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Google Debuts Video Games Streaming Service Stadia (polygon.com)
Google today launched its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. From a report: Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be accessible on a variety of platforms: browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices. In an onstage demonstration of Stadia, Google showed someone playing a game on a Chromebook, then playing it on a phone, then immediately playing it on PC -- a low-end PC, no less --, picking up where the game left off in real time. Stadia will be powered by Google's worldwide data centers, which live in more than 200 countries and territories, streamed over hundreds of millions of miles of fiber optic cable, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.
Phil Harrison, previously at PlayStation and Xbox, now at Google, said the company will give developers access to its data centers to bring games to Stadia. Harrison said that players will be able to access and play Stadia games, like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, within seconds. Harrison showed a YouTube video of Odyssey featuring a "Play" button that would offer near-instant access to the game. Pichai announced the new platform at the Game Developers Conference, saying that Google want to build a gaming platform for everyone, and break down barriers to access for high-end games. Users will be able to move from YouTube directly into gameplay without any downloads. Google says this can be done in as little as 5 seconds. At launch, Stadia will stream games at 4k resolution, but Google claimed in the future it will be able to stream at a video quality of 8k. The company says it will launch the service later this year in the U.S. and UK.
Phil Harrison, previously at PlayStation and Xbox, now at Google, said the company will give developers access to its data centers to bring games to Stadia. Harrison said that players will be able to access and play Stadia games, like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, within seconds. Harrison showed a YouTube video of Odyssey featuring a "Play" button that would offer near-instant access to the game. Pichai announced the new platform at the Game Developers Conference, saying that Google want to build a gaming platform for everyone, and break down barriers to access for high-end games. Users will be able to move from YouTube directly into gameplay without any downloads. Google says this can be done in as little as 5 seconds. At launch, Stadia will stream games at 4k resolution, but Google claimed in the future it will be able to stream at a video quality of 8k. The company says it will launch the service later this year in the U.S. and UK.
Its been pretty impressive seeing the resurgence of PC gaming after consoles seemed to have expanded to take over the gaming market... Google's move can only help to cement that trend.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After all that Google has abandoned over the years, why would anyone trust them for anything?
The big ones I think of are:
Reader
Wave
Picasa
Google+
I love google docs, android, and gmail but I would not be surprised to see them get dropped as well.
You and what bandwidth?
I'm not looking forward to the wave of streaming-only game releases that will occur as a result of Stadia and any future lookalike services. Some quick problems off the top of my head:
- When nobody owns copies of the game, the publisher can remove them for good if they fail to turn a profit.
- Potential modding scenes for these games will never materialize.
To never pay for Open Source software unless as a famous cloud service.
This is a project to track and monetize gamers in their youth so that their data can be scraped and sold to Google affiliates. Anyone fawning over it is a moron who deserves to be robbed and beaten by Google's data extraction henchmen.
I'm sure it worked great on their gigabit test network.
I can't be sure from the article, but it looks like this is a different approach to gaming. Normally the code and data for the games is sent to your device, and then your device runs the game logic, renders the graphics, and outputs the video and sound, sending data to central servers for multiplayer gaming. This service takes data from your controller, sends it over the network to a server, runs all the logic and rendering there, then streams the video and sound back to your device.
This is a radical change that has lots of serious implications if it catches on.
I expect Google will be able to encode the game video in a number of different formats, enabling streaming to many different devices. Doing this in real time is a nice trick. Eventually they should be able to support multi-monitor setups and other interesting configurations.
Your local GPU is no longer important
I agree with the other items, but the system has to be able to decode a high resolution video stream very quickly - which is usually dedicated hardware, or the GPU on most systems. I don't think that even the faster CPU's today could manage to decode a 4K video stream quickly enough for the bandwidth required.
It's not as important though for sure, just saying there is still some base of performance you have to meet for the video needs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What is going to do all that graphical and computational processing then? The internet?
I don't think you understand how computers work.
Must rebuy games? + no mods + limited to there list of games = ripoff
They mentioned TV's. Any word on whether this will be available on WebOS for LG TV's by any chance?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
After all that Google has abandoned over the years, why would anyone trust them for anything?
The key thing about this service is, there's really not much need to trust Google. You just play and enjoy games.
The only thing you are technically "trusting" them with is save game data. But even there, a lot of games you are playing are saving your real status back to some server like an EA account.
I am OK with the risk of playing through a game, and losing the same game status sometime later - since those tend to not be useful after a while anyway, it's often hard to go back and play older games anyway never mind keeping the save.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In a world where you can own no remnant of things you pay for, it's only the parent companies that can archive and preserve culture.
The root cause of this trend might be the flood of info we are exposed to daily, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Youtube, but the end result is a complete loss of any permanence.
I can still pick up a Super Nintendo game and play it - long after the parent company has abandoned the hardware. In fact, that company still continues to sell some of the games, but only in a form that has a limited lifespan. Now what do I have after paying for Google's gaming service for years upon years? I have nothing. If a company wants to pretend a game never existed, there is no one else to preserve it.
The promotional video reminded me Pied Piper's tables, back when the show was really good (= before last season).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
This isn't PC gaming.
It's hard to tell from the article, but Google is obviously running the game on PC's in the backend. It makes way more sense than Google modifying a bunch of consoles to stream games, wouldn't you say?
So you are running the PC version of the game, probably with display settings fixed, and simply receiving the display via video stream, and sending control commands back to the "PC" )probably some kind of virtual PC) that is streaming the game.
So how is this not PC gaming? In theory it would be easy to have access to any PC game this way, at a resolution and quality level maybe better than most people's local PC's could handle.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and when comcast does there own others will be slowed down and then comcast will hit you with all kinds of fees to make of for the loss tv subs.
Or possible multiple login's to the same game simultaneously?
And there we have it, rock bottom.
I don't know who Phil Harrison is, but he must HATE games, and gamers.
I have just one question: When will Google discontinue this?
In a world where monthly data caps cause issues for streaming movies and TV shows, what could possibly go wrong with streaming video games? I'm sure Comcast and AT&T (among others) will love this. As soon as user's get their first overage bill they will realize what a bad idea this was.
If Google was smart, they would have used this to drum up demand for their own ISP service, Google Fiber. However that, like most other Google "hobbies" is all but dead now.
Much like most other Google offerings.
Also...."Stadia"??? What a fucking stupid name.
Ignoring the latency, dropouts, and compression artifact issues. You're basically renting the GPU instead of buying it. This is taking advantage of the fact that most people's gaming GPUs sit idle for most of the day. If on average, gamers buy a GPU and use it only 20% of the time (4.8 hours/day), a streaming service like this can provide the same gaming experience for as little as 1/5th the cost, since their GPU can be used by someone else when you're not using it. So if you're used to buying a $600 top-of-the-line GPU every 2 years ($25/mo), a service like this could potentially give you the same graphical experience for $5/mo ($120 every 2 years). That huge price delta will be compelling enough to make a lot of people ignore the latency, dropouts, and compression artifacts.
The fact that Google might drop it won't matter because unlike the services you listed, the software service here is just a transparent streaming layer. You can always switch to a different streamed game service. Or even go back to buying a GPU and playing the games on your own hardware. As long as the same game titles are available, the interface will be the same, and you'll likely even be able to copy over your saved games. Like how you can cancel Netflix and switch to Hulu, and the only thing that really matters is which movies and shows are available in the library.
Mat = Jump + conclusions + without seeing anything
Don't get too used to this. Google will retire it in 2021.
I'd be curious how this system retains your play state and how you might store saved games. I'd hate to have a mobile connection drop and lose a game mid-level, but if it is constantly saving your stream and can be picked back up on the PC, that would be interesting. Also, I wonder how saved game files work and if you have a certain number, or if you unsubscribe how long they might be saved.
Again this? Google must have forgot to cancel their slashdot shilling subscription in the late 90s
It's the 3rd or 4th time i see this on the front page. It's not even news the first time around.
The idea of "streaming games to your TV so you don't have to have a console" has been around since around 2000. Here's a complete gravey^H^H^H list of some of the companies who have tried. Even technologies like NVidia's shield or Steam's ability to stream within the intranet don't seem to have taken off.
Google entry into this market seems foolhardy at best.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I already hit my monthly data cap sometimes. I assume this would use a great deal more data than normal gaming since usually the video is all local. So that would make it an expensive proposition for me.
As the game is not on your computer...
Same difference to me streaming the display of my PC and the controls the way Steam did with a recently discontinued Steam Link product (think that was the name).
As the game is not on your computer... things like modding outside of what is intended by the dev's of the game is impossible
Are you sure about that? Why would it be impossible. You could basically have an account on Google's to allow you to upload new game files like mods. Just because Google is not supporting that initially does not mean it's impossible, after all they have to be storing things like controller configuration settings on their side also.
Anything a PC game could do could easily be done by streaming, and it seems pretty clear to me they are using PC versions of the game as the base for what they run. So it is PC gaming, just less configurable (at the moment).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given that their example was an Assassin's Creed game was enough to make me ignore the rest of it.
Stolen from the YouTube video of the google presentation:
"Man, Google missed the point. Maybe in 10 or 20 years, when ISPs catch up, streaming like this might be possible. Not to mention nobody wants to get rid of their hardware."
This is basically the gigantic issue with this thing.
http://onlive.com/
... not really, but given Google's track record... expect the announcement in the near future.
Ahh, the announcement without any price. What a classic. "It's great, it's magic, trust us! You don't need to know how much all of this will cost!"
You don't need to know a lot of things apparently. Like what sort of internet connection you need, how much this would eat into your data plan, that you're locked in permanently to Google's ecosystem with all your games and thus must pay rent indefinitely to them to even access these games. But don't worry, it's cool tech, which means it's sure to succeed as a business!
Low altitude satellite internet, lower latency, cheap bandwidth, and this makes for an attractive situation.
Especially on mobile
Because its not very nice to give publishers and lawyers the power to completely wipe a game out of the existence.
They have been trying to have this power for years now, and many games got a lot harder to erase for trivial shit like music licensing expiring to pure corporate assholery.
This service is for the future with 5G in mind. IMO Google will create a foldable pixel phone with build in controller that will be Switch like to play games. Both Android + Stadia. The picture will stream to your Andriod TV when at home while still using your phone as the controller. Still think this service is doomed for high-end "pro" gamer that drop 2k on PCs. But most people will find this service good enough.
This might be used to power streamable VR experiences on new wireless headsets and break the cord on VR. Will massively reduce the cost of entry for VR on hardware front.
the interesting part is that all of this is running on a linux, debian based OS.
i'd say linux is a viable gaming platform!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.