Stadia launch dev: Game makers are worried “Google is just going to cancel it” thinks such concerns are "kind of silly" (dev responds, see threadmark)

[Alucardx23]

We can take a pretty good guess at this point though. They're all using the same chip source, only Google got theirs a year or more earlier. Google also hasn't exactly displayed "server stacking" yet, just talked about it, and they're not the first company to string several instances of the same console together. Gran Turismo did that with PS2s. The only thing they have is their internal network and data store, and MS have been all in on closing that gap for a while now.

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This is a little bit more than just talking about it. You will probably reply with "yes, but it's not a real game that is out yet" and I will reply to that with "yes, but that is besides the point, you said that they only talked about it". The video below is a real demo of multi GPU rendering.

 

[Devilgunman]

IIRC, Ouya had more hype than Stadia pre-launch.

 

[dead souls]

IIRC, Ouya had more hype than Stadia pre-launch.

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[riotous]

Why do people keep bringing up Ouya as if it has any relevance?

 

[Deleted member 176]

Why do people keep bringing up Ouya as if it has any relevance?

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I think that's the point

 

[Billfisto]

Why do people keep bringing up Ouya as if it has any relevance?

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Yeah. People should be bringing up the Sega Channel.

 

[Crayon]

Way to hack up the title to feed the confirmation bias. Glad that got changed. Im not too excited for stadia myself, but some here are really losing their heads.

 

[JoJo'sDentCo]

This is a little bit more than talking about. You will probably reply with "yes, but it's not a real game that is out yet" and I will reply to that with "yes, but that is besides the point, you said that they only talked about it". The video below is a real demo of multi GPU rendering.

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This demo was not impressive IMO. Didn't make me see the light at all.

 

[Klart]

DOA

 

[Deleted member 13101]

Apologies if this was already mentioned, but everyone in the world uses google maps, calendar, mail, etc. for multiple utility purposes. Everyone can use a google pixel in their daily lives, if they want to.

But stadia, to play the tomb raider trilogy and destiny 2 at launch, for a less-than-instant entry price, is not going to attract the same type and size of crowd. If they are expecting people to take to stadia like they do to maps, uh...

And the ouya comparisons in part have to do with shipping a product to people who are essentially backers at this stage. Ouya had issues with this too. But this is worse. If one of the largest most influential companies can't ship a physical product to people, whose order limits were known in advance, that's just bad.

 

[riotous]

Apologies if this was already mentioned, but everyone in the world uses google maps, calendar, mail, etc. for multiple utility purposes. Everyone can use a google pixel in their daily lives, if they want to.

But stadia, to play the tomb raider trilogy and destiny 2 at launch, for a less-than-instant entry price, is not going to attract the same type and size of crowd. If they are expecting people to take to stadia like they do to maps, uh...

And the ouya comparisons in part have to do with shipping a product to people who are essentially backers at this stage. Ouya had issues with this too. But this is worse. If one of the largest most influential companies can't ship a physical product to people, whose order limits were known in advance, that's just bad.

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They aren't expecting people to take to the Founder's Edition like people took to maps.. they have a free version rolling out next year likely w/ demos and trials for people to have $0 entry fee.

Founder's edition is a strategy that probably has a few reasons; one is likely actually to LIMIT interest / availability in the early stages so their servers don't crash and burn. I'd actually bet good money it's the reason for the slow shipping too. Shipping in waves so that they can make sure they can handle the load.

 

[ImaLawy3r]

..... What?

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You haven't heard of couch baity? hmmph.
Auto-correct strikes again - Click Baity.

 

[noyram23]

How does the hardware update work by the way? Google promised an ultra settings capable quality right?

 

[riotous]

How does the hardware update work by the way? Google promised an ultra settings capable quality right?

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No; google never promised anything like that. They can't; games are now pushing settings beyond what most reasonable even high-end gaming rigs can push at 60FPS.

Google has a 10TF GPU and a good CPU/amount of memory backing it.. devs are also being encouraged to offload compute to shared servers ala Crackdown 3's destruction stuff.

But for now it is most likely that for most games they'll be running in a single Stadia instance; so something like RDR2 is unlikely to be pushing "Ultra" settings. In fact, I predict it will be somewhere in the "High" settings range, and probably only 30FPS.

A lot of Stadia fans have been shouting "everything 4k/60 on Ultra!" but it's unrealistic. Realistic for a huge chunk of games, but now that a new console generation is approaching we should see companies pushing things further.

Whether google upgrades from the 10.1 TF machines or starts letting devs actually stack/sli/crossfire them soon nobody knows. It's doubtful; the idea that these streaming companies can upgrade hardware that quickly is kind of ridiculous. It would be a HUGE expenditure to upgrade every GPU in every server on all of their server farms.

 

[noyram23]

No; google never promised anything like that. They can't; games are now pushing settings beyond what most reasonable even high-end gaming rigs can push at 60FPS.

Google has a 10TF GPU and a good CPU/amount of memory backing it.. devs are also being encouraged to offload compute to shared servers ala Crackdown 3's destruction stuff.

But for now it is most likely that for most games they'll be running in a single Stadia instance; so something like RDR2 is unlikely to be pushing "Ultra" settings. In fact, I predict it will be somewhere in the "High" settings range, and probably only 30FPS.

A lot of Stadia fans have been shouting "everything 4k/60 on Ultra!" but it's unrealistic. Realistic for a huge chunk of games, but now that a new console generation is approaching we should see companies pushing things further.

Whether google upgrades from the 10.1 TF machines or starts letting devs actually stack/sli/crossfire them soon nobody knows. It's doubtful; the idea that these streaming companies can upgrade hardware that quickly is kind of ridiculous. It would be a HUGE expenditure to upgrade every GPU in every server on all of their server farms.

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There's just way too many things holding this thing back (streaming in general too), that's why i'm not really confident if Google will support this long term. It's gonna be a costly upkeep compared to their other service and I don't think there's enough initial audience for this.

 

[Deleted member 25870]

Working in tech, you have to be willing to make bold moves and try things that could fail

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That's fine. Tech experiments and think tanks are fun. At the end of the day someone has to justify a cost associated with the risk though.

As a consumer, considering Google's track record and lack of communication, I don't see that the gamble is worth my dollars.

 

[Grayson]

This is the most entertaining disaster in years and easily foreseeable.

Without them giving us a clear escape clause so we know where we will he eventually playing out purchases this is a fools game.

 

[Alucardx23]

This demo was not impressive IMO. Didn't make me see the light at all.

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Sure. Personally I care more about how they said the demo was working than how the demo looks. 3 GPUs were working together in order to run that simulation and that is the impressive part. You can see how developers can use that same configuration for other cases tu run different types of simulations you might care more about.

 

[Fart Master]

No they weren't. Knack, Killzone, Playroom, Resogun. These were. The entire rest of it was rereleases.

I'm not just singling out PS4, XBO had the exact same problem. Neither console had actual new games almost a year into the cycle.

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BF4 and COD Ghost had significant differences than the last gen versions and I wouldn't call a two week gap a rerelease.

 

[ty_hot]

"What does this mean for places where everyone goes to Internet cafes, like in Brazil? Who knows."

lol wut

 

[inpHilltr8r]

The video below is a real demo of multi GPU rendering.

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I saw a great demo of cloud physics last time the generation ticked over.

 

[StiLteD]

This is now being corrected, so I don't know about the "permanent" part of your post.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/10/youtube-reinstates-banned-markiplier-fan-accounts/

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Yeah and no one had any luck whatsoever getting overturns before a multi million subscribers YouTuber publically hounded them. Without an advocate with pressure like that good luck to you. Their appeals process (along with their recent TOS changes regarding descretionary cancelling of channels on the nebulous basis of "financial viability") is completely stacked in corporate and industry favour. User and creator rights and recourse are increasingly tipping towards non existent. So yeah my trust in them for anything with hard monetary value is pretty much zero.

 

[Alucardx23]

Yeah and no one had any luck whatsoever getting overturns before a multi million subscribers YouTuber publically hounded them. Without an advocate with pressure like that good luck to you. Their appeals process (along with their recent TOS changes regarding descretionary cancelling of channels on the nebulous basis of "financial viability") is completely stacked in corporate and industry favour. User and creator rights and recourse are increasingly tipping towards non existent. So yeah my trust in them for anything with hard monetary value is pretty much zero.

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Just saying it was not permanent.

 

[Dinjoralo]

"What does this mean for places where everyone goes to Internet cafes, like in Brazil? Who knows."

lol wut

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Actually, streaming services could be huge for internet cafe's. The only problem being availability.

 

[Alucardx23]

I saw a great demo of cloud physics last time the generation ticked over.

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I guess you are trying to say Crackdown 3 right now. Besides that, I don't know if your logic is something like "someone said something was going to happen, and since it didn't happen this allows me to say that everything else is the same." it might also be some technical knowledge about how the Stadia servers work and how it's not possible to have them work together on a task. Is it any of the two I mentioned or something else?

 

[Pheace]

Actually, streaming services could be huge for internet cafe's. The only problem being availability.

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I've never actually visited an internet cafe, but do people go there mostly for the internet, or the hardware? I mean, both to some extent of course, but you get my point.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

I guess you are trying to say Crackdown 3 right now. Besides that, I don't know if your logic is something like "someone said something was going to happen, and since it didn't happen this allows me to say that everything else is the same." it might also be some technical knowledge about how the Stadia servers work and how it's not possible to have them work together on a task. Is it any of the two I mentioned or something else?

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You appear to be attempting to extrapolate my position and project it into something ridiculous. To what end I will charitably pretend not to know.

Here, I'll spell them out for you:

1: Controlled demos are a terrible predictor of shipping product.

2: Stadia servers working together is not particularly impressive, and could be easily copied.

Care to give it another shot?

 

[Alucardx23]

You appear to be attempting to extrapolate my position and project it into something ridiculous. To what end I will charitably pretend not to know.

Here, I'll spell them out for you:

1: Controlled demos are a terrible predictor of shipping product.

2: Stadia servers working together is not particularly impressive, and could be easily copied.

Care to give it another shot?

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It's not that. It must be important to you why Crackdown 3 was not released as shown and how it is a completely different situation when compared to a gaming server like Stadia. If you agree that Stadia server blades can work together, then that is exactly how you get to simulations like the ones we saw on for Crackdown 3.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

It's not that.

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I'm sorry, I'm having difficulty understanding your argument. I'm not sure how to better restate my positions, as I can't quite tell where you disagree with them. You appear to be extrapolating wildly from a very limited data set, and then arguing with your own assumptions.

 

[Alucardx23]

I'm sorry, I'm having difficulty understanding your argument. I'm not sure how to better restate my positions, as I can't quite tell where you disagree with them. You appear to be extrapolating wildly from a very limited data set, and then arguing with your own assumptions.

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I was not extrapolating anything. I actually asked what was your logic behind saying what you said. If you say "Controlled demos are a terrible predictor of shipping product" when I share a video of multi GPU rendering on Stadia, you must say why on this case it is not possible. You can even forget you saw the tech demo and just focus on the claim that Stadia does allow for developers to have multiple blades to work together. This is something that is definitely impressive and the main reason why developers say they will be able to do things that are not possible on local hardware alone.

 

[MistaTwo]

Gamers don't care about how much millions or billions some company would bring by selling them games. What they do care about is the apparent and complete loss of their purchases in case this company here won't get its billions and decides to just pull the plug on its end. With your regular console this is less of an issue as you can still play games on it even if the backend will be shut down. Once Stadia backend is shut down it will disappear, completely, with all the games you've paid for. So the potential is nice and all but what will happen if it won't work out?

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It just seems like concern trolling to me. Everyone is clutching their pearls about Google taking their paid purchases away, but I can't think of a single service where that happened. The most high profile services which they have killed are usually free services or redundant services.

Unless someone is going to point out how they lost all of their purchases on Google Play, then it's just nonsense.

There is a good chance I am missing something, but I can't think of a Google service with paid purchases which has been shut down.

The difference is, Stadia will cost google millions, if it is not very successful. And Google tend to kill projects that are not successful and they killed much bigger projects than Stadia.

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Which projects have they killed with the same opportunity cost as canceling Stadia, namely recurring revenue in the billions of dollars?

 

[Penny Royal]

incredibly rushed and messy launch

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What, you mean like Stadia has the impression of being?

 

[MistaTwo]

What, you mean like Stadia has the impression of being?

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Yes, that's the entire point. A lot of launches are rushed and have issues.
For some recent examples, the fact that the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Switch both had prevalent hardware defects has did not stop them from being successful platforms.

The point I was making, which you seem to have missed, is that Android Market was a much bigger mess than Stadia is shaping up to be, and it has grown into a billion dollar business (now known as Google Play), and the one that is most directly comparable to Stadia over the entirety of Google's services.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

can't actually trust the current Google on anything as long as they still have the current CFO

 

[ty_hot]

Actually, streaming services could be huge for internet cafe's. The only problem being availability.

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I just meant that it has nothing to do with Brazil, noone relies on "internet cafes" for anything here, except workers that work for cheap companies that use free wifi for emails lol (even those are not cafes though).