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Why Google Stadia Will Be a Major Problem For Many American Players
Earlier today, Google launched its long-awaited "Stadia" cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Unlike services from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, Stadia is powered by Google's worldwide data centers, allowing users to play games across a variety of platforms -- browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices -- all via the internet at a 4K resolution. One major problem with Stadia, which Google didn't mention in its presentation, is that it will require a ton of bandwidth, testing the limits of data caps that most U.S. internet service providers have.
"Most US ISPs cap their customers' bandwidth usage, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB per month. And streaming 4K content eats up about 7GB an hour," Steve Bowling from YouTube gaming channel GameXplain tweeted. "And that's based on Netflix's publicly available guidelines for 4K video content, which is shot at 24 fps, a far cry from 60fps, meaning content at 4k60 could be more costly." He added: "Your average consumer likely isn't rocking a 100Mbps+ connection, and in some parts of America such options aren't even available, limiting Stadia's potential reach. And if you are, that cap can come at you fast, especially considering most folks are going to use their internet for more than just streaming games. Most ISPs offer additional data at a premium, but how many are going to want to pay that premium to stream 4K games?"
What's unknown is whether or not Google will work with ISPs to help alleviate this concern. PCWord also notes that there's no option to download and install a game if you want, which is an option available on Steam's streaming service. "You're always streaming it, and presumably copies sold through the Google Play store won't come with more traditional versions from other storefronts," reports PCWorld. "You're either all-in on Stadia and streaming or you're not."
UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Kotaku they were able to deliver 1080p, 60 FPS gameplay for users with 25 Mbps connections. They also said that they expect Stadia to deliver 4K, 60 FPS for people with "approximately the same bandwidth requirements." How exactly they will achieve this is still unclear.
"Most US ISPs cap their customers' bandwidth usage, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB per month. And streaming 4K content eats up about 7GB an hour," Steve Bowling from YouTube gaming channel GameXplain tweeted. "And that's based on Netflix's publicly available guidelines for 4K video content, which is shot at 24 fps, a far cry from 60fps, meaning content at 4k60 could be more costly." He added: "Your average consumer likely isn't rocking a 100Mbps+ connection, and in some parts of America such options aren't even available, limiting Stadia's potential reach. And if you are, that cap can come at you fast, especially considering most folks are going to use their internet for more than just streaming games. Most ISPs offer additional data at a premium, but how many are going to want to pay that premium to stream 4K games?"
What's unknown is whether or not Google will work with ISPs to help alleviate this concern. PCWord also notes that there's no option to download and install a game if you want, which is an option available on Steam's streaming service. "You're always streaming it, and presumably copies sold through the Google Play store won't come with more traditional versions from other storefronts," reports PCWorld. "You're either all-in on Stadia and streaming or you're not."
UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Kotaku they were able to deliver 1080p, 60 FPS gameplay for users with 25 Mbps connections. They also said that they expect Stadia to deliver 4K, 60 FPS for people with "approximately the same bandwidth requirements." How exactly they will achieve this is still unclear.
If bandwidth is concerned, it is no different than watching Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Prime Video, or YouTube. Consumers are already aware of their data caps if they're hitting them.
This is worse than renting games. Streaming them too? I have great fibre service where I live and I'd still rather just install them on my top end gaming pc and enjoy them with the best experience I can get.
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
A solution looking for a problem.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Imagine if there were places in the US that had less good latency than others.
Wow imagine if there were whole countries where they had no decent ping times and shitty bandwidth. Good thing none of them exist.
The minute cloud anything is announced we immediately rush to point out how terrible our ISPs are. All Google has to do is make this Google Fiber-exclusive.
I've always figured watching 4K content here and there, I'd never come close to maxing out my bandwidth cap - and indeed I have not.
But it really is true that bandwidth caps everywhere are going to be hit hard if game streaming becomes popular, games you usually play for a lot longer than any movie, even a series... Never mind ISP caps, you could easily see mobile caps being hit even harder and sooner by people streaming games to phones to play them on the go.
Even with Google pushing this you have to wonder if this is a viable business just because of the caps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have gigbit fiber to home with a 10 TB cap. I am still not interesting is leasing games. If I buy a game i want a physical copy I can lend out to people when I am done playing it. My friends are much the same which means we can trade games for a while. That makes the cost of games much more reasonable. Even downloading a game usually doesn't give you that option.
Now you know why ISPs hate it, it means they have to bend over and take it, and pass the costs onto you.
If bandwidth is concerned, it is no different than watching Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Sure it is, much different.
First of all, most of that content you get from those providers is not even in 4k yet.
Secondly, all the TV/movie streaming providers compress the video quite a lot more than a game can, without noticeably losing lots of detail. In movies or shows the focus is not so much on tiny minute details bu instead on large figures on the screen.
Lastly, most people spend a LOT more time on a game they like than movies or TV. I know in the times when I am really into a game I put way more hours into gaming than I ever would watching video content.
So this service will indeed sneak up on people who otherwise never notice bandwidth caps (which is I would say, most people). This people are also not truly aware of data caps from a practical sense since it does not affect them today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who was waiting for this?
I already pay for unlimited because family use of Netflix always maxed us out. Now adding this is fine as long as itâ(TM)s cheap.
When you are playing a networked game you do not broadcast "the content". You share positional and attribute metadata over the network. The pretty graphics are downloaded once.
Remember Google Fiber?
You didn't care about having it before, but now you want it.
Sergey and Larry ain't no dummies.
My main issue with this whole thing:
The ISP issues we have today are not going to allow this to happen. I'm not a huge data user, but I do business from home and have quite a few teleconferences and watch HD content at home, and I was passing the 1 TB cap for my ISP every month, consistently, which essentially made it 150 USD per month for internet, so instead I put a business line for 100 USD a month to fix the problem.
I don't see anyone else doing what I did unless they can justify it.
This is a solution that is looking really hard for a problem.
More anti consumer DRM.
What about latency of the controllers? I wonder how a first person shooter would be on this...
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
What makes you think there is lag?
It's not like streaming is new, and most people report the experience with a good connection, does not have noticeable lag. I'm sure there are some but is there enough that most people would notice, I'm not sure...
I think that there is a pretty large market of people who would rather choose much better looking graphics over slightly more lag. To maintain a really high end gaming PC takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to invest - this service is a way to experience high-end graphics with none of the hardware pains that comes with owning and maintaining a gaming PC. Yes there are downsides but more casual gamers will happily take that tradeoff.
If Google is smart, they would offer games that are PC only and not on consoles from this service, that would probably be the fastest path to get adoption rates up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... it seems to be yet another data collection vacuum for google.
I've seen other startups trying to incorporate heavy lifting of GPU games to servers and using ISP connection for playing games. It has many issues from network congestion, delays especially problematic in shooters and reaction games. Claiming 4K just adds to the overhead, streaming a movie a lot different then gaming. First streaming 4k movie is one way streaming not gaming, many ISP's have bandwidth issues in peak times so gaming will just be sharing that bandwidth.
Google might as well announce date they will become bored with it and shut it down during launch to save everyone time and guesswork.
The only thing more idiotic and wasteful than the underlying concept of streaming games is relying on Google for anything.
all via the internet at a 4K resolution. One major problem with Stadia, which Google didn't mention in its presentation, is that it will require a ton of bandwidth, testing the limits of data caps that most U.S. internet service providers have.
Well, it's 4k resolution over the internet. Of course it's going to use a ton of bandwidth. Do they need to point that out for stupid people?
Who else remembers Google Wave?
They'll team up with spacex and offer this service with starlink as it rolls out. Hell, throw some data centers in orbit and cooling is cheap... And LEO isn't too bad for radiation toasting the CPU/GPUs.
What's unknown is whether or not Google will work with ISPs to help alleviate this concern.
Cue the chorus:
"That violates Net Neutrality!!! EVIL!! EVIL!!! Burn the blasphemer! BURN BURN BURN!!!!"
So... How can Google "work with ISPs to help alleviate this (bandwidth) concern" without getting people all hot and bothered about "net neutrality"?
The beta testing for this was called Project Stream. I took part in this during the month of December, playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I'm your started gaming enthusiast. I work full time and game for about 3-4 hours after work. Working the weekend is not uncommon for me to play 6-8 hours. I live alone and don't stream much Netflix. This was the only month that I have ever come with 100GB if hitting my data cap.
Its not bad enough to pollute my internet with pointless video packets, it has to be exacerbated by fag gaymerz.
nVidia recently published a study showing that having 60fps / 60hz was inferior to higher frame and refresh rates for things like KD ratio and overall play-ability.
There is no way I will play a game where I intentionally add delay to my experience. On the contrary, the advice is to REMOVE delay, even very tiny delays seen in your monitor refresh rates.
If you can measure the delay in milliseconds like on an IP netowrk, it's already GAME OVER for you.
Besides, do people still use DoubleClick? ROFLMAO
The resolution is one hell of a twist in what otherwise is a solid round trip. Desktop revolution? Pffffft.
Listen, if they can stream 4k over wi-fi per their statement I'm sure everything will be fine. They are pretty smart and I wouldn't be shocked if hey came up with their own compression standard.
...so if that 7GB/hour rate is based on movies/TV, there's no guarantee that it applies to games. First, there's the framerate, which is usually 24/30 for movies/TV versus 30-60 for games. The other is that most movies/TV have fairly static scenes, so they compress fairy well (and the streaming service can use multi-pass encoding). A lot of video games are full of random action scenes that won't compress well.
None of these streaming services can get over the bandwidth hurdle. The only reasonable use for game streaming right now is LAN network within a home.
Whatever latency you have to the server, add another 100ms or so to compress and decompress the video stream.
Tic-tac-toe will work great.
"Why Google Stadia Will Be a Major Problem For Many American Players" That's kind of backwards. Blame a provider of a service instead of kicking the backsides of the network providers for their shitty state? Seriously, it will be Stadia that will be a major problem for the US players, not your crap internet connection provided by a crap company for idiotic prices and frequently with laughable speed and latency? Do you think Stadia would be the major problem for people having $40/6mbit connections? I remember the days when the US was leading in bandwith and prices. It was so long ago, just thinking about it makes me feel old.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Oh sorry. Did I ruin your parade?
Once you have a 38-inch 3840x1600 monitor (or comparable) at home for gaming, there's no way in hell you'd EVER want to endure trying to play your games scaled down to your phone's minuscule display or even a Web browser on a less impressive monitor at your parents' house. Maybe you can manage it at work if you're a very lucky tech guy or stock trader....
People with 38-inch 3840x1600 monitors are nothing. Even Linux on the Desktop boasts exponentially larger numbers.
You know why gAmInG iS bEiNg rUiNeD?
Because since the 90s, the majority of people playing games have been filthy casuals. Since the 00s, you can up that to vast supermajority. And they want shitty games on their phones. And collectively, they now outspend you by absurdly unbelievable numbers.
Your favorite studios know this. That's why they moved to console first long ago; that's why nobody but Internet grognards cares about yOu gUyS hAvInG pHoNeS.
Stadia should prove wildly successful... Except, it's Google, so it'll be a disaster of non-functional UX followed by an early grave. Doesn't matter if Google fails, though. This is where the market is going.
New studies are showing that streaming has become a major player in harming the environment especially in the fossil fuels pollution area. In short all the servers that have to run to provide the service, all the AC, battery backup, backup generators, and then every router and switch that data has to go through is using electricity. Much of it produced by fossil fuels. A streaming ONLY service is even worse, because you use all the electricity over and over. If you download it you are only using a fraction of the electricity. I really hope Google rethinks this.
Lol
If bandwidth is concerned, it is no different than watching Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Prime Video, or YouTube. Consumers are already aware of their data caps if they're hitting them.
Malaysia used to be VERY SUCK at providing Net access, but since the default and very corrupted UMNO government was thrown out last year, net access for average Malaysians have improved tremendously.
The landline package that I subscribe to provide me with 350 MBit / sec speed with no cap, for a monthly fee of less than 40 USD.
On the other hand, inside the United States of America, the first nation to provide Internet, net access has gone from bad to worse .
I guess the Americans might want do what the Malaysians did last year, and DRAIN THE SWAMP , once and for all !
Anything from Google is mediocre at best. So don't expect a real usable service for a long time.
Even though I have a connection more than capable of handling the streaming there's no way I'd ever want to stream my games.
Lag aside (and it's inevitable there will be some, simply due to the physics), the lacklustre hardware they're using to render hardly fills me with excitement - heck, even my laptop is faster than their hardware (I use a Clevo desktop replacement, on the basis that if I'm going to be gaming outside of home, it'll be at a friend's place or a hotel, so will have a desk and power).
Still, for those who don't mind lag, don't mind compression artifacts and who have the bandwidth it'll be fine. The rise of streaming audio and video shows that up well enough - I'd rather have a blu-ray with high bitrate and minimal artifacts, but most people would disagree.
This is a three to four year deal.
At best. Lots of press, several levels of various presentations, demos, and blurbs at conferences. Then rollout. Whee!
Then nada. It will be too late, not consistent between the wildly different platforms. Eventually their gaming voice assistant will start bad mouthing the mediocre player stats and piss off the seventeen remaining players.
For all their noise, they really don't have the staying power for anything besides search.
There are some technical difficulties with this, but I think it could do well if Google is smart with their marketing.
The biggest hurdle will be getting people to sign up for it. I can't see people paying a subscription fee to stream from the cloud on top of buying games to play on the cloud as well. Theoretically it could be a better investment for say a parent than just buying a game console, but I think most people will be short sighted. Lets say Google prices the sub at $10/month. Most game consoles release at about $400-500. A $10/month sub that always gets you the most top of the line [virtual] PC won't hit a comparative cost until after about 3-4 years. Unfortunately, I think people will see that $10 a month and just think its too much when compared with other subs they are probably paying for, such as Netflix, Spotify, cable TV, etc.
I think a smart way to tackle this might be to include Stadia in existing bundles. For example, if you have YouTube Premium or YouTube TV, then you get Stadia for free and maybe a 10-20% discount on your first game purchase.
harm being done to US broadband rollout through corruption and anti-competitive practices. But unlikely. They'll be much more likely to blame it on Hillary. Dopey cunts.
.....playing different games.....
Gratz google. Gaming always flew under the bandwidth radar...using near no data once game downloaded. Why push this, it is testing the weakest part of the data chain. Any savings made by the user will be spent on increasing data costs in the long term.
...while it may support it, how many people NEED their game delivered at 4k? Seriously?
And for those who claim to "need" it, if you offered them a choice of every game they want whenever they want, at $20/month, but capped at 1920x1280, vs buy a while console for what,, maybe $500, buy ONE game (now about $100, really) and play only that game at 4k, I'm pretty sure I can predict which of those at least 75% of the gaming population will choose.
-Styopa
Aww. That’s too bad. Too bad that gamers won’t be able to pay to prioritize their traffic. You know. With net neutrality and all.
There’s no free lunch, people.
ever heard of compression?!? You can compress a 4K60 down to 10Mbps if you want, it would be ugly, but you can, and in real-time too for the compression, even 1ms per frame. Decompression time on your PC depends on your GPU (or even CPU)
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Live TV is 10-30 seconds behind.
Real time encoding and decoding means that if the source is one hour long, the output will last for one hour. It does NOT mean that it somehow violates the laws of physics and does things without taking any time to do it. So if you press the button to start encoding and 1 minute later the output starts, then when you press stop it takes no more than 1 minute for the output to finish, that's real time encoding.
"Low latency" video hardware is defined as three frames (100ms) or less. Per device. So 100ms to encode it, 100ms to push it out to the pipe, and 100ms to decode it would be a system of low latency devices.
Nothing exceptionnal here and it's certainly not the future of gaming consoles or PC, or a bleak future at most. PS Now and other services like Xbox game pass or Geforce now know the same technical restrictions and will never provide the same level of quality a console or a high end pc can provide for the following reasons: - Latency, even with the best ISPs in the world, you'll have to get at a sub 16ms (for 60fps) latency on the whole chain (encoding & total roundtrip network delay): Impossible today, and what's worse is if you want higher framerate, let's say 120fps, it'll be 8ms. Infrastructure is not ready for this. - Image quality: On a TV it looks ok, but on a PC monitor, even with the best encoding algorithms you can notice artifacts, granted that's a trade-off more acceptable than latency. - Variable refresh rate: Byebye Freesync & Gsync. - HDR: While you can encode HDR infos in video, the way HDR works on PC monitor for the moment is different than what you get on your TV, it'll be a mess to support on such service. - Encoding @fixed frame rate creates judder even if your game is capped at 60/120 fps, just because the encoder part can't really matches the subtle difference in refresh rate of your TV or PC - Mods: good luck with that. - VR support is impossible because of latency, 1fps delay on a headset is vomit guaranteed. For those who think: "they'll overcome all these technical issues later", that may be true for some (variable refresh rate etc...) but anything tied with latency, unless you rewrite physics laws, that won't change.
Your average consumer likely isn't rocking a 100Mbps+ connection
I would bet the majority of Stadia customers will have 100Mb+ connections in the US. People get hung up on average connection speeds in the US but some of that is people choosing lower speeds than the maximum available and most of these customers will be kids in relatively urban areas where DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber are routinely available. 300-500Mb/s cable modems are pretty normal these days, even in third tier cities. I used to live in a city of 50k people and the local cable provider offered 300Mb/s for $70/mo and fiber from AT&T starting at $50. At work we deploy broadband service al over the south east using local providers for direct internet access for VPN backup and we see anything from 300-500Mb/s as the standard these days from the local cable MSO. Now I live in a second tier citiy of about 600k people and I have three different gigabit options (AT&T, Google and Comcast). Neither AT&T nor Google Fiber have caps on their 1Gb service. (see here for AT&T under the "Internet 1000" plan - "No internet usage data caps").
So while the average consumer in the US might not have 100Mb/s, that does not really matter. What matters is the connection speed of Stadia customers.
Who knew that live-streaming 4K video required an unusually high bandwidth connection?
Ken
Pied Piper's inside-out compression?
Ken
There's a documentary on it's development on HBO, it's fascinating!
Ken
The ability to stream 4K video to those few users that own 4K devices will likely use about as much bandwidth as 4K television, but then again who has a 4K device and would prefer to stream games rather than play them on local hardware? (Are their target customers those folks with 4K devices and no $500 game box?)
Ken
My cell and home ISP data caps are much higher than they were just a few years ago, and a big reason for that is the rise of online video (thank you, Netflix!).
If you hate the idea of data caps, then you should welcome stuff like Stadia that drastically drives up data usage by average joes. Caps don't get raised/eliminated due to usage by a few outlier power users, they get raised when the more typical user's consumption goes up.
If this results in a mom testifying in front of congress that she received a $10,000 bill from Comcast because her son was playing Fortnite 8 hours a day for 6 weeks then I'm all for it. Maybe we'll get some legislation outlawing data caps.
PRE would prefer they used the term "Stadiums" please.
Compression invokes considerable lag. Are you ok with 250ms - many seconds of control lag in your FPS games?
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
If they do it like Youtube and auto scale to your bandwidth, or you just set it lower - that solves that issue. If it was playing on a Chromebook - it was not 4k
First of all, 4k ~ 7gb is false. All streaming services that use this metric are lying. They're not pushing out 4K video. It's extremely compressed if it is, considering 1 hour of 4k is going to be far closer to 12+ gb with even the best codecs right now.
The moment a Google project either becomes non-profitable or loses its internal leader (usually due to promotion) the project will be cancelled. You will receive a few months warning after which the product will just disappear.
At this point you couldn't pay me to use a new Google offering. Search is safe. Mail is probably safe. Everything else is suspect. I firmly believe this and I'm a G Suite customer.
I see a lot of technical naysaying and a lot of "Google will shut it down before you can exceed your caps". I say, "Show me the games!"
I have some doubts about video game streaming, it doesn't have all the same advantages as streaming music, TV, or movies (gaming is already "on demand", for example), but it could bring some benefits if they can manage the technical issues:
- play anywhere on any device (with sufficient data)
- play a wide range of games for one price
- it could hobble manipulative practices like buying a game multiple times on different devices / online services (Super Mario Bros.), loot boxes, season passes, etc.
But none of that matters until Google shows me what they've got where it counts: GAMES. People will buy proprietary Nintendo hardware to play Super Mario; they will buy proprietary Sony hardware to play God of War. I think Google needs some exclusive games to sell this service, especially with Sony, Microsoft, and Amazon nipping at their heels. Right now all I've heard is they have Ubisoft (so what?) and maybe some exclusive Sega stuff (maybe interesting if they get exclusive games).
It looks like they are trying to start up a first party studio with Jade Raymond, but if they're just getting started, they'll have nothing to show until late 2020 at the earliest. Is the product half-baked? Does it matter if they can deliver later on?
I welcome the service. We need more innovative stuff like this. The artificial caps of the ISPs should not really be their concern.
Yes, someone has to deal with them. For now its us, but we need to fight back and we need hard data to help with that.
If you do not live inside a large city you probably don't have anything which is 'high speed' available in your area.
So ALL internet streaming services are unusable to those without good internet.
We have had this problem in the U.S. for more than 15 years and it has not improved.
And it will never improve.
All the video streaming companies have been seeing user counts leveling off since 2014, and its because of the lack of high speed internet in 60% of the U.S. geography.
"Players" are people attempting to game-ify dating.
"Gamers" are people who play games.
I'm in the Nvidia GeForce NOW beta, which is a similar service. The games run on their servers and the display is streamed back to you. I must say that it works much, much better than I ever expected. I'm in a fairly rural area but I have a decent connection at about 110 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up. It's usually quite playable, even over wifi. It does chew through a lot of bandwidth and latency can be an issue. The biggest caveat is that I like single player turn-based games. Even when I play real-time first-person games they tend to be Tomb Raider-ish, with more of a stealth and exploration focus rather than reaction time and precision. But it lets me play games with higher minimum requirements than my old-ish laptop meets, and lets me play a world of PC games that have never been ported to my Mac.
This kind of technology can work reasonably well for a lot of people. It's definitely not ready yet for the super competitive players, and I doubt it ever will be (barring some great revolution in subspace communications...) But I think there's a market for it and I'm glad to see competitors in the space.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
...why getting rid of net neutrality was pushed so hard. American ISPS can just extort cash from google if they want an American market for streaming games.
Also, video game streaming is absolutely stupid. Just another trend in a constant tidal effort to get consumers to relinquish ownership of everything.