Google Stadia - Changing How We Game?

[BLUEVOODU]

In the last 10 year - More Companies are moving to the cloud... movies go from renting via mail to streaming... Digital Distribution for games is starting to take a more dominant role in how we buy our games... amongst other changes.

Now, Google wants to change how we play games.  Enter the Google Stadia:
Stadia, Google's gaming platform, changed the rules of the console wars - Polygon.com

I started talking about this in the topic:
Retro-Bit Sega Genesis Controller!

Google wants you to offload all your "console processing" to them.   They would handle all processing of your game... and your input for the game would be transmitted over the Internet.  THIS MEANS... you have to ALWAYS be connected to the Internet.  It also means you have to have a pretty good Internet connection.  But you won't have to worry about beefing up your hardware or... hardware at all.

They have been play testing this and it's quite interesting.  If this catches on... it could legitimately change how we play games forever.   But... it really negates couch coop... and that's something I personally wish we wouldn't lose.   Couch Coop seems to be less and less a thing anymore though.

What are your thoughts?    Post it up!

[targetrasp]

I ranted about this before any sort of research and may have to backpedal a bit.

IF it works as advertised it could potentially find its way into my home but I'm really going to miss those physical copies...

Speaking of if... What are the consequences to the hardware market? If I can run whatever off of Google's resources why would I pour thousands in a gaming machine? Why not buy one of those 200 - $300 hp trade-ins off of newegg? Would that then make the price of cheap stuff go up, or the price of high end stuff go down, or both?

As far as devs go, it seems like it'd be easy to develop for as well. I wonder if you'd get to use their resources for developing? It seems unlikely but if so i'm sure that'd bring everyone with any sort of idea and talent to the table.

[BLUEVOODU]

@targetrasp ... price wise... that's a hard one.   If hardware isn't as prevalent... you won't see development for it at the user level.   Development would be more of the server / host level... because regular consumers wouldn't be buying anymore.   OF course, this all assumes high adoption rates.  I'm not sure I see it getting this far... but it would definitely appeal to the gamer... 

If you think about the possibilities, you could literally have whatever game you wanted to play on demand.   For example, for a monthly price... you could play all Nintendo games ever made.   But I'm sure we would be getting into something like where HBO, ATT, Netflix, Amazon...etc... have their own services and compete with shows and pricing, so not all games would be on 1 source.

Pricing is a good question... Internet connectivity would have to be great.     Would this mean the death of couch coop?  (even more-so than today).


@trkorecky @CreepinDeth @retro junkie @Jack @targetrasp @Grindspine @Mai Valentine @Kinikko @Strubes  ... thoughts?

[trkorecky]

I was part of the Project Stream test for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I largely played on the super fast connection at work, and it played pretty well.  It seemed better with a controller than a mouse and keyboard, probably because the controller naturally ate some of the latency.

The Stadia announcement showed some really neat integration as well -- playing kicks off the stream that you see as well as an ultra high quality of it to your YouTube gaming channel, viewers can queue up to play against you, you can fire off a link to friends and have them load up in the exact scenario you're in to challenge your score, compatibility across almost any device that can run a web browser or receive a Cast, etc.

That said I think the biggest hurdle is convincing developers to make a Linux / Vulkan port of their games. I'd personally love to get my hands on a dev kit.

[CreepinDeth]

For example, for a monthly price... you could play all Nintendo games ever made.

They can do that now but Nintendo won't, so I don't see this happening.

I haven't kept up with Stadia, to be honest. The reason I don't really pay attention to it is because our internet infrastructure is a joke (in the US at least.) I'm already sold for the most part on streaming gaming services, but unless our internet gets better and more reliable they're not going to succeed.

Also, it's Google, and they are known to abandon projects all the time. They have trouble focusing on their products and sometimes even undermine them with other products. Google will have to prove to me that they're in this for the long haul before I start relying on their streaming service for all of my gaming.

[BLUEVOODU]

@trkorecky Yeah... I Think those integrations are a great idea.   It seems like the take what Steam can do a bit further.  But... will it work well once you have a load of people?  Like other cloud offerings... do you think they'll have tiers?  For example, you have to pay to have access to HD or 4K streaming versus lower res streaming.

@CreepinDeth I agree with you.. but it seems to be getting better and better.  There are places that really need more competition to drive down prices... and other parts of the country need better infrastructure.  Rural areas... may never see justice in this department.

This is definitely an interesting concept... but I don't know if I like getting away from hardware consoles.  It's another step away from actually owning your games and consoles.   There are very enticing features though.

[Grindspine]

Gamers hate lag and latency.  Server processing is always present on online games, which has improved over time, but the option to play a simple single-player game on a local machine will certainly still have appeal to old school gamers.

[BLUEVOODU]

I think that needs to appeal to all gamers.  What's the point of a single player game if you cannot play when there's no internet connection?  This was a big downfall to the too strict DRM strategy.  Steam had an issue with it or awhile if I remember right.   We are talking a long time ago... but There was some issue with playing offline.

The concept seems cool... who knows... maybe we are ready for it.   Something like this might (IMO) take down the remaining Gamestores though.

[targetrasp]

I saw something today where they were only going to allow it on pixel smart phones AND 4k would require 35 meg, essentially knocking off any hopes of playing on a phone. I also saw where it's 10 a month for the service and the only games shown were stuff we've already got AND I didn't see any platform exclusive stuff.... Starting to think this is going to tank