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Stadia Review Thread
- Thread starter KoolAid
- Start date
Good point, but Google and friends don't have to replicate a mobile game experience on a big screen. They could bring back local multiplayer fun, with board games, card games, trivia games, game shows, and the like. Think about games like Buzz!, or the Jackbox or PlayLink games, and allow players to use their mobile phones as controllers while they sit around the TV.
They just need to be creative, and deliver games that aren't prevalent on competing platforms. They could become the prime destination for these types of games, instead of positioning themselves as a "poor man's video game console", because that's exactly what they're being perceived as, for better or for worse.
I just don't see how even the concept of having your games on your mobile device is really going to be a service seller. The minority of gamers, sure, will want to shell out $60 for a game they probably already own so they can have it on their phone/etc. But the large majority of phone gamers out there seem to be only concerned that their phone has a good camera and little else. A $60 game compared to a F2P match-3 is going to be the hardest of sells.
Stadia is headed by Phil Harrison. How stupid do you think he is? I'm pretty sure Google and their board knew the realities from day 1, yet they still saw value in the project.
One of the supposed selling points was that the settings would all be maxed-out anyway because Google would provide hardware up to the task. You know, because streaming means that you "don't have to buy/upgrade an expensive PC anymore."
It was discovered by one of the websites, forget which (GameXplain maybe?). Digital Foundry is going to look into it tomorrow. They did a very quick test to show it really was a thing.
I think this is possibly where xCloud (and future PSNOW) could work where Stadia isn't - it isn't the only option. It is part of a strategy that includes standard consoles. So it works at home and then is an option on the road
I've already said this, but stadia will only be about 30% weaker in gpu compared to the next gens(if they are 10tf rdna). If next gen games are native 4k stadia will be about 1600 - 1800p with its current hardware. Stadia games will still look great it will be something like Pro vs 1x visual difference.
This changes things... For me at least. 60fps RDR2 is something, even with a blurrier image.It was discovered by one of the websites, forget which. Digital Foundry is going to look into it tomorrow. They did a very quick test to show it really was a thing.
But why is this happening?? What a major f up by Google if Chromecast is somehow capping the performance so the launch gets butchered by negativity for the wrong reason.
Web browser is capped to 1080p, Chromecast Ultra runs the game at a higher resolution (though not 4k). That's likely the reason for the performance difference. We saw the same thing with Zelda Breath of the Wild at launch, there were points the game actually ran more smoothly in portable mode than docked, because the portable mode ran at a lower resolution.
Looks like a busted GPU. If this were an actual console launch, the madness of paranoia among day-one buyers with every single microscopic graphical glitch onscreen would've been just unleashed to the world!
(but cause this is Stadia, it's just a bunch of boring flashing lights instead... meh.)
Can you lower the resolution on the Chromecast and get it up to 60fps there as well?
How are things running on mobiles?
There are only three quality options, so maybe? We'll just have to wait for people with the device to experiment to find out.
Remember Destiny 2 has one of the lowest input latency in the industry, this is why it feels so great to play even at 30fps. So Stadia is basically taking away one key feature of the game.
Exactly what I expected and the user reports leading upto it. I think if Google can provide a subscription service that includes all the games as part of it's package then it will make more sense to people and feel like a more complete product. It will also be a great way of connecting it's members and building communities because everyone will have access to the same games.
Meh might as well just buy a console for each gen. It's not even that expensive in comparison to PC and you don't have to worry about data cap or internet quality :p
Stadia is bound to fail. Psnow and Xcloud won't because like other said, they are complementary and aren't meant to replace anything from physical gaming
Stadia is bound to fail. Psnow and Xcloud won't because like other said, they are complementary and aren't meant to replace anything from physical gaming
the games are not running on windows. It's a special build of the games, probably running on a custom build google linux distro...
Google's got all the time until the PS5/XBN launch to turn Stadia into a compelling product. That's the real deadline.
Stadia was never going to be more than a niche/novelty at this Founders-only soft launch with no free tier, no YouTube integration, no demos, no wide availability, and a tiny/old library.
The next checkpoints are the launch of the free sub tier and the release of Cyberpunk.
As someone who plays Destiny almost daily, this is gross. This is like combining Destiny with Smash Ultimate's online infrastructure.
Harrison came on in 2018. Project Yeti (Stadia) predates him at Google by a wide margin of time. I doubt very much that he does anything beyond general market planning, and judging by the strategy, rollout, pricing, no shared licensing, etc, I wouldn't exactly say the guy is hitting it out of the park.
Sometimes executives seem to bounce from high paying job to high paying job with no discernible talent or skill. Call it 'pulling a Mattrick'
The killer app is when they implement it into YT and get streamers involved. The dream use-case for Stadia is you watch a streamer play a game, and there's a link you can click to play a short section of the game for free. That's a long way down the line though.
I'll get mine 25-26 nov. Getting ever so slightly hopeful here... Framerate is my passion, resolution not so much. RDR2 in 60fps in the living room won't happen any other way for me.
I don't expect any game streaming service working better it will be improvements but for me all the game streaming services I've tried works more or less the same . Now, Google, GeForce all have the same issues it works well in some games ...but Fighting, FPS or anything that requires fast input for me just doesn't work.
assuming Switch is the last mainstream dedicated portable mobile streaming is probably the future of playing "real" games portably. though that's regardless of whether stadia actually breaks into that mindshare or if there's going to be serious demand for it any time soon (IMO we're still about 5-10 years removed from that)
It was obvious that Stadia's launch would be troubled, but this is turning out even worse than I expected. The weird performance deficiencies are certainly an unexpected turn.
Part of me wonders if maybe the noisy neighbor effects from other users on the same physical box are just that bad. In theory it should be able to be mitigated at least somewhat by carefully allocating stuff like CPU cores, but maybe there's some bottleneck somewhere else that's hamstringing it.
There's literally nothing weird, this was exactly what was expected by everyone who works in cloud or who has a solid understanding.
Yea, but this soft launch has still done a lot of damage. Today was probably the most coverage Stadia will ever get. Even if they start to turn things around, it's going to be an uphill battle to get people to actually pay attention again.
I should be the target audience for this.
Haven't had a capable gaming pc for decades, only a 2014 macbook.
But this sounds bad. Latency, the price, technical problems, lacking library. It might improve in the future, but honestly I doubt this is going to be the streaming service I was hoping for.
Haven't had a capable gaming pc for decades, only a 2014 macbook.
But this sounds bad. Latency, the price, technical problems, lacking library. It might improve in the future, but honestly I doubt this is going to be the streaming service I was hoping for.
What does the cloud have to do with it? The problems causing controversies are pretty much unrelated to the streaming, everyone says the streaming "just works"; the problems everyone is talking about are related to the rendering of the software/hardware, which isn't as good as it should be in the games shown off. A game being rendered at a lower resolution isn't cloud-related when the game' video stream is still being streamed at full 4k.
That's literally not true.
1) There are compression artifacts softening the image. Until there's a service with lossless compression (lol) this will continue.
2) There is noticeable latency. Duh.
3) Internet hiccups are causing inconsistent experience.
Upgrading the rendering hardware and software will address none of this.
Hell, if you address (1), 2 and 3 get worse.
If only they had a little foresight and had partners to have shared platform licensing, they would not only increase the confidence in buying games for Stadia (no fear that Google will kill it and no games!), but you would have users without the service who would eventually have a small library of titles they could bring with them, increasing the potential customer base.
Like say someone bought a decent PC in 2015, has a GTX 970, i7 3770, 8GB, etc. But games are starting to run slightly rough for them. Guy's GPU dies in another year, and he decides, well, I can bring my games over to Stadia and just use onboard video to stream them, oh, and buy this new game too!
But nope, all or nothing. So in this case, if the guy has a big Steam/Origin library, he has every incentive to just replace his GPU or get another PC built, because otherwise he loses his entire library.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Stadia. Stay duh.
Eh, this is hardly the case. Lag, latency, these have all been real issues, eg; the Times guy with Gbit connection and a MASSIVE input delay for Destiny.
It's a huge mix of issues INCLUDING the lag and responsiveness. Digital Foundry has already measured worse latency than console despite the lower framerate of the console.
Best you can say is that some people claim it's working for them, but again, some people are incredibly desensitized to things that drive other people crazy. "I can't tell the difference between 60 and 30fps", etc.
And nobody (except like one news site who had a horrible internet experience) cares because the effects of those are minor. All the big controversies here are about how Google claimed the server hardware was as powerful as a next-gen console, yet games are having their render settings set to medium and running at 1080p while streaming at 4k. With a bit of controversy about pricing.
i mean, aside from that one site, every article that talks about the streaming itself is like, "best streaming ever! Just minor hiccups."
LOL you really haven't been paying attention if that's what you think. Just the impressions of people trying to play MK alone are damning in terms of how well it runs in terms of responsiveness and playability. And that is directly observable, DF has already measured worse input lag than consoles, even comparing "60fps" Stadia to 30fps console.
It's been a near total disaster at multiple levels, including lag and latency for many so far.
If you can't compress the current rendered visual fidelity without softening the hell out of it, there's questionable value in rendering at higher settings.
This whole thing is a joke and will remain so for the forseeable future.
There is value in services that offer hundreds of games for a flat rate because the expectations of the fidelity will be lower, the value is in the content.
This whole thing is a joke and will remain so for the forseeable future.
There is value in services that offer hundreds of games for a flat rate because the expectations of the fidelity will be lower, the value is in the content.
Um, yeah, of course latency is worse than not streaming, everybody knew that was the case, that's not a big deal because it was expected, and better than all other cloud gaming services. I watched a number of reviews and streams, including DF, only saw one that made a big deal about latency being unplayable. Mortal Kombat in particular was one everyone said was pretty good, better than expected, they were able to pull off moves and combos. Like, Giant Bomb said it played well, just felt a bit "heavy". The game that some people said affected their gameplay was Destiny 2 trying to get head shots.
There one traditional point which does not apply to current reviews of Stadia, that is the scalability of quality and performance, which will only increase from this baseline as compared against consoles which either requires a generation leap or buying upgraded variants in the same generation.
The scale of increase of quality and performance will be much more than the usual graphics drivers update for new generation of cards from Nvidia/AMD from product release.
The scale of increase of quality and performance will be much more than the usual graphics drivers update for new generation of cards from Nvidia/AMD from product release.
Looking at how YouTube compression has gotten worse over the years I can only imagine the horror of trying to play whatever smudgy low-bitrate mess that Google likes to call "1080p60".
This entire service feels like an experiment to see if game streaming can work, rather than a genuine attempt at launching an appealing and competitive gaming platform.
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But then that negates one of the supposed benefits of Stadia being 'single spec'. It's also unlikely they're going to want to do upgrades that aren't systemwide (or at most base vs Pro), which means they're significant investments, so they're not likely to be doing that on a regular basis. Except for maybe in the first few years due to adaptation and for recovering rep I doubt upgrades will come faster than upgraded variants.
That is from the company standpoint, but from a customer standpoint that cost is mostly not included (except in the case of two Stadia packages, Base and Pro).
I mean, the Switch in Japan is already offering streaming options for some games (AC Origins and RE7)
I'm going to keep shouting into the void, but if your aim is to rent a decent-spec PC in the cloud, the service you want is Shadow.
Will you be able to do what you want with that hardware?
Like choosing your own resolution, settings etc? Even use windows desktop?
Just a 4 core CPU could be problematic for many games in this day and age.
People are being dishonest when they share this video as proof of how the experience of using Stadia is like in general. This is no different than someone sharing a video trying to play a fighting game on console with a 300+ms connection and saying "See! It sux to play console video games online". People would be really fast to point out the obvious on a casa like that. It should have been clear that Stadia will depend on your internet quality to have a good experience.
For example, see IGN doing the same test (8:20).
Yes and yes. I'm not advertising Shadow, but it will do exactly what you want: it's a full, high-spec Windows machine in the cloud.
Disclaimer: it's a lot more expensive than Stadia, but you can shop on Steam / Epic Games Store / GOG / PC Game Pass and keep your game licenses if you decide to stop subscribing.
So...just like any other streaming service where latency is based on ping? What happened to negative latency and input prediction and all that load of bullshit? I'm guessing not available at launch too?