[bathtub365]

Is download time a significant factor for people with the types of connections that will have a good experience on Stadia? It’s my understanding that downloading a large game in a timely fashion and streaming it are both bandwidth-intensive. As for “terabyte-sized games” are there any of those on the market, or even on the horizon? At some point it’s either outside of the budget of most games to produce that many assets, or the 1080p/upscaled to 4K experiences that Stadia provides won’t make use of extremely high resolution textures.

[Macha]

We're not at terabyte yet, but 80-100gb is becoming increasingly common. Even the crash remakes are coming in at 30gb, and that wasn't that High budget a title.

[bathtub365]

Google recommends a 35mbit/sec connection for 4K Stadia streaming and they say it uses 20GB/hr of data[1]. Even at your high example of 100GB, that’s just 5 hours of streaming. I understand that the idea is to optimise for instant play but it seems silly to download enough data to cover the entire contents of the game potentially multiple times over a play through. Platforms like Steam, Battle.net, and consoles already allow developers to post staged installs where players can start playing a game before all assets have been downloaded. Stadia continues to look like a solution in search of a problem, where that solution comes with a lot of tradeoffs that I find hard to swallow. 100GB is also only 10% of 1TB, and I find it hard to come up with a concrete use for the other 900GB.

1: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9607891?hl=en&ref_t...