.
I have the Stadia Founder's Edition, and yes, it 'sucks' but my expectations were never over the top, I totally expected it to end up like this. It's early, and it's not going to be an amazing experience for the majority of people, but for some it works just okay enough.
People should have been weary of their marketing terminology.
I have the Stadia Founder's Edition, and yes, it 'sucks' but my expectations were never over the top, I totally expected it to end up like this. It's early, and it's not going to be an amazing experience for the majority of people, but for some it works just okay enough.