[vocatus_gate]

> Streaming games is the future, deal with it.

So, so wrong.

1. Much of the world has heavy-handed data caps. Those aren't going away any time soon. Streaming two ways eats into that quickly.

2. Input latency is real, and super annoying. And it's not just that there's latency; that you can get used to. It's that there's highly unpredictable latency which is super frustrating when playing anything but turn-based games. And at that point, why not just run it browser-based and be done with it?

3. Packet loss. Packet loss doesn't matter on streaming video because you can just wait for the server to re-send it, or just buffer till you get far enough ahead. On games, real-time response is critical, and there's no tolerance for waiting to "catch up on the stream."

The Internet will never be a good streaming platform for real-time gaming, not without some serious protocol upgrades. Everyone focuses on Netflix like it's remotely the same; it's not. Netflix is one-way, loss-is-okay, and latency (round-trip time for the packets, NOT the same as bandwidth) doesn't matter. Gaming is exactly opposite.

Without proper end-to-end QoS or dedicated circuits ($$$) Google Stadia will fail just like every other games streaming platform before it.

[Crinus]

Honestly, these aren't issues that would block something like Stadia, the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen.

These issues will be solved. The loss of control is not something that can be solved though and is IMO a much bigger issue.

[friendlybus]

You can't solve the input latency problem. You could move the input code into a super low quality game that runs on the thin client and validate the actions on the server. You could remap the high res streamed data onto the low res game client. But then you are just moving the lag from input to the updating the game world.

If you could solve the latency problem, multiplayer games wouldn't suck so much. Even super local servers with 22ms ping are one and a half frames of game rendering late for the round trip.

[account42]

> the solutions will simply be games designed around these issues pretty much how many modern games are designed around the limitations of a console controller or a mobile phone touch screen

If that happens it will just be another big negative impact of Stadia.