[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

People kept trying to convince me that Stadia is fantastic with its supposedly amazing tech.

I live in a larger city and I am in the privileged position to have access to a top shelf internet connection, so I gave it a try. It was not "fantastic", I would describe it as barely ok. Latency was surprisengly good I admit, but absolutely noticeable and annoying. If this is some kind of "future of gaming", I have to say it feels like a massive step backwards to me.

Fans will of course tell me that I am not the target audience given that I highly value these aspects, but I still have to wonder who is (good internet, short distance to data centers, at the same time not owning consoles or a PC).

Many people worldwide do not have the luxury of access to fast internet.

[cashewchoo]

I think perhaps a bigger issue is that, presumably their audience is "people who currently like AAA games with huge graphics requirements", which are going to be "core gamers". Which are perhaps some of the most notoriously hard to please people in the world (I say this with some amount of love). And they take tremendous pride in their hardware (see: pc building subreddits, pcmasterrace, etc) and companies (nvidia, alienware, evga, msi, asus, etc) take great pains to market to them because they can sell to them at great markups just for making build quality a bit better than the usual dreck you find at Best Buy and slap on a bunch of alien heads and LEDs (again, I say this with some amount of love).

So I think the existing market is going to be really hard to crack for a lot harder-to-unseat reasons than just "it's a better experience" (which they can't provide anyway!). These people aren't cost-sensitive (generally) and will generally have pretty decent, dedicated hardware.

So I can only conclude that they're hoping to create a market of people who don't currently play AAA games due to cost or space constraints.

Which is consoles.

So yeah, I really don't know where they're going with this.

[brundolf]

Not to mention: for the people who don't want to play AAA games, they almost certainly already have a local device in their pocket that can handle anything they might want to play, without latency or even a subscription

[nickelcitymario]

So, they're YouTube circa 2007?

[zepto]

Latency is not an issue with YouTube.

And of course in 2007 there was no better alternative to youtube, whereas all alternatives to Stadia are better.

[nickelcitymario]

There are streaming gaming services that don't deal with latency issues?

(Not being sarcastic. To my knowledge, no one has cracked this yet.)

My overall point in comparing to YouTube is that the internet WILL get faster. More and more people will have the kind of broadband needed to make this a good experience. I'm sure it sucks today. But what about 10 years from now?

Streaming video used to suck. Now it doesn't.

Streaming games currently sucks. Tomorrow it won't, and for the same reason: The infrastructure will catch up.

[mikestew]

But what about 10 years from now?

Man, what was the name of that streaming console that they never produced that was all hyped about ten years ago (EDIT: found it, the Phantom[0]; and OMG, it was 16 years ago)? Because that was what was being said about...ten years ago. Still waiting.

I don't know that's a nut that will ever get cracked. I've got symmetrical gigabit fiber, but you think it's the speed that makes the difference? Nope, it's latency. And to a certain extent, one has to hope that the speed of light will take a big leap forward. Here's an example that has little to do with gaming: online music playing with other people. Boy howdy, 30ms of total latency and you'll quickly notice. That's why practically no one uses (for example) Zoom, and uses something like JamKazam instead. Zoom has other priorities, as long as the packets get there in a reasonably timely manner. JamKazam, OTOH, prioritizes low latency. You go buy a special box ("USB audio interface") to plug things into, wired Ethernet and no WiFi, and your headphones and mic are wired. Everything is wired. And even then, in a two hour jam session we'll get the occasional person that's lagging just a half-beat off. (I wish everyone used JamKazam for online meetings, because a side benefit is that conversations are much more pleasant without the lag of a Zoom/Teams/Whatever meeting.)

So hundreds of dollars of equipment, and no wireless anything in sight, to cut latency to something reasonable to play music, but somehow a wireless controller connected to a box using WiFi over an internet connection that has the same latency it did probably ten years ago is going to work smoothly? Not today, not tomorrow, but maybe sometime in the future as long as you're not in Seattle trying to play someone in Miami.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Entertainment#Release

[zepto]

> There are streaming gaming services that don’t deal with latency issues?

No, but those aren’t the only alternatives - consoles, PCs etc, are. Youtube had no established, better alternative to compete with.

You may be right that streaming games won’t suck in the future.

I’m just pointing out that this is not like the YouTube situation at all. Also YouTube didn’t suck even at the beginning.

[jhbadger]

Perhaps a better analogy would be Netflix streaming. A lot of people thought it was nuts given how many people were still on low-bandwith DSL connections that couldn't reliably stream even in standard definition. There was already an existing solution that worked well -- DVDs by mail (Netflix's original business model). That still exists, but is a small fraction of Netflix's business today.

[nickelcitymario]

Netflix is definitely the better analogy.

[nickelcitymario]

> Youtube had no established, better alternative to compete with.

If you're comparing game streaming to consoles, then the fair comparison is to every other source of video entertainment that predates YouTube. Like: DVD, VHS, network TV, cable TV, bootlegs, etc. They had EVERY alternative to compete with, and almost all of them were better in some way or another. YouTube was (and is) simply better in ways that matter even more.

That being said, maybe latency will never improve. Maybe no matter how much pipe you have, the fundamental speed limit of light is enough to ruin this whole concept for gaming. Maybe.

But I doubt it, personally. I'm willing to bet that this is an idea that simply needs technology to catch up to it.

[zepto]

> If you're comparing game streaming to consoles, then the fair comparison is to every other source of video entertainment that predates YouTube. Like: DVD, VHS, network TV, cable TV, bootlegs, etc.

No, this is simply not correct.

YouTube was a new type of content that simply wasn’t available on any of those channels. If you wanted to see peer-produced video, which turns out to be very compelling, youtube was the only option.

The games you can play on stadia are the same games you can play on other platforms only worse.

Again - streaming may end up catching up, but the comparison to youtube simply is not informative, because they aren’t similar.