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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.

Sounds like you want a Steam Link.

I knew someone would mention those.. I have two since they launched. However, they don't do 4k or HDR and I still need the 95%-of-the-time idle 1,500$ graphics card.

the latency is also terrible. even with a single player platformer game I couldn't make do with it.

Steam link games don't have latency compensation since the games are unmodified. I assume that stadia games will have latency compensation, so should be much more playable.

How would you compensate for that?

The server will know what frame you were seeing when you pressed your button. So it rewinds it's state machine the appropriate number of frames (hopefully just 1), applies the input, and fast forwards again.

This may result in a visual glitch, but you won't have missed your target.

I wonder if you could use something like the RetroArch rollback solution[1] - render multiple versions of the stream, then pick the closest one based on player input. With a fast enough Internet connection, you could let the _client_ pick, then there is no lag.

Of course, the hardware you have to throw at it to do that quickly becomes ridiculous, unless you can come up with a way of efficiently rendering the multiple versions.

[1] https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-2%E2%80%8A-...

can't speak for Steam Link because I have one, but it was more headache than it was worth to get running.

That said, I had my Bootcamped MBP with a XB1 controller connected over Bluetooth and any input lag was negligible with the Assassin's Creed Odyssey Project Stream demo.

There's no chance whatsoever that Stadia will be lower-latency than Steam's in-home streaming.

No matter how good Google's CDN network is, you can't compete with sub-1ms in-network round trips. There's not really any clever "latency compensation" you can do here.

Even if you rewind state to apply input, which games probably won't support anyway, that still only helps you close the gap added by internet latency. A gap that in-home doesn't even have in the first place.

Were you using old wifi? I've only ever heard of latency issues when using wifi and then only when using older than N. Latency when using Ethernet is less than the HDMI latency on consoles.

Steam _Stream_ can do 4K @ 60FPS.

You still have an idle graphics card, but you can enjoy the benefits of it from any laptop in your home network. My gaming desktop is wired, my Linux laptop is wifi, and I get 4K @ 60FPS flawlessly.

However, I would prefer not to have to upgrade in the future and offloading the intensive parts to Google would be highly preferable.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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

Actually, the 2080ti is around the same price as the 1080ti, if you can find one.

I was wanted to have a good gaming experience, but also wanted the extra memory for machine learning. However, I didn't end up doing much ML with it.

Why is it tied to only 1 screen? You can use Steam or Nvidia Shield to stream to just about any screen or tablet in the house and it works great. My gaming system is headless and I play all my games streaming to one system or another.

Steam and Nvidia don't have the stellar 11 9s kind of reputation Google has. Also, you have to actually buy those games first, so your library is a tiny fraction of what Stadia offers.

True... but they were talking about how their collection was limited to their single gaming system at home which wasn't true. They have options for that. But both of those are technologies to stream your own games, they do nothing to provide the games themselves. So it really is apples/oranges as a general topic.

Yeah but do you really think you're gonna be like, "You could hand build YouTube at home!" and anyone is going to be like, "Oh okay, WTF Google why even try?"

> Also, you have to actually buy those games first, so your library is a tiny fraction of what Stadia offers.

What makes you think games would just be included in Stadia?

Competing streaming services here are around $10-20/month without any games included. Origin's game access is $15/month without any game playing hardware included.

So... what will stradia end up being, and at what price? Would you pay $30/month for this? When a PS4/Xbox is only $300-400 in the first place, and has a lifespan of ~5 years?

Origin does not compete with Stradia, sorry.

I didn't say it did, sorry.

Oh okay, in that case there's no real example you've given for the cost, so $30 may or may not be the cost, but considering a high-end rig approaches $3k and is relevant for 5 years, $30 is a great deal, especially if you get access to a large game library, which is what's happening.

Origin isn't relevant to this conversation.

Er... What?

$15/month for a streaming service + $15/month for game access service equals, drum roll, $30/month.

What are you not getting here? Origin is relevant as a reference point for what the games themselves cost on a subscription.

Stadia still needs to actually pay for games, after all. Either as a subscription (reference origin's pricing), or you straight up buy them at the normal $60/pop.

Did you miss me saying "$30 is a great deal" or something?

Steam has built-in in-home streaming so you can play games on your beefy PC from anywhere in the house.

Keep in mind that 2080Ti will give you a way better experience than this will. The actual specs of the hardware here would fall into solidly mid-range. As in, the equivalent entire system would be less than your 2080Ti alone.

So instead of spending $1500 on that piece of gaming equipment spend $250-300 instead. That's what you're actually getting here. A very slow CPU with a mid-range GPU. It's a budget build that's not going to drive 4k@60fps with the bells and whistles. Not remotely close. It'll be fine for 1080p gaming, though, but that's realistically it.

+1, ex networking+tools gamedev here and have almost the exact same thoughts.

They haven't fundamentally solved the latency issue, 50-100ms of ping is brutal and the people who could be a target for this generally won't have a fiber internet connection.

Network gameplay works via misdirection, predictable simulations and knowing how to converge a divergent state(including rewinding in time to re-play hittraces and the like). Streaming gets you none of that.

It'll work for high-latency sensitive singleplayer games but not seeing it scaling out wider.

And when all the clients and the server are sitting in the same DC?

Now you can program your clients and server like they’re all on a LAN. And now you can trust the client. (The client, not the inputs.) Those are huge reductions in complexity. This makes delivering good multiplayer easier, not harder.

But I do agree that input/display latency is going to be a thing. Results may be highly variable and you’ll probably know two people in the same city who have very different experiences with it.

The joystick and display device are just the clients now. You have the same problem just moved around a bit. Without the benefit of being able to use techniques to hide latency, such as client side prediction.

No, the client is still the client. It's still a big bunch of stateful code, but now it's running on the LAN with the server and can't have its bits fiddled by the customer. All that code where the server fastidiously checks the client's untrusted state updates goes away, replaced by a much simpler layer that sanity checks the inputs. All that code where the server has to rewind and replay inputs to deal with late-arriving client state updates goes away (assuming your game isn't cross-DC). All that code where the server is protecting clients from other clients, sending down corrections and fixing up the world so it maintains some semblance of causal order, goes away.

At my day job I'm working on a AAA multiplayer game, and making a properly server-authoritative game with significant client-to-server latency mitigation imposes serious costs in dev time and complexity and security review process. And now, at least in theory, they mostly disappear.

The input/display lag problem is different from what we have now. It's new. We don't, of course, compensate for lag from input to client. (Between client and server, yes, but that's actually a different beast.) And yes, you won't be able to do much about it. You'll be relying on Google to keep your latencies down. They said they're deploying to 7500 nodes, so there's hope. Time will tell. I'm hopeful a lot of people will be reporting single-to-low-double-digit latencies.

But this is much, much more than just moving around the same problem.

Sorry but I just don't see it.

I'm used to designing systems and games that work in 100ms+ latent environments since that's what you see in production(or try mobile where it can be 2-5x that).

We were doing 250ms ping times back in '99 with games like SubSpace and the like where you had a predictive game model/design. Yes you lose the overhead of designing for latency because it just won't fundamentally work in those scenarios.

I agree that it will all hinge on what kinds of latencies we see. If Google can produce the same kinds of latencies it does to 8.8.8.8, it's definitely got a shot. Mobile's an even bigger challenge, but I've seen wire-competitive latencies from 5G, so I think there's hope there too.

This does, however, leave VR high and dry. Wonder if they have any ideas about that angle.

Getting a consistent latency to their edge servers is going to be tricky.

Wifi for instance is completely out. All it takes is someone turning on the wrong blender/micowave/power adapter and just the smallest bit of RF pollution will put you into unusable territory. Gets harder as your population density rises.

You can already see this with in-house streaming today. I can stream Netflix but my local LAN XBOne streaming is pretty unusable for things like Monster Hunter.

As your population density lowers the chance of you having the sub-30ms latency w/ 0% loss decreases significantly.

Like I said in the root, they'll able to get this to work for non-action(~200ms window) singleplayer titles, the idea that you could use this for multiplayer is laughable.

I'm seeing anecdotes elsewhere in this thread that wifi worked very well for some testers.

Will it be a worse experience than a 2080 Ti on your desktop? Sure. But will Stadia be good enough to win over the expense and hassle of the alternative? Maybe!

Regarding your last point, I'm not sure Id would stake their reputation on delivering a game that is going to be "laughable" on Stadia. They might know something we don't.

We'll see how it works out.

>And when all the clients and the server are sitting in the same DC?

But what do you do when they don't? This can happen in multiplayer games with low population or during "bad times".

You might have less trouble because latency is more predictable, but you still need the whole rewind stuff.

I predict a lot of game teams developing new IP for Stadia will impose a single-DC-match requirement, because the time/complexity tradeoff of implementing all that stuff won't be considered worth it. Then, if their game fails, maybe they'll blame that decision. :-)

I'm not super sure, anymore, about latency being as big a deal. Particularly with regards to monitors. Display lag on a large TV can be upwards of 50ms by itself; display lag on a monitor can be as low as 5ms. If you're viewing this as a competitor to low-end, relatively lightweight console play, the total lag of display plus network is actually maybe not that bad. Also, living in Boston I was seeing 16ms pings on Google's service when I tried it out, which might be an adoption factor. 16ms plus a monitor's display lag is going to be competitive with most HDTVs.

That level of lag definitely makes some games implausible. (Part of why I bought a big-ass OLED is that newer TVs, but particularly OLEDs, seem to have generally consistent display lag; being able to play Tekken 7 on a 55" screen with only 21ms of lag is nice, but to do it on my old LCD is like playing underwater.) But I think it's going to be more practical for more games than the current conventional wisdom suggests.

Yeah, but you hit the nail on the head when you said you have a steady, consistent latency on your TV.

When you're stuffing the pipe w/ 4k encoded content that puts a lot more pressure on the connection and added packet loss or delay is brutal in that case.

All of this stuff is subtle but it compounds in the same way that the average gamer won't be able to immediately spot 30 vs 60 fps but they'll know that the game "feels" better at 60.

I fully agree that it's an inferior good, and I still don't think multiplayer games will be much of a thing. But I do think that even pretty involved action titles (they tested with an Assassin's Creed title) will be okay. Not great, and I'd get mad at them, but I'm also a really demanding user. Most folks kinda aren't.

Yeah, this is my opinion, too, almost right on the nose. Especially the part about only supporting a product for a few years.

I also don't like the idea of games-as-a-service in the sense that I only own a license to the game for as long as I pay a monthly fee. I'm okay with licensing content within the game (i.e. DLC), but I shy away from subscription games services like Xbox Games Pass or EA's Origin subscription.

A streaming game product like this doesn't solve that issue. Additionally, the latency issue, like you pointed out, is too much for me to consider _not_ owning my own gaming hardware.

Have they even said anything about the business model? I'm a few minutes behind on the stream, but I don't recall any mention of licenses or subscriptions. The only "practical" example of launching they game they showed was... out of a button on a YouTube video.

EDIT: A "Stadia store" was briefly mentioned shortly after my comment, it looked like it was tied into Google Play.

They didn't say anything concrete about money.

I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)

The "Stadia store" suggested games would likely be sold or subscribed to. But I definitely have to imagine some sort of trial model being available for the launch-from-YouTube options. Perhaps a time-limited option, that won't stop you from joining a streamer with Crowd Play, but would cut you off after a while if you hadn't already purchased it?

I'm very curious about the expenses game developers will face too, which definitely wasn't brought up. Id Software bragged about just using one Stadia instance, but then later demonstrations showing split screen gaming "without compromise" was shown running each screen on a different Stadia instance. While Google suggests this makes split screen gaming possible again, my guess is that split screen gaming costs the developers twice as much to implement as a service cost, since it uses twice as much hardware. Making it probably mostly a nonstarter anyways.

> they do have a name associated with dropping products after a year or two

Totally a concern. When OnLive closed people lost all their games, no refunds. While if you went to the store and bought a physical disk. It'd still be yours.

The average console quality game is about 50 or 60 bucks nowadays. If you are an active gamer, you could lockup and lose hundreds or even a thousand dollars when they decide to close it.

Most of Google's services are free, but paid ones I'd hope they wouldn't as easily abandon too.

When Project Stream closed down, Google and Ubisoft did give everyone who played a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey they could play via Uplay. As much as these companies really don't want to talk about "when we inevitably shutdown", I feel like a lot of player trust would be established if there was a clear commitment to that.

Would you be buying games for $50-$60 through Stadia? What if they follow a model like Playstation Now or Origin Access, where you pay a monthly fee to have access to the entire library (a la Netflix)?

I haven't bought a game on physical disk for a long time. My impression is that in many cases, you're still going to be downloading a big release day patch upon installation. And for multiplayer-heavy games, it doesn't matter if you have a physical disk when the servers are shut off.

Just FYI, but no one outside the tech scene knows about Google's reputation for dropping support of their products or their eroded reputation in regards to do no evil. I have tried talking to people about it and they really just don't give a shit.

Also Microsoft or Sony weren't companies known for gaming when they entered this space and now they are the leaders.

Gamers do.

Sony entered at the right moment with the right tech, MS was at their peak when they started xbox.

More specifically, Microsoft was losing billions of dollars per year on the xbox early on.

Huh, how can you compare this to Steam? Google aims to obviate the need for gamers to own top-of-the-line hardware. Steam does not offer that feature.

Current gamers already have gaming PCs, so there isn't much of a benefit.

Even for people that don't have gaming computers or consoles, you can put a decent one together that costs less than one of Google's phones

Gaming PCs need to be upgraded on a 2-4 year basis if you want to keep near the top-of-the-line. One of Google's phones can cost $600-$1000, which is significantly more than a new console. So I'm not sure why you even bring that up, as if there were no economical difference between putting $500+ on your credit card, and trying out a $15-$30 month subscription.

Computer upgrades amortize pretty well. Over the last 8 years I've made 2 upgrades to my computer: A new SSD ($100 for 1TB) and a new GPU which is overkill for many purposes (~600 for a GTX1080). That setup can play many games at higher than 60fps, which beats the hypothetical max of Stadia (and I'll believe "4k at 60fps" when I see it— the Project Stream demo seemed to have a much lower framerate than that while still having noticeable artifacts on a 1440p monitor). Compared to that, $30 a month for streaming (if that's the price) seems as predatory as those companies that let you rent-to-own a TV. Although I'm not a fan of renting games vs owning.

True, but the only PC you're going to build out that competes with the price of a Chromecast Ultra is a Raspberry Pi retro box.

I don't know, I worked in the gaming industry as well. Only left last year, but even then I was seeing a growing desire to move to host systems: https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 or https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive.

With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers.

All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.

> people are more and more wary about giving this company any more personal data

To have the data of every choice and move in every second of every game would be quite useful to calculate the model of the particular user with the level of accuracy barely existed before.

It'd be useful for game developers also.

Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release.

Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.

That's for sure, but Google wouldn't be Google if they don't invent the way to derivate from that data something like "neural heatmaps" of the particular user to use it for advertising part of business.

Not necessarily. Google doesn't derive advertising (or any other data beyond broad bytecounts, for that matter) from the cloud-customer data stored in their cloud storage infrastructure.

Let the market decides it.

I would definitely try this on some quirky little games that I love to watch the streamers play, but too lazy to download. If the play could start in minutes, I would try it.

I think we'll have to see what Microsoft is going to do at E3, because they've signalled in the past that they want to take this streaming approach, and they have their own cloud too...

This doesn't offer anything more compelling over using Steam? Excuse me?

At this point I see comments like yours in here (from "games industry" insiders) and I see horse breeders decrying the car. "It takes gas instead of grass, it'll never work!"

Please.

> this doesn't offer anything compelling over using Steam

- drastically lower power requirements

- no worries about hardware refreshes

- no waiting to download a 50gb game

- can play anywhere (steam link is getting there, but it's not as easy as opening a new chrome tab)

> hardcore PC gamers are never going to accept the latency

cool, they don't have to.