-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Google formally unveils the "Stadia" launching in 2019
- Thread starter BAD
- Start date
This product is filling an interesting niche for the YouTube/Twitch generation. Streamer is playing a multiplayer game, I want to play as well, one click and you're in.
I've never thought about it but I suppose there are plenty of people who find a game interesting and want to play it, but are probably more inclined to just keep watching rather than going out of their way to buy it and then having to play from the beginning, which would be annoying for slower paced games. This is a way to monetize that userbase I suppose.
I guess my only concern is that the target audience seems kind of niche.
I've never thought about it but I suppose there are plenty of people who find a game interesting and want to play it, but are probably more inclined to just keep watching rather than going out of their way to buy it and then having to play from the beginning, which would be annoying for slower paced games. This is a way to monetize that userbase I suppose.
I guess my only concern is that the target audience seems kind of niche.
I feel that it would be helpful to clarify that a little bit. The picture displayed at the conference features edge network nodes Google builds/operates, including Google Data Centers/Google Cloud Platform regions, Google PoPs (Points of Presence), and Google Global Cache. For most people, when you access Google services, your traffic generally follows this path:
Your Device -> ISP -> PoP -> Data Center (with static contents served by Google Global Cache; for games it might be pre-rendered scenes, subtitles, audio files, etc.)
If helpful, think of PoPs as gateways to Google network; they are not data centers and do not run much workload, but they help provide a better network experience by granting you an optimized pathway to Google Data Centers. You do not need to live near a Google Data Center to get the best performance; being (physically) close to a PoP would suffice.
A list of Google-related PoPs are available here: Google Fiber, Google LLC, Google LLC AS36040.
I guess we'll see. But with Google being notorious for regularly killing projects and services without impunity, a bit of caution is not unwarranted I think.
Here's a fun website about all the things they created/bought and then killed. The list is very long and includes many different types of products of varied scale:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
that's because cloud infrastructure is basically useless without configuration options. there is no reason to think that will translate to games being moddable on their streaming platform by regular joe consumers. Not to mention that your regular joe isn't even going to be a customer of google cloud. Let me ask you how configurable google drive is, because that's a much closer comparison to this service for your analogy.
And even if they do implement some modding support they are never going to give you access to executables and all the raw data files which makes 90% of the actually interesting modding work unviable. Btw, comparing this with sony and MS streaming services is a bit strange when what people actually are worried about is modding on pc going away(as more games go streaming only).
Last edited:
Game studio will be in much worse situation because music artists at least can give live concerts...
That's basically how I see this, Google using this to tie more into Streaming culture and people who watch games but can't afford a game station or fancy computer to run graphics. While also providing content creators more ways to interact with fans.
But I still feel the group they are targeting here is incredibly niche and I can't really see it take off unless a ton of lets players are being paid to utilize it.
Some of those lasted quite a while. Google+ was never popular but it lasted 8 years.
I have some faith that Stadia will last at least 5 years.
Even then they'll still have to make sure the games are accessible if people purchased them or something.
Niche?! It's for anyone that wants to play Fortnite or Apex, or whatever the next big things is, without splashing out on a several hundred dollar box.
There's a potential audience of hundreds of million day one with a very low barrier to entry.
You don't even need to buy the controller as far as I can tell... just whip out your phone or play on your Mac/PC/Tablet with zero investment.
There's a potential audience of hundreds of million day one with a very low barrier to entry.
You don't even need to buy the controller as far as I can tell... just whip out your phone or play on your Mac/PC/Tablet with zero investment.
Preservation ought to be profit-agnostic and not entrusted to any for-profit company, let alone one whose business model is to put ads in front of people.
This is dead in Australia, internet sucks so much here.
That presentation was a ton of nothing... absolutely nothing to show, but hype tweets? lol
That presentation was a ton of nothing... absolutely nothing to show, but hype tweets? lol
So you can't use content you've downloaded from there anymore?
But is there a market for people that want to play a video game but literally don't even have a smartphone (which is where the real low barrier of entry games are ) and is willing to buy a device to pay a subscription to play those games?
1. We do not know a device (the controller) is needed. It wasn't for the beta.
2. We do not know the business model, so I dare say they will not even need to pay a penny to play Fortnite et al. The money to support these games will come from Epic and other publishers to lease the infrastructure*.
* Edit: I guess throw IAP cut in there too?
Last edited:
That's not what he asked. Nobody lost content with the store shutting down. You can still redownload purchased games, you just can't buy new games.
But PoP is not just a glorified name for cache? I don't think it will solve the requirement of computing power to generate unique content for each user.
I have a decent internet connection. If there is a way to store save games on a local piece of hardware, I think I would be interested in this. I spend thousands of dollars on hardware during each generation. If I could avoid that somehow, I'm game.
I wonder what games will be on it, though. If EA pc games are exclusively on origin, and activision-blizzard games are on battlenet, and bethesda games are on their launcher, that only leaves who? Square-Enix and ubisoft? Indies? I guess we will learn more.
I wonder what games will be on it, though. If EA pc games are exclusively on origin, and activision-blizzard games are on battlenet, and bethesda games are on their launcher, that only leaves who? Square-Enix and ubisoft? Indies? I guess we will learn more.
If they make it free that will be some wild shit. Taking up computations on a remote system for free would be something else.
But if a person owns a device to interface with Stevia, they can also play the sort of low spec games that are popular.
Google Drive is highly configurable because it provides an API. You may say "but that's for developers", but anyone can get developer credentials. So anyone who is interested enough can do what they like with it. You're typically not a "regular joe" if you're messing around with mods on PC either -- you have to be into it. So there is a parallel of sorts there. But my larger comment was that Google as a company has a history of opening up their products through things like APIs and such. They have a culture of pro-customization. These kinds of features come about when a company has such a culture/background. So in these early days (where they haven't revealed details yet), what I'm saying is that they have a greater propensity / likelihood of offering such possibilities than most other companies.
It actually isn't a different term for cache. You are right that PoPs do not compute; in the case of Stadia they help make it faster to serve rendered scenes and deliver user inputs. I am pretty sure the data centers themselves have enough power to prepare contents.
I like PC gaming mostly because of the low input lag. So I'm definitely not the market for this.
But I understand the market Google is going for. But I feel like this has been tried, and the reason why it fails every time is because broadband Internet in the US is overall terrible.
But I understand the market Google is going for. But I feel like this has been tried, and the reason why it fails every time is because broadband Internet in the US is overall terrible.
There is a big problem in gaming where downloading a game from Ubisoft is more fun than actually playing it. This new service seems designed to directly try to address that problem.
Its cool that there is no dongle and the controller isn't required. So you can just play right away through Chrome and the controller you already have. The key unknowns (beyond performance) are of course the software lineup and the pricing structure.
I tuned out of the presentation after like 30 minutes, were there any other games mentioned besides AC and Doom? And was there any mention of first-party game development by Google?
I tuned out of the presentation after like 30 minutes, were there any other games mentioned besides AC and Doom? And was there any mention of first-party game development by Google?
I doubt that people that feel like this are going to have a great time streaming either.
Yes, there is a new first party studio which will develop games and work with partners, headed up by Jade Redmond.No word on games in development yet.
People aren't going to risk their gaming experience on "it depends".
Oh wow.. interesting.
So many new first-party studios being birthed, next gen is going to be fascinating.
That was my first reaction as well. ''It sounds like Stevia, haha. Bad name.''
POP would be more like at what point in the internet do you go off the "Public Internet" and onto the "Google Internet/Network".
Lets say you are in California and connecting to a datacenter in New York (extreme example to make the point). Without a POP you would be on public networks the entire way subject to whatever the owners of those networks do.
Now lets take the same example but say theres a POP in California. You would only be subject to the public networks up to the POP. From the POP to New York you would be running entirely on the privately owned network (Google in this case). This means that Google has more control over the traffic than they normally would from that point to the endpoint.
EDIT: Something like Valve's relays would be a good example of this in effect. Valve wants you on their network as early as possible. All the POP is doing is forwarding the traffic the way they would like instead of the way your ISP would like.
So the point is that speculating about what they might offer compared to some potential offering by sony or microsoft is meaningless when what people are worried about is losing the modding capabilities we have on pc today, and there is no way they are ever going to offer something that matches what you can do with unrestricted access to executables and data that's running locally. Not to mention that even if google provides the tools it's still going to be up to license owners for each individual game.
Yep. Which is why it isn't on my radar. Our net companies are basically carnies.
Thanks for the details. It's still a round trip to the closest DC though. In Australia's case that's Sydney. At minimum with Australia's largest ISP and one of the highest plans/connections available I'm still pushing 60+ms from Melbourne. Using Google's pipe through their POPs to save hops and what not might go a little better but that's not what I'm seeing from GCPing. I can't imagine trying to play Apex or Halo with an input latency doing this -
1. See what is cloud rendered to my screen e.g. multiplayer enemies
2. Reaction time
3. My inputs sent back to cloud
4. Cloud processing of inputs/world/clients
5. Rendered back to my local device
6. Repeat
It's quite a round trip, I doubt it will all be done within 50-150ms at best.
Looking at Melbourne POP (from your link and searching Melbourne) they have third party datacentres such as PIPE, Vocus (who I host physical and virtual servers with my company), AAPT etc running their DCs for them, just rack hosting and some pipe leasing basically. No Telstra though, no iiNet though (which are Australia's 2 largest ISPs, by a large amount actually).
It's basically as I say, it's not even announced here yet and I doubt it will have anything like the Azure network of support and processing in Melbourne especially.
At least Vocus own the fibre network between Melbourne to Sydney for example but you have hops from Telstra to just get into the Google POPs within a third party DC etc. It's quite a different beast to Google in USA where they own fibre all throughout.
This is really unclear to me. I know I'm not part of the demographics for this console, but I honestly have no idea who the Google Stadia is for. Not to mention, they seem to be incredibly lofty with the 4k/60fps targets considering the issues that come with latency and internet connectivity; what a person gets in Toronto, Canada is most likely not going to be the same performance that someone gets in Los Angeles, USA. And that's not bringing up the differences in hardware access if you decide to use Stadia on different hardware. I don't really buy Google's tests since that's a controlled setting and not representative of the average person's situation.
This might be overly negative to me, but I feel like the inconsistent performance of streaming games is going to turn people off of the concept than companies seem to think.
This might be overly negative to me, but I feel like the inconsistent performance of streaming games is going to turn people off of the concept than companies seem to think.
