
Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service - valgaze
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18271702/google-stadia-cloud-gaming-service-announcement-gdc-2019
======
justfor1comment
I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire
experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The
game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your
network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I
expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game
will continue before the lag started. This was specifically a problem when
playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would
say something like "Go to the * lag * and meet * lag *" and then I had no idea
what I had to do next. Lag was still a rare thing during my experience. It's
just that when it occurred the timing was unfortunate.

~~~
derefr
How do you picture your hypothetical vision of things working on the server
side? Naively using buffering would make the input stream desync from the
output stream. "Input prediction" works well enough when a game supports it,
but lag would reappear for titles where the game doesn't. A general solution
(for games with no input prediction) would require you to run the game in an
x86 emulator with save-state + rewind support, such that network stutter could
be translated to micro-rewinds of the game's VM; and even that wouldn't work
if the game was multiplayer.

I could see games being able to signal "there is no input during this
cutscene, so it can be buffered at the client." But for everything besides
cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work like a VoIP call (hard-
realtime), doesn't it?

~~~
Wowfunhappy
But for everything besides cutscenes, game streaming essentially has to work
like a VoIP call (hard-realtime), doesn't it?

I imagine most music, and some during-gameplay dialogue, could be buffered at
the client. I'd expect sound effects to be the only audio that needs to be
super low latency. Maybe certain dialogue too, _if_ the speaker is visible on
screen.

This alone might alleviate a lot of the GP's problems, since most audio
wouldn't cut out. That can make a huge perceptual difference.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Ugh, I'm past the edit window and forgot to put a '>' before that first
sentence. I was quoting, not plagiarizing, promise!

------
b_tterc_p
Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the
gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business
model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further
drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More
accessible but worse content.

Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model.

The cost per user will vary drastically by the amount they play and how
computationally demanding it is. I just don’t see it being feasible without
personalized cost. Looking forward to paying minimum cost for minimum graphics
too.

~~~
ssully
I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription
services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others
like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly
subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games).

The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I
tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past winter. It worked
well and was impressive, but I have a good internet connection with a 1TB cap.
I have friends with much worse speeds and harsher caps and I am not sure if
this would be viable for them.

I am more concerned about 'physical' gaming being phased out. I doubt Stadia
will do this soon, but I like building a new computer every 4 years for
playing games. Maybes it's something I won't actually miss(like how I don't
miss CDs for music), but it remains to be seen.

~~~
fileeditview
F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing
that could happen to gaming.

~~~
jdhn
For some people, the grind is the main attraction, especially if it's well
balanced. Look at Path of Exile, that's one hell of a grindy game and people
absolutely adore it.

~~~
fhood
Is the grind an integral part of the gameplay, flow and pacing of the game?
Fine.

Is the grind a way to slow progression in order to make micro-payments more
desirable? Fuck. That.

~~~
ajacksified
Or worse, a hybrid like Assassin's Creed Odyssey: a $60+ game that gets super
grindy, but reminds you that you can opt into micro-payments to get a little
experience or coin boost...

I really enjoyed it for the first 20 hours or so.

~~~
bitL
Morrowind was way more grindy than Odyssey (make 50 steps, a monster attacks
you, repeat until the end of game). Odyssey just made all enemies within +/-2
levels of your own character, contrary to Origins, where levels were preset
for each area.

~~~
Noumenon72
I downloaded two mods pretty much instantly for Morrowind: no cliff racers and
being able to run without losing stamina. Saves uncountable hours.

------
zarriak
I really don't understand why people here aren't talking about the real
underlying principle of this service. Google has captured the education and
cheap laptop space with chromebooks. This is the logical extension of that
software. Sure they will eventually combine chromeos and android but this is
one more step in the direction of everything happening inside of your web
browser.

The entire reason this is happening is because Google has successfully
captured what once was the holy grail of markets, education, and is doing
things like this to keep people on chromebooks.

ChromeOS could be as important than Android. Especially with the Windows 7
extended life support coming up, Google has less than 4 years to convince
people to transfer to their platform instead of Windows 10. I know it seems
heretical to imply that it will happen but I think this is a good example that
Google considers it not only a real possibility but something that they might
actually have a good chance of being able to pull off.

The most important thing to realize is that they are focusing on gamers as a
trial, the people who are price sensitive and who have to move first off of
Windows 7 since they can't pay for extended support even if they wanted it.
They can then continue this into the workplace. This is a brilliant move by
Google.

~~~
ergo14
Unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS is only used in US schools on a wide scale.

~~~
noir_lord
The only Chromebook I've seen anywhere is the nice one I bought my mum for
Christmas year before last, she loves it and I've had no issues supporting it
(like not a single one, she uses it constantly as well).

I've got a school age stepson nothing there either.

~~~
superfrank
Give it a couple years and they will be everywhere. I used to work for a
company that sold a monitoring and filtering product for school computers.

It's only been in the last two or three years that the ecosystem around them
has really matured enough that they can compete with Windows machines and
iPads on anything other than price. With the way schools' budgets work, we've
really only just passed the early adopter stage.

~~~
pjmlp
Not with the hardware division being downsized.

~~~
superfrank
Are you referring to Google's hardware division? If you are that doesn't
really mean much.

Most schools aren't buying fleets of Pixelbooks. They're buying chromebooks
from companies like Acer and Asus which make devices that retail in the
$200-400 range.

~~~
pjmlp
Yeah, but someone needs to actually develop ChromeOS, without Pixelbooks
management might decide to focus elsewhere.

And right now from the outside it feels like there is a ramping internal
politics going on with ChromeOS, Android, PWA, Flutter, Fuchsia, Kotlin, Dart
teams, with upper management giving free reign and let the best win kind of
stuff.

~~~
superfrank
> Yeah, but someone needs to actually develop ChromeOS, without Pixelbooks
> management might decide to focus elsewhere.

I really, really doubt that. I don't think you understand how ubiquitous
Chromebooks are becoming to the education space. Last I heard, in the US, 60%+
of all school provided computers are Chromebooks. School SysAdmins love them
because they're dirt cheap and can be provisioned quickly.

From Google's perspective it's great too. Between Google Classroom and the way
chromebook device management works, students have to have a google account to
be able to go to school. There's rules on what data can collect, but still,
kids are forced into the Google ecosystem at a young age.

ChromeOS doesn't need the pixelbook to survive, it provides an enormous amount
of value on its own.

> And right now from the outside it feels like there is a ramping internal
> politics going on with ChromeOS, Android, PWA, Flutter, Fuchsia, Kotlin,
> Dart teams

100% agree there. I've been hearing for the past 3 or 4 years that Android and
ChromeOS were going to be merged and nothing has yet to come of it. It seems
like even Google doesn't know what is going on there.

~~~
pjmlp
Check the worldwide market share, Chromebooks are less than GNU/Linux
desktops.

Being only king of US school system isn't something that holds long term in a
product roadmap.

~~~
superfrank
> Being only king of US school system isn't something that holds long term in
> a product roadmap.

Dude... I'm sorry but you are so wrong. Like I said originally, I literally
just left this industry after working in it for years.

US spends more money on education than pretty much any other nation, both per
student and as a total dollar amount. The reason the numbers are so low world
wide is because chromebooks in education are a relatively new concept.
Everyone has been going after the big fish, which is the US.

Additionally, they way you need to handle student data in the US is fairly
consistent across state lines, which means you don't need to customize your
solution very much to be able to sell to all 60 million students. Once you go
overseas, you'd need to sell across multiple country lines to be able to find
a pool of students that big (unless you're targeting China, Russia, or India
which all have their own issues).

If you don't believe me, here's a blog post from a few years ago where google
literally say ChromeOS is here to stay and then they focus heavily on it's
benefits to education. [https://blog.google/products/chrome/chrome-os-is-here-
to-sta...](https://blog.google/products/chrome/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay/)

Even if you want to ignore all of that, I don't think you realize how much of
a PR nightmare it would be if Google just stopped supporting ChromeOS right
now. Schools have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying into this
ecosystem. For schools that buy at the district level, it's in the millions.
Most schools/districts don't have the budget to just replace all their
computers overnight. Shutting down ChromeOS would pretty much fuck all digital
learning in a lot of school districts for years to come.

PS. I'm pretty sure iOS's adoption numbers US & worldwide (not in schools,
just total consumer adoption) match up pretty closely with Chromebooks, so
there goes your idea that only dominating the US market isn't a viable
business strategy.

~~~
pjmlp
Should I list all products that Google has written blogs about they being here
to stay?

~~~
superfrank
Sure. I'd love a list of all the products Google has canceled (not merged into
another offering) after coming out on their official Google blog and saying
they are here to stay.

------
AcerbicZero
Cool.

Unfortunately, any and all trust I had in google maintaining its services for
more than a few years is long gone. I have games from ~10+ years ago I can
still download, update, and play via Steam; What are the chances this lasts
more than 3 years? In addition to that obvious concern, I'd also be very
hesitant to let Google have any control over my gameplay experience. The
downsides of the gaming as a service just have no appeal to me, although I'm
sure it would be functional in certain generes, for a certain type of gamer.

Regardless of how many streamers are playing Skyrim in their browser, I don't
think I'll be joining them.

~~~
aylmao
This is actually something that worries me, long term. There's people who
still play 30+ year old games— you can still buy a used NES and play classic
Tetris if you wanted.

Mario Kart on the Wii still works. Online play is broken though because
Nintendo has no interest in running old servers to keep a service in a long
discontinued game running.

If any games are developed solely for Stadia, will they disappear if the
platform disappears? Even if it doesn't, will they be playable in perpetuity,
or will Google shrug breaking changes if it's for games that are over N years
old, and have under K users?

~~~
bitpush
I think most things we buy have a life. When I pay $$ to get shoes, I dont
expect that to run forever. Sure, it might be nice but I _understand_ it might
lose its life after a while. We expect software similarly to run forever, but
I think we need to start associating life against it.

Now if a shoe only works for a week, I'm not going to buy it. If it works for
a year, sure I'll take it.Similarly for a digital good (phone, computer,
software) we need to come up with a baseline on what the acceptable number for
life is. It cant be Infinity, but it should be reasonable.

~~~
aylmao
The big difference here I think is for most things we buy, we're mostly
control over their longevity. I can take care of something and have it last
longer.

This all ties into ownership. If I own something I have control over it, so I
can re-sell it if I'd ever like to re-coup some value or let someone else make
use of it. I can lend it to a friend, and have it back to use or lend again. I
can give it as a gift to a friend or family member. I can keep it indefinitely
as a memory. All of these are reasons why some people still have a NES,
GameCube, etc. It's probably not that they've been playing on the console for
30 years. They either kept the NES they owned as kids, or bought one second-
hand for the nostalgia, or got it as a gift from someone who knows how much
they like classic games, etc.

There are still have tournaments for games on old consoles. Old games are
perfectly good games— they don't have the same wow factor, but they are as fun
today as they have always been. Will future "classic games" be lost to
history, or available only when a publisher decides to monetize the nostalgia
of the public with a re-release?

------
ilamont
Some may remember an earlier streaming game service, OnLive, that crashed and
burned spectacularly: [https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-
report](https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3274739/onlive-report) plus HN
discussions here:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=onlive&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

I saw the OnLive demo. It was very slick, and the concept seemed more than
viable, it was inevitable.

~~~
KallDrexx
OnLive was both before the Cloud era (where they manually had to maintain many
points of presence that were near consumers and they didn't have the money to
do it near what Google, Amazon and Microsoft are able to do) and before GPUs
were really mainstream for in normal data center servers to the scale this
type of service requires.

~~~
ehsankia
Key quote from the linked article:

> the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and
> only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide

They were burning through all of their money because they highly overestimated
the audience. That's one of the main problems the cloud was made to solve.

~~~
Const-me
This particular cloud will only solve the problem if google will find a way to
sell the time of these AMD GPUs to someone else.

Traditional GPGPU customers, and machine learners, usually use CUDA instead of
OpenCL / VulkanCompute / DirectCompute. At least from my position is looks
that way. I’m a freelance developer and my clients are picking CUDA in ~75%
cases. The rest is DirectCompute, if computing on client PCs and hardware
compatibility is required.

------
pier25
Sounds great on paper but I'm skeptical.

Not only you will need a really good internet connection and wifi, but also
being close to a Stadia data center. The best possible case scenario will
probably be a latency of around 50 ms, but I'm guessing the average will be
closer to 100 ms which is too much for many types of games (specially
competitive games the streamers play).

Heck, even streaming in your local network isn't such a great experience these
days.

I love the idea, but realistically we are still very far away from streaming
games replacing consoles or PCs. Many companies have tried (Nvidia, Sony, etc)
but no one has succeeded for the simple reason that latency is not there yet.

~~~
nsfmc
i tried this and found it to be pretty satisfying. i played entirely on a
macbook while traveling during my winter vacation. It worked surprisingly well
even with mixed wifi, i would compare it to the experience you get from using
PS4 Remote Play or Steam Link over ethernet.

The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the
above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're circle
strafing around a target and the _entire_ screen is constantly redrawing). I
thought it was great for playing a game casually: i.e. story mode. Lots of
people use that phrase as a put-down, but the system is well suited for a game
like ACO where you are mostly being tactical, planning, exploring, and moving
the story forward.

I think of a game like 2016 hitman: i hesitated to install 30G of it to my
ps4, but if you told me i could drop into the demo/prelude in less than a
minute, even at 720, it's a very appealing concept for somebody like me that
plays video games the way other people watch netflix while they're eating
dinner: basically whenever i have some downtime and want to dip into a story
or mechanic i like for ~30 mins.

~~~
beefsack
> Steam Link over ethernet

Note that even Steam Link over Ethernet is too laggy to play KB/M FPS at any
serious level - the input lag makes FPS almost unplayable.

I can see the growth of services like these, especially with more gamers being
unable to access dedicated hardware, but there will always be a niche for
dedicated hardware. The only way I think they could solve that problem with
streaming is using some sort of hybrid streaming approach where some of the UI
is remote and some is local and they could do client side simulation somehow
for input.

~~~
nsfmc
i perhaps have diminished standards, but i found steam link over ethernet to
be totally serviceable for playing through most of hyper light drifter on a
controller. the input lag was fairly minimal and the computer was already
quite long in the tooth, but to your point, i wasn't getting 60fps, that's for
sure (probably realistically it was a firm 30fps).

i don't doubt that consoles will remain useful, but i think that services like
this will satisfy a pretty legit niche for a vast swath of games that aren't
really dependent on low latency input (i.e. puzzle/turn
based/rpg/simulators/board game conversions) and that are often 'discovered'
by people finding letsplays on youtube.

for some variety of mmorpgs, i can imagine devs being excited about the
reduced surface area for cheating/exploits. for somebody like me that uses a
mac, i'm looking forward to playing a version of Civ that doesn't cause my
laptop to sound like it's about ready to take flight. i don't think the idea
is meant to replace consoles, though more, it seems like a way to grease the
wheels of commerce and get people playing (and buying) games that they've been
traditionally priced out of because of the not-insignificant startup cost of
building and maintaining a gaming pc/console.

------
kemonocode
So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm
thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another
year before it's taken behind the shed.

~~~
gipp
This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really
don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life.

Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are
another.

~~~
_bxg1
The difference is they launch high-profile, promising-the-moon projects and
put their full weight behind them, and then give up a couple short years later
for inscrutable reasons ([cough] Google Fiber [cough])

~~~
gipp
I don't see how their reasons are any more "inscrutable" than any other
company who cans failed products (all of them).

~~~
_bxg1
Google Fiber hadn't truly failed, it just turned out to require more work than
they'd hoped, so they just said "never mind" to the cities they'd led along
with big promises: [https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-
as-...](https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-
experi-1833244198)

They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it, casually changing
course on a whim and leaving masses of people spinning in their wake. Just
look at how they've managed YouTube and its guidelines, bans, etc. Or the Play
Store and all of its debacles. Were I a game developer, I would never want to
be beholden to a Google gaming platform.

Case in point:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702)

~~~
jhall1468
> They lack the ability to commit to a space and cultivate it

That's because states, entrenched providers and in some cases local
governments made every inch of work cost a mile of time. The cost was making
Fiber a non-starter... ISP's benefited from nationwide networks largely funded
by governments, then used their monopoly influence to prevent any competition,
and "hired" state governments to enforce their monopolies.

But we can hand-wave all of that away and claim it was Google's lack of
commitment.

~~~
_bxg1
I don't deny that ISP's make it far harder than it needs to be. They make it
impossible for small upstarts. But Google, of all companies, had plenty of
resources to make it happen if they really wanted to.

~~~
jhall1468
Blowing millions of dollars on an investment that will take decades to pay off
isn't good business. Google decided, rightfully, that the answer was webpass.
It's a better revenue generator, and has considerably lower barrier to entry.

~~~
_bxg1
The point is they overcommit and then back out instead of doing more careful
due-diligence. Google Glass is an example of the right way to explore a new
product; most of their ventures aren't so conservative.

------
holoduke
The reason why these kind of initiatives fail is because they do not solve a
real problem or issue. The average Joe doesn't need another subscription just
to play some games. Having a console where you buy games is more than enough.
I also silently hope that Google will fail hard with this one. Since they are
the worst publisher on earth with absolutely no compassion towards its
developers relationships.

~~~
pergadad
$400 for a current console and $60 or so for a recent game. Assuming you buy
the next gen after 3 years or so there's quite a budget invested in the
gamer's part - a streaming service at maybe $20/month that gives you access to
recent titles doesn't look that bad in comparison.

~~~
root_axis
Even with a very conservative 3 year lifespan of a console (5 years is closer
to reality) 20 dollars a month over 3 years is 700+ dollars and at the end of
the day you don't own anything. It seems like a pretty bad deal overall.

~~~
alexandre_m
Video games and consoles don't have much lasting value, so it's not a good
investment (except for some collectors).

If you mean to keep a copy and be able to play it again anytime in the future,
then yes I'm with you. However, most of the games are either thrash or doesn't
offer much replay value, which means that once you're done with it that will
stack up somewhere and collects dust.

One point though is you can trade games that you own, which has some appeal.

People used to bring the same argument for music streaming vs buying a CD or
digital copy. See where that brought us.

Convenience wins most of the time.

------
jakamau
I played with Project Stream during the technical beta and I would say it
cleared the hurdle of "good enough." The resolution was good and the input lag
was normally small enough to be compensated for or go unnoticed.

Since the majority of this venture's hardware appears to be in-house and, I
assume, easily re-purposed for other core services I'm less cynical about the
half-life of this product.

I have no intention of buying the controller but if this let's me stream to my
existing hardware with minimal friction I would be interested. If they
structure it as a monthly subscription with a robust catalog they would
probably get my money.

I'm curious to see what happens.

------
m_ke
Google is really flexing on people here. With 5G this will be the future of
all computing and only google and amazon have the data centers to make it
work.

Sundar opened up the event talking about deep learning, I wouldn't be
surprised if they used this platform as a way to train their RL models against
humans or on data generated by the users.

The youtube integration is also a shot at twitch.

~~~
eitally
I'd argue MSFT does, too, and they've already cleared a HUGE hurdle with XBOX
(the hardware + game ecosystem) & XBOX Live (social engagement).

The opportunity for Google is huge, but it will require sustained, strong,
cross-functional execution that can be challenging for such an engineering
driven, compartmentalized organization.

~~~
m_ke
Yeah, but they control all of the platforms to make this work.

With Android, Chrome, Chromecast, Youtube and GCP they have all of the pieces
in place.

~~~
anth_anm
I wish anti-trust was a thing.

~~~
diminoten
I don't, getting that many different companies on the same page would be
basically impossible.

------
jpambrun
And the games will run on Linux using Vulkan. I find that pretty awesome.

~~~
mtgx
Looks like Fuchsia is a year years too late to be used for this, but I guess
it wouldn't be too difficult to switch it out later on.

Still a great thing for Linux and Vulkan. Too bad Sony refuses to support them
on its PS consoles.

~~~
pjmlp
Just like with OpenGL, Vulkan is not like Vulkan.

Plenty of extensions to choose from.

[https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php](https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php)

------
minimaxir
Other comments have suggested this might fail like OnLive/Nvidia/PlayStation
Now because the economics of streaming on the business end don't work out.

This case is different. Stadia is the first video game streaming product _made
by a cloud computing_ company, and also a cloud computing company which
developed a video codec (VP9) just for high quality/low latency streaming.

The economics are much different on all sides; it all depends on how Google
prices the service. (it'll be curious how Microsoft's xCloud competes. Maybe
Amazon will get in on the fun too.)

~~~
holoduke
It will fail because developers will think twice before willing to depend on
another evil ecosystem from Google.

~~~
hiccuphippo
Developers will put their games where the users are. Right now most developers
deploy to PC, XBox and PlayStation (and some to Switch) what's the cost of one
more platform to deploy to vs the extra sales it can produce?

------
cheeyoonlee
I also participated in the beta and was quite impressed. In my case, there was
no lag and instead, when connection was poorer, the stream quality would get
lowered (i.e like Youtube - 1080p to 460p). I think this can be completely
resolved with a solid connection.

Speaking on Google leveraging Youtube for Strada, I also think this could be
an amazing affiliate opportunity for game developers and content creators.
Imagine watching your favorite streamer (or I guess game reviewer) and with a
click of a button, without having to download, play the game right from your
browser (demo or full game). Great source of income for content creators,
great frictionless experience for viewers/consumers, and great tool for
developers.

~~~
holoduke
You mean a great place to loose another 30% of your income. A great place
where you are forced to implement Google play related shit. A place where you
can be expelled from the service based on wrong bot decisions. A place where
there is no human support. A place where only the big publishers are looked
after for. A place where indie developers are treated as shit. A place where
search algorithms are dubious. Yes that's what you can expect from a Google
stream service. Just as the playstore currently is.

~~~
ppseafield
Like Steam, but a little bit worse?

------
cwyers
More details are available here:

[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-hands-
on-with-google-stream-gdc-2019)

They have benchmarks and go into detail on how well it runs. I found this
interesting:

> "[It's] a complete port," Google's Phil Harrison told me. "[Ubisoft] built
> the game completely for Stadia and they're actually doing a talk at GDC
> about how they got their game up and running."

> In our earlier analysis, our impression was of a game that very, very
> closely mirrored the PC version running at 1080p resolution, with some
> elements upgraded beyond the console quality threshold defined by Xbox One
> X.

> "Correct, but they started from their main line on the consoles, it's not
> that they took the PC version and ported," Stadia VP Majd Bakar explains.
> "You can see that as the UI changes according to the controller you connect.
> I wouldn't call it a console port, I'd recommend going to the talk. It's
> going to be run jointly between Google and the team that did the work for
> Project Stream and they will talk about how they did it and the work stream
> they followed."

------
gwern
> Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game
> developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a
> machine learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply
> drop an image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style
> throughout.

This is a fascinating testament to the rate at which deep learning can run. If
you think back to 2014-2016 (less than 5 years ago), one of the common things
people said was that style transfer would be really cool to apply to video
games or video, and then the middlebrow dismissal was 'style-transferring a
single frame Gatys et al 2014 style takes a Titan hours so [simple math] shows
we can't style transfer in realtime for decades, duh'.

But, GPUs got better. Deep learning got better. Style transfer got better.
Now, here in 2019, realtime style transfer is not just old hat (Facebook
launched a realtime style transfer video app for smartphones years ago), but
Google is announcing a service to stream countless hours of style-transferred
video games to potentially _millions_ of players.

------
geddy
Does anyone even consider playing on the go anymore? I will be 200 years old
by the time you can stream 60fps to a device sitting on a bus on my way to
work.

Streaming may have a place in the future, but if it's the only option, then
consider me a full-time retro gamer.

I already despise the fact that the masses voted to kill ownership of games,
and now it's going straight to killing "rental licenses" as well, putting all
of the power of entertainment and commerce in the hands of, essentially, two
companies: Google and Amazon.

Ya'll voted for these massive monopolies, really looking forward to the
dystopia.

~~~
cwe
5G is on the way, and will enable this stuff anywhere. MWC had tons of demos
of 4k, multiplayer, and VR games streaming via 5G. A lot depends on
how/when/if it's all rolled out, but unless you're currently 194 years old,
it's gonna be a lot sooner than you think.

~~~
saberience
If 5G is anything like LTE, it will work some of the time, cut out at other
times, rapidly degrade into crap quality before coming back to full speed at
random intervals. And bear in mind I live in Orange County, CA, hardly the
backwoods.

We are a long, long, long way away from having constant, fast, reliable, high-
bit rate connections for mobile devices.

(Note, I am on an IPhone XR in OC on ATT)

------
sidcool
The computer scientist in me is giddy with excitement. If it is as good as it
sounds, we are in a new age of gaming. Kudos Google.

~~~
saberience
So, I work in the games industry and I don't think this will be successful.
This has been tried before (multiple times), gamers haven't wanted streaming
services. PC gamers already have Steam and this doesn't offer anything
compelling over using Steam, and more casual gamers are playing on Ps4 or
Switch or mobile. Also, the hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the
latency associated with playing on remote servers.

Google isn't a name that people associate with gaming or gamers, buit they do
have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two. I wouldn't
trust Google to still be supporting "Stadia" in 5 years time, whereas I do
know Steam will still be there.

Also, Google's reputation for "do no evil" has been rapidly eroded in recent
times and people are more and more wary about giving this company any more
personal data than they already do. Contrast this with Steam, a private
company that gamers trust with their data.

I think Google is once again reaching here into a space too late and without
anything really compelling to make people switch away from existing
Xbox/Windows/Steam ecosystems.

Edit: One other additional aspect to this: it doesn't really matter how fast
Google's servers can stream the data, most people's ISPs do not have great
consistent connections. Hell, I have Google Fibre at home and occasionally I
get issues streaming 1080p Netflix (stuttering etc). Most people have services
with bandwidth caps and do not get consistent enough speeds to support
streaming games. At my parent's house in the UK, the situation is even worse
with lower caps and very often there are disruptions in the connection and so
the Netflix stream will turn into a blocky mess for 10 seconds or so.

~~~
jpambrun
I am a "gamer", I have a 2080Ti and I hope it's the last 1500$ gaming
equipment I ever have to buy. It sits idle 95%+ of the time and it is tied to
only one of the all the screens in my house.

I want this to work.

~~~
crysin
Curious: Why'd you go with a 2080Ti and not just a 2080 or 1080? Did you just
want the RTX support or did you just want the absolute best possible GPU for
gaming regardless of price?

~~~
beenBoutIT
I can't answer for OP, but I went with a 2080ti because it's cheaper than
purchasing a 2060/2070/2080 now and buying a 2080ti later. If price wasn't an
issue I'd have gone with the best possible Titan RTX.

~~~
twiceaday
That doesn't make much sense. If you buy a 2070 now in a few years the
successor 2170 (or whatever) will be more powerful than the current 2080ti and
cheaper.

Unless you have unlimited budget I find that buying cheaper cards more often
will give you better average performance.

~~~
frankchn
The pace has slowed down somewhat. A 2080 (discounting the DLSS and RTX stuff)
is about as fast as a 1080Ti, a 2070 is about as fast as a plain 1080, etc...

~~~
twiceaday
That doesn't really change my argument. If the pace slowed down then a x70
will last longer too.

------
fixermark
I'm concerned about how this will work for game libraries.

If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the
cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware
target does not change.

Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine)
of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they
attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built?
And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or
dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure
indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull
those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more
popular games?

This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a
beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-
installed and run on my own new hardware.

~~~
hex12648430
Not to mention the frequent horror stories of people having their account
closed by google, often by mistake. There's even a link about a story like
that right now on the front page. [1] Good luck getting in touch with a human
and get your saved games back if that happens to you.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702)

------
hex12648430
I really hope the latency we've seen in the live demo was due to the venue's
poor internet connection because otherwise this will make some games
unplayable. They mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available and that it
would be a good benchmark for the service's latency but I'm waiting to see
some independent reviews to believe it.

Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt
people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices
(of games or subscription) are extremely competitive.

The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux
and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.

~~~
ehsankia
Latency: Project Stream has been in beta since January, and there are a lot of
testimonials out there. Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the
latency seems to be imperceptible, assuming a good connection.

Target audience: Probably people who used to own consoles/gaming rigs, but no
longer do for a variety of reasons. The fact that you can play anywhere and on
any device (chromecast, phone, laptop), makes it competitive with devices such
as Nintendo Switch of Nvidia Shield.

~~~
dragontamer
> Other than fighting games and fast pace shooters, the latency seems to be
> imperceptible, assuming a good connection.

There are certainly games out there which would respond poorly to latency and
jitter. Play Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, but randomly jitter your inputs by
10ms to 20ms here and there, and that would make it far more frustrating
experience.

Its bad enough that those punishing games can kill you quickly with a single
mistake. But when you're fighting the controller and the lag, its that much
worse.

I think streaming would be definitely fine for games like RPGs, or slower-
paced adventure games (ex: Skyrim). But this will never be acceptable for
Cuphead, Overcooked, Hollow Knight, or Touhou (or Jamestown). I'm willing to
be proven wrong of course, but I've generally felt that even TV-lag is enough
to make me rage-quit some setups when playing these games...

And TV-lag is consistent. WiFi based internet lag is jittery by nature. The
question of what to do with dropped packets or delayed packets is an important
design choice, and I don't think there's a correct answer for these twitch
games like Cuphead.

\---------

Fighting game players are so crazy about latency that they don't even use
local Bluetooth controllers (!!) The serious fighting game community will
likely never accept something like this solution.

The more casual, but still relatively twitchy, "hard games" players (Cuphead)
is what I'm curious about. Whether or not the latency is acceptable for that
community.

~~~
Slippery_John
I can't reliably play Dark Souls via Steam Link over a wired connection that's
less than ten feet long. Google may have some special sauce that improves the
situation but like you I doubt it would be sufficient for all games.

~~~
fcarraldo
I hear this a lot, and this is typically a network optimization problem.
Networking is hard, and "a cable with enough bandwidth" is only part of the
issue. How many hops between devices? Are any devices in the chain wireless?
What router are you using? How many other devices are connected to it, and
what kind of load are they putting on it?

FWIW, I frequently stream PS4 and PC games, wirelessly, over 802.11ac and it's
more than playable. Dark Souls III, and even Overwatch, is playable over my
network.

------
ron0c
Google really promoting how it's better to develop for than anything else
since they can constantly upgrade the hardware. How long before Stadia
exclusive content?

~~~
Klathmon
They aren't the first or the only one doing this. Crackdown 3 already semi-
famously uses Microsoft's cloud systems to do some physics processing in the
cloud and not on the client.

Stadia might be a lot easier for devs to code against since _everything_ is in
the "cloud", rather than having to split where the processing happens
specifically, and so we might see more exclusives there because of that, but
MS and friends aren't going to just fall over and give up if this ends up
working.

~~~
djhworld
> Crackdown 3 already semi-famously uses Microsoft's cloud systems to do some
> physics processing in the cloud and not on the client.

Is that true though? I remember in the early Don Mattrick days of Microsoft
they were heavily pushing the whole cloud physics thing but ever since then
that has been swept under the carpet or heavily downplayed.

~~~
Klathmon
I haven't played it myself nor have I done a ton of research, but Crackdown 3
just came out recently, and I heard them talking about how important the cloud
aspect of it is to enable the dynamic destruction they have in their
multiplayer stuff.

The link below from late 2018 talks about it a bit

[https://www.windowscentral.com/inside-crackdown-3s-azure-
clo...](https://www.windowscentral.com/inside-crackdown-3s-azure-cloud-
powered-destruction)

~~~
mikewhy
From people who've actually played it, it's nothing like what they hyped up or
demoed way back when.

------
Ronsenshi
This is not a first service that tries to do that. And as before it all ends
up with how close the gamer is to the server node, how stable user connection
and whether connection is metered or not.

I just pinged my google.com server node - and it's over 16ms. Which means no
60fps.

~~~
CountHackulus
No, it just means your input latency will be longer than 16ms.

~~~
Ronsenshi
60+ tick multiplayer servers are a thing.

Besides - low input latency means you get response that is not exactly what
you are doing in the moment.

------
odensc
As someone who participated in the beta, it's not as good as they make it
sound. The compression of the video stream is quite bad in any slightly
intensive scenario, the latency is certainly noticeable, frame drops every
once in a while, and in general it's nowhere near as fluid as a local gaming
experience.

I have gigabit fiber and quite a good machine, so I'm certain that's not the
issue. Maybe some of these issues could be solved by closer edge servers, but
it'll be a while till it reaches the level where you can play FPS', etc.

------
fzeroracer
From a preservationist angle, this would be a terrible path for games to go
down. Any exclusive games released using Stadia would be impossible to play
once the servers shut down because users don't have any access to the
software.

Even if MMOs shut down, there is usually an opportunity to write a new server
by reverse engineering the client. I can't really support anything about game
streaming unless it was tied into an actual game you could install or play
without relying on their servers to exist.

------
_bxg1
I'm skeptical they'll be able to overcome the latency problem. At some point
there's a hard cap that only infrastructure can help with - not software - and
Google's already given up on rolling out their own infrastructure.

~~~
shereadsthenews
Google has more of "their own infrastructure" than any ISP you could name or
any of the transit networks that people think of as "tier 1".

~~~
_bxg1
But it's not an ISP. Presumably this gaming service's primary market isn't
Google's own data center employees.

------
ilovecaching
I did the beta, and I think the service is great, but I used 300GB of data in
two days of play. There's no way this is going to fly when most people are
under a TB cap.

------
Tiktaalik
If this sort of thing becomes ubiquitous RIP game preservation efforts.

------
LaserToy
Former PSN eng here. So, it will be very interesting to see what is going to
happen. I feel we were not very successful with Playstation Now. It requires a
lot of money to even start scaling, you need a powerful (read expensive)
machine which can be fully utilized by just 1 AAA game. And for any
competitive gaming experience - latency is a big one. If you want to play
multiplayer as you going to have latency to Google's machine and then to the
game server.

Anyway, I'm not in gaming business any more, so I wish G good luck in
disrupting the industry. It is just they were not really that sucsessful in
disrupting anything they didn't acquire (read copied and tried to improve),
but maybe this time...

~~~
dougmwne
What do you think of Google's controller? Having it bypass the
laptop/chromecast and connect directly to wifi seems like it will save some
latency, but how much?

~~~
Corrado
The controller was the most exciting part of the announcement, for me. I think
it's a really smart move to connect the controller directly to the network and
not through the "console". It makes the controller a first class citizen and
gives it the ability to do all kinds of neat things.

------
ulucs
Honestly, there's got to be a better solution than full-on streaming. Has
anyone seen the demo where there's >2 seconds of input lag? Even with around a
0.1 input lag, what can I play comfortably? Any kind of action games or
platformers are out of question. Ironically, those games are the ones which
usually demand high processing power. Most other games are toaster-compatible
and I can run them without paying(?) Google a streaming premium.

I also like being able to play games when on the bus or the subway, so the
whole always-online thing is a bit of a bummer.

------
Bahamut
I wonder how the Google customer service experience here will be...

------
bluthru
One of the biggest reasons to install windows is gaming. If this takes off (or
enough games are released on linux as a byproduct) linux could gain a larger
install share.

~~~
buboard
.. or macOS

------
Paraesthetic
I give it a year and they kill it along with all the save files of their
users. Google can't be trusted on this one.

------
codexon
I participated in the beta. Everything was great except the graphics became
super grainy and pixelated when you rotated the camera or during high motion
scenes.

My download speed is 50 mbits and I had about 5 ping to the google servers.

I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this unless you live
downtown with 100+ mbit speeds.

~~~
ulkesh
> I don't think US internet infrastructure is ready for this.

This is a very fair point and should be emphasized. It's not only the
infrastructure, but the lack of Net Neutrality, the monopolies of many areas
to a single ISP, and data caps -- they're all hurdles in the US.

------
bovermyer
If this isn't laggy as all hell, it could be a game-changer.

...sorry.

------
ocdtrekkie
So, uh, the controller has a microphone, and connects directly to the Internet
over Wi-Fi. I guess it's nice this time they told us upfront?

Really curious what the network performance requirements would be for 4K or 8K
game streaming. Haven't heard them admit to that.

~~~
rc_hadoken
..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).

~~~
Klathmon
I wouldn't be so sure.

Competitive games already need to compensate for latency in the network. This
system technically won't have any "additional" latency, it will just move
where it happens.

The amount of time between you hitting a button and a server somewhere
registering the command and sending it to other players should be roughly the
same (or close enough not to matter all that much for the vast majority).

Sure, some games where local timing is everything won't work as well (Super
Smash Bros probably won't be able to be played on this system at the top
tier), but the vast majority of players and games won't ever need that kind of
millisecond precision.

~~~
flohofwoe
Latency hiding in "traditional" multiplayer games basically works by doing
computations for other players locally (even if it's as simple as dead
reckoning and extrapolating a few milliseconds into the 'future'), and only
apply corrections when this diverges too much from the server because of
network hick-ups. Unless Google invented some new magic, that's not possible
with a video stream (but hmm, who knows, maybe they have invented their own
'game-streaming video codec' with additional information for some sort of
2D-dead-reckoning for regions of the video frame... but my guess is they
simply don't care about latency).

~~~
theresistor
> 2D-dead-reckoning for regions of the video frame

That is, in fact, how video compressors work. It's called motion estimation.

~~~
eclipxe
Yep, if you did something where local controller input directly impacted the
motion vectors for macroblocks in a video frame...you could maybe hide some of
the latency, but that seems dubious...

------
gsich
Their live presentation already showed the input lag.

------
andrewmlevy
It's a smart move for Google to leverage their huge captive audience on
YouTube to drive adoption. With Amazon's similar position with AWS and Twitch
I'd be surprised if we didn't see a similar offering from them.

------
Animats
Any indication on how this ties in with the Google/Improbable deal for big-
world games? Those work better if all the clients are in the same data center,
a few microseconds apart.

This only works with Google web clients, such as Chrome, right. It may turn
out that all this is just a ploy to force everyone to use a Google web client,
giving Google total control over the online user experience. ("Browser" is so
last cen.) Then Google can exit games, except for putting ads in them and on
top of them.

------
mladen5
I sometimes casually play Fortnite over nVidia Geforce Now via xDSL over wifi.
And while i do entertain myself lag is hindering overall experience, at least
in FPS games.

------
bastawhiz
My immediate thought is that Google is going to be actually running the games
on hardware in edge data centers (to keep latency low). If you own a cloud
software business, you're likely looking for any revenue-driving excuse to
build out hundreds/thousands/etc of small DCs in every corner of the world.
Stadia revenue (or the promise of Stadia revenue) would pay to build out the
infra, and extra capacity could be sold off to GCloud customers.

~~~
lbotos
I like this thought, but if google can't build edge nodes because of:

\- GCP \- AdSense \- Gmail \- Internal CDN Needs

Then I don't think that Stadia would be a big push for doing so.

~~~
bastawhiz
They do already have at least _some_ edge presence. But my understanding is
that's largely been for distributing content, like YouTube. I imagine
storage/bandwidth at the edge are largely solved problems for Google.

Has Google needed to run code physically closer to the user up until now?
Likely not. Gmail/AdSense/etc. probably don't have [many] use cases where
putting compute physically closer to the user (versus physically closer to a
database replica) adds a ton of value.

With the advent of AI/ML, that's changing. Accurately recognizing speech,
recognizing people and objects in streaming video, translating text, etc.
likely don't require access to other resources, but the latency between the
server and the user is super important. Video games are essentially the
epitome of the use case: you're not going to need to bang out many queries
across the Google network to play a round of Splatoon, but every millisecond
of lag you can shave off, the more valuable your service becomes.

I could see Google selling cloud functions that execute within shouting
distance of the user. What would the round trip be? 30ms? This could be a play
by Google to take on Cloudflare workers.

------
djhworld
This is going to be so cool....if it works.

I wonder where the instances will be? Will they put them in their regions, or
will it be rolled out to their CDN POPs?

------
vernie
I enjoyed when the presenter said "there is basically no hardware acceleration
on [the Pixelbook] whatsoever." Roasted.

------
buro9
In London where the fastest internet available to me at my address in zone 2
is 12mb highly contended in the evening.

This isn't for everyone, clearly a bet for the future. But this is why Google
Fiber should have gone wider and international, or governments should pressure
telcos to build speeds massively in excess of demand.

So much is held back by a really bad last mile.

------
DanCarvajal
The key to me is that this is a console built for YouTube and that might be
its biggest selling point to a lot of people.

------
wurst_case
This is what I've seen everything trending towards for almost ten years now.
The next step is to build hardware that utilize the full benefits of data
center gaming. Vr headsets can shrink and are only limited by the method of
getting light into your retina. Same goes with any kind of haptic feedback or
audio feedback.

------
awill
As expected, it's running on Debian [0]. Ubuntu really messed up with their
licensing, losing both Valve and Google...

I'm also curious why they're not stating the CPU manufacturer.

[0] [https://stadia.dev/about/](https://stadia.dev/about/)

------
mempko
It's funny to see this and

"The Cloud is Another Sun" on the front page.

[https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/cloud_is_another_sun/)

------
kensai
A more philosophical question. If they manage it with a hard, computationally
and bandwidth intensive problem like games, does this mean that this kind of
computing is coming for good for every kind of activity?

Is this is the last time we need to upgrade to an expensive graphics card?

------
jerrybee
I don't understand giving a keynote like this and then not launching the
product for months. Apple figured it out long ago - way more power in "it's
available now" than the alternative of forcing customers to wait an indefinite
amount of time.

------
daemonk
I wonder how much of the gaming market consist of games that requires good
latency.

I would be perfectly fine playing Civilization or turn based games on this
infrastructure as sub-100ms latency probably isn't that big of a deal here.
Perhaps google is going after that niche?

------
SoupyDolphin
Services like this are already in operation, see Shadow and GeForce Now.
Developers don't need to do anything to have their games supported on these
platforms either, so I don't understand what Google are bringing to the table
with Stadia.

------
azinman2
Won’t latency be a giant problem?

~~~
wmf
If only Google had spent over ten years optimizing its network for low
latency.

~~~
fixermark
Unfortunately, since Fiber didn't take off, they didn't spend ten years
optimizing _your_ network latency. ;)

~~~
azinman2
Not to mention they talk about this for phones as well...

------
Anointmous
I used this in beta on a cheap chromebook. It worked great, and since I don't
like putting games on my machines or upgrading hardware or using windows,
perfect. Realistically, the only way I could play this game on this hardware.

------
captainmarble
This will boost pc gaming significantly. Now everyone can experience pc
quality game on tablet, phone, mediocre pc. But bad news for mobile games and
gaming hardware manufacturers IF stadia's pricing is affordable enough.

------
johnyzee
_Google is also launching a new Stadia Controller that [...] will work with
the Stadia service by connecting directly through Wi-Fi to link it to a game
session in the cloud. This will presumably help with latency and moving a game
from one device to another._

Sounds like a horrible design choice. My controller now needs to be wifi
connected, so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?

 _Focusing on developers, Google also unveiled an impressive way for game
developers to apply their own design style to titles on Stadia. It’s a machine
learning-based style transfer tool that developers can use to simply drop an
image into the video frames of games and have it mimic the style throughout._

Sounds like another gimmick that nobody has ever, or will ever need. But
"Machine Learning!"

~~~
golfer
"so I can instantly change my game session from my phone to my TV?"

Clearly the latency advantage is the main benefit. Just as stated in the quote
you used. Can you explain why that is a horrible design choice?

~~~
johnyzee
How does it improve latency? The device it is connected to is already internet
connected and there is no meaningful latency between the controller and the
device. So how does the on-board wifi help?

Adding wifi to a device for no reason is horrible, I don't suppose it needs
explaining.

~~~
satysin
By directly connecting the controller to the service via WiFi it removes any
potential issues with the device having to act as a proxy for the controller
input. For their dedicated Stadia set top box it isn't a big deal (as they
will control the hardware) but when used with phones, third party STBs and
such it can be problematic. Google will have no control over the WiFi hardware
in all these devices and many cheaper WiFi chipsets are buggy in a multi-
device setup.

Adding WiFi to the controller removes all those potential issues and allows
them to tweak things to be as good as they can be for latency, power
consumption, range, etc. (at least in theory anyway).

~~~
dougmwne
Yes, I was thinking along the same lines. It seems like the combined latency
of bluetooth, passing that input through the OS, browser, then out to wifi
could be considerable, especially if the machine's wifi and bluetooth chips
are not optimized for low latency. Since Google makes the hardware of the
controller, they can use all the lowest latency chips and drivers possible.

I'd be very interested to see some latency benchmarking of the stadia
controller vs an xbox controller. I'd also be curious if a future version of
this controller could connect directly to an even lower latency 5G connection,
bypassing the wifi router and cable/fiber modem and removing yet another
latency question mark. Even when playing locally, input lag can be
considerable, so this might be a very smart hack to make this streaming
service playable with a larger range of games.

~~~
satysin
Yes 5G is what is on my mind also although that comes with different problems
such as network access.

How about a controller with an RJ-45 so I can plug directly into my router :)

------
synaesthesisx
Isn't this similar to Nvidia's GeForce Now service? I've been impressed with
Nvidia's beta; with a good connection you can play a ton of games at maximum
settings with just minor input lag.

~~~
karlding
Yeah, there's quite a few companies that are working on a similar product,
including PlayStation Now (Sony) [0], GeForce Now (NVIDIA) [1], and Shadow
[2].

[0] [https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-
now/ps...](https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/playstation-now/ps-now-
on-pc/)

[1] [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-
now/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/)

[2] [https://shadow.tech/int](https://shadow.tech/int)

------
th0ma5
Can I buy just the controller? Sure does seem the PS4 controller is about the
best out there for most gaming, and I've been hesitant to buy anything else.
This controller seems just as well made.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Have you tried the Xbox One controller? Hands-down the most comfortable and
most well-engineered controller I've ever used.

~~~
vernie
They're both great.

------
01100011
How is this any better than GeForce Now from Nvidia?

It seems odd that Google chose to create its own gaming studio. Doesn't that
make them a competitor to the folks they support from?

------
sergiotapia
Jade Raymond is at the helm!? Color me very excited, she was running the
original Assassins Creed game back in the day. She's a very talented producer!

------
jayd16
Did anyone catch the details on their private cloud offering? Are they selling
server blades? Can you run apps on it like CAD or simply Unity itself?

------
o10449366
The optimist in me says this is exciting, but the pessimist in me says Google
will just end up cancelling it in ~2 years.

------
Angostura
Have they announced the closure date yet?

------
shmerl
Let's see how easy it would be for developers to make a normal desktop Linux
game from a Stadia game.

------
markdog12
A bit more info on [https://stadia.dev](https://stadia.dev)

------
rnantes
Strada looks like a game changer, I bet it will be massive by 2025 when
internets speeds improve. Only companies with major infrastructure (Microsoft
and Amazon) will truly be able to compete with Google. The cost of hardware
can even be spread between multiple people lowering prices. Plus it divided
monthly via a subscription, meaning a lower cost of entry versus buying a new
Console.

------
mtw
Yet another google service thats going to be closed in a year or two

------
alinspired
reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive)
that was shut down in 2015

------
mmanfrin
This is superficial, but good lord is the box itself ugly.

------
ganoushoreilly
I'm most excited for Linux gaming as a byproduct!

------
djanogo
I give this 2 years before Google removes all references of "Stadia" from it's
product lineup. They have never stuck with a product which, relative to rest
of their products, has smaller but dedicated adoption.

For example, Valve will keep updating/supporting/hosting events of CSGO even
if it has <1Mil active users on PC, but I can totally see Google pulling plug
on it and burn dedicated followers.

~~~
munificent
_> They have never stuck with a product which, relative to rest of their
products, has smaller but dedicated adoption._

Google Books (14 years old), Google Finance (12), Google Scholar (14), Google
Fonts (9), etc.

~~~
rasz
>Google Books

broken and abandoned [http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-
is-go...](http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-badly-is-google-
books-search-broken.html)

>Google Finance

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-
know...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-finance-as-you-know-it-is-
going-away-here-is-what-will-remain-2017-09-27)

------
deevolution
Could this be peak attention economy? I fully expect - no, I demand - that the
price to play these games be fully compensated for by the data I generate from
playing each game.

------
bdz
Love this comment from earlier today

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429388)

------
johnchristopher
So, no AAA or famous indie games announced ?

~~~
alienreborn
No exclusive games but they revealed that Doom Eternal will come to the
service with 4k, HDR and 60 FPS.

------
Gonzih
I hope this service will not be shut down like google reader or google+ after
google fails to capture high large chunk of the market.

------
moocowtruck
how do i have lan parties? how do i play these games with multiple people in
same household?

------
rasz
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG06H7IQ9Aw)

TLDR: >60ms of added latency (160ms) while plugged on Google campus connection
in specially modified and tweaked game versus unmodified typical Ubisoft bad
PC port, compression artifacts

------
stillbourne
How many years until its canceled and our game libraries erased from all
existence?

~~~
bitpush
"Hey, I started this new workout routine". "LOL, how many weeks until you
fail"?

~~~
rarec
"Brah, you started a new workout routine nearly every other month and haven't
stuck with it. What makes this time different?"

~~~
mav3rick
"Brah, I started, finished and WON many fitness competitions over 20 years.
Doesn't matter if I try and fail. I will get better."

~~~
akhilcacharya
Meanwhile, I'm not even convinced Assistant is better than the Google Now
voice search.

~~~
mav3rick
They use the same back end.

------
giorgioz
"Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who says he plays FIFA 19 “quite a bit" I just lost
a lot of respect for Sunar Pichai all at once.

------
black-tea
Using the same name as one of Google Maps biggest competitors. Nice.

------
vernie
It's cool to imagine that you won't be able to go back and play old games
anymore. That rocks.

------
tareqak
Given the number products and services that Google has shuttered over the
years and their focus on learning all there is about their users, I am going
to sit this one out.

There is definitely some cool work here though: being able to have access to a
library of games without lugging around a console or computer is an
interesting idea with both pros and cons. The pro that I can think of is not
having to be responsible for upgrades. The con is that we continue to move
towards a world where we rent more and own less.

~~~
fixermark
Probably worth noting: this project appears aligned with Google's Cloud and
mobile initiatives. It's unproven, but it's originating from spaces where
Google's products have stuck around.

