Stadia - now "free" for a month or two - The Bear and Badger

GurtTractor

The laws of physics strike again. No thanks.

Subbax

I got my code yesterday afternoon and I'm actually impressed with it. I'm running 300MB fttp so no issues with bandwidth.

Booted Destiny 2 and landed in the Tower in under a minute, pretty decent compared to both Steam and PS4. Noticed aliasing in the Tower straight away though. Can't tell if I'm being harsh as I was pretty harsh about the whole concept beforehand.

Moving, jumping, and shooting all seemed great bar using the Scout rifle [didn't have a sniper but assume the same]. I think it's because there's sound and noise involved and there was just something off about it. The shot fired but the sound seemed a little delayed so it was offputting for sure.

I think it's alright for 120 quid.

Edit - I think in the end it's going to come down to individual situation. For me, I've got a PS4 and a 5+ year old PC. I've no free cash to upgrade either so as always, renting is an easy option in the short term.

When the next gen launches, Stadia is going to come under serious pressure but it's early days so there's potential to get better. Hopefully D2 is patched to 4K instead of upscaling soon.

davyK

Bandwidth isn't the problem with game streaming. It's latency that is key. The two are linked but there isn't a strong causal link.

Bandwidth means more for downloads, not for comms.

LivDiv

Just reading up on this.
Red Dead is 1440p upscale to 4k.
Destiny is 1080p upscale to 4k and on medium settings.

Doesnt seem like the pro aka 4k version is really worth it. Obviously it is the only option currently.

Frosty

The games are all Linux ports. I assume there wasn't enough time to optimise them to run acceptably at higher settings and resolutions.

The Krypt in MK11 wasn't working at launch either.

Doesnt seem like any of it is worth it at the moment.

davyK

Is there any way of indies publishing games on this?

Might be great for indies dipping their toes into cloud gaming.

acemuzzy

But it's not cloud gaming in that sense

AndCallMeCharlie

Was so hyped for this but it couldn’t have been a less inspiring launch

Vela

It's out?

Finally wii u has competition.

isanbard

There's still a chance they make this worthwhile with a gamepass/now/netflix style option 6 to 12 months down the line I reckon.
The current launch nonsense makes for a difficulty buy..

Vela

xbox will beat them to it. Their game pass is a far more attractive solution. I say that as someone who has neither.

XBox - subscribe to a service, get full access to games for no extra cost
Stadia - subscribe to a service, pay full RRP for games

LivDiv

Yup Project Xcloud is a better solution.
The only thing Stadia really has going for it is the low entry price, but then you can also get an Xbox on contract.

Nice try Google but no thanks.

GurtTractor

Was watching a tech news thing where they were talking about all the features that were talked about but are MIA for Stadia's release - "that's business plan code for 'let's see how many people use this before we bother spending money to develop those features'". This is why you don't pre-order..

https://killedbygoogle.com/

monkey

Dropping full RRP on a game that you can only ever play for as long as Google feels like keeping the service up. What a deal!

SpaceGazelle

This thing is bullshit.

GurtTractor

It does have the strong whiff of something that will be dead and forgotten very soon. I mean I hope they do something with it and get some games on there that make it worthwhile, but it's certainly a very poor showing from google.

SpaceGazelle

I'm amazed they released it. Shocking behaviour.

Dinostar77

This is Google all over. They are famous for it. Have the ideas never properly followed or backed up post release. This is why they are so far behind in the commercial cloud space. Just Google "google flops" and the list is as long as it is wide.

Facewon

GurtTractor wrote:

Was watching a tech news thing where they were talking about all the features that were talked about but are MIA for Stadia's release - "that's business plan code for 'let's see how many people use this before we bother spending money to develop those features'". This is why you don't pre-order..

https://killedbygoogle.com/

RIP inbox. My favourite.

Vela

Honestly its more of a scam than anything else.

Tempy

I feel like it’s just glomming onto the current trend in everything being a subscription model, which is now the new “normal” and benefits the bigger companies more because they can wring a lot of profit out of people barely using it in between fits and starts when people watch/play a handful of titles a year in between the generally sloppy curation done by the platform holders.

That’s my experience of subs anyway, I tend to pay for them despite barely using them, because the hassle of cancelling and renewing all the time is a pain. Others mileage probably varies.

Time_on_my_hands

The pricing model for this just seems bizarre. I do wonder if Google is just roadtesting the technology and eventually their aim will be to have businesses using Google servers instead of buying higher-end pcs.

Also, I think we've found the only platform not running Skyrim, there's no big online games except Destiny - which is free to play everywhere else.

Subbax

It's playing fine for me. Played a few hours yesterday and didn't have any issues with latency on Polaris or Graviton lance.

Was wrecking with Polaris in a few Control games too.

davyK

acemuzzy wrote:

But it's not cloud gaming in that sense

But it's pure cloud gaming is it not? .. with all the processing happening on servers with frames being delivered to client machines over t'internet?

I'm not sure if the games themselves would need to be architected in any special way to run in that environment. They will be running on virtual machines with the hypervisor somehow delivering each frame to a network for delivery to the user.

The base source code may need to be recompiled perhaps.

No reason why small indie developers couldn't get involved.

And if they DO need to be re-architected then indies could learn a great deal from that,

The main problem with streamed games will always be the internet. It just isn't a network in the traditional sense that can prioritise traffic and be tightly managed.

b0r1s

That’s the key last point and you’ve got to assume that Google’s long game is to eventually be the ISP and cable infrastructure company too (was Google Fiber a success?). But that kind of future is a pretty scary proposition.

davyK

Indeed.

As fibre becomes more ubiquitous and new deals for leasing dark fibre that companies can operate as a network become more available it may well become a better proposition - but that still may be some time off.

Tempy

I think the thing with indies at the minute is they have a bunch of viable platforms each with their pros and cons, so the question is why would they chose Stadia? Last I heard Google we’re positing a “pay the devs per hour spent in the game” which could punish indie devs who don’t want to make a game that requires lots of hours to play through. Being an indie dev is often a case of using the earnings of the prior game to develop the next one, rather than to live, with a failure meaning an end to your career, so there has to be a real draw for them to put in the work beyond the big 5.

djchump

Plus, not many indies are going to be able to do a Linux + Vulkan build.

Vela

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihQ1CxY_CGg

davyK

Yeah - indies get a lot out of mobile and Steam I suppose.

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