Be Excellent To Each Other

Google is having a go at Live Streaming. The Doom sequel will be on it. They're saying it will do 60FPS and 4K.

The controller has Google Assistant built in, because of course it does.

"OK Google, shoot the cunt!"

"Is a wookie a bear?"

I'll be interested to see the pricing model. If the games cost the same on Stadia and the PS4 I can't see myself not playing them on the PS4.

Also, the built-in Google Assistant walkthrough stuff is for fucking chumps.

Using the Play store is a decidedly more pleasant experience than the PS store.

The set of human experiences more pleasant than using the PS store is a very, very large one.

I'll still need a way to stream it to me telly though. So that'll either be a box of some kind or a built in app, no?

Chromecast

Which is a box, obv.

Possibly Chromecast Ultra. They didn't say anything about the old one.

What if the games cost the same as the PS5 and look as good as the PS5 but you don't have to spend £500 on a PS5 to get them?

Does it play CDs?

HEARTHLY'S PREDICTION - FAIL

Just like OnLive did. (And I correctly predicted would fail.)

No one wants this.

Or at least, nowhere near enough people want this, and it won't work well enough.

Case closed.

Who will win:

the combined market research and product management expertise of Microsoft, EA, Google, Sony, and Nvidia's cloud gaming departments
~vs~
two seconds of thought by one forumy boi

You make a good point, however I do think you made the same point in the OnLive thread.

My opinions haven't changed substantially: OnLive was a long way ahead of its time but eventually this stuff will work on a technical level, decent chance that time has come or is coming very soon. Certainly, very large companies with deep expertise in the area think so. That's a different level of investment and commitment to what OnLive brought to bear, and commensurately, I'd expect there was a much higher level of forethought and research and business case building to that necessary to spin up a startup.

You do me a disservice Doc, I put quite a lot of thought into these things, and my opinion above is the result of that thought process. (I went into some detail in the original OnLive thread with my thought processes.) That's not to say my opinion won't be wrong, but it's certainly not the result of 'two seconds' of thought.

Plus, it's not like all of the companies on your list aren't capable of fucking up. Off the top of my head (and this is literally just off the top of my head):

Microsoft - Zune and Windows Phone
EA - Live service over-saturation BF5/Anthem for example
Google - Google+
Sony - VAIO/Bravia and retreat from mobile
Nvidia - Fermi (And Nvidia are flattered by brand loyalty and/or AMD's lack of competitiveness)

I don't think anything's fundamentally changed since OnLive, this is a niche proposition, it's an answer to a question that no one's really asking, it requires super-fast always-on internet, it requires hardware of some description and a screen (y'know, like a console or a PC does), and who is it for?

Keen gamers will still want their consoles and their PCs in their own little games den, casual gamers are just dicking around on their phones and tablets and will continue to do so.

Plus most internet connections are shared, and it only takes one person in the household to hammer an upload or a download and saturate the connection for everything else to go to shit for a time, something which games are going to be incredibly intolerant of.

I did all this in the original OnLive thread, I don't think much has changed, I think this will fail. I'm a fucking massive videogames geek and this is of zero interest to me and everyone I can think of. Ahhh but it's not aimed at you, comes the answer, to which the reply is, those other people will just carry on playing Candy Crush or whatever on their phones.

If the technology works properly then I’m happy to embrace the future and will stop buying consoles and PC hardware.

It’s about access to games, primarily, and that will be the important factor.

It won't work for vast swathes of the various populations, though. And I bet it still has noticeable lag.

OnLive worked really well, and Sony bought it and put the important bits into PSNow.

I'm not convinced that counts as "failing".

I'll still have a PS5.

I just will

Biggest hindrance for me is proving that I’ll retain access to a game I’ve “bought”. We’ve seen this with kindle and other online digital platforms but not at a sticker price of £50/item.

Fully aware that some games require permanent online so access remains reliable on access to the servers which can be switched off but these games are the exception in my repertoire, not the norm.

Very interesting but it’ll be flakey as fuck I bet.

It says it'll work on any device with access to a Chrome browser which surprised me. I thought it was a stand alone type thing?

According to https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/ ... d-2017.pdf

In 2017, 58% of UK broadband users had internet of "up to 30 mbit/sec" or more, which should be fast enough for a 4k stream even allowing for some of the "up to" wriggle room. That number will be quite a bit higher today.

Bandwidth != Latency.

Meanwhile the group of three houses I own one of are the only ones in the parish not getting FTTP funded by superfast worcestershire

Some interesting bits here
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... -interview

Another way to think about latency:

In the modern console world, I wouldn't under-estimate this factor either:

But...the lobby game

On what planet is 30Mb/s good enough for a 4K stream?

As per the Apex Legends thread, I installed the game on my XB1X last week and gave it a go. Holy shit it looks glorious, on a big 55 inch telly, native(ish) 4K@60FPS with all kinds of amazing shinies, it looked gobsmackingly gorgeous, you simply aren't going to squeeze that sort of picture quality down a 30Mb/s internet connection, and that's what people are getting now, on current gen consoles. (And that's before you start to factor in contention on the LAN from other people doing shit on their various devices.)

I get that 30Mb/s is fine if you're doing some sort of end-to-end compression run on a video render or something like that, but games are entirely dynamic, the backend has no way of knowing what frames it will have to draw in the future, and it can't rely on interpolation from the last without all kinds of horrible muddiness (as seen with OnLive).

For my money, Stadia falls into exactly the same hole that OnLive did. Keen gamers want their consoles and/or PCs, they want their games collection in a 'permanent' online repository such as XBL/Steam/PSLive/Origin, they want to know they've got local installs of their games and that they're not reliant on a fast internet connection just to be able to play their games at all. (For example, Forza Horizon 4 is an 'always online' game, but I always just play in private mode unless I'm doing multiplayer with my chums, so once I've got into the game I really don't care what my internet connection is like, or if Mrs Hearthly is uploading a video to YouTube and saturating the upload of our internet connection.)

So if it's not for keen gamers, who is it for, casual gamers? Hell no. They're not going to buy kit and pay a subscription fee or purchase costs for something that to their mind, they can do on their phones for free.

And it's not like it'll be good for the 'travelling gamer' either, we've all used hotel wi-fi, right? Even the premium upgraded version? I generally think I'm doing well if I can play Hearthstone smoothly. (A turn based card game....)

There's no real market for Stadia, they're not going to be able to convince (enough) people it's something that they want. I call fail.

I get 16mbps, Netflix will stream 4k after about two or three minutes when it decides it's safe to try. YouTube will stream 4k instantaneously.

I do hope to be convinced by this. I think it will be popular and people will want it as soon as Google's megacomputers are churning out stuff that any console or shitty little home PC could not even hope to touch. It just needs that killer title.

Yes but as I note above, that's pre-rendered and pre-compressed, all the CPU grunt required to optimise that stream has already been done, because it's a linear 'a to b' source file, whereby all the compression algorithms can do their stuff safe in the knowledge that one frame will always follow another in a perfectly orderly fashion. (For example, when I render out a video for my YouTube channel, Vegas Movie Studio utilising my 8C/16T CPU with GPU acceleration gets very busy for quite a while, and plonks out a very nicely rendered result at the end of it all.)

(And furthermore, once my upload to YouTube has completed, YT then munches away at it for quite a while longer to do its own optimisation before I can actually publish the video.)

Now transpose that to a videogame.

Are you going to look left, or right? Move forwards, or backwards?

It's literally got to do the whole thing on the fly, and that's what you're not going to be able to squeeze down a 16Mb/s pipe, or 30Mb/s pipe, without it degenerating into a horrible blurry mess, and you can add in latency as well. (And that's even assuming the game has got the whole internet connection to itself with nothing contending locally or all the way to the server and back.)

We already know how long it takes to encode that stream, a few tens of milliseconds, so it's clearly not comparable to a PC rendering a video file.

Once a connection can sustain a given stream then what difference will it make? If you had a 100mbps it's still going to be the same stream surely.

Utterly baffled that they did not discuss how people will be asked to pay for this.

I imagine it will be with money.

Probably not money, you can't use that on the internet, it'll be PayPal or something.

Because it's a few tens of milliseconds behind the button press you made. When it's a fixed stream you're passively consuming that's fine, when you're interacting any milliseconds are bad.

It could be an 8k stream at 60fps with hdr and 3d and fuck knows what else, if it's 50ms further in the past than the guy playing in good ole VGA he wins.

While you feel a bit nauseous as you look at the game over screen.

Is it a subscription that includes all the/some of the games? Do you buy games individually?

I get that there is some latency due to the need to encode the stream. I don't get why more bandwidth will reduce it.

Also you probably won't be playing anyone using VGA unless he's sat in a data center.

@doctor glyndwr "architecture you're talking about microseconds in some cases"

I have no idea what they're taking about but it doesn't involve the consumer internet.

@hearthly wait, do we have the same issue and I didn't understand?

It’ll be completely free but with targeted banners down both sides.

Is +50 ms extra latency enough to ruin a game then?

::whistling innocently:: what did you think of Doom (2016) by the way?

It's the round trip time between two game clients.

In the normal online gaming case, its the sum of our ping times.

But in the cloud gaming case, it's the ping time from one server rack to another, possibly within the same DC. Microseconds is achievable.

Nothing has been shared yet.

You'll be able to play for free... for 5 minutes, then you'll have to watch a 30s advert before you can carry on.

POTW

No idea, I haven't played it. Watching the most recent 100% speed run makes it obvious there's a lot of (very fun-looking) fudging going on though.

I remember my old Toshiba TV. If I left all its processing on ridge Racer 6 was impossible compared to when I turned it all off.

Games with 150+ms latency generally feel shite.

Sure, prediction gets better, but there will always be a point where the Mind isn't being fed input and feeding output back quickly enough to make it feel like your fingers aren't involved in controlling what's on screen.

@doctor Glyndwr again, where the hell on the real average consumer internet are microsecond client-client pings achievable? Or, let's make this "easy", single (not digit, single) millisecond.