News [AT] Google Announces Stadia: A Game Streaming Service

[Qwertilot]

Oh, I can see how they can get DLC's, cosmetics etc etc in easily enough

 

[coercitiv]

Oh, I can see how they can get DLC's, cosmetics etc etc in easily enough

How is not the hard part, the hard part is justifying the Stadia fee to someone who needs to pay to play even after hitting the Play button.

• Hit Play to load the Game.
• Hit Pay Extra to load Red Lazors DLC.
• Would you like a custom skin for only $2?
• This door is locked. Unlock content for only $1.99
• Oh bummer you died! Instantly revive to keep you progress for just $0.19! First revival is free!
• Extra music is available for $0.99
• Cannot equuip Very Big Gun, requires level 10 to use. Level up instantly for $0.99!
• Dangerous Boss ahead, save your progress for $0.09
• Connection lost. You died.

 

[Adawy]

How is not the hard part, the hard part is justifying the Stadia fee to someone who needs to pay to play even after hitting the Play button.

• Hit Play to load the Game.
• Hit Pay Extra to load Red Lazors DLC.
• Would you like a custom skin for only $2?
• This door is locked. Unlock content for only $1.99
• Oh bummer you died! Instantly revive to keep you progress for just $0.19! First revival is free!
• Extra music is available for $0.99
• Cannot equuip Very Big Gun, requires level 10 to use. Level up instantly for $0.99!
• Dangerous Boss ahead, save your progress for $0.09
• Connection lost. You died.

There was a leak a while back about a company trying to advance AI or something like that in MMOs to manipulate the players into doing just that and much more.

There was no proof for the credibility of that leak, but I definitely saw it happening.

 

[Markfw]

There was a leak a while back about a company trying to advance AI or something like that in MMOs to manipulate the players into doing just that and much more.

There was no proof for the credibility of that leak, but I definitely saw it happening.

All those "free" games for your phone ? Thats exactly what they all do, and make BILLIONS (all together, not one company) doing it.

 

[beginner99]

I suspect that google have realised that one day streaming games will be big. Sure not to us but the moment but when they can get it cheap enough and the latency is good enough why buy a console. If you disagree they you just sound like all the people defending their cd's, dvd's, blueray's and even paid for mp3/4's. Now we just stream all our tv and music - only old people buy it (my teen-aged kids never would).

I prefer to "own" the thing and not pay because ultimately that is the most convenient. Eg. bit torrent. And I don't even have to feel bad about it because here the download itself is legal /what is illegal is upload /sharing) and you pay small fee that goes to artists on every usb stick or hdd you buy which is another reason not to actual pay else you pay double.

The issue is for music you need $2000 worth of equipment to notice or actually hear the poorer quality if you do at all. With video streaming most people simply sit too far from their 4k or even 1080p TVs to benefit from the high resolution hence taking a drop in resolution/quality compared to a bluray / bluray rip doesn't bother most people either. Many also don't really notice.

In contrast if every action you do in a game has a slight delay it can get frustrating very, very quickly. I mean imagine starcraft type game on streaming. Just lol.


And last as other have said streaming and subscription is just a huge rip-off. You don't need to be a genius to realize that you completely loose ownership and it will cost you a lot more in the long run. Doesn't matter if it is music, movies or video games.

 

[mooncancook]

You need to build the high speed rails first before you can run the bullet trains, google.

 

[coercitiv]

And last as other have said streaming and subscription is just a huge rip-off. You don't need to be a genius to realize that you completely loose ownership and it will cost you a lot more in the long run. Doesn't matter if it is music, movies or video games.

I'm a Google Music customer and I don't see it as a rip-off at all. What others pay daily for a pack of cigarettes I pay monthly for listening to whatever music I want, wherever I go. Seems like a fair trade to me, and it doesn't stop me from building and owning my own collection.

It was actually this subscription that made me write the slightly exaggerated posts above, as the experience with a music subscription is friction-less from a financial interaction POV, and this is what makes it work. Going back to gaming, developers and Stadia, the current monetization models include all kinds of subsequent purchases that cannot exist in the world of the "games subscription", simply because they would break the most important product proposition of the subscription model - pay a fixed monthly fee, play all the content.

Better tech will eventually solve the latency issue, but I'm not sure developers will eventually like what services like Stadia offer in terms of financial gain. We're already seeing a lot of movement and unrest in this area, with developers opting for Epic exclusivity in the detriment of Steam, developers choosing to sell Android games outside of the Play store, and Spotify calling out Apple for monopolistic behavior when it comes to it's App Store and iTunes "synergy".

Stadia may become a fine way to reach an even wider audience than traditional PC & console gaming has to offer, but I doubt developers see it as anything more than complementary revenue.

 

[Mopetar]

DRM/Anti-Piracy is what has developers interested in streaming though.

Bully for them, but the onerous hurdles leave me uninterested in playing. CD Projekt has already shown that you can still produce financially successful games without bothering to include an DRM at all. Make a good game and people will buy it. It doesn't matter what producers want to sell, because you can't sell something that no one wants to buy.

 

[Rifter]

Thing is, outside of Android and Chrome (and, of course,Google) Google has a bad rep for abandoning almost every project they've undertaken.

At this point, I'm personally feeling like the Google name is more of an albatross around the neck of any project rather than a sign of deep pockets.

This thing is going to have problems overcoming the streaming stigma to begin with, and at the first sign of rough going Google is going to bail...

Yup google is going to pull out and abandon this just like almost everything else they start. Google is great at hyping up stuff and then killing it off a year later, they never follow through on anything though.

 

[Mopetar]

All those "free" games for your phone ? Thats exactly what they all do, and make BILLIONS (all together, not one company) doing it.

Reminds me of an old Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/10/unbeatable-value

 

[tajoh111]

The bandwidth usage for this would be insane.

Google is failing to realize the same mistake it has made with it's pixels books and Nexus phones. Bandwidth is not cheap and wifi is not super fast and everywhere.

Google has usually put the minimum storage amount on it devices and put just tiny bits of onboard storage. The worst offenders were the first gen pixelbooks.

It's ridiculous that their latest generation of pixel book come with a base of 128 and cost a minimum of 1200 dollars.

Someone supplementing this with cloud storage when when mobile Data is super expensive made it mostly impractical.

The infrastructure requirement will piss off alot of internet companies and put further lobbying on changing how internet is priced and regulated. The estimates put the bandwidth usage at 20GB per hour which is 20 Gigabytes of data used in an hour.

Stream onto a phone? LOL.

The console industry and market was not asking for a third player or forth player to enter. More players mean more fragmentation, more consoles to buy for exclusive games and another ugly box on your shelf. This might not have a box on the shelf but they will have another ecosystem to buy into. I don't think people want this unless it sony or MS or Nintendo or doing it. With googles brand, I feel this will fail like most of google project like this.

 

[Mopetar]

With googles brand, I feel this will fail like most of google project like this.

Yup. May as well already stake out a spot for it: https://killedbygoogle.com/

@Hitman928 should convert this into a poll where we predict how long it takes for Google to axe this thing.

 

[jpiniero]

Make a good game and people will buy it.

Right, but if it's good people will play it on streaming too. The anti-piracy angle is why developers would be interested, not to mention it lowers the barrier to entry for what's needed to run an AAA title down to basically zero.

Now Google being Google, it's likely to fail but one of these services is going to be a hit.

 

[Mopetar]

Right, but if it's good people will play it on streaming too. The anti-piracy angle is why developers would be interested, not to mention it lowers the barrier to entry for what's needed to run an AAA title down to basically zero.

Now Google being Google, it's likely to fail but one of these services is going to be a hit.

Seems doubtful. I won't pay for a streaming service at all, but assuming I were of a mind to consider it, the service is not worth a whole lot if it doesn't have all of the games I'd want. It's similar to the growing problem where people might need to buy 3+ streaming services to watch all of the shows that they want.

If I'm a developer and looking at this, there's no more guarantee of money for me through this service than selling physical copies. Take games like Fallout 76 or Anthem where people have largely abandoned the game. Even if someone only played 10 hours, Bethesda or EA get their ~$40 (usually about 60% - 70% of the retail cost), but with a streaming service, they only get paid when players are playing their games. I probably don't want to put my new games on these services since that takes away from copies I sell just as much as piracy.

The other issue with these services is utilizing the hardware. Most customers will only play on a limited basis, but they all want to play in a similar time band. Most people are at school or work during the morning and afternoon, so the hardware sits idle. Then in the evening people start to hop on. Unlike Netflix where it's not too much more work to stream to another person (especially if you're letting or having the ISP cache content) and it's all just a matter of bandwidth, with this service you need a physical GPU behind it and you either need to buy enough for each customer to have their own, or ensure you've got a good idea of how demand averages out, but you'll still need a pretty high percentage because any new release will see a lot of people wanting to play. If you oversell subscriptions, people will cancel when they have to wait because all of the hardware is being used.

Then you have to find something for all of that hardware to do when people aren't gaming on it or you've got expensive equipment in a datacenter that's not being utilized. I'm sure someone like Google could find a use for it and make their own little cloud that uses the GPUs for number crunching when they're not otherwise busy, but that doesn't necessarily make you any money.

These services are just a mess for so many reasons. The experience isn't as good, the business side in challenging because publishers don't necessarily like the model, and it's not something that scales all that well since each user needs dedicated hardware that's potentially expensive. Maybe someone will eventually get it right, but if you look at how previous investments have turned out, this is just a giant money pit. Add that most of the popular free to play or e-sport titles don't require expensive hardware to run and these services are even less appealing. Why pay $20 (or more) per month what I can play for free on my own PC that I've already got?

 

[pj-]

The instant nature of it is pretty neat. Even with fios, it sometimes takes upwards of 15 minutes to install a modern game plus another 5 to launch it, get past the splash screens, and fiddle with graphics settings.

I could see myself using Stadia to try games out or to play B tier games where fidelity doesn't matter tremendously.

 

[jpiniero]

IIRC I don't think Google disclosed how pricing will work. I do imagine there would be an upfront cost for release titles but it's a bit hazy. Maybe a subscription for older titles.

Add that most of the popular free to play or e-sport titles don't require expensive hardware to run.

Right, but streaming wouldn't be for Fortnite and other F2P/P2W games. Those would stay local but those would be mobile type games and not AAA quality.

 

[Dribble]

IIRC I don't think Google disclosed how pricing will work. I do imagine there would be an upfront cost for release titles but it's a bit hazy. Maybe a subscription for older titles.



Right, but streaming wouldn't be for Fortnite and other F2P/P2W games. Those would stay local but those would be mobile type games and not AAA quality.

It's google, there will be free trials and subscriptions. You'll be watching youtube about the latest game and get an advert to try it free for an hour or something. Click a button and 30 seconds later you are playing it. Want to try something else, click and you are playing it instantly.

Then they can do extra stuff like - say *famous youtube streamer X* says lets see how many zombies we can kill on level X, or the most people playing together on Y. You watch his stream, click and you are there playing with him in seconds.

There's lots you can do with this sort of thing, just got to have a bit of imagination - it's gonna work whether us old timers like it or not.

And just like social media, music and video streaming their will be a rush to become the number 1 provider, which is why google are getting in early.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Thing is, outside of Android and Chrome (and, of course,Google) Google has a bad rep for abandoning almost every project they've undertaken.

Yup google is going to pull out and abandon this just like almost everything else they start. Google is great at hyping up stuff and then killing it off a year later, they never follow through on anything though.

Yup. May as well already stake out a spot for it: https://killedbygoogle.com/

@Hitman928 should convert this into a poll where we predict how long it takes for Google to axe this thing.

I'm telling ya. When companies get big and/or successful enough in one category, they pursue side projects. They either don't know enough about the category or care enough to succeed in them. Thus it results in endless stream of them being abandoned few years later.

Google might be big, but they are bound by physics like everyone else. I think the best they can hope for is Stadia finding a niche among some. Pretty sure that's not what they are aiming for, and its exactly that attitude of "dominate the world or else" that will cause them to axe the thing some time in the future.

There are many business areas that a much smaller company would consider it being profitable, but cause a mega corporation to abandon it.

 

[maddogmcgee]

The bandwidth usage for this would be insane.

Google is failing to realize the same mistake it has made with it's pixels books and Nexus phones. Bandwidth is not cheap and wifi is not super fast and everywhere.

Google has usually put the minimum storage amount on it devices and put just tiny bits of onboard storage. The worst offenders were the first gen pixelbooks.

It's ridiculous that their latest generation of pixel book come with a base of 128 and cost a minimum of 1200 dollars.

Someone supplementing this with cloud storage when when mobile Data is super expensive made it mostly impractical.

The infrastructure requirement will piss off alot of internet companies and put further lobbying on changing how internet is priced and regulated. The estimates put the bandwidth usage at 20GB per hour which is 20 Gigabytes of data used in an hour.

Stream onto a phone? LOL.

The console industry and market was not asking for a third player or forth player to enter. More players mean more fragmentation, more consoles to buy for exclusive games and another ugly box on your shelf. This might not have a box on the shelf but they will have another ecosystem to buy into. I don't think people want this unless it sony or MS or Nintendo or doing it. With googles brand, I feel this will fail like most of google project like this.

I get unlimted 100/40. maybe 95/35 in real life. Will be more than fine to play a few games on my TV.

My gran has unlimited 50 so people don't have issues as Christmas with phones and Netflix. Internet will still be more than fine for playing a few casual games while chatting to relos. This would also let my use a small and slim laptop with integrated graphics rather than invest in a beast of an expensive laptop that I will rarely use. Hell maybe I just play it all on a tablet instead. This is awesome.

 

[Hitman928]

[Ars] How id Software went from skeptical to excited about Google Stadia streaming

 

[TheELF]

The estimates put the bandwidth usage at 20GB per hour which is 20 Gigabytes of data used in an hour.

What, do people think that they will be streaming raw gpu data? They will be streaming at least with h264 if not vp9 if not h265. (if not something even newer)

 

[TheELF]

Why pay $20 (or more) per month what I can play for free on my own PC that I've already got?

Why pay $20 (or more) per month if you could pay $60 for each single game right?
It all depends on what they will offer,origin basic access is $40 a year and it's completely worth it instead of buying all the battlefields and battlefronts and all the rest individually.

 

[beginner99]

What, do people think that they will be streaming raw gpu data? They will be streaming at least with h264 if not vp9 if not h265. (if not something even newer)

Any of these formats but especially h265 would require the device to have a hardware decoder for it. Probably less of an issue on modern smartphones (but only modern top level ones). Also any older laptop without dgpu also would not qualify. And even h265 4k easily takes 20gb per hour if you include the sound. that is pretty much the size 4k hevc movies take up.

 

[DrMrLordX]

The console industry and market was not asking for a third player or forth player to enter.

Third? I think you're forgetting the Switch. There was a call for another player not too long ago, and Ouya tried to answer, but failed. There was a lot of interest until it proved to be a mess. With the Switch on the market, I don't see a hope for another hardware console solution at this time. Stadia (and competitors) might still be able to carve out a niche, or crowd out the existing hardware-based consoles.

As far as bandwidth goes, I think Google may be looking at this in terms of chicken-and-egg. If Stadia works and there's interest, then there will be more pressure on the telcos and cable companies to start rolling out more fibre to the home. Google has already tried this on their own (Google Fiber). Uptake has been slow. Stadia could drive demand for bandwidth. Pay careful attention to the Net Neutrality debate going on in the public square, and see who is lined up on which side. The telcos and cable companies want no Net Neutrality. They want "broadband" being defined as speeds below 20 Mbps. They want to continue selling as little bandwidth to their customers as possible for as much money as possible.

Google (and others) supporting Net Neutrality seem to want more bandwidth being available to the general public. Google has put their neck out there with Google Fiber to attempt to deliver it at a decent price. They don't seem to support lukewarm broadband definitions at the Federal level. Let's not paint them as heroes (they aren't). In the end, it's all about money. Google stands to profit from people gaining more fibre to the home. Stadia plays into that strategy.

Some of us already have enough bandwidth for Stadia anyway. I get ~230 Mbps over my wifi and 1 Gbps over Ethernet thanks to my power company, and it's $68 per month. I'm not sure if I'm interested in Stadia since I have the hardware to run games already and I mostly get stuff on sale. It's worth watching, though.

 

[Mopetar]

Why pay $20 (or more) per month if you could pay $60 for each single game right?
It all depends on what they will offer,origin basic access is $40 a year and it's completely worth it instead of buying all the battlefields and battlefronts and all the rest individually.

Why pay $60 for a new game when Steam sales exist? There are still some games I’ll purchase right away, but I’ve got such a backlog that by the time I can get around to it, it’s already on sale.