Google announces Stadia - new game streaming service

Ryzza5 · March 19, 2019

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/19/google-streaming-video-games-gdc-2019/

"The company today revealed Stadia, the evolution of its efforts to make digital, on-demand video games reliable and viable. It'll be available this year in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. Google dropped the news during an hour-long showcase at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Google's plans for its streaming service bring the industry's "Netflix for games" promises to life. Ideally, it will allow folks to play any game on any connected device -- think Devil May Cry 5 on your iPhone, Dead Cells on your smart TV or Apex Legends on a Mac. Stadia will be able to stream games in 4K, 60FPS and HDR color at launch, but eventually it'll support up to 8K.

However, it's also much more than that."

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More connection means more consumerism, and Stadia will allow developers to sell their games in new ways, including directly via YouTube and Twitch live streams. For example, load up a trailer for Assassin's Creed: Odyssey on YouTube and, at the end, click the "Play" button and the game will load in as little as five seconds in your Chrome browser, ready to play. That's all it'll take.

Stadia's Crowd Play feature allows people watching a YouTube livestream to jump in line and actually join that streamer's game. State Share, meanwhile, lets folks to send links to specific sections of a game, and their friends can then simply click and play from there in the Chrome browser.

Google has been preparing for its foray into video games for years, hiring a handful of high-profile executives including former Sony studios and Xbox head Phil Harrison, and Assassin's Creed visionary Jade Raymond. Raymond is officially the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, Google's new game-development arm.

The Big G has also been testing out its streaming prowess. The Project Stream beta test kicked off last year, allowing some folks to play Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, a new and sprawling AAA game, via the Chrome browser. We tried it out and found it worked well, running Ubisoft's fancy new title seamlessly on a 2015 Macbook Air.

Google isn't the only tech giant making moves in the game-streaming space. Microsoft already has the Xbox Game Pass subscription service and it's reportedly building a streaming-focused console that'll be announced soon -- E3 is just around the corner, after all -- while NVIDIA's Geforce Now has offered seamless play for a few years, in beta. PlayStation Now is also a thing, though it's still fairly unreliable day-to-day. Those are just two potential competitors for Google, but rest assured there are plenty more lurking right behind.

Google has an advantage over some companies with its robust cloud network that includes more than 7,500 nodes positioned around the world. Leading game-engine companies including Unreal and Unity, and studios like Doom creator id Software, are partnering with Google on Stadia as well.

PlayStation, Steam Link, nVIDIA and now Microsoft and Google are all about the game streaming hype train! Are you hedging any bets as to what the future of gaming holds? And will you be a part of it?

Eudemon · March 20, 2019

my first reaction was since they use AMD chip, AMD stock jumped over 12% on a single day

aside from that, I wonder how much input lag there will be between device receiving input, encoding it, transmitting that input through home wiki / 4g, send it through ISP, routed to google datacenter, calculate movement, and send output back through ISP, your home wiki, your device, and then decode, sending to monitor and display to you

Ryzza5 · March 20, 2019

I'd imagine certainly too much lag for Racing or FPS games.

Using Steam in-home streaming has been too laggy for most of the games I've tried, over a wired gigabit LAN with 1-2 hops.

A recent Microsoft demo showing FH4 'streaming' has been called out as faked (or terrible, or both) in YouTube comments saying that the presenters' inputs did not match the screen output.

But the question remains why so many large organisations are fighting to capture this market if the experience is going to be that bad? Or does 5G mobile Internet on the horizon change everything?

Eudemon · March 20, 2019

the 4K at 60 FPS they claim at stage is certainly do-able

but number one thing they avoid talking about ... how much is the input lag !?? maybe when 5G comes out it will help

and then there is unbox therapy (well yes i know he doesn't know shit about how tech works) talking about it and said "no input lag" "streaming is not downloading" ... how???

TDU Iceman · March 20, 2019

On 3/19/2019 at 11:39 PM, Ryzza5 said:

Ideally, it will allow folks to play any game on any connected device

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"Ideally"

On 3/20/2019 at 1:21 AM, Ryzza5 said:

But the question remains why so many large organisations are fighting to capture this market if the experience is going to be that bad? Or does 5G mobile Internet on the horizon change everything?

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Silicon Valley is out of touch with reality for the most part. And even if 5G worked well, there are still countless bottlenecks and points of failure between the server and client.

Edit: And they can't even get Youtube videos to load reliably a lot of the time. How could they get gaming to work decently if they can't even get that right?

Edited March 20, 2019 by TDU Iceman
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Ryzza5 · March 21, 2019

Microsoft's Phil Spencer sent this email to his team:

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"We just wrapped up watching the Google announcement of Stadia as team here at GDC. Their announcement is validation of the path we embarked on two years ago.
Today we saw a big... competitor enter the gaming market, and frame the necessary ingredients for success as content, community, and cloud. There were no big surprises in their announcement although I was impressed by their leveraging of YouTube, the use of Google Assistant, and the new Wi-Fi controller.

But I want to get back to us, there has been really good work to get us to the position where we are poised to compete for two billion gamers across the planet. Google went big today and we have a couple of months until E3 when we will go big.

We have to stay agile and continue to build with our customer at the "center. We have the content, community, cloud team, and strategy, and as I've been saying for a while, it's all about execution. This is even more true today."

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