
"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it" - necrodome
https://threader.app/thread/1196557401710837762
======
ArmandGrillet
I want Stadia. I've read reviews yesterday and was amazed by the lack of a
long term vision from the reviewers. If Google doesn't drop the ball (which is
a huge if knowing the company's history), Stadia makes a lot of sense.

I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, the cheapest way to do that as I don't
have a console nor an expensive computer is Stadia. And when I will want to
play Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia will be the cheapest option - again. It will be
the most enjoyable option too: no installation, no upgrade, I can just play.
Last but not least: apart from the Switch, consoles force me to use a TV,
Stadia will be usable on my Mac in the kitchen or the bedroom.

As someone who stopped playing after high school, Stadia is the first offering
that matches my needs of a Netflix for games. I don't care if gamers nor
teenagers want it, as long as developers make money and people like me use it
the business model will work.

~~~
Crinus
> the lack of a long term vision

How about this for a long term vision: any game you buy now will be totally
lost in the future ("long term") when Google decides to shut down the service
(which happens all the time) or deactivate your account (which also happens
all the time) while developers will have moved on and/or closed and wont give
a second thought about. In the meanwhile, while Stadia exists, any games will
be filled with anti-consumer garbage that you wont be able to do _anything_
about - not even the files that make up the game are under your control.

I'm 100% hoping this will fail, not because it isn't a technically cool
product nor because i cannot imagine the potential it has - i want it to fail
_exactly_ because i can imagine all the negative potential it has.

I do not want to rent my computer nor i want to rent my gaming device, i want
to fully control everything in it and i do not want any commercial scheme that
erodes the marketplace which allows me to have that freedom.

~~~
Jyaif
> i can imagine all the negative potential it has

But you fail to imagine all the positive potential. Terabyte-sized games with
0 download time, more interactions between players, better graphics, no more
cheating, no more piracy (which leads to more games or bigger games), and
better utilized HW (which is good for your wallet and the environment), and
obviously you can play wherever you want.

Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

~~~
vocatus_gate
> Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

So, so wrong.

1\. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any
time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly.

2\. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's
latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly _unpredictable_
latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games.
And at that point, why not just run it browser-based and be done with it?

3\. Packet loss. Packet loss doesn't matter on streaming video because you can
just wait for the server to re-send it, or just buffer till you get far enough
ahead. On games, real-time response is critical, and there's no tolerance for
waiting to "catch up on the stream."

The Internet will never be a good streaming platform for real-time gaming, not
without some serious protocol upgrades. Everyone focuses on Netflix like it's
remotely the same; it's not. Netflix is one-way, loss-is-okay, and latency
(round-trip time for the packets, NOT the same as bandwidth) doesn't matter.
Gaming is exactly opposite.

Without proper end-to-end QoS or dedicated circuits ($$$) Google Stadia will
fail just like every other games streaming platform before it.

~~~
Crinus
Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the
solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how
many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller
or a mobile phone touch screen.

These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be
solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.

~~~
friendlybus
You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into
a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions
on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res
game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating
the game world.

If you could solve the latency problem, multiplayer games wouldn't suck so
much. Even super local servers with 22ms ping are one and a half frames of
game rendering late for the round trip.

------
turtlebits
"Gamers" don't want Stadia. And all the negative reviews of Stadia are by
people who already have console/gaming PCs.

It's targeted for those that don't have either, like me. I carry my Pixelbook
everywhere and would be nice to play games on it. I don't want another device
to carry around and don't have the time or patience to wait for
patches/updates or the ridiculous storage requirements games have nowadays.

The only part that stumps me is why you need pay $130 for a controller and a
Chromecast with "special" software on it. Isn't the whole premise that you
don't need dedicated hardware to play games?

~~~
corodra
I'm seeing this a lot and don't understand... where the hell are you people
travelling where bringing a console/game system is a concern?

I travel for work or for vacation. If for work, I'm there hitting "Spit money
out for me" at an ATM. Not gaming. I'm not home so I can make much better
money in a short timespan to enjoy home time more. End of days is visiting
restaurants/bars and either socializing or schmoozing clients. If none of
that, I read a book, do work on the laptop or enjoy a movie.

Vacation... I mean... seriously, I can game at home. I go somewhere to do NOT
home stuff. Why would I travel somewhere and spend money to... play video
games like I would at home? Even not vacation, I go to the beach on the
weekend to... hear me out... walk on the sand, sun bathe and go in water.

These excuses for a subpar games as a service are pretty ridiculous. It's an
obvious "We found a solution to a problem that doesn't exist". That and the
controller looks so bottom barrel generic. It's like the knock-off to a knock-
off of an Xbox controller until they realized it was for a ps3 instead and did
a late night change to it.

Edit: I get it, everyone vacations differently. But playing video games while
out on vacation is like bringing a Subway sandwich to a 3-star steakhouse
restaurant. You are there to not-home. But I also don't get the japanese
restaurants where they expect you to cook your own food. Mofo, if I'm going to
cook, I'll cook at home. I go somewhere to pay a premium for food, it's so I
don't have to cook it. I'm 32, stop making me feel like the old man yelling to
stay off my lawn!

~~~
hombre_fatal
Your post makes sense if the only travel you do is your 2-week vacation you
get every year while always returning to a permanent living fixture, like a
house you own. Or if you just don't mind owning a bunch of appliances.

I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any
equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a
long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet.
Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

Also, even when you're at the beach all day every day, you still come back to
a place to sleep where you might enjoy some gaming or Netflix. And if you are
living there for weeks, you'll find that you don't need to visit the beach
every single day to enjoy your time there. It's nice to merely do something
you love in a place you love. :)

I'm generally happy with the few games I have on my Macbook Pro. But even on a
$2000 two-year-old machine, I have to play almost everything at minimal gfx
settings and I have limited SSD space. Even a game like Civilization 5 becomes
a stuttering mess. I don't see the need to dismiss Stadia without trying it.

~~~
FussyZeus
> I'm someone who lives abroad and doesn't like hunkering down with any
> equipment, not even a bookcase. I don't like staying in one apartment for a
> long time. The only cooking appliance I own is a single cast iron skillet.
> Something like Stadia interests me if it can deliver.

But that's the rub innit? The only people who are going to be really
interested in this product are the hypermobile, and I don't know about your
experience with mobile internet, but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in
decent quality going. With remote gaming, you're now adding controller input
to that datastream, outbound, and then rendering those actions and
transmitting back to the device to enable anything remotely approaching a good
gaming experience seems like science fiction.

The people who will be most interested in this are those without a "home"
setup, and the less "home" you have, the more appealing, but also seems like
it would in turn be the most frustrating experience to try and _use._ Which is
sort of what this piece is getting at:

\- Gamers don't want it, because we already have our libraries and such tuned
to existing platforms and devices

\- Casual gamers _may_ want it, but they're already spoiled for choice in a
massive mobile market, where games just happen on their already very powerful
phones

This puts Stadia in an awkward position of in theory being the worst of both
worlds: the limitations of console, with the network requirements only high
tier residential internet can deliver, over devices with limited network
capability.

~~~
dzhiurgis
> but my LTE can barely keep a YouTube video in decent quality going

You'd be surprised how better internet can be outside of USA. My LTE can
probably keep up four 4K streams going.

~~~
FussyZeus
Considering I couldn't even stream steam games from my PC to my tablet at
enough of a speed to make games like Destiny playable, let alone enjoyable,
you'll have to forgive my skepticism.

------
ryandvm
Stadia exists because Google is a perpetual spaghetti throwing machine.

Mainframe-style gaming is possible and they have the resources to try it so...
here we are. If it doesn't take off, Google will have no problem killing the
program in 3 or 4 years.

That said, I really don't see the problem with this strategy. It surely makes
much more sense than having an ever growing stable of also-ran offerings. The
upshot of course is that every now and then one of these "side projects" takes
off into an enormously successful business unit (e.g. Android, Maps, GSuite).
All of those programs could have just as easily died on the vine like Google
Plus or Wave.

~~~
TremendousJudge
>Android, Maps, GSuite

All of these products have existed for 5+ years.

What recent thing has Google brought to the table that actually stuck?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Probably their cloud offering and / or parts thereof, e.g. Firebase.

~~~
scarface74
Their cloud offerings are a distant third to Microsoft and Amazon and support
- especially enterprise support - is legendarily bad.

~~~
lukeschlather
As someone who uses Google Cloud, Azure, and used to work for Amazon, I am
happy using GCP but find Azure to be lacking in a lot of ways.

Also Google support is usually absent but when I actually get to talk to a
human, they're great. Microsoft support is usually present but often seems
explicitly designed to waste my time.

~~~
scarface74
Since you use to work for Amazon, I would suspect that your bar for acceptable
support would be a lot higher. Even on the business support plan, opening up a
ticket and starting a live chat is close to immediate with AWS. I’ve used them
as the “easy button” plenty of times when I probably could have figured out
the issue myself but didn’t want to waste time. They are batting close to 100.

The one exception was a weird ECS error I kept getting that they couldn’t
figure out. I realized later on that I hosed the permissions trying to do
something cross account.

I’m sure they would have eventually figured that out.

------
evervevdww221
I used to work on (the second generation) cloud gaming. It's very difficult to
be profitable. Most people would think that the challenge is latency,
streaming quality. But the real challenge is cost management. The cost can be
easily as high as $2 per hour. At this rate, the monthly cost will buy you a
decent computer or a console. It doesn't make sense.

Plus, to make cloud gaming work, you have to own everything. From the video
encoding hardware, operating system, virtualization, game content,
distribution channel, cloud ...

For example, we tried to hack windows to support existing windows games. It
was very difficult. Windows isn't a multi-user system. There is no proper user
isolation. We have to monitor the hard drive to see what files are touched by
games, and try to resolve conflicts caused by different users using the same
machine. It's very hacky. An easier way is just discarding the VM and
refreshing the hard drive, but it will result in long loading time of several
minutes, very high cost and poor experience.

And then there is the game store problem. Game publishers won't share revenue.
You basically sell the games at the same price and also charge users for the
cloud gaming platform for a compromised experience. doesn't make sense.

There is only one company that owns the whole stack, Microsoft. They own the
OS and APIs (so that includes all the drivers), virtualization, games (XBox
store), data centers (Azure).

A few years ago, YC invested in a cloud app streaming company (they kinda used
the same technology we used.). I was surprised. After working on it for a few
years, I would not invest if I were an investor.

Google's stadia seems to be smarter. As it tries to avoid some of the dead-
ends we went to, especially trying to hack windows to make it cloud gaming
friendly. Google chose to use Linux and develop games tailored for cloud
gaming. I think that's a better choice, but will face content issues.

~~~
akvadrako
How does it make sense that a computer at home, with 5% utilization and retail
power prices, can be less per hour than a computer with 50% utilization and
wholesale power?

Even if all you do is host single-user machines with retail games installed
and some kind of imaging solution, it seems like it should pay off.

~~~
evervevdww221
$2 per hour per machine is not a made-up number, just check how much Amazon
charges for a GPU vm.

Again, we were a small company, we had to use other cloud providers. I don't
know why amazon or alike are so expensive. We tried colocation too, not any
cheaper to be honest.

Also, when buying a computer or a console, you don't pay by usage. you pay one
time to own the hardware and the remaining 5 year usage is free, plus power
bills no one really cares. 5% utilization times 5 year is still some decent
hours, the cost is not necessarily more than a cloud vm.

For a cloud vm, you pay by usage. The more you use, the more you pay, the
overall payment is not capped. Eventually the cost will surplus that of the
hardware. And I'm saying "Eventually" is actually a month.

~~~
mantap
Amazon is a bad fit for this use case. Amazon's value proposition is: "you are
making money, pay us a big chunk of it and we will help you scale up with less
effort and fewer staff.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that making a cloud gaming service would
necessitate assembling your own servers. Games just have different hardware
requirements to everything else, it's well known that "pro" graphics cards are
not meant for gaming.

~~~
aeturnum
Not Op, but they specifically said the using a colocation (i.e. setting up
your own servers) was not helpful in keeping down costs.

~~~
mantap
I know but I find it hard to believe that Colo provides no benefit. I'm
guessing a large part of their AWS bill would be bandwidth since this kind of
a pathological use case for AWS (streaming individual video with no
possibility to use CDN).

------
tombot
Stadia exists because Google wants to create more opportunities to show video
advertising. What better way to do this than to turn games into another type
of streaming video. Pre-roll before the game starts, mid-roll in between
levels. When players stream games to other views, more pre-roll before they
watch.

~~~
deepbake
You could just pay for the subscription and skip the ads though, similar to
netflix or disney+.

~~~
tombot
and YouTube premium :)

------
skohan
As a consumer and a developer I don't really want Stadia to succeed because of
the shift it represents in terms of ownership of media, as well as hack-
ability of games. In general I want to have games locally so I can do whatever
I want with them.

However, as an industry observer, it's hard to imagine that something like
Stadia doesn't have the potential to be a huge success if they really could
deliver on promise. With all the people watching people play games on Youtube
and Twitch, it's hard to imagine you couldn't convert at least some small
percentage of that massive audience into players if the barrier to entry was
only a click of a button.

~~~
yummypaint
I agree. Right now the focus is on new capabilities this can bring, but if it
succeeds it provides an even more invasive way for companies to insert
themselves between people and their property. I would argue that the reason
stadia is being developed is to further the trend of moving users' files and
computation away from their control. Now everything people do in games can be
third-party trackable. The computing industry has figured out they can double
dip by pushing people into work flows that just happen to trequire a
subscription. Expanding this conquest to gaming is happening now because the
rationalization is just becoming believable.

------
OedipusRex
I said this in another thread about Stadia, the market for Stadia is
vanishingly small. The people who have high enough internet speeds that either
can't or won't get a "traditional" console or PC is extremely small. Too small
to signal to Google that this is worth maintaining
([https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)).

For Stadia to survive, Google needs to bring in new "gamers", because existing
"gamers" already have their own in-house platforms to play on. OnLive tried
streaming games a few years ago (granted, without the Google advertising
budget and infrastructure) and it was too unstable to play.

On top of all this, Stadia is going to have to either pony up and pay an
existing company to include Stadia players in their online servers (Steam,
Epic Games, etc) or silo all the Stadia players together. The first time input
lag causes you to lose a fight is the day you cancel your subscription.
"Gamers" are not very forgiving.

It's a terrible idea that was built because Google can build it (as stated in
article). It may live on with a cult following but I highly doubt it.

~~~
turtlebits
Disagree, there are a ton of professionals that would love to play current
games casually, but don't want to spend on extra hardware (or even having
another device around), and waste time with game patches/updates.

For me, I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my
primary notebook just to play the occasional game or two.

~~~
bussierem
>[...] and waste time with game patches/updates

I'm not sure what your most recent experience with games is, but this is not
an issue on any modern game platform. That stuff happens behind the scenes
while you sleep or go to work. I've never once gotten home from work and had
to "waste time with game patches/updates" unless I felt like heavily modding
my game.

> I just don't want to lug around a bulky/heavy device in addition to my
> primary notebook

This is also completely untrue with modern devices. I have a $1700 Dell XPS 15
off the rack, dual booted windows/linux, and it can run almost every single
game in my 250+ game steam library on high graphics with zero issues. It is
also my one and only dev machine, and it weighs about 4 lbs or so (while the
brand new MBP 16" weight 4.3 lbs)

You seem to be making arguments based off of experiences you might have had
many years ago.

Also, to nip this in the bud: XUbuntu LTS installed onto my Dell with
absolutely zero config issues, all hardware drivers supported. Literal plug-n-
play. I spend more time installing Windows.

 _Edit_ : I just looked it up for size/weight:

Dell XPS 15: 0.45-0.66mm thick, 4.0 lbs for base configuration[1]

MBP 16": 0.64mm thick, 4.3 lbs for base configuration[2]

 _Edit 2_ : I am making an assumption based on demographic on HN that your
primary dev machine is a MBP or similar Apple product -- If I am incorrect you
are welcome to correct me, sorry.

[1]: [https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-
xps-15-7590...](https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-
xps-15-7590/spd/xps-15-7590-laptop#configurations_section)

[2]: [https://www.apple.com/macbook-
pro-16/specs/](https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/specs/)

------
dcchambers
My _only_ issue with Stadia is that Google has no policy regarding what
happens to the games you have purchased if/when they shut down the service.
Well, I guess they have a policy - and that is "you don't own these games, you
temporarily own the rights to use them while this service is running."

I take solace knowing that the $60+ games I buy for my PC or Switch are mine
because I have local copies. I am not going to spend that same amount on a
game that I don't control. And Google is now infamous for terminating services
that people like and use with little notice.

I think the tech is fine. I think they'll get the latency issues worked out
for _most_ uses. Fighters, rythem games, or fast-paced shooters were never
going to work well streaming from the cloud. The physics just don't work. But
there are many games that would be enjoyable streaming and ~150ms of latency
wouldn't matter much.

Sadly, I think the negative press from this launch is an early nail in the
coffin. I don't know if Google cares enough about the product itself to turn
it around.

~~~
randyrand
Steam only has a promise that they’ll give you the games without DRM if they
shut down.

Id much prefer something more legally binding.

~~~
dcchambers
That is true - but I can legally download and keep a copy of all games I own
on Steam on my hard drive forever. If they are online games/have DRM the
online/activation servers might shut down some day, but every single player
game I have should be useable forever. Until my drive fails anyway. Most games
have had the DRM cracked. In my mind it's perfectly legal for me to take
advantage of that crack to bypass the DRM in a case like this since I have
legally purchased and downloaded the product.

I have a number of DRM-free games (from Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, etc) that I
have offline copies of. No one can take those away from me by shutting down a
service.

------
_bxg1
I think if they dropped the purchase price that currently sits on top of the
subscription price then it would become scary. I don't know if those
financials would work out, but it would be compelling.

Note that I say scary. I'm not even a game developer, but I am _terrified_ of
the implications of centralized, ownership-less gaming. Independent game
preservation would disappear overnight. Things that end up in licensing hell
could be retroactively removed from the face of the earth. Indie developers
would be even more at the mercy of publishers and gatekeepers than they
already are.

Of course it would be twice as bad for _Google_ to be that streaming company,
given their general detachment from and lack of understanding of games
culture. But I won't support even the streaming efforts of Microsoft and
others. Having it become the de-facto distribution model would be a bad thing
for developers, and a bad thing for people who like games.

------
013a
Stadia is a mess of inconsistencies in strategy that I can't seem to resolve.

It provides the closest to an "awesome" experience when wired up on fast,
reliable internet. But its also the most interesting in a mobile setting where
I can't necessarily have dedicated gaming hardware, but where I'll also have
inconsistent WiFi/LTE.

Its target market isn't really traditional gamers, instead, I guess, focusing
on the untapped segment of casual "gamer-interested" people. But, these people
are going to generate FAR less revenue. And, there's a free tier? Why would
people who play very casually choose to pay for it? Cloud gaming is an
insanely expensive infrastructure investment. What's their revenue plan?

In a couple months, xCloud will be out. XBL Gold gives me like three games per
month. Game Pass has, like, 200 games including some _awesome_ titles like
Gears 5. Unclear how much xCloud will cost, but I'm certain Microsoft is
willing to fight on competitive pricing. Why should I buy Cyberpunk on Stadia?
Why should anyone? The incumbents have insanely good first-party studios
churning out exclusives; they have brand recognition; they have consumer
trust; they have the technology and DC footprint; there's no visible plan here
to convince _anyone_ that Stadia is the platform to be on, which means their
customers won't be loyal. They're giving them no reason to be.

Cloud gaming, in general, is pretty cool. I love the tech, and I could see
myself using it... but as a value-add to a home setup. I think that's where
it'll shine, and that's what xCloud is targeting. My broader point isn't that
there aren't people who will find Stadia as a good fit for them, but rather
that Stadia isn't going to survive just on those people. Cloud gaming only
makes sense as a value-add to a broader platform that can support it, both
from a revenue and consumer experience perspective.

------
eternalny1
Stadia to me may not be ready yet, but I have no doubt in the future this is
how we will be gaming.

Once bandwidth is ubiquitous enough to stream 4K games at 60 FPS without
having to INSTALL anything or even OWN A GAMING PC/CONSOLE, this is a no
brainer.

Why shell out for a new 2080TI card when you can just pay another month to
Stadia and let them handle all the hardware to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4k
60 FPS?

No downloading a 150 GB game, no patching, no constant hardware upgrading, no
having to go back in your catalog and reinstall everything if you get a new
system. They are all there and you just "press start".

I realize Stadia currently does not run RDR2 at 4k and 60 FPS. But it will
once the hardware and bandwidth landscape catches up.

~~~
fulafel
The 4k 60 fps bw requirement is just 35 Mbps, is there really catching up to
do unless we're talking about mobile hotspots? Netflix 4k is 25 Mbps.

~~~
raxxorrax
If everyone would use that bandwidth simultaneously, that can put huge loads
on the net.

Imagine you suddenly have 3 kids. You would need to tell your least favorite
kid that it needs to play outside because your connection is too slow.

~~~
fulafel
"Back in 2020 I sometimes had to choose between playing video games at 1080p
and going to play outside because my parents didn't want to subscribe to the
100 M net connection, you kids today don't know how tough we had it." "Really
gramps? I know 1080p looks terrible but how could they threaten you with the
outside?" "Well the outdoors was less of a scorched hellscape back then. "

------
ekianjo
I read the article, but it feels like "don't build anything until you are sure
users want X". The problem is that nobody knows what users actually want,
especially when you build something new. And the market will keep throwing
ideas in several directions until one day, an idea sticks and becomes
successful.

Like, no gamer in pre-Wii times "wanted to play hours standing with a motion
controller". Nintendo released the Wii and it was a huge success (for a while
at least).

Maybe the author's point is that Stadia is not doing anything "new", and this
may be a good point. But it's still early days, and Google has deep pockets.
It's a little too early to discard Stadia.

~~~
Someone1234
> I read the article, but it feels like "don't build anything until you are
> sure users want X".

The article addresses that exact point:

> I think the answer's obvious. Because they designed the product backward.
> They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what
> COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?".

Your issue is largely addressed by their second Apple example. They're talking
about the thinking that ultimately results in the product, and how Google's
(and Sun's) thinking is focused on themselves and e.g. Apple's thinking is
still user-orientated even if they have to "sell" an original concept.

So absolutely try something new, but as the article says, it still has to be
designed for an actual audience rather than just being created to further that
company's own interests without offering enough value for their market.

~~~
ekianjo
> rather than just being created to further that company's own interests

I find the Apple example unconvincing, especially for "recent Apple" stuff.
Removing ports on their laptops, making some models' keyboard worse (most
Apple users dislike the touchbar), making them unserviceable, forcing the
phone users to buy expensive peripherals (Airpods...), bug-ridden OS updates,
all of this point to a disdain towards their users rather than the opposite.
Am I missing something?

~~~
seabrookmx
100% right, and they've been panned for this.

The result is a 16" Macbook that's thicker, larger, and has an "old-style"
scissor switch keyboard.

Even the new Airpods pro finally have silicone tips.

Apple has learned the hard way, and looks like they're finally turning around
a bit. Maybe even the next iPhone will have USB-C?

I don't own a single Apple device but would consider an iPad (a base model.. I
don't need/want an expensive "Pro") if it had USB-C.

------
birdyrooster
Stadia is and will remain laughable because it has absolutely no answer for VR
content and is a laggy mess in the best conditions. If a partnership between
AT&T and NVidia couldn’t crack this egg, why in the world would Google be able
to? It’s a physics problem that cannot be overcome. The hubris of Google to
tout this platform is incredibly annoying as a gamer.

~~~
ansible
Yes, on the one hand, traditional gaming (FPS, etc.) is most of the market
now. Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. But we're on the cusp of VR/AR really taking
off.

The current all-in-one VR systems are _almost_ good enough for a lot of people
to jump in. I can see the next-gen of those being very popular. Certainly,
you're giving up a lot by wearing all the rendering silicon on your head, but
the other side of that is that it shaves precious milliseconds off the end-to-
end latency, which is critical for a good experience.

And there's no way to do any of that with streaming games.

Now, for an old man like me who's mostly playing turn-based strategy games,
card games and such, Stadia _might_ be an attractive offer. Of course, those
sorts of games don't push the limits of my old system, so... yeah, I don't
need it right now either.

While top-end PCs can render better than top-end consoles right now, I don't
see that as being compelling enough, especially when you factor in the network
bandwidth / low-latency needed.

------
poorman
We had Sunrays at SUNY Oswego when I was in college. I thought they were
great. I didn't have to carry a laptop around, just a little smart card that
fit into my wallet. Plug it in and I had access to 120 core servers.

~~~
schnable
We had them at Case, too, but they weren't that popular.

------
bhauer
Here's a take: I don't want Stadia; I want a modern and personal Sunray. I've
described a computing model called PAO [1] on my blog that is Sunray-like in
that you connect to your own personal computing environment from all devices
concurrently. Singular instances of your applications are merely _viewed_ on
all of your devices, using view adaptation similar to today's responsive web
apps (and Microsoft's UWP desktop app model).

The key differences from Stadia:

1\. PAO would not be just for games but for all computing.

2\. PAO would not be centralized by default, but broadly deployable, making it
something you could self-host on a compute node anywhere (e.g., in your home
with a static IP and VPN). PAO would work especially well with a network
abstraction layer like ZeroTier, allowing all of your devices to coexist in a
private virtual network. You could of course pay a service provider to host
your compute node, but that would be one option among many.

3\. PAO would expect multiple concurrent clients to applications. A single
email app would exist and service views on your home laptop, work desktop, and
mobile phone concurrently.

[1] [https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao](https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao)

------
tiborsaas
Offtopic, but why someone bothers to type a proper blogpost in Twitter? It's
such a crap experience read something there that multiple thread reader
projects exists.

I can only think of the simplicity to publish content makes it too easy for
lazy authors.

~~~
perennate
I scroll with my mouse to read pages, and the very slow scrolling amount on
this "threader.app" was very frustrating.

~~~
choward
I'm using Linux Mint and it scrolls super slow. I will never understand why
companies insist on wasting resources on ruining a feature that works
perfectly fine. What do they get out of it? Does it somehow lead to more
profit? It really baffles me. It seems like nobody wins.

~~~
tiborsaas
The designer of the project probably gets an anxiety attack each time they see
how scrollbars wildly fluctuates in different platform. This had to stop so
let's ruin the experience for everyone :)

(It scrolls just fine for me in Chrome, on a Macbook)

------
p1necone
It was obvious from the start to me that Stadia was not going to succeed. Sure
it's totally plausible tech, and it _does_ work relatively well if you have a
stable, fast, non data capped internet connection that's close to a data
center. But the portion of the population that _doesn 't_ have all those
things is way too high and the negative PR about Stadia being awful for those
people is going to sink it.

------
lnanek2
Personally, it seems to fill a niche I'm in. I don't have any high graphics
quality gaming systems. The closest I have is: a 5 year old macbook, a Switch,
a Quest.

Stadia would let me play some of the hi-fi titles out there without buying a
more serious console or a newer PC. Hell, even the Witcher novels were fun to
read and I'd enjoy trying the games. I ordered a founder's edition Stadia, but
haven't received it yet.

Biggest drawback to me is that it won't support a higher quality VR headset
than my Quest, like the Index, and won't support the latest Half Life game.
What if the next Portal is in VR? Then I'll have to buy a PC and Stadia was
pointless...

------
api
Google Stadia belongs to yet another category: products that some people like
and want and others hate and hope fail for social/political/economic reasons.
AMP and Facebook Libra are other examples of products like this.

I hope Stadia fails because if PC gaming dies it will harm consumers broadly
by further decimating the high-end PC market and reducing demand for high-end
edge device CPUs, GPUs, etc.

We do not want a world where all compute belongs to someone else.

------
devit
Seems to me that it would be very good for people who have fiber connections
at home and are close to a Google datacenter (or just don't care about
latency), and want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU without having to pay for
it and own a physical desktop computer (perhaps because they don't have the
budget, or play games rarely, or buying a desktop computer is hard or
uncomfortable for them).

~~~
iMark
If you want to enjoy gaming on a high-end GPU, you almost certainly care about
latency.

~~~
devit
Not necessarily, you might like sophisticated graphics but not play games
where latency is particularly important, or just not be annoyed by latency and
not interested in competitive play.

Also as an anecdote right now I have 5ms ping to google.com and 1gbps downlink
(fiber at home in major city), so it seems like 60fps or maybe even 120fps
zero-extra-frames-latency gaming would be achievable there, for instance.

------
pier25
That's not true. Stadia does solve a number of problems some people want
solved.

1) Faster multiplayer

2) Immediate streaming to Youtube at high quality

3) 4K 60Hz gaming without requiring a high end PC, or even simply gaming
without a dedicated gaming device

4) Cross platform gaming so you can seamlessly move from one device to another

Nobody really _wants_ to stream games, but moving gaming to cloud solves those
problems.

It remains to be seen if Stadia can indeed solve the lag issues though.

------
sct202
I'm not sure if I want a Stadia, but I think there is a product that could
succeed doing something similar. Like, I occasionally play Starcraft and other
PC games, but it's kind of a pain to plan out future desktop or laptop
upgrades because I can only consider products with more powerful video cards
and enough extra space to hold each 60+gb game to handle even moderate gaming.

~~~
plopz
I couldn't imagine how painful playing starcraft would be with an extra 100ms
of latency.

~~~
oefrha
There are plenty of high ping players on the ladder already. I myself have
played on the NA server while physically in Asia. American pros train on
Korean or European ladders too. It’s okay.

Also, StarCraft doesn’t have to be ultra-competitive. You can enjoy the
campaign or coop, or just play some unranked multiplayer for fun. A bit more
latency doesn’t ruin the experience, and many/most human beings aren’t twitchy
enough anyway.

~~~
plopz
You must be talking about sc2, in remastered theres only one global ladder and
when you do hit koreans, if the turn rate drops due to latency, many will just
leave the game.

------
Despegar
I think it exists because they've got plenty of infrastructure assets all
around the world because of GCP (and are investing in more) and they're
probably trying to dream up ideas to drive up utilization and gain some
operating leverage on it. A consumer subscription business that depends on all
your data centers would do that.

That's not a really good reason to make a product though.

~~~
Jonnax
This is what they said of their specs:

"CPU: Custom 2.7GHz hyper-threaded x86 CPU with AVX2 SIMD and 9.5MB L2+L3
cache.

GPU: Custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units, capable of 10.7
teraflops.

RAM: 16GB of RAM with up to 484GB/s of performance."

That's not really a spare capacity machine but what sounds like Custom SoCs.

But perhaps if it goes to crap, there'll be a new GCP instance type.

------
rawoke083600
Gheesh I would def want stadia ! I no longer have to fret over which bodypart
to sell for the latest in graphics cards or wonder should I rather go the
console route. Which version of WINE should I try to use today.

I think if the Stadia experience works(technically speaking) it might just be
the "new way" and make the "old way" well feel old !

Like Uber(the concept not the cmpy). Prev I had to look up a taxi's company
number... phone them and tried to tell a person what my address is (keep in
mind in my country we have 11 official languages, can you imagine the accents
and trying to correctly spell your address over the phone), after that I have
to phone them a few times to ask "Where are you" etc...

I hope cloud gaming will be the new thing ! I can't keep up buying graphics
cards and lugging my desktop to my gf's house.

Google please make Stadia work !!

------
awill
There are rumours of a Steam Cloud [0] IMO this would be the best of both
worlds. I don't want to purchase games from Google that will only work on
Stadia. The ideal solution is to purchase games on Steam that you can play
either on a regular PC, or on Steam's Cloud Gaming Service. I'm fine to pay
$5-10/mo for Steam Cloud, but I really, really don't want to re-purchase some
games again (like I'd have to do with Google), or lose my cloud purchases if
either a) Google cancels Stadia, or b) I want to switch to a different cloud.

[0]: [https://www.resetera.com/threads/rumor-valve-is-working-
on-s...](https://www.resetera.com/threads/rumor-valve-is-working-on-steam-
cloud-gaming.151484/)

~~~
thrownblown
this already exists, its called nvidia geforce now.

------
mrob
>I do see two fighting games and two rhythm games (latency hell!)

Fighting games benefit greatly from low latency, but rhythm games do not. The
important thing with rhythm games is _consistent_ latency, and that can be
achieved by adding artificial latency when network latency is low. You can
adjust the input timing windows forward or backward to match the latency, and
many rhythm games already allow that. High latency like you might get with
Stadia will make the feedback the game gives you harder to associate with your
performance, but when you're playing well you're primarily paying attention to
the input cues, so the game is still perfectly fun and playable.

------
Grzegrzolka
I'm a lifelong gamer (since 1996), currently have PC that only has weak
integrated GPU so I cant play much, but super speedy 500mbs fiber internet
connection and 80mbs LTE on the phone. I look like ideal Stadia client, right?
Well, no. I'm not interested in slightest, I'm waiting passionately for PS5.
Current internet technology (latency) is not enough to make cloud gaming
possible, you can instantly feel this 140+ ms of delay. Other than that,
Google don't know jack shit about games, you can clearly see it in Stadia
announcment conference. Good luck, I give it 1.5 year and nobody will remember
what "Stadia" is.

~~~
kenhwang
The interesting part is it could've worked if Google actually understood
gaming. The PS4's remote play capability is more than usable for most games.
That pretty much relies on your own uplink speed and hops over residential
internet hosted on underpowered hardware.

Google is one of the few companies that could've had enough data centers
geographically spread out enough where most people's latency is tolerable and
game selection is curated to not be latency sensitive.

But instead they completely flub both the technical implementation and the
pricing model.

------
adamnemecek
I've been using Nvidia GeForce Now for over a year and it's been pretty good
actually. Like there is a small delay but it only really impacts me if I play
against other people. For RPGs for example, it's really good.

~~~
woudsma
Same here, I use it on my Mac and it works great with a Steam account. I like
that portability. Also the quality is pretty amazing. I only play games every
now and then, so a piece of software instead of dedicated hardware is a good
solution for me.

------
Animats
From a game developer point of view, it's terrifying. If you thought that
dealing with Nintendo or Valve was tough, imagine dealing with Google.

"The biggest complaint most developers have with Stadia is the fear that
Google is just going to cancel it"[1]

You don't even get to see the terms and conditions unless you apply to be a
developer and are accepted. That's scary. Maybe the big guys get better terms.
Then there's the Google "I am altering the deal" approach to terms.

Google already has a cloud-hosted game product - Improbable's Spatial OS, a
back-end system for large MMOs. Improbable raised about $2 billion to develop
it, and it's used only by a few indy developers, two of whom launched, got
some users, then shut down their game. Cost too much. Runs only on Google's
servers. There are some games in development for it that might launch someday.
(I liked the Improbable technology concept, but they spent so much VC money
developing it that it's now too expensive to use. The investors are going to
have to take a haircut.)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-
the...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/stadia-launch-dev-the-biggest-
concern-with-stadia-is-that-it-might-not-exist/)

------
someexgamedev
As someone who used to make async multiplayer games I think Stadia is a good
fit currently for that style of game. Using it for latency-sensitive AAA games
seems like a decade or two too early for the tech.

Cloud gaming has huge multiplayer advantages because you can skip the whole
network stack and build your game for couch multiplayer, yet it's still
playable over the internet.

Combine that with the deep pockets of F2P gamers, and Google's existing
relationship with these devs via Google Play; I have no idea how they missed
this.

------
kossTKR
Slightly off topic but weird to not see Shadow.tech mentioned.

It's a smaller French streaming company where you get a complete VM you can do
anything with for an unlimited amount of time.

It's not as easy because you will end up spending a little bit of time setting
things up compared to a game-only system though.

I have used their service and was absolutely blown away _as a casual gamer_. I
stream in 1440p 60fps+ with no hiccups and a latency of about 18ms from my
laptops.

You need a solid connection, no low caps, and a good wireless router but other
than that it's pretty amazing how well it works - also i would rather not use
Google after their turn towards monopoly in the last years.

They are coming out with support for up to Nvidia Titan Tiers so you can have
a crazy 3D rendering workstation on the go.

On the downside i guess it's not very green to be streaming several terabytes
of data each month, also it's beginning of a pretty horrible slippery slope
privacy wise.

But for "just gaming" or other non privacy/important stuff the "terminal"
concept is pretty cool.

On a side note does anyone have any CO2/Megabyte calculator? I have had a hard
time figuring out how impactful the move to constant HD streaming in a lot of
homes is?

I slightly remember reading that the internet could use upwards of 1/3 of
total power consumption in X amounts of years.

------
partiallypro
I genuinely just don't see how Google can possibly compete with the gaming
catalogs of Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft is already testing xCloud with some
positive (and negative) comments. Sony just signed a cloud deal with Microsoft
to do better game streaming...I just don't see how Google competes. And given
Google's track record in killing products before they can get off the ground,
I don't know why users would invest in it.

------
ksec
I disagree with the reasons that this article put forward.

>I think the answer's obvious. Because they designed the product backward.
They didn't think "what do people want?", or even go Apple and think "what
COULD people want, if we showed them why they wanted it?". Sun started with:
"What can we build?"

Both the case study with Solaris and Stadia failure has nothing to do with
wants or needs. I actually want Solaris features of Thin Client, and the magic
it describe where its state lives on Big Computer. Along with Stadia's idea of
streaming games. Both of them are perfect in concept, I want them!

The problem is the experience. Apple didn't start if it could or not, they ask
if the User Experience will be great. And I cant think of a product or
services where latency is not part of the User Experience. Both Solaris and
Stadia's experience so far is simply not good enough, and for me it might
never be good enough. Solaris might have nailed the Thin Client Desktop
technology, but its UI along with no quality apps, no one wants it. These apps
and ecosystem are all part of the experience.

Stadia are also good in concept, in practice the latency and graphics quality
just put people off. And the trend is in Mobile Gaming, when was the last time
you heard Mobile Network Operators said they have abundant of bandwidth?

And it is the same with VR Gaming. If VR Gaming failed now it is not because
the build or want problem. We WANT VR Gaming, the problem is the technology we
have right now doesn't bring the experience we want just yet. It is like Pre
iPhone era Smartphone.

If the experience were good, people will buy it, if it is not, they wont. It
will all sort itself out.

------
kgraves
Stadia is a staple of what the open web should be for games. Just open a web
browser and the game is available. Much in the same way that Photoshop should
be available on the web.

Unfortunately it had to be Google that had to get their oar into this space
and therefore it looks like just a toy demo for them.

I do wish engineers at Google should instead contribute to the technologies
that advance the open web instead of vanishing Google products.

~~~
skohan
I for one would like to see more, better local software rather than web-
everything. My laptop is more than capable of running photoshop locally, and I
don't see the benefit of running a slower, high-latency version which is
vulnerable to network conditions. It seems like that does much more for Adobe,
their cloud provider, and my ISP than it does for me.

That's not to say there shouldn't be online _options_ for things, but it seems
inevitable that as those options become increasingly viable, software vendors
will aggressively push consumers toward them so they can have an excuse to
have a recurring revenue model.

------
siffland
So it is

$129 for the device, $9.99 Per month, $x.xx for the internet connection you
require at all time due to no offline play, $x.xx to buy titles that you can
only play with said internet connection.

At least now you CAN buy games you can play offline with the other consoles
and PC. If someone came up with Movies Anywhere for video games so i could buy
it once and play on any console i would be cool with this, but 20 years from
now when you get that nostalgia and want to pull the Stadia out and play that
one game....well you can't (unless it is still around, but then they will pull
games from stores due to licensing, maybe because it has that one song on it
and it is copyright....). At least with a physical game and ps4 or xbox1 there
are usually ways to play without internet on some games.

I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have
real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun
stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked).

I think the tech is cool and some people will love it. Not sure if it is what
i would want to invest in.

~~~
chachachoney
>> I bet with the data mining and everything they will do fun stuff like have
real time ads play on billboards in games targeting you and other such fun
stuff (maybe they do that already in games, i have never looked).

It's going to get interesting when they decide to start aggregating and
storing in game behaviors, and then selling that data to third parties or
using it to augment their incursions into health-care/insurance.

It'll get even more interesting when they cooperate with authoritarian states
to identify 'problem' citizens based on in-game behaviors or limit the
spectrum of possible in-game behaviours within ostensibly open world sandbox
environments.

I'll leave the predictive policing branch of this prognostication as an
exercise for the reader.

------
twoquestions
There's already a bunch of gaming computer providers like Parsec and Vortex,
what does Stadia bring to the table? Personally I doubt the decision makers
involved play games more twitch-based than Civilization. For fighting and
rhythm games, being _meters_ too far away from the game system makes latency
annoying, let alone 200ms away! Even a game server at every residential zone
and apartment block would not be better than a potato machine a foot away.

Cynically, it looks like they're trying to swallow that market whole, betting
they have more money on hand to price themselves artificially low to carpet-
bomb the small cloud gaming market.

EDIT: Something I forgot to mention, Parsec already works with the games you
own anywhere else, and on a crappy Android tablet. What Stadia looks like its
selling is increased latency, _plus_ a walled garden store, _plus_ necessary
custom hardware.

Unless Google is giving away the hardware you need to play, I can't see this
being price competitive next to a Nintendo Switch, and the latter needs no
Internet connection at all.

~~~
twoquestions
Scratch Parsec, they don't rent cloud machines anymore, it looks like they're
a streaming service now.

------
Jyaif
> Sun started with: "What can we build?" "What would be good for US, if people
> wanted it?".

The author wasn't in the room when this idea came up, so I feel like this is a
completely made up story. These Sunblade were a great idea, and they still
are. I'm sure we'll eventually get there again at one point. Sun failed on the
execution, but that's an other story.

------
jshaqaw
Stadia interests me. I haven’t played games in a long time because dabbling
back into them after decades I don’t want to make a major commitment to buy
equipment and keep it up to cutting edge. Plus I really like my iPad form
factor for games. At the end of a long work day sitting at a desk in front of
a computer I really don’t want to be sitting at a desk in front of a computer.

~~~
vocatus_gate
I know you said you don't want to purchase equipment and keep it up to date,
but the progression of CPU's and GPU's has slowed _drastically_ in the last
decade. I easily get 5-6 years out of my gaming rigs now, and build them
fairly well specced for $800-1000. Keeping current is significantly less
hassle or cost than it was ~10 years ago.

------
buddylw
I actually think there's real potential for these services, especially among
kids in the enthusiast gaming community. I don't necessarily think we'll be
throwing out our PC's for stadia, but I think there is a market if someone can
deliver a cost effective product.

A bit ago Fortnite went from requiring DX 10 to DX 11 support in Windows. Kids
with old hardware were devastated. Out of nowhere they couldn't play their
favorite game until they saved up for a new video card, or worse, an entire
laptop. PC gaming is a really expensive hobby that's completely out of reach
for many.

You can point to consoles as a lower cost answer, but $400 is still a lot of
money for some people, and PC gaming is still preferred by many enthusiasts
for the keyboard/mouse experience and the ability to multitask with Discord,
Spotify, etc. Consoles are closing that gap in functionality, but they aren't
quite there yet.

Some people were saved in the above fortnite situation by GeForce Now, a
competing service to Stadia that's been around a while. You can pick at the
technical problems with streaming games vs PC, but at the end of the day, kids
with reasonable internet that signed up were able to play fortnite in their
PC's again. It solved a real problem.

If you add to all this the fact that so many kids interact with the world
through a Chromebook or iPad issued by their school, one can see a world where
a stadia gaming app or a GeForce Now app is their most convenient gateway to
big games.

Stadia could still flop if Google doesn't develop and promote it properly, or
if people aren't willing to pay enough for the service. I do believe there are
people that want stadia, though, and outside of slow internet connections, I
don't see why the sharing economy can't extend to gaming PC's.

------
madrox
No matter how you look at it, Stadia is going to be an interesting business
study in a couple years. It's clear publishers don't care about it. Fun fact:
when I last checked, all the publishers that are launch partners all have
Google Cloud accounts. I suspect game publishers are in this for the free
servers, not because they believe in the platform.

------
perennate
With smaller devices like laptops and netbooks (along with smartphones)
becoming increasingly popular, Stadia caters to people who don't want to
invest in a second device just for gaming. I know several people who only own
a laptop and are interested in this service; I'm sure the market is there.

The main challenge, though, is that they are late to the competition -- NVIDIA
GeForce NOW seems much more mature (the aforementioned people are already
using their beta) and it's not clear what Stadia brings to the table that
NVIDIA can't do better (since they make the consumer GPUs).

Also, I think Google messed up by focusing on the Stadia controller and other
physical devices; that's exactly what people don't want, to purchase more
devices. And I read through their FAQ and don't even understand whether you
need the controller to use Stadia. If it's actually required, that's
ridiculous.

~~~
gambiting
The biggest advantage that GeForce NOW has is that it just runs regular PC
executables. Games for Stadia need to be compiled specifically for Stadia, and
I have no idea why developers would spend the time and money building _yet
another_ version of their games, unless Stadia turns out to be incredibly
popular or Google throws a lot of money at them.

~~~
perennate
Wow, I didn't know that. I thought it'd be like GeForce NOW, and somehow let
you play your Steam games from your computer in Chrome. Starting to agree with
the author, I no longer get what the point of Stadia is.

------
dmix
Sunray might have failed but there were tons of companies who used Windows
thin client machines successfully...Oracle/Larry Ellison made a big deal about
it.

Obviously they all switched back to fat clients but Sunray wasn't the only one
who tried it and some made a lot of money while it lasted.

------
Justsignedup
It is a product that needs to exist in the future. It should have been on the
drawing board for the next 5 years.

Google will kill it. I guarantee it.

In 5 years someone will release a better version because the internet
infrastructure will be ready for it.

------
Grue3
>and I've never heard of anyone other than Sun _using_ it

Well, I happened to have used it. This entire post gave me flashbacks. I was
studying in Moscow and was too poor to afford my own PC, and when I bought one
I still didn't have an Internet connection, so I was mostly using a computer
room in a certain educational organisation. And they had all those Sun thin
clients, and that awful-looking UI and Opera browser (back when it had _ads_
). There were some ancient computers with text-only displays as well. It was
definitely an experience.

------
catchmeifyoucan
I loved the sunray description. In a lot of ways this reminds me of Firefox
OS. It's really amazing technology but before finding product/market fit, we
have to find product/solution fit. Super important to find even the core group
of users who really need this. I like Stadia - and I'm a social casual gamer.
I play games on my Fire TV lol, and it'd be a convincing argument for a device
to bridge the gap to more beefy games, but positioned against Xbox and PS4,
I'm not looking to do any sort of heavy gaming

------
owaislone
I consider myself a "gamer" and would never ditch my PS4 or PC for Stadia but
most of my friends who like to play games casually would love something like
Stadia. One of them even purchased the founder edition. Most of them don't
want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on consoles and high end PCs to
play just for a few hours on every other weekend. It's just too costly for
casual gamers. A service like Stadia makes total sense for such people.

~~~
dijit
I’m a grown up now. Booting my PS4 to play only to be greeted with “40G
download required before online play is possible” is what makes me think
stadia could take off. The on boarding of consoles is super crappy and the UX
of pc gaming is also very inconvenient and is prone to weird issues.

------
jupp0r
Comparing Stadia to Sun Rays does not make sense. Companies buying Sun Rays
did have to pay for the server in the basement. For me it solves an actual
problem - I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2, but don't have a gaming
desktop computer or a TV, just a Macbook. I don't have to spend $2000 on a
machine that will be obsolete in 2 years, takes up a ton of space in my house,
even when not in use. Why isn't the use case obvious?

------
crispweed
When considering selling points, everyone seems to be focusing on the
advantages of being able to run traditional games without console hardware or
delays for installation, but no-one seems to be talking about how something
like this could fundamentally change the constraints on multiplayer game
design. I wonder what the server side looks like, and whether anyone is
working on MMO type products that are designed specifically for this setup..

------
squar1sm
Sun was ahead of its time in many ways. I used a Sunblade and never thought of
it again until this article and its relation. Interesting.

I've thought a lot about zones and Docker. I remember booting a zone for the
first time on Solaris (copies the kernel) and was amazed at how fast it
booted. It had a lot of the same things (volumes that are mounted). I used to
explain Docker as Solaris zones sometimes but no one knows what Solaris is.

------
jagger27
My hot take is that if the speed of light was 10 times faster I would like
Stadia. 20ms of extra latency is unacceptable to me, but 2ms would be fine.

------
torgian
The problem I see with Stadia: lack of ownership of games and bandwidth.

I guess lack of ownership of things, at least for media, is something that is
just gonna happen. But, bandwidth, that is a big problem. Especially in the
US, where internet is shit in most places. Can't see playing a game over the
internet in most of the world.

Maybe in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, you could, but not many other places.

~~~
crooked-v
Also, even where the internet isn't shit, all the major ISPs have implemented
1 TB monthly data caps.

~~~
torgian
This too, though it's not necessarily true for some countries.

I enjoy unlimited bandwidth in Taiwan. I've played online games using my phone
as a hot-spot (not ideal, but it's possible here).

Honestly, I hope Stadia fails partially due to this, and other potential
issues that come with that service.

Stadia is like Audiobooks or E-Books managed by a central database. It's all
well and good until someone decides to cancel those services forever
(Microsoft actually did this recently)

------
conradfr
I have colleagues who use Shadow[1] at work during lunch on their work macbook
and they really like it, even the lag is very manageable.

So I guess many people want it. The real question is how long until this kind
of gaming is imposed, like the need for a connection even for single player
games today.

[https://shadow.tech/usen](https://shadow.tech/usen)

------
JohnFen
I certainly don't want Stadia. Stadia doubles down on the very things that
drove me away from most modern games in the first place.

------
shmerl
One positive result from Stadia can already be observed. More developers are
starting to implement Vulkan renderer in their games and custom engines
(common engines all have Vulkan renderer for a while already). And not only
that, they finally are starting seeing Vulkan as the real common API:

Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCqut9tr6iA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCqut9tr6iA)

    
    
        > We realised that if we did a port to Vulkan, which is a
        > renderer that is used on phones and various other stuff,
        > we get Mac support, we get Linux support, we get support
        > for things like Google Stadia and so on - it was just
        > worthwhile to do a Vulkan port. So we started that,
        > because it's going to be good for Path of Exile players.
    

I suppose they mean translation from Vulkan to Metal with MoltenVK when they
mention "Mac support". But that line of thinking is going to become more and
more widespread now, thanks to Google throwing their weight behind Vulkan for
Stadia.

Optimistically, pressure on MS, Sony and Apple will increase to the point
where they'll support Vulkan on their walled gardens that now enforce DX, GNM
and Metal lock-ins, because developers will demand it. And even if they'll
resist, projects like MoltenVK and gfx-rs will help break their lock-in
despite such resistance. gfx-rs would need to add Vulkan to GNM translation
though.

So while I'm not using Stadia due to its idea being basically DRM on steroids,
the positive effects from it also exist.

------
PaulHoule
The strange thing about Stadia is that not only is Google making an
impractical product that people don't want, but so are Sony and Microsoft.
It's like the "race" to 5G or the "race" to AI, but in this case there is no
prize -- you expect any hardware from Google to be a lost cause, even
Microsoft has had good luck selling mice, but Sony is serious about hardware
so how did they get caught up in it?

The one real advantage I see is that if you want to livestream a game it is
probably more efficient to stream the game down to the player and then pipe
the stream into a CDN for everyone else than it is to upload the stream and
then pipe it into a CDN.

Maybe you could make a game like Titanfall or Fortnite that runs on some
monster server in the cloud and hypothetically eliminates the need to share
state across a network, but I think you're trading one set of problems for
another set of problems.

I used to have two Sunrays and a SPARC Solaris server in my cubicle, we were
hoping to use them for kiosks at a large university library (might have bought
200+) but we couldn't compile Mozilla for Solaris and all of the other
browsers available for Solaris were either too old or looked like somebody's
science experiment.

Today there is a real market for desktop virtualization. The Bridgewater hedge
fund has switched to desktop virtualization because they are paranoid MoFo's
who (1) are worried about the physical destruction of their headquarters and
(2) don't want employees walking out with a laptop full of secrets. So they
RDS in to cloud servers and like it that way.

~~~
TremendousJudge
> but in this case there is no prize

The prize is getting people to pay for a subscription forever instead of
buying your console once

------
lazydon
When I saw the domain (th(e) reader) next to this post, I for a while thought
it was a Google reader clone that's going to be lamenting about it. As in
Google Reader was a product people actually wanted but it no longer exists as
opposed to Google Stadia. Ah, how much I miss Google Reader to make this weird
connection.

------
balls187
This is a hell of an article.

The talk about sunray is intereting with another HN article about FB/MSFT
Remote Development.

I use Cloud9, after using sublime for nearly 8 years. My dream scenario is my
iphone is my computer, and monitors and keyboards are dumb terminals that can
stream I/O from my iphone wirelessly/dock.

~~~
balls187
I'll offer a counter--if we never had the Apple Newton, would we ever have the
ipod,Iphone,Ipad?

------
d--b
I work remotely. My computer is in New York and I live in Paris. It works very
well. I don’t understand the long rant about explaining why people don’t want
remote computers.

Then Stadia, as a casual gamer I’d be more than happy to pay $2 every now and
then rather than paying 300 for a device I don’t buy $60 games for.

There you go

~~~
scott_s
I don't think that's the pricing. The device itself is about $130, $10 a month
for the service, and then you will likely pay $20 - $60 for each game. Yes,
they will eventually have a catalogue of games like Netflix, but similar to
Netflix, it may not have the game you want to play now. See
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-
stadia-r...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/18/20970297/google-stadia-
review-gaming-streaming-cloud-price-specs-features-chrome-pixel)

~~~
wildrhythms
Stadia isn't a device; it's a service. There is no "device itself", unless you
count the bundle they sold that included a Chromecast, controller, and 3
months of the service + 3 months for a friend.

You can play Stadia on an Android phone, Chromecast, or a Chrome browser on a
laptop or desktop.

The service is free; you pay for the game only.

The $10 per month is only for the Plus service or whatever it's called that
gives you 4K resolution and 5.1 surround, and presumably some free games/deals
based on the marketing.

The communication thus far has been shitty, that said.

------
rossmohax
Stadia has a chance of killing cheating for PC gamers (if that can still be
called PC gaming of course)

------
scrumbledober
It seems like stadia or something similar would be perfect for simulation
games that are often CPU limited and could be pretty latency tolerant. Would
love to play Factorio on a stadia like service. Reaction times are not
important and frame rate is usually limited by cpu

------
uhhhhhhh
Unfortunately his view of sunray misses the fact that that is a massive market
with a significant use case in govt/healthcare. Sun may have been early and
had crap for marketing, but the idea was good and there certainly is a market
for it.

------
jrockway
> And, of course, "run Solaris" just killed the whole thing instantly, so
> instantly it baffles me how they didn't stop the project on day one. In 2004
> nobody could use Linux except programmers— you struggled to run office
> suites on Linux— and Solaris was one step harder than Linux.

I dunno about this. My dad was a research chemist and when I was a kid I would
occasionally go into the office and check out the computer. They were all
using Unix workstations (Solaris I believe) and seemed to get their work done
fine. There was Lotus Notes, there was NCSA Mosaic... all the things you do
with your computer today, they did with Unix 25 years ago. My dad wasn't a
programmer and neither were his lab-mates. That was just how computers were
then. This was not 2004, though, this was like 1995. But I was 10 and figured
it out with 10 minutes of screwing around on "take your kid to work day", so
maybe it wasn't so complicated that no mere mortal could ever hope to compute
in that environment.

I agree that office suites circa 2004 were bad. I used Linux all throughout
high school and never liked Abiword or the competition (I guess OpenOffice
might have been a thing back then). I learned LaTeX and used that. Looking
back, I don't think I would have liked Microsoft Word, either. WYSIWYG was a
big deal back then, but I didn't really care what I got. (I ended up tweaking
LaTeX to double-space and use thin margins to look like Word, since teachers
demanded it. I personally didn't care; whatever Knuth decided looked good, I
was fine with.)

Using Unix or Linux back then was really liberating. I remember that if you
wanted to learn C or C++ on DOS/Windows/Mac at the time, you had to spend
hundreds of dollars on an IDE (Borland C++? Visual C++? I don't really
remember.) Or you could just install Linux, and it was all free. Sure, Emacs
had some warts, and wasn't really integrated with GCC... but if you were
willing to push through, you could do your homework at home, while your
classmates had to stay in the computer lab and do it.

I dunno, I don't think it was all that bad. We ended up using the "software
runs on a server" model anyway, with web apps. You open Google Docs to type
something and if your computer blows up, no worries, you can just keep working
from another computer. Very much like the Sun smartcard-based system the
author describes, just with more "material design" instead of "some UNIX geeks
were excited they figured out how to draw shadows efficiently." What's old is
new. Not much has REALLY changed.

------
touchpadder
If Stadia will be free then why is Google charging money? Are they short on
cash? No. They want to limit the majority of reviews to fanboys who buy into
"what it can become" narrative. On top of that it will not become free.

------
bscphil
Real twitter link:
[https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762](https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1196557401710837762)

------
mikedilger
Before that Sun tried the JavaStation, also an attempt to return to the
mainframe/terminal paradigm. Management was stuck on the idea that such a
paradigm was the only solution for Sun as a company.

------
chrischen
What exactly is google doing that OnLive didn't do? I tried OnLive... it
worked well. It was just pointless because it didn't really offer any benefits
over running games locally.

------
dehrmann
This brings back memories. My college had a bunch of Sun Rays (or a similar
Sun product) in the CS labs. I TAed for a classes that used them. Non-CS
majors _hated_ them. And vi.

------
jasonkester
This is the sort of product that the Big Tech Companies build because they
happen to live in the one place on earth where it will work.

There is evidently a small area centered around the San Francisco Bay Area
where internet connectivity is ubiquitous and perfect. You get unlimited 5G
coverage with 2ms ping times and hundred gigabit fibre into every habitable
structure. And Google, Apple, etc. all have their offices there where they
design products that connect to the internet.

There's no reason for an engineer at one of these companies to consider a
situation where somebody wouldn't be connected to good internet. Certainly
it'll always at least be 4G speed (if the user is in a tunnel or something
maybe), but it'll never not exist at all.

So you get things like Apple Music (and Google Play Music and every other
streaming service) where you get in the car and it starts playing where it
left off in your playlist, then you head off down the road in your little
thousand person European village. The song ends when you get to the edge of
town, and silence ensues.

Because it didn't occur to the app to buffer the next song.

And not because of bandwidth reasons. Bandwidth is _free_ , remember. Apple
will happily charge you 60mb of it to view their homepage, and your device can
happily buffer 3mb worth of song (or the next 50 in the playlist) without
breaking a sweat.

No, it's because nobody who worked on that product has ever been off of the
Apple campus. So it never occurred to them that people might want to listen to
music someplace where there was no internet.

So no, I can't imagine trying to stream a video game over the broadband in our
house. I don't think there are that many places in the world where you could
do so today.

~~~
Traster
In this case it's not even about people not having good internet. It's about
people not being physically near a data centre with the GPU that is playing
your game. Come home from school, turn on Stadia? Bad news, everyone in your
time zone just turned on stadia too and so the nearest slot is in NY,
congratulations, you've got >100ms latency.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Also, many Americans use an an inferior broadband infrastructure to get to the
rest of the internet, which means you not only have high latency due to
distance, but also slower speeds during peak usage for cable victims.

------
hypertexthero
Hopefully Stadia encourages more publishers to make games that work across
platforms, especially multiplayer games. I think cross-platform play is one of
the main reasons Fortnite is so popular.

I am skeptical about everything else, especially with the direction Google’s
management has steering toward, but curious what will happen.

Are more ads and abusive user tracking in games the price of ”free”? Would all
ads and tracking really be turned off if paying a monthly or yearly fee? What
happens when the network goes down or the service is retired? What happens to
modding? Who controls what can or cannot be said, and what can and cannot be
criticized, or even mentioned, in a story?

------
SeanMacConMara
i fear people will "want it" when it gets good enough

the combination of "dumb screen(TV?) as interface" with "any/all content* you
want (cheaper with ads)" will be very attractive to the 99% of humans who dont
want to think about computing

is widespread personal physical ownership and control of general purpose
computing a feature of the future ?

what laws do we need to think about to prevent harm that may cause ?

*text/radio/TV/movie/social/web/games/etc

------
magwa101
I don't want to dive into the world of gaming, consoles, and expensive
machines. Not interested. Stadia as an easy way to try games out? Yeah, I'm
in.

------
bloopernova
I wonder how long it is before we see a news story like:

"Whole family's Google accounts destroyed because $child tried to hack/cheat
in Stadia game"

------
wkearney99
The bigger hassle is adding users. Apparently, right now, before Xmas, there's
no way to add users without buying more hardware kits?

------
wkearney99
The controller is not very good. It's in-between the PS4 and XB1 controllers
and just a little off to be unsatisfying to use.

------
rsweeney21
I want Stadia. A couple of weekends ago I wanted to play games with my kids.
We have 4 PS4s and we were going to play Destiny together.

The wonderful family time never happened. We spent 2 hours waiting for updates
to the PS4 so we could connect to the playstation store to download Destiny.
We then spent 3 hours waiting for Destiny to download (60GB IIRC). By the time
everything had downloaded and updated the moment was gone.

We don't play games often, but when we try to, we spend all the time we had
waiting for updates.

Stadia solves a real problem.

------
archie2
The original iPhone was not a product that existed because people "wanted it".
It existed because Jobs had a vision - and he was effective at convincing
people that they actually did want it.

Stadia unfortunately misses the mark on the second part due to sloppy
implementation and just boneheaded PR. I think game streaming can be viable -
but I doubt Google will be the one to crack this nut. My money is on Microsoft
with xCloud, but even then that's still a wait and see for me.

~~~
edent
That's an interesting look at history. The original iPhone was a synthesis of
existing phones. People who wanted a touchscreen had a SE p900, people who
wanted a decent camera got an N95, people who wanted a decent web browser
installed Opera - and so on.

The iPhone succeeded (eventually) because it looked at what a diverse group of
people wanted and (eventually) put the best features in one package.

Regarding Stadia - there are a huge number of gamers who buy fewer than 2
games per year. An expensive console is a turn-off for them. There are a huge
number of gamers who want to play every single game - subscriptions are their
saviour. Stadia could - eventually - bring together what a diverse group of
gamers want.

------
JohnJamesRambo
I think streaming gaming is doomed but that Sunblade system they are
describing sounds really cool for casual computing.

------
EugeneOZ
I want Google Stadia. My internet bandwidth is more than enough for 4k 60 FPS
and price for their service is pretty good - better than $3k PC for 5 years -
you need to upgrade GPU at least every 3 years and CPU every 2 years (and,
therefore, motherboard) to keep "high-end PC" title and play new games on
"ultra" settings. Here they promise the same for a price, comparable to what
my high-end PC takes for electricity.

~~~
utf985
Where are you getting this data from? 2 years for a new CPU? My gaming pc from
2015 that cost just a little over $1k runs all recent games on ultra just
fine.

~~~
EugeneOZ
I'm talking about playing with 4k screen resolution.

------
danShumway
Somewhat of an aside, but I see mcc come up on Hackernews fairly often, and
whenever that happens I usually find myself enjoying her technical commentary
a lot -- even when I disagree with it.

In this case, I think the analysis is pretty spot-on.

I can think of a world where Stadia is solving real problems and presenting a
really attractive use-case. I don't think that's the world we live in.

------
sidcool
I think the current version of Stadia is just the beginning. Eventually most
big techs will offer cloud gaming. It's going to be glitchy for some time. I
am very optimistic on the future of stadia. People giving negative reviews
seem to be missing the long term vision. I hope the naysaying does not
discourage Google, Microsoft or even Apple.

------
jancsika
omg what is with the slow scroll on that site? When I roll the mousewheel or
arrow down it moves so slow.

What could possibly cause a front-end designer to choose to slow down
scrolling like that?

omg the whole text is a giant link that takes me to the less readable twitter
feed.

------
mirimir
Actually, aren't Google Docs and Office 365 basically Sunray?

With a GUI, of course. But still ...

------
theseadroid
Car was not a product people wanted when they only wanted faster horses.

------
bobloblaw45
To be totally fair I hated the idea of steam when it first came out.

------
thrownaway954
is it just me? going to the website i can't seem to really find how you
purchase games, hook this thing up or even what the benefit is.

------
rogerkirkness
Stadia will clearly win, and people's stockholm syndrome about local consoles
will melt away the way it did for other rejections of cloud. Local compute
will become a niche.

------
ptah
Sunray but for Linux would be awesome Linuxray

------
scotth
I want it. And now I have it. And I like it.

------
dmtroyer
::yawn::

I get the point, but this is mostly conjecture.

------
est
News at 11: PCI out performs fiber connection over public Internet

------
RockmanX
if google says you want it, you better want it

------
scotth
I want it.

------
762236
The author means that she doesn't want it. I want Stadia and everything that
it brings.

