The repercussions of Google Stadia

#1

OK, I find it somewhat surprising that this topic hasn’t cropped up here before. Google has of course, announced Stadia, and I’m curious as to what people’s reactions are? If games are going to shift from client to server, well…that will change a LOT of things, so… what do y’all think? How will this alter the games industry?

#2

It means 3 things really:

  1. More people will play PC games - a lot of current console players.
  2. They will realize that their Console actually has crap hardware - far less new consoles sold, unless they beef them up to PC level, which can be done.
  3. BAD - Gamers lose total control over games/game files. No more files you can have locally.

The worst thing is that services like Stadia may 3 years from now become the only way to access certain games and certain hardware.

You simply won’t be allowed to access anything locally anymore - just to access it on a server.

#3

Assuming the streaming model becomes main-stream, I’ll pedantically disagree that it has far more ramifications than the 3 points above:

  • single-platform development has a lot of advantages for both quality & cost
  • Google controls hardware amortization / upgrades
  • impact of market fragmentation & competing streaming services ?
  • exclusive content ?
  • Google web-based game engine & DCC tools ?
  • no cheating in multiplier games
  • modding still possible, but curated
  • fewer constraints due to synchronization of distributed game logic (more dynamic virtual worlds)
  • problems with low-latency gameplay (ie. no hard-core competitive twitch games)
    …

Just scratching the surface here - but as usual, avoid thinking about this in black & white. Stadia & streaming will probably never replace PC gaming, the same way mobile never replaced console gaming. It all co-exists in an eco-system & shares a portion of the global gaming audience. It’s probably more productive to think of it in terms of the impact it may have on your job or job prospects.

#4

OK, my main question is: How are we supposed to MAKE games for this thing? Are we supposed to use engines, or can we code it from scratch, or are we supposed to use some kind of “Google-proprietary” tool (horrific idea)?? Google’s own site mentions Unity, is that the only one, or can we use FOSS engines like Godot ( since the server is a Linux machine)?? Can we or are we, supposed to use such software over the internet, running on a Stadia server, since many folks will not be having such high power hardware on their local machines?? (and also, the GPU they’ll be using is unique to them, which they developed together with AMD). Does this mean we’re back to the old days of the game industry where 1 guy or 2 guys can get together and make a game in their bedrooms?? :smile: It would be absolutely AWESOME if that were to be the case :smile:

Besides that, the three MOST important points are:

  1. This is the moment when poor countries, like mine, start to game - IF they price it right. Nobody here has money for consoles, or for that matter, games FOR them. This could be a turning point for all such countries round the world.
  2. This is the end of piracy, since there’s not gonna BE any executable on the client side - that’s fucking INCREDIBLE, I think! :smile: (it’s a HUGE problem here - if Google manages to kill piracy, I for one, will be cheering, for sure! :slight_smile: )
  3. This is probably the end of the platform wars, ie. whether you use Win/Mac/Linux or whatever, since any damn OS has a browser on it, to play the games. So - could this mean a mass migration away from WINDOZE??!!

Also - if the game IS running on some kind of huge “supercomputer” or whatever, wouldn’t it be possible to “string together” multiple GPUs, and get the number crunching power of all of them combined??!! I think a game that would take advantage of that (which obviously is not possible now) could be INCREDIBLE - am I right about this?? Would it be possible?

#5

You make games the same way you’ve always made games - with a game engine

It’s a linux platform with an AMD graphics card. They even have dev kits available. Game engines like Unity and Unreal are already working to support it.

#6

From what I’ve heard, the latency is high enough to be noticeable, there’s going to be a not insignificant amount of people that would still want a console so that they can have lower latency and not have to rely on a constant high-quality internet connection. Especially in the U.S. where many areas don’t have good internet access.
Streaming can be an alternative, but I don’t think it’s going to take over.

#7

Of course. You could run a game on a Stadia server with say 8 GPUs, or on a cluster of say 8 servers with 8 GPUs each. Basically, games that look as good as Hollywood movies are already possible, technically speaking.

You would pay far more for this than for a normal PC game of course - you are using a lot of hardware and electricity after all.

The games would look incredible though. More like immersive movies than games. So people might be OK with paying - say - 5 Dollars an hour to play such a game.

50 Dollars would let you play a 10 hour game from start to finish. There are plenty of adult gamers who have the money for this and probably would much prefer these “Hollywood Quality” games over stupid PS5 or XBox games. Those tend to cost 60 Dollars anyways, and typically contain only 10 to 20 hours of single player content.

The future for services like Stadia is quite bright.

#8

OK, now with all this antitrust stuff happening with Google,…I’m not a lawyer, but…is there now any danger that Stadia will NOT happen?? Anybody have any clue??

#9

The actual outcome will be that there will be pretty minimal ramifications. Stadia will basically fill the gap for those not necessarily wanting to upgrade secondary or work hardware for gaming, which will be pretty small market. Mac Users, Laptop users and potentially IT, what’s left of call center employees will be enticed by the discreet in browser conduit for gaming.

Android users playing across a multitude of Android forks that make it impossible for developers to code one game to run on all phones will have a solution. Whether consumers will buy into it is a separate matter considering light, casual and FREE games with MT are what sell in high quantities on mobile with only a few exceptions and that’s the opposite of what Stadia is proposing.

There aren’t a significant number of existing console or PC gamers with any interest in game streaming that also have monster internet connection that will want to take advantage of it.

The fact is most gamers already got a huge sour spoonful of insane greed from more than a few game publishers (especially EA) and rejected it. The result of rejecting a whole slew of full priced but still Pay2Win games has the majority of the existing community extremely reserved to downright defiant of any shift the seeds more control to game publishers.

Moreover, in the US atleast, with Net Neutrality being a thing of the past even if game streaming were to become significant it wouldn’t be long before Google would be continually extorted for more cash or face crippling random “throttle out” states from ISPs and those additional escalating costs would be passed on the the consumers and that would be above and beyond whatever other psychologically manipulative gambling mechanisms they would attempt to employ.

#10

I’m going to ignore Stadia for the time being. Google is the sort of company that has habit of throwing sh** at the wall and in every direction hoping that something will eventually stick. Stadia, for me, seems to be in the same class as Google Glass. It’s a grand experiment that may or may not work. Consumers are, in fact, just play testing guinea pigs.

If you had told me that any of the big three console developers decided to back this strategy across the board then, maybe, you would have caught my attention. Google? Not so much. When it comes to games, I hold them in the same regard as I do Nokia. (That one’s for you old timers out there. :slight_smile: )

That said, I don’t like the idea. There are too many ways in which it can go wrong and even more ways where it’s not a product designed for mass appeal.

#11

Er - Microsoft does have xCloud, coming sometime, and also there is this (which I posted about here already):

#12

As far as mass appeal is concerned, I think, IF Google prices it correctly, THIS is the moment when countries such as mine, where people don’t buy expensive consoles, or, for that matter, games, Start To Game!! I think Google would be very well aware of this fact - I doubt they’ll bother to even target Stadia much to Western countries at all.

#13

That’s one of Google’s talking points and it’s quite disingenuous for several reasons:

  • It is ridiculously hard to write a game engine that scales well on just 2 GPUs (just look at how few games actually support and benefit from SLI / Crossfire)
  • The virtualized GPUs in data centers are engineered in the exact opposite direction : multiple users per core, not multiple cores per user. Said cores are also going to have to be very energy efficient, which rules out any high-end halo SKU (Titan / Ti / VII)

If you have been around GDC this year you may have seen a conceptualization for some kind of an MMO with destructible environments : this is very unlikely to be turning into a real game anytime soon.

#14

You sound knowledgable, Shehbahn - are you a game engine dev? :slight_smile:

Read this:

#15

I wear that hat on occasion. I am not working on either Stadia or GFNow products or services though.

Also, i should probably soften a bit my last statement : given the technical hurdles of leveraging virtualized GPUs in server warehouses, this doesn’t really make sense from a business standpoint. Considering the multi-billion investment risks necessary, it is unlikely that we will see any kind of “killer app” in the near future IMHO.

#16

That only applies on the US / Europe, as the rest of the world (the forgotten but still customer countries) dont have the same internet speed as you guys, I dont think local files are going anywhere.

So… how do you end up with the “More people will play PC games”? I thought the whole point of Stadia was to be played on a TV with a gamepad.

  1. We all know console has crap hardware, no one cares if I can play on my couch, just like no one cared about Switch graphics if I can play on family vacation sitting on the beach.

  2. Good point, mods for example… will they go away?

#17

My point is, if the Switch has low graphics and is currently selling like hot pancakes… do you really think Stadia wont follow?

#18

Actually the US is probably not Stadia’s primary target (crappy ISPs + cheap space + cheap hardware). Look at nations like Korea with high population density, modern internet infrastructure & more modest disposable income for instance.

Assuming streaming is less battery hungry than rendering, it’s pretty obvious that Stadia streaming to Android mobile devices is probably going to account for a very large portion of that business.

Also : judging by what i have seen of Assassin’s Creed at GDC, the GPUs in Stadia’s cloud are fairly low-end, so i wouldn’t expect ‘PC master race’ experience out of the service… we should find out soon.

#19

I still don’t think Stadia is going to get any traction with AAA games on mobile because high density character meshes and environments generally are wasted on small mobile devices and in worse case scenarios aren’t easily readable on little screens.

I was talking about this to someone else and ultimately I don’t think Stadia is going to have any implications for those that work outside of mobile games. Stadia will likely become a substrate for mobile gaming that lies under the patchwork of Android variants that currently creates a multitude of compatibility/performance issues. Ultimately, if stadia makes game deployment to android platforms easier, faster to a larger user base it should help developers considerably.

#20

I think Xbox is better situated for this, for a lot of reasons. Part of it is that since they already have a gaming device/service they can offer a better value. I’m assuming that when you would buy a game digitally from the Xbox store you would have the ability to install it on the Xbox/PC along with being able to stream it. They also have that value of cloud saves where you could play the game like normal on your console and then continue your save file when streaming and easily switch between the two.
That gives the value for existing gamers where you can have your console at home but can still play your games wherever and the value of purchasing the game isn’t just the ability to stream it but you can still download it and play it like normal.
Also, I think Microsoft’s expertise in the area with their cloud systems and gaming will help make it work a bit better.