When will Google kill Stadia? | Hacker News Reader

When will Google kill Stadia?

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45 pointsseaish44 comments

I signed up for the free Stadia trial they offered awhile back. I wanted to get back into gaming, don't have any hardware to run modern games and have a fast fiber connection at home. I seemed like the ideal target user.

I spun up a classic, Serious Sam and immediately was disappointed. It looked okay 95% of the time but would randomly get tearing and input lag at critical moments when enemies appeared. I tried on different hardware and different connections and it was all unusable. I think the issue is even a minor lag in FPS games ruins the experience. Forget about playing competitive multiplayer games like PUBG or Counter-Strike.

I ended up finding an unexpected alternative. Microsoft offers Xbox All Access plan as low as $23 dollars per month for physical console + game pass ultimate. To me that has been a much more compelling offer considering I own the console after and gave me immediate access to over hundred games to play locally (including great AAA titles), a fantastic way to get back into gaming. Also, I found out you can plug in a keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Seeing smooth low-latency 4K games is so refreshing and stark contrast to Stadia.

At this point I don't really understand Stadia's target market. It caters to such a tiny intersection of groups that it's almost nobody. Stadia might stick around as a niche for awhile, but it's never going to be the majority of gamers first choice since running games locally is such a superior experience.

> Microsoft offers Xbox All Access plan as low as $23 dollars per month for physical console + game pass ultimate.

Where are you able to buy this? It's sold out everywhere when I just looked.

There are occasionally refreshes at US retailers that sell All Access plan, I snagged one from Target. Admittedly the industry, including PlayStation and NVIDIA, is struggling to keep hardware inventory in stock worse than the typical next gen transition because of COVID, but in a few months they will probably be a lot easier to find.

If you can't wait you could do a trial or couple months of Stadia (or GeForce Now, Shadow, etc.) until you can get your hands on one. Or play retro and indie games on your old hardware in the meantime, that's what I did. :)

People kept trying to convince me that Stadia is fantastic with its supposedly amazing tech.

I live in a larger city and I am in the privileged position to have access to a top shelf internet connection, so I gave it a try. It was not "fantastic", I would describe it as barely ok. Latency was surprisengly good I admit, but absolutely noticeable and annoying. If this is some kind of "future of gaming", I have to say it feels like a massive step backwards to me.

Fans will of course tell me that I am not the target audience given that I highly value these aspects, but I still have to wonder who is (good internet, short distance to data centers, at the same time not owning consoles or a PC).

Many people worldwide do not have the luxury of access to fast internet.

So, they're YouTube circa 2007?

Latency is not an issue with YouTube.

And of course in 2007 there was no better alternative to youtube, whereas all alternatives to Stadia are better.

There are streaming gaming services that don't deal with latency issues?

(Not being sarcastic. To my knowledge, no one has cracked this yet.)

My overall point in comparing to YouTube is that the internet WILL get faster. More and more people will have the kind of broadband needed to make this a good experience. I'm sure it sucks today. But what about 10 years from now?

Streaming video used to suck. Now it doesn't.

Streaming games currently sucks. Tomorrow it won't, and for the same reason: The infrastructure will catch up.

> There are streaming gaming services that don’t deal with latency issues?

No, but those aren’t the only alternatives - consoles, PCs etc, are. Youtube had no established, better alternative to compete with.

You may be right that streaming games won’t suck in the future.

I’m just pointing out that this is not like the YouTube situation at all. Also YouTube didn’t suck even at the beginning.

Perhaps a better analogy would be Netflix streaming. A lot of people thought it was nuts given how many people were still on low-bandwith DSL connections that couldn't reliably stream even in standard definition. There was already an existing solution that worked well -- DVDs by mail (Netflix's original business model). That still exists, but is a small fraction of Netflix's business today.

Netflix is definitely the better analogy.

> Youtube had no established, better alternative to compete with.

If you're comparing game streaming to consoles, then the fair comparison is to every other source of video entertainment that predates YouTube. Like: DVD, VHS, network TV, cable TV, bootlegs, etc. They had EVERY alternative to compete with, and almost all of them were better in some way or another. YouTube was (and is) simply better in ways that matter even more.

That being said, maybe latency will never improve. Maybe no matter how much pipe you have, the fundamental speed limit of light is enough to ruin this whole concept for gaming. Maybe.

But I doubt it, personally. I'm willing to bet that this is an idea that simply needs technology to catch up to it.

> If you're comparing game streaming to consoles, then the fair comparison is to every other source of video entertainment that predates YouTube. Like: DVD, VHS, network TV, cable TV, bootlegs, etc.

No, this is simply not correct.

YouTube was a new type of content that simply wasn’t available on any of those channels. If you wanted to see peer-produced video, which turns out to be very compelling, youtube was the only option.

The games you can play on stadia are the same games you can play on other platforms only worse.

Again - streaming may end up catching up, but the comparison to youtube simply is not informative, because they aren’t similar.

But what about 10 years from now?

Man, what was the name of that streaming console that they never produced that was all hyped about ten years ago (EDIT: found it, the Phantom[0]; and OMG, it was 16 years ago)? Because that was what was being said about...ten years ago. Still waiting.

I don't know that's a nut that will ever get cracked. I've got symmetrical gigabit fiber, but you think it's the speed that makes the difference? Nope, it's latency. And to a certain extent, one has to hope that the speed of light will take a big leap forward. Here's an example that has little to do with gaming: online music playing with other people. Boy howdy, 30ms of total latency and you'll quickly notice. That's why practically no one uses (for example) Zoom, and uses something like JamKazam instead. Zoom has other priorities, as long as the packets get there in a reasonably timely manner. JamKazam, OTOH, prioritizes low latency. You go buy a special box ("USB audio interface") to plug things into, wired Ethernet and no WiFi, and your headphones and mic are wired. Everything is wired. And even then, in a two hour jam session we'll get the occasional person that's lagging just a half-beat off. (I wish everyone used JamKazam for online meetings, because a side benefit is that conversations are much more pleasant without the lag of a Zoom/Teams/Whatever meeting.)

So hundreds of dollars of equipment, and no wireless anything in sight, to cut latency to something reasonable to play music, but somehow a wireless controller connected to a box using WiFi over an internet connection that has the same latency it did probably ten years ago is going to work smoothly? Not today, not tomorrow, but maybe sometime in the future as long as you're not in Seattle trying to play someone in Miami.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Entertainment#Release

I think perhaps a bigger issue is that, presumably their audience is "people who currently like AAA games with huge graphics requirements", which are going to be "core gamers". Which are perhaps some of the most notoriously hard to please people in the world (I say this with some amount of love). And they take tremendous pride in their hardware (see: pc building subreddits, pcmasterrace, etc) and companies (nvidia, alienware, evga, msi, asus, etc) take great pains to market to them because they can sell to them at great markups just for making build quality a bit better than the usual dreck you find at Best Buy and slap on a bunch of alien heads and LEDs (again, I say this with some amount of love).

So I think the existing market is going to be really hard to crack for a lot harder-to-unseat reasons than just "it's a better experience" (which they can't provide anyway!). These people aren't cost-sensitive (generally) and will generally have pretty decent, dedicated hardware.

So I can only conclude that they're hoping to create a market of people who don't currently play AAA games due to cost or space constraints.

Which is consoles.

So yeah, I really don't know where they're going with this.

Not to mention: for the people who don't want to play AAA games, they almost certainly already have a local device in their pocket that can handle anything they might want to play, without latency or even a subscription

I'm biased, as a fan of stadia, but I don't think Google will kill Stadia, at least not soon.

They're closing their game studios, which so far have produced nothing anyway. As a platform to play games, it's basically faultless. Consolodating the product to play AAA games without having a buy a console seems like a solid move.

I might be wrong. Google might do a Google and shutter it though.

I've used Stadia on a 150ish Mb connection and it runs as fast as the game does locally. I multiplay borderlands 3 with friends and very rarely have issues.

If there's speed issues, what Stadia seems to do is lower the resolution being transmitted, in order to maintain speed and low latency.

So the worst is some very rare periods of minor lower resolution adjustment for a few seconds then it turns back to normal. It's a blip.

It's never been an issue for me.

I love seeing Cyberpunk in max resolution on my 5 year old macbook or playing windows only games on Chrome in Linux.

The issue isn't bandwidth; Netflix can stream HD video over a 5Mbps connection, and Stadia should require about the same bandwidth as video streaming because that's essentially what it's doing (and sending input signals back the other direction, but those should be negligible)

What's much harder is latency. Who cares if your interactions with Netflix have a 500ms delay? For a video game, even 50ms is a problem. And you can't improve latency just by adding bigger pipes: there are unshakeable physical limits around how long it takes an electrical signal to go to and from a data center X miles away, and on top of that there's the rat's nest of routing that the signal has to go through along the way. The former can't be solved except by building out more datacenters so that more people are closer to them. The latter can be solved, at great effort, but I don't see ISPs having much motivation to do so. This is why individual experiences with Stadia are so hit-or-miss: it mostly comes down to luck, in terms of a) how physically close you are to a datacenter and b) how streamlined the network infrastructure around you happens to be. And I don't see a clear path for Google to significantly improve this over time.

Like I said, I've never noticed any significant latency playing multiplayer with friends.

It's seamless on a 150 meg connection.

Starlink has a 40 ms latency and that literally goes to SPACE and back THEN ALSO goes through all of the network routing issues that you're talking about.

So you may be overselling the latency problem.

You may have other issues going on? I don't know why you're getting 500 millisecond delays. I'm certainly not getting that.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...

What I'm saying is that you must be one of the lucky ones who has a low-latency connection

(Whether or not you're playing multiplayer isn't really relevant, because those other people are talking to the datacenter, not your local client)

> You may have other issues going on? I don't know why you're getting 500 millisecond delays. I'm certainly not getting that.

I haven't personally tried Stadia, and 500ms wasn't intended as a representative example, it was just an extreme number for the sake of illustration.

I have, though, read reports from lots of people who have "good" internet connections, saying Stadia is noticeably laggy (just look at the top comment on this very post).

To get down to specifics, a latency of >16ms is a lagged frame at 60FPS (which is the standard expectation for the current gen of consoles, and has been the expectation on PC for many years). That time window also has to include actually processing and rendering the game state (you can throw hardware at this part, but only up to a point).

So, that Starlink figure of 40ms will still give you a pretty unideal experience.

Starlink has a 40 millisecond latency and it goes to space and back and then it goes through all of the additional routing issues you're talking about.

So I think you may be over estimating how much latency is inherent in the network.

It may not be that I have a low latency connection...maybe you have an exceptionally high latency connection.

Maybe your apartment building has issues with the wiring?

You should really call your landlord. You're really missing out on how cool Stadia is.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsi...

In some cases Starlink can actually have less latency than wired connections. It's not so clear cut. Also not every internet problem is solved by calling the landlord. In fact, mine has basically nothing to do with my internet in the first place.

Right. I'd bet Starlink actually gets to skip a lot of the routing and repeating that landlines have to go through

40-100ms is standard latency on any sort of internet enabled software even on the most average connection, and has been for a decade or more. I get 60ms latency on my phone hot spot.

If you have 500ms ping your problem is not the internet, it's something local to your building or computer, I hate to be the one to break it to you!

Buddy we're way past the 500ms thing. I never said that I or anyone else has ever had a ping like that, it was just a hypothetical to illustrate how latency-tolerant most networked services are (to contrast with gaming).

Buddy you were the one who said you were running Netflix with that number.

Buddy are you paid by google to shill so hard?

If you have 500ms ping on any sort of internet enabled software the problem is not the internet, it's something local to your building or computer.

100ms or less has been normal for over a decade on the most average connections. I have 60ms on my phone hot spot.

Did you just compare Stadia to a console plugged directly into to your T.V. with a hardwired controller?

Your problem isn't with Stadia... your problem is with physics.

Yeah Stadia doesn't run with 16ms latency at 69fps.

But for casual gamers 30 to 60 fps and 40 milliseconds is perfectly adequate for a multiplayer game especially considering it's run in the browser...and what tons of people use all over the world everyday!

> Did you just compare Stadia to a console plugged directly into to your T.V. with a hardwired controller?

I mean... yes. This is what Stadia is competing with. It's in their marketing materials.

> perfectly adequate for a multiplayer game

If you're referring to the latency that traditional gaming machines have to contend with during online multiplayer, there's still a difference here

For many years now, online multiplayer games have used a technique called Client-side prediction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction) to deal with the fact that tens of milliseconds of latency in a game feels terrible. They can't fix the latency itself, but what they can do is apply short-term changes to things like character movement and camera rotation on the client side, with the assumption that those changes will happen regardless of what the server responds with after handling the multi-client inputs. They effectively front-load the little stuff where tiny differences in latency are noticeable, and leave the server to handle the longer-term stuff like collisions and scorekeeping. This keeps interactions instantaneous, even though the shared game state can't be, and maintains a smooth game-feel.

This is impossible to do for cloud gaming, because the "client" itself lives across the network. The actual client sitting in front of you in this case knows nothing about how to render any aspect of the game, it just mirrors a video feed.

It's great that Stadia is working well for you. It's working well for some people. Nothing wrong with enjoying it. I just remain highly skeptical that it's ever going to work well enough for a large enough number of people to be a long-term success.

You seem to think you know more than than Google and Nvidia and Steam and PlayStation and Microsoft about game streaming services, which is very shocking to me.

How preachy you are in these conversations ..it sounds like you may have a bit of an ego and possibly a little prince complex? You could look into that as being the root cause of the issue.

Millions of people happily play online games all over the world daily with way worse specs than you demand.

I think most people have more realistic requirements than you do to have fun with an online game.

Time will tell who is right! I'm betting on the multibillion dollar companies though!

I wish you the best and hope you never have play a game with less than 60 FPS and 16 millisecond latency ever again

"For a video game, even 50ms is a problem" -- that rather depends on what kind of video game. For a first person shooter, yes. For a role playing or adventure game, not really.

Anything with real-time continuous motion is going to feel fairly uncomfortable with that kind of latency, which includes the great majority of AAA games, including most roleplaying and adventure games

Numerous multibillion-dollar companies are creating game streaming services, think youre wrong...and I do too.

No they’re doing it to stop piracy and to have even more control over when people stop playing game XXI and buy the sequel game XXII electric bugaloo. Don’t think they’re being altruistic.

Even if you're extremely cynical take is accurate people won't use it if performance is unsatisfactory.

I want to know when google is going to kill GCP, cuz they lose $5.6B on $13B in revenue. Is alphabet going to give it the axe in 2023 like was leaked? https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/lb7j6c/alphabet_bea...

The problem I have with Stadia is the target audience.

People who want to play AAA games, and

People who don’t care about latency, and

People who don’t want a console.

Honestly, who is this for? If you can’t afford a console there are options such as “Xbox All Access” which starts as low as $23/month. If you want to play AAA games and don’t want a console, you probably care about latency.

I just don’t get it.

I want flexibility that includes quality games with quality graphics. I'm not looking for high-end gaming PC quality (which I used to own) but close to it. Stadia hits that for me. I play it on TV and laptop depending where I am.

Gaming PCs and consoles will be around for a long time as they serve a market. I hope Stadia builds on their market fit and to become another platform widely used.

I've never used Stadia, but I have used xCloud and I can say that the experience is great, for some genres. Game streaming works really well for slower games, like dungeon crawlers and rpgs. for these games, it's 100% playable and is great on the train. There's some other games, like PUBG and forza, that just really don't make sense with the latency (This is on my cable nbn, I get roughly 7ms ping)

Stadia’s terribly laggy. Also hardware is cheap, why wouldn’t I just run it all myself? Just yet another attempt to get people renting instead of owning.

What's considered cheap is relative. $12 a month is more accessible than lump sums of $500. It may be cheaper to have your own hardware in the long run, but not everyone is able to afford seeing that through.

As for laggy, Cyberpunk runs orders of magnitude better through Stadia on my only computer - a dated Core i3 laptop - than natively.

You're not wrong. Running it yourself is obviously better if you have the hardware. It's just there is a value proposition with platforms like this that I think can make it so more people can play AAA games than before.

Stadia the service is free. It's a free console. If you pay $29.99 for Madden 2021, you can play it for free forever (as long as Stadia exists). The ~$12 is a subscription that adds games to your library and is completely optional.

Modern consoles all have pay-as-you-go-plans for something like $30/mo. I hate the renting aspect of it, but they provide accessibility to the platforms to those who cannot afford it.

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