[basch]

"gamers" are a small portion of the game buying community, especially very profitable more casual games.

What percent of mobile game sales do you think go to "gamers?"

Conversely, gamers are probably a high percent of the medium-high end hardware community. Those companies manufacturing physical products do need to cater to gamers.

[mreome]

Casual games are a huge market, but Stadia is marketing itself as being for "playing AAA video games" and using graphics processing power as a selling point. It doesn't appear to be targeting the causal market.

A pretty sizable subset of AAA games are heavily effected by reaction/latency time. It could be a solution for some kinds of MMO games though, where high latency is already designed for, and not having to distribute content updates would both be a plus for the players and allow the developers to keep "secret" content/events secured before they were intended to be made available.

[basch]

id argue by virtue of being AAA games they are games that have MASS appeal to a large portion of society, not just "gamers." The population of people who played Halo/COD/Fortnight is quite a bit bigger than people who identify with gaming subculture. googles move has everything to do with commoditizing high performance hardware FOR THE MASSES.

to the same effect, plenty of people want 4k and hdr, but arent film critics, nor videophiles, and dont actually care about data compression, bitrates, or banding.

[mreome]

I'd disagree that AAA has to do with mass appeal, as the industry uses that term to distinguish games in terms of development and marketing budgeting, not target audience. Many AAA games are specifically targeted at only the hardcore "gamer" demographic, because while that's a smaller group they are usually willing to pay much more for a game then a casual gamer will. I would of course agree that AAA can be targeted at, and appeal to, a much larger and somewhat more casual demographics as well.

My point was less about demographic and more about the network-latency concerns for specific common game-types. You cite correctly that they want to commoditize high performance hardware for a mass market, and note games like Halo/COD/Fortnight seem to have a very broad appeal. My question then becomes, can their solution commoditize high performance for the masses for these kinds of games? I'm curious to see how their solutions pan out, but there are a lot of road-blocks to achieving their goals. Graphical quality is only part of what qualifies as high performance in a game. In any FPS games like these game-play/graphical latency is a huge issue for play-ability. Developers go as far to take specific monitor hardware into consideration to shave down the latency. Stadia effectively adds a network loop connection between the keyboard and screen -- that's A LOT of a extra latency. Also, if this is going to target the mass market, then it has to work for the mass market and I think (in the US at least) there is going to be a large percentage of the population who's internet will lack either the necessary bandwidth, or network latency to Stadia's servers, in order to achieve a playable/desirable experience.

[valker43]

I would argue that there is a huge segment of users that would technically be interested in playing actual AAA games but can't be bothered to put up the initial investment. Many friends of mine don't have TV's or a beefy PC. Laptop and phone is pretty much the standard. But if they had the option to click a button on a YouTube video and check out a game, they might. A subscription is psychologically much more appealing to most people that a big payment upfront. Especially if there is a free trial. It's kind of like the difference between CapEx vs OpEx.

I think this segment will be a primary target of Stadia. If you want uncompressed 4K, 144hz, HDR with extremly low latency then your not currently playing on a console anyway and probably have a $2000+ machine sitting on your desk. For the enthusiast the tech is not there yet in streaming. But make no mistake. It will be there soon(ish). The day is not that far off when local machines will disappear for almost anything. And on a technical level nobody will be able to tell the difference.

[basch]

to me, AAA is budget, and for the most part, you get budget by delivering sales. As a series goes on, they expect more sales, or budget gets cut.

Can you think of a AAA, "hardcore gamer only" game that is significantly more expensive, precisely because they know sales will be lower?

Latency can be fixed by moving the processing closer to the edge, like a CDN. Cloudflare and Netflix have boxes everywhere, google just needs to pop some mammoth consoles colocated inside isp data centers, and group people together connected to the same console. They can get there with 5G faster than itll make sense to keep adding gfx power to phones (battery life.)

Google is looking towards the future, where half the population lives in a city with cheap 5G.