
Has GeForce Now Quietly Killed Google Stadia? - MikusR
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-has-geforce-now-quietly-killed-google-stadia
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Crosseye_Jack
Thought Fuck it, I'll fire it up.

The website account page keeps saying "Your order is still in progress. Try
refreshing after a few minutes" (Even as I type this) but once I got the order
confirmation email I just downloaded the local client and installed it.

First It needs C+P support. It's a pain in the arse to type randomly generated
passwords into the remote game client but at least it seems to remember my
login details so that might only be a pain in the arse once.

The local client doesn't seem to have the ability to scan my local machine for
games nor query stream or battle.net for my games. I had to manually search
for a game I was interested in playing.

Picked Overwatch cause I play that a fair bit after searching for a few other
titles and came up blank. I normally get around 20ms lag playing locally but
on their servers I was getting 50ms. Game client (GeForce Now Client) says I
have a 8ms ping to their servers.

It might of just been my personal "feeling" about it but there was some input
lag. In OW if you press melee your character will punch right away even if it
takes 20ms for that response to hit the server, but ovb I had to wait for that
action to leave my machine, get rendered and get sent back to me before I saw
it here.

Played a round on the arcade and I felt off my normal game, but if I only
played using the service I would prob get used to it.

Its a nice idea and if you only play single player games or not so competitive
multiplayer games like OW I can see a use for it esp if you don't want a
gaming rig but atm its not for me.

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NikolaeVarius
Standard "No" response to article title asking a question applies just fine
here.

~~~
deminature
>Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no -
Ian Betteridge

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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Mindwipe
I don't really think cloud gaming has a market in my lifetime anyway (the
economics seem desperately broken and there are multiple usability issues that
are not plausibly overcome), but certainly Stadia looks an extremely bad
proposition in comparison.

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saber6
Edge computing (<5ms from your location) may be able to make this a reality
for people close to populated areas.

~~~
setr
I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently, and more
elegantly (with additional side-benefits, like being able to upsell on food,
and perhaps even creating social interaction) than cloud-gaming will for a
very long time.

It's not clear to me why it never picked up in the US.

~~~
technofiend
>I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently

For your definition of efficient, maybe. As a strawman, for the father who
wants to get in a few minutes of gaming now that the kids are asleep and can't
or won't spend the money on a high-end gaming rig capable of playing modern
day AAA games, Stadia is the answer. He can start a game in less time that it
takes to drive to the nearest pc cafe. Assuming his wife will let him leave to
do so. There's no comparison in terms of convenience or efficiency.

The target market isn't really twitch gamers sitting on super-high-end
machines playing all hours of the night and naturally they're derisive of
Stadia because it isn't meant for them. Stadia is meant for casual / semi-
casual gamers who don't want to invest in up to date hardware but still want
to play modern games.

If you want to understand why PC Cafes didn't take off I'd argue the reasons
are similar to why Netflix, et al have killed the movie theatre industry in
the US. At-home convenience is preferred to a communal experience particularly
when costs come in to play.

~~~
LeoNatan25
For that dad, the consoles are a much better solution. No dependency on
internet, much lower response time, much larger game catalog.

~~~
technofiend
Loading update 1 of 23...

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aiddun
The biggest draw of GeForce Now over Stadia for me is that I can still play my
existing Steam library and don't have to buy new copies of the same games.
That, for me, is a dealbreaker.

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maest
I have both Stadia and GFN.

Stadia is straight up unplayable on my wired internet connection.

GFN works fine. I've gone through Prey 2, The Witcher 3, We Happy Few, The
Witness and a couple of other titles on NVidia's service.

It's pretty good to be honest, however, some caveats: 1\. Note how all those
titles are single player. I don't think competitive multiplayer games will
properly catch on platforms like GFN/Stadia, mostly because of the input
latency hindering you in a competitive game. I've tried DotA2 and the input
delay is noticeable . That being said, I see people talking about Modern
Warfare and other shooters on r/geforcenow, so at least _some people_ are
playing these games, but, based on my experience, I have a strong prior that
most people won't enjoy competitive games.

2\. GFN really needs a better games search engine. My use case (which I
imagine isn't that uncommon) is that I buy games on Steam specifically to play
on GFN. However, there's no good flow to decide which game to play next.

So far, I've been using the full games list they used to display at
[https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/games/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-
gb/geforce-now/games/) but now that's been replaced by a search bar! So the
only possible flow now is to look a game up on steam, then manually check if
it's supported by GFN. Now, most games are not supported by GFN, so I have to
create a shortlist of games, then manually check each one and see if GFN
supports it, then make a purchasing decision.

GFN needs a first class search engine, where I can search supported games by
genre, year of release and maybe rating.

3\. The UI/UX is super janky and confusing in terms of how steam starts up
inside of GFN and how you have to install the game. It doesn't bother me that
much, but it does feel consumer unfriendly. I was hoping they'd improve the UX
before launch, but I guess not.

4\. Had a weird bug this one time in The Witcher 3. There are 2 expansion
packs you can buy for the game ('Blood and Wine' and 'Heart of Stone'). I do
not own them. However, a while ago, I logged onto GFN, started up TW3 and saw
a message congratulating me on having installed the expansion packs. I
shrugged and resumed my most recent load and, fair enough, new abilities had
been added in the game. I logged off after 2 hours of gameplay. The next time
I logged on, the expansions were gone and my recent saved games were unplayale
because they needed the expansion to load. Must have been some weird glitch
where the expansions were still installed from a different player. Weird.

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PaulHoule
Stadia smelled bad on the first day.

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stevefan1999
Stadia is dead on arrival due to its hard limit on Linux. I mean they want
game developers all to use Vulkan on Stadia, a much better and superior
graphics API, but still people got used to the inferior OpenGL/DirectX
immediate mode thinking, Stadia need to give time the masses to adapt the
better way of utilizing the GPU.

But I love to see how far Geforce Now could do. Maybe we could trigger a
sandbox escalation and use that juicy GPU as a render station/encoding
station, its just so cheap man.

~~~
m-p-3
I don't think it's dead, because a major hurdle for gaming on Linux is the
hardware heterogeneity, and the fact that there isn't the same volume of
potential customers on the end-user side.

However, Stadia brings a Linux platform with well-defined specs, which greatly
reduce the amount of configuration to test, like a game console.

Many game developers are already used to a Linux/Unix/BSD-like environment if
they develop for the PlayStation and the Switch, so I think they still stand a
good chance.

On the topic of Nvidia, I'm glad they're jumping with some competition.

