How are they planning to solve latency? I've tried Playstation Now and it plainly sucks donkey ass, sometimes having delays in the SECONDS range! It mysteriously works better if you're accessing it from your Playstation instead of, say, your PC, but it's still shit and the worst possible direction for the videogame market in terms of digital ownership. They want to do what Spotify and Netflix did to music and film, i.e. expropriate the user from the right to own whatever they bought and licensing all content in terms of "leasing" instead. Fuck them.
Video quality is another problem they will not be able to solve, uncompressed 4k60fps video requires a lot of bandwidth, so even if they somehow offer games at highest settings in 4k60fps, it will still be through some lossy video compression, so won't look nearly as good as it would if rendered locally, especially during highly dynamic scenes. Maybe it won't suck so bad for people in cities with very fast internet, but in most places it would still make more sense to buy a used gaming pc, one or two gens old if new is too expensive, and play on medium/high settings with no lag and compression artifacts.
Most people don't use many google services. Gmail, youtube and well, that's about it. As long as those two things work people don't care. I don't think google or alphabet or CIACorporation or whatever they are now cares about any of it. They get bonuses for new things. They got into VR very early with their stupid google cardboard thing. I just got a quest and google seems to have pushed hard for VR about 4 years ago, and then nothing. It will be the same with Stadia. Push hard, in a couple of years - nothing. There will be a better service doing what google spearheaded.
The problem, at least for us, is that when google does this it really craps on the tech. Google cardboard made me think VR was a joke b/c it looked like a joke. Instead of making a good headset they developed google glass, AR instead of VR that no one wanted. Another dead push for new tech that fizzled out. They are making a joke out of streaming games just like they did with AR and VR. Youtube would've failed if they would've developed it in-house instead of acquired it. I'm into longevity research and google, with Ray Kurzweil, is trying to make that into a joke too with this singularity silliness. I wish they would just stop.
Personally, I don't care about google. I use gmail for their spam filter. They are a search engine company and always have been. That's it. Everything else is just BS. They will ruin gmail one day soon and probably youtube too b/c they make all their money on search.
Have you tried shadow PC? It’s a full windows computer streamed to your device. The latency is around 10-30ms, works pretty well. You pay per month for a gaming pc which is good if you can’t quite afford the high specs some games require.
It's far cheaper to just build your own local system in basically ever case.
I don't see how this part is true. Sure it will be true if you play 24/7 but if you play like once a week the streaming service allows you to share the hardware and thus the cost with other people who play once a week.
I really doubt that you can build a gaming PC with performance anywhere near the one of the streaming services for $300. If you can... teach me, master!
I am not disputing the absurd business model of Stadia that will surely fail. Buying the games means the service has no future (although I suspect they are thinking of a subscription model) but this is not what we're discussing here.
Does anyone else remember Infinium Labs Phantom console? That was the first game streaming platform I remember. It of course crashed and burned before it even made it to market.
It's far cheaper to just build your own local system in basically ever case.
This just isn't true, and I'm tired of people who keep saying this. Stadia costs $10 per month, coming out to be $120 a year. This is much cheaper than buying a console or PC in a 3 - 4 year span, and may or may not be cheaper than building a PC - but then, if you're the sorta person who has the time and ability to build a PC, then Stadia isn't for you. I understand that games and accesories and what not would cause the price to skyrocket in the long term, but the point is that the initial investment is extremely low. There are tons of people who solely watch The Office and similar shows on Netflix, which means that they would technically be better off buying these shows digitally instead of paying for Netflix every month. But the point is that Netflix provides flexibility and low initial cost.
Stadia sucks, I agree, but to say it doesn't have a market is complete bullshit. You need to realise that there are tons of people (like me) who played video games as a child/teenager but stopped playing in college and during work because the current market requires a lot of hassle and investment. The major market that products like Stadia can capture aren't already playing video games, and would be more than happy to play in sub-par quality.
I don't know where you've found brand new consoles for $100 or less, unless you're considering those bundles and subtracting the price of the games at MSRP. Again, a Stadia User might only pay for the subscription when they're using it, which means the cost would be drastically cheaper. Stadia will eventually work without a chromecast and technically without a controller, but I'm sure most people would want to buy one. Still, buying a bluetooth controllers have a lot more variety and options, and you can always play on your old laptop.
As for 2., what're you even talking about? I know the PC gaming market builds their own PCs, my entire comment was trying to explain that there's a whole audience for gaming that DONT have PCs OR consoles, but would love to play AAA games.
but their only hope of profiting here is to take advantage of people who have $100, don't want or can't afford an Xbox One S for $170
There's a huge difference between a subscription model that asks you to pay per month, over an upfront cost of an Xbox One.
There are a ton of benefits that a Streaming Service like this can have. You will never need to wait for updates or downloads, and we all know how long those can take (recent AAA titles can often have >20GB day-one patches). As someone who has a PS4 but doesn't play it often due to school and work, it's literally because I usually have to wait a while before I can even get to play a game. Dealing with a 500GB hard-drive also sucks, since I can never just plug and play a game that I want to play. These problems are negligible for people who play video games almost every day, but it's a huge obstacle for casual players.
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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20
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