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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.
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.
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
Must rebuy games? + no mods + limited to there list of games = ripoff
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.
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
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.