https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18271702/google-stadia-cloud-gaming-service-announcement-gdc-2019

If they can get developer buy in and have a big portfolio of games this is going to take over the industry

But they haven't said what it costs either

For real.

Gaming on youtube will be the norm in no less than 10 years.

Also, I feel like the first casualty here could be Xbox.

Massively reduces the unique functionality of the Switch once 5G has wide availability. Microsoft is also going to be launching their own game streaming service that has a foothold in people's gaming lives already. Playstation's PS Now service is in trouble by comparison, and they'll have to either build out a cloud gaming service themselves with worse data center locales or continue to release high powered expensive consoles.

Microsoft is the least vulnerable to this kind of service, because they're set up to develop a competitor. The other two are not.

MS doesn't have the library of first party titles that Nintendo and Sony do however, which is going to hurt what they can offer through their streaming service I would imagine.

Available 2019. Still no mention of cost, I can't believe it's free. Unless the developers eat the cost.

Hoping they get some big games on it before launch. Fortnite, Apex, COD etc

Doom Eternal is announced so far.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18272797/google-stadia-doom-eternal-games-cloud-service-announcement-gdc-2019

I mean existing games I suppose. Although it's probably difficult for existing games to port over

Agreed, Sony is the one that could be in real trouble if this takes off. They still have alot to prove that this is viable though. Streaming netflix is one thing but latency is crucial with gaming and is something the isp's really aren't too focused on (its all about the speed with them).

It really is a 3 horse race to see if this technology will work between microsoft, google and amazon. Google and Amazon will have to rely on youtube and twich as their selling points because I don't see either one developing the stable of first party content required to really compete with sony and microsoft. microsoft is weaker than nintendo or sony but they are still way ahead of google and amazon and gamepass noobdy has anything like gamepass atm.

TBH I want the best of both worlds. Streaming as an option and downloaded games when I'm at home.

In 10 years maybe my internet will be fast enough to support it with low latency.

Vade281 said:

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TBH I want the best of both worlds. Streaming as an option and downloaded games when I'm at home.

In 10 years maybe my internet will be fast enough to support it with low latency.

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As someone that participated in beta testing a game streaming service, I'd tell you that latency isn't an issue. And my home internet isn't anything special.

Cromagnum said:

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There are tons of gamers that do not live in high speed internet areas. Playing with crappy latency is a non starter.

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I agree. The whole point of my post was to say in my experience latency isn't an issue.

EDIT: Just as a reference, my home internet at that time was 6Mbps down/1Mbps up, ATT Uverse.

rbcs_2 said:

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Vade281 said:

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TBH I want the best of both worlds. Streaming as an option and downloaded games when I'm at home.

In 10 years maybe my internet will be fast enough to support it with low latency.

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As someone that participated in beta testing a game streaming service, I'd tell you that latency isn't an issue. And my home internet isn't anything special.

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I did too, but I'm very skeptical when it comes to FPS games versus and action game that precise button presses don't matter as much. I'd love to see how a rhythm game fares. I also have 200 MB download and I still got pixelated video. Time will tell.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Disagree strongly.

Nintendo has always been the least susceptible of the three because of the strength of its first party library.

Microsoft seems to have the weakest exclusive library of the three, and when gamers have the option of shelling out $400 for the next Xbox, or playing those same AAA games in Stadia, I don't see much reason why they wouldn't go with that.

Now, Microsoft could be fine. But, my point is that Xbox might not.

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I think the exclusive library is extremely minor when considering the future of Xbox or PS. Nintendo's is relevant because they are just about the only platform with a wide range of games for kids. For Xbox and PS it's largely irrelevant, neither have exclusives that make the platform a must have for 98% of gamers.

Microsoft and Xbox are well positioned for a long future. Windows is the default platform for PC gaming, and MS's work to make titles available for all their platforms will keep Xbox relevant as a console. Basically, titles that are released for PC will be compatible with Xbox by default. Right now their core APIs are limited to software in the Microsoft store, but that will change

Frankly, I don't think a game streaming service for AAA titles is really viable without hardware on the client end. The latency of button presses is too high, speed of light dictates that. Potentially, you could get away with it if it were streaming from a headend or other localized compute center like that, but anything with latency over 2ms is too high

Maybe I'm wrong, we shall see.

This was my experience with AC half the time. I put in 15 hours on AC on Project Stream.

Stadia requires developers to port their games to the platform. XCloud is just Xbox One X's on server racks so most Xbox Games will be available to stream day 1. Betting Stadia will launch like a new console with only a handful of games.

kb2001 said:

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Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Disagree strongly.

Nintendo has always been the least susceptible of the three because of the strength of its first party library.

Microsoft seems to have the weakest exclusive library of the three, and when gamers have the option of shelling out $400 for the next Xbox, or playing those same AAA games in Stadia, I don't see much reason why they wouldn't go with that.

Now, Microsoft could be fine. But, my point is that Xbox might not.

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I think the exclusive library is extremely minor when considering the future of Xbox or PS. Nintendo's is relevant because they are just about the only platform with a wide range of games for kids. For Xbox and PS it's largely irrelevant, neither have exclusives that make the platform a must have for 98% of gamers.

Microsoft and Xbox are well positioned for a long future. Windows is the default platform for PC gaming, and MS's work to make titles available for all their platforms will keep Xbox relevant as a console. Basically, titles that are released for PC will be compatible with Xbox by default. Right now their core APIs are limited to software in the Microsoft store, but that will change

Frankly, I don't think a game streaming service for AAA titles is really viable without hardware on the client end. The latency of button presses is too high, speed of light dictates that. Potentially, you could get away with it if it were streaming from a headend or other localized compute center like that, but anything with latency over 2ms is too high

Maybe I'm wrong, we shall see.

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Your TV probably introduces 10-20ms of latency, at least for the average gamer. So your standard of 2ms seems a little low (extremely). Even high end gaming monitors add 1-2 ms of input lag. I don't think cloud gaming is going to supplant consoles for online competitive shooters in the near term, but when fiber or fiber equivalent services are more prevalent (again, 5G or low earth satellite service) I think it could.

That's accurate, but dropping that local latency from 20-30 ms to 1 ms probably cuts half or more of the latency to your local Google Data Center. My fiber connection gets me 33 ms latency to Google's Data Center in Iowa. Most people in this country and in the major gaming markets in the world are closer to one of Google's data centers than I am in Dallas. 33 ms is probably not going to be inconvenient for a lot of games. Maybe for competitive FPS's or Souls style games, but not for things like Assassin's Creed or Action Adventure games.

Microsoft has even more data centers. My ping to the server in Texas is 20 ms. That's like taking my low latency TV and rolling it back 3 years to what a lot of people are already playing on.

I guess my point is that the trade off of not paying $500+ every 5-7 years is worth the dip in latency. At least for me and I assume a lot of people who play games.

That's why I included my last sentence.

If I had to choose between the two RIGHT NOW, I'm going to go xCloud especially if switch gets access.

Google will have to blow me away with games and price to even get me to bite. But at least I don't have to invest in hardware and can try it out on a game by game basis. We'll see what happens at E3.

That's not an issue derived from the data center's ability to process the game as well as an Xbox it's a connection stability issue, which is a concern. If I set up steam in home streaming I can get near the same quality of game to my TV, but there's less distance (latency) and traffic (peak resolution) on my home network than on the internet at large. It's functionally a very similar process, just harder to achieve the stability of the stream.

Kotaku did an interview with Google and they said they have improved the streams such that a 30 Mb/s download speed would be capable of doing 4K60 HDR up from the 1080p60 they did on 25 Mb/s speeds during their test.


I think it'll work for a lot of people and not for others, just like video streaming back in the day, but as technology improves over the next 5 years more and more people will have access to high speed low latency internet capable of using the service. So this next generation this type of service isn't going to completely upend the marketplace, but by the next one it might. I'm going to try out Xbox's cloud service before purchasing any console, because I believe it will work good enough for me and if it doesn't I'm only out the cost of one month's subscription.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Disagree strongly.

Nintendo has always been the least susceptible of the three because of the strength of its first party library.

Microsoft seems to have the weakest exclusive library of the three, and when gamers have the option of shelling out $400 for the next Xbox, or playing those same AAA games in Stadia, I don't see much reason why they wouldn't go with that.

Now, Microsoft could be fine. But, my point is that Xbox might not.

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Well, it kind of depends on Google's pricing model. Are you going to buy games and pay a monthly fee to stream them, or pay a monthly fee to stream any game from a library? If they go the monthly fee+purchase route, buying an xbox might actually make sense depending on the fee. I could definitely a it being a cheaper competitor though.

hph6203 said:

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That's not an issue derived from the data center's ability to process the game as well as an Xbox it's a connection stability issue, which is a concern. If I set up steam in home streaming I can get near the same quality of game to my TV, but there's less distance (latency) and traffic (peak resolution) on my home network than on the internet at large. It's functionally a very similar process, just harder to achieve the stability of the stream.

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A data center may have the capabilities to process game but there are a lot of parts that are very different from video streaming.

1. Video streams have buffering at the destination that can hide lag.
2. Video streaming is largely a push operation. (There is a control loop but the latency tends to be long unless there are a lot of packet drops).

For true cloud based gaming there are a number of thing that have to be optimized to minimize the latency at both the source and destination to make the game seamless.

A game especially an FPS is going to have to have a very short control loop to avoid perceived lag. Since they want this to work on existing devices with just a Sadia App they are not going to have optimized video decode,bluetooth or network stacks on the client devices. To minimize lag you need all of those functions working very efficiently on client.

At the server side they are very likely going to have to have a very custom network stack and offload processing or the Network processing alone will be a performance issue. Critical control commands need to be decoded and prioritized over other network traffic and fast tracked to the app.

I was responding to a post about the image quality of the Stadia stream as compared to a natively running console game, which I was saying was more a function of bandwidth rather than the data center's inability to process and encode the image for the end user at a closer quality (I'm not saying it will be in parity). I compared it to Steam In-Home streaming, because it's functionally a similar process (much more similar than video streaming, I wasn't comparing it to that), but harder to achieve, because you have the added difficulties of distance and additional traffic muddying the system.

Obviously there are going to be latency issues, and some people aren't going to have the bandwidth to get an end image that compares to the locally processed game, but my point is that this is the first time a service like this has been launched that the infrastructure at least appears to be strong enough to end up being a replacement or cheap introduction to console quality gaming for some people.

For me, I play primarily third person action adventure games (Uncharted, Last of Us, Tomb Raider) or 2D Platformers (Celeste, Ori and the Blind Forest) and if I can get access to those types of games without shelling out $500 for a console I'll gladly take on the additional latency issues and image quality issues. My reaction time ain't that good and neither are my eyes. I also have a gigabit connection, so I imagine that at the very least the image quality won't suffer too greatly.

In the short term the majority of people are still going to opt to play on an actual console at least among the current crop of console gamers, but I think if you tell someone that doesn't currently play on a console that they can play such and such game and all they need is a $60 controller you're going to end up reaching a larger audience.

If enough people make the switch it's going to become a choice between PC gaming or streaming, because a console production line isn't going to be able to sustain itself if there's not enough buy in to the platform. That's why I say Sony is in the most trouble of all of them. I don't believe their games are unique enough to justify the purchase of their console if the alternative is close enough and significantly cheaper.

Edit: Put it like this. If I want to sit on my couch and play Assassin's Creed on my 4K OLED TV in my living room, get a bit tired and want to go lay down and play a bit more before I pass out I can take my controller from the living room to my bedroom and then take it to work and fool around on an iPad at work during downtime. I watched all of Game of Thrones, because I could watch it at work, I could see the same scenario with gaming to some extent.

For Xbox they could say, hey you could buy our $500 box and any game you buy for it if you subscribe to our streaming service you can take it anywhere with you. You can get the low latency premium experience sitting in front of your living room TV and accept the shortcomings of streaming while on the go.

That's why I think Xbox (Microsoft) is the least at risk platform going into the future. They're in the position to offer the best of both.

When I mention the display latency I'm just saying that there is variability in display latency all the way down to 1 ms all the way up to 50 ms or so depending on the TV. So when you say it's not going to be acceptable to have even 2 ms of latency, my counterpoint is that the vast majority of gamers haven't even done the legwork to buy the lowest latency TV (or a gaming monitor for that matter) they can afford so 2 ms may be bad for you, but it's not bad for people in general (I 100% do not believe you would notice that small of a difference). Going from the absolute lowest latency TV to the best gaming monitor would net you 10 ms in input lag. How many people do you know that play on a monitor? Connection latency is the 20-60 ms or so ping that people have, so 2 ms is a fraction of that.

I believe Digital Foundry measured the entire input latency at 178 ms on Project Stream (not including display latency) and that measured latency dropped to 166 ms (including the Pixelbook's display latency and including WiFi latency, which adds 4 ms, and again how many people hardwire their console?), which the technical head of the project said was an improvement in network optimization and compression techniques. Compare that to an Xbox One X at 145 ms and you're not losing much in terms of latency. So going hardwired would drop Stadia's latency to within 15 ms of an Xbox One X running the game locally. Most people's reaction times are not that fast. Their methodology may not be 100% accurate, but as long as it's consistent you can see it's not that bad. Granted they were in San Francisco and the closest data center was only 400 miles away. Dallas to Iowa is probably comparable to the maximum distance most people would be from a Google data center (not all, most), which would add an additional 20 ms to their measured latency (given that SF to LA is about half as far as Dallas to Iowa). For FPS's, fighting games or rhythm games and some platformers that may be a deal breaker, but for most slower games it's definitely not and their tech is apparently improving.

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

I wonder if Google will be leveraging this technology to allow people to not just play games, but make them too. Instead of spending money on a machine to create and render games, you just pay a monthly subscription to use Google Drive and a developer version of Stadia to make a game. Do a trade off where they get timed exclusivity in exchange for cheap server access?