Google: Stadia Exclusives To Have Features 'Not Possible' On Home Hardware (arstechnica.com) 64
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.
Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.
Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.
.. but don't hold your breath (Score:5, Informative)
We've heard these promises before. Maybe concentrate on not having Google get bored and shutting it down after two years.
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Indeed. This sounds very much like the usual marketing lies. At the most, there will be some irrelevant GFX effects or the like.
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Every new part of the world is sent to 100 users in near realtime as needed?
A 100 player get realtime file updates as they interact with over a large map?
More HDR and extra bright ray tracing via the global art cloud?
vs 100 gigs of traditional art on a desktop computer with a powerful gpu?
When does that lag of cloud loading start to show in game? A 10ms connection to the city datasets?
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Humans perceive reaction to be instantaneous with delays up to 100ms (despite what some gamers claim that see themselves as superhuman, obviously). Hence you have input-to-server + computation-on-server + video-sent-back + decompression-time-for-video = 100ms for this to work smoothly.
Not so unrealistic in countries with good Internet infrastructure (which the US obviously has not). For example, my ping to www.google.com is around 1ms, and that is the round-trip time. Of course, there needs to be oodles of
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I'm not going to claim that I can identify the exact amount of a sub 100 ms delay that I'm experiencing, but way back in "the day", before I got all old and sluggish, I could rather reliably play a first person shooter and headshot anybody currently visible with a jerk of the mouse.
Let's say that would be half a second to center the screen on any currently visible point. If I couldn't perceive delays of under 100 ms, I'd be off by up to 20% every time.
And that was just me being a twitchy kid with a decent
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Your brain compensates for up to 100ms, hence the estimation will still be correct. But you cannot "perceive" it. Your reaction quality is pretty much the same whether there are 0ms or 100ms additional delay. Yes, counter-intuitive, but its what the science says.
PC vs. Consoles vs. Cloud (Score:2)
At the most, there will be some irrelevant GFX effects or the like.
That has usually been the case on most games (either PC games or multi-platform console games) because in order to not shut away large swaths of your potential customer marker, you have to plan for the lowest denominator and only use advanced features that only a small faction of your user base has exclusively for visual fluff, that won't impact the gameplay.
Console exclusive have been better of, because then the developers can concentrate on a homogenous userbase that have all the same feature. No need to
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This right here:
"Maybe concentrate on not having Google get bored and shutting it down after two years."
We stopped using Google products for home a couple years ago and now as a company we are moving away from Gsuite for this very reason. Google is like a kid with ADHD. As soon as something shiny comes along they forget about their existing products that are tangentially close in purpose.
And fuck you /. for turning off AC posting.
Youtube counter exemple (Score:2)
On the other hand, digital entertainment such as gaming is a ginormous market, that is on the rise and will keep rising as it phases out older form of entertainement (like TV) and has enormous gobs of money involved.
(And also doesn't have such a strong network effect as social networks have)
So the situation isn't as much as Google's Feed (or Google +), but more like Google's Youtube (video is another sector next of video gaming which is also on the rise and also eating TV's lunch).
Still, what could happen i
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as a company we are moving away from Gsuite for this very reason.
Bad decision, or at least bad rationale. Google only shuts down products that aren't successful at scale. GSuite is enormously successful and is a major revenue and profit engine for the company.
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Imagine, you could have something like Sim City, where "We offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud,"
Imagine how great that would be!
Bunch of bullshit nonsense... (Score:2)
... stadia is the end result of the absurdity of what happened to PC gaming over the last 20 years with the rise of the internet. For the first 30 years of general computing there was no mass high speed internet so whenever game and software developers developed a piece of software they had to give you the complete thing called a "local application" or simply - a complete piece of software, files and all you installed on your machine.
After internet penetration reached a threshold, companies were all over t
download caps + poor internet will kill this in US (Score:2)
download caps + poor internet will kill this in US
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You know how you can tell when this man is lying?
He's breathing.
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Doesn't matter, the US is 4% of world population. Google can ignore this miniscule market and flourish in countries without caps.
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The absurdity of using high speed internet to stream a real time games is proof the average member of joe q public is full retard levels of dumb.
You know what's dumb? Not having the humility to consider that engineers behind systems like Stadia might not be "retards". Your community college 2-year IT degree might have taught you about things like "jpegs" but I have a feeling there's quite a lot more to the system than that.
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You know what's dumb? Not having the humility to consider that engineers behind systems like Stadia might not be "retards". Your community college 2-year IT degree might have taught you about things like "jpegs" but I have a feeling there's quite a lot more to the system than that.
Yo dumbass, I've watched as games were stolen for the last 20 years, stadia is the final shot in a war on game ownership after we went from dedicated servers, full level editing tools in AAA games to not having them and games split into two pieces, where part of the game is trapped on a remote server and never given to you because they are coded in a fraudulent way.
Go get a copy of quake 3 from gog.com and then go load up overwatch, unplug the network card in overwatch and notice you can't play overwatch, b
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Yo dumbass
Thanks for proving my point.
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Yo dumbass
Thanks for proving my point.
I didn't prove your point, you proved mine. Without getting a complete copy of the game files, gaming history will be destroyed because game companies don't give a flying shit about gaming history. So preserving old games is going to be difficult to impossible for server locked games which most now are, and games will simply disappear by corporate fiat. Anyone who is FOR furthering those kinds of business models is in fact stupid and doesn't care about what they are doing to others that care about those
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I didn't prove your point, you proved mine.
Oh ya? Well I know you are but what am I?
News headlines (Score:2)
Google announced that the Stadia streaming game service will be shutting down for good on October 25th.
Google plans to transition its focus to their new gaming service Lancelot which is more gooder.
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You forgot that in between these two platforms, they will launch two beta game platforms, each geared toward a different type of game. Both will be seen as having the potential to being a Stadia successor, but both will suddenly disappear upon Lancelot's announcement.
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Wow aren't you optimistic!
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And will take all the games running on it down with it, which will lead to much lamentation and grief and a yell for boycotts of the makers' future products.
Because it was absolutely unforeseeable that it would ever happen!
I don't want to subsidize their hardware (Score:2)
If they ever eliminate the competition there is no reason for them to try and push hardware, and I also don't want to pay for hardware with all that power when I can't use it as I wish. I'll be covering their costs and getting nothing I can use for my purposes or sell later.
It is also constraining developers when they have to bend to Alphabet/Google's mandates on what software and middleware can run on their platform, the prices you can sell your software, the cut they take, there is too little control left
So here's a scary thought... (Score:2)
One benefit that immediately leaps to mind of Stadia, is that since no player controls the client lots of hacks and cheats are simply not possible.
So what if Google took over some major eSports events and made it a requirement that all ranked play be done through Stadia?
Hmm!
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Your thoughts are evil!
Mods, Emulators (Score:1)
>One benefit that immediately leaps to mind of Stadia, is that since no player controls the client lots of hacks and cheats are simply not possible.
But it also makes it impossible to mod games.
Modding usually fixes issues that the developers (or more likely, their employers) wont fix.
Example: http://www.re4hd.com/ [re4hd.com]
Also, think about preservation, emulation.
Remember the Silent Hills playable teaser?
It's likely we will never be able to play that again, because it was only hosted on Sonys PSN.
Somebody could s
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But it also makes it impossible to mod games.
No different to consoles.
Now, imagine a streaming service, no extracting anything and not emulating anything.
For some things it will be good, for some things it won't be good. There is more diversity in gaming platforms than ever before, in fact I don't think we've ever had a game platform monoculture.
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And now you know why I don't play on consoles.
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So what if Google took over some major eSports events and made it a requirement that all ranked play be done through Stadia?
and there is an network issue at an live event then what?
No major eSports events need to be LOCAL LAN ONLY so no lag or any WAN issue can mess things up.
Google could prevent a tournament form existing (Score:2)
Google's power to allow or refuse use of Google's truck of hardware would let Google play kingmaker as to which tournaments are allowed to exist.
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Not sure I see the issue. These systems (Nvidia, Steam Link, and Stadia) already play acceptably with "decent" internet connections.
If they dropped a server on the same LAN that the eSports players were playing on, I imagine they would work incredibly well.
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Plus it's the ultimate in DRM, doing what Steam can only dream of being. Charge whatever price they want, guarantee that there are no possible competition from resold games, no one will ever be able to play an old version of a game, or even any game that the publisher determines is outdated. Even single player games will essentially be like MMOs - must have a subscription, mandatory bug patches and feature upgrades, and the gameplay may change a couple times a year. You can't play the old games because t
And they would have gotten away with it too (Score:2)
So there's one small but fundamental flaw in that hypothesis, eSports cares a lot about latencies.
If they don't want to host those major eSports events very close to their servers, where latencies are comparable to LAN, they probably won't get far with that.
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Given Google's track record, that means that they first take over all eSports, then shut down the service somewhere in 2-3 years and eSports will finally be a thing of the past?
I start to like that service.
console exclusive games suck! (Score:2)
and will the high end games cost $99 or more + fees to cover the costs of an gameing hardware better then $2K+ home systems?
The Stadia Team are idiots (Score:2)
Server side physics calculations are absolutely nothing new nor innovative, MS already tried and failed to do this with Crackdown 3 and hint: the sheer technical ability to do so was not only available but was also not what caused the experiment to be cancelled. "Negative" latency is entirely game dependent and causes giant stutters as soon as the cached frames
Maybe they should have asked game designers (Score:5, Interesting)
In my game industry experience, programmers often think of cool new ideas to generate content procedurally, but many times, this ends up clashing with what game designers, writers, or artists would describe as "fun" or "interesting" or "aesthetically pleasing". Content creators are typically much more interested in having more explicit control over the gameplay or content creation experience, rather than relying on sophisticated algorithms that are hard to control or predict, and which are often disappointingly mundane in execution compared to their grand ambitions. In other words, they'll gladly choose the illusion of a dynamic world, instead of trying to simulate it via deep, complex algorithms, since that makes things much easier to tweak and tune as needed.
This is why so many game worlds are still painstakenly hand-crafted. We just don't have algorithms that can create worlds that are anywhere as interesting as a human designer. Players quickly spot the repetitive patterns and get bored with that content. And naturally, we're nowhere near having algorithms that can create dialogue as interesting as a human, of course.
I'm not sure what Google is thinking here. To me it feels like they haven't really been talking to any professional game designers, instead asking random programmers within their organization, and this is a list of brain-stormy ideas they came up with. They have all the hallmarks of programmer-derived ideas, instead of focusing on something that could actually enhance real gameplay.
It's fitting that Tresspasser was brought up. Tresspasser (I actually played a demo when it came out) failed for many reasons, but at the heart of that disaster was the fact that the developers put physics before fun, not because their physics engine was not powerful enough. It feels like Google doesn't even understand the lesson used in their own example.
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Also, a lot of the hand crafted experiences are crap. Look at Fallout 4 which had god knows how many hours put into it, but had a story rivaling something a sma
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What makes you think they didn't ask game designers?
The things they are talking about don't sound like the things game designers or content creators typically ask for. Obviously, it's just speculation on my part, but it sounds like they're trying to figure out how all those back-end servers can be somehow used for games, and we really haven't seen anyone able to do this yet. Microsoft was touting this sort of thing a few years ago, and very little ever came of it.
For instance, they talk about physics, but you can't just send physics calculations off to the
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Exactly. It sounds like a classic misunderstanding about batch processing vs. realtime. If you have a physics tick rate of 1000Hz, a massive cluster may be able to AVERAGE 1ms per tick, but they are extremely unlikely to be able to receive the game state, process a tick, and reconstruct a single set of data and get it back to the client in
Maybe someone will find a use for such a cluster some day and I'll be kicking myself for not seeing it, but right now everyone seems to be the same as me. We'll use it b
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I think I spent most of my time in Trespasser checking my health...
internet controlled pinball will lag that can kill (Score:2)
internet controlled pinball will lag that can kill you.
It's cool but the lag the lag man.
Place your bets (Score:2)
That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game."
Since MMOs already ran on dedicated hardware in a datacenter, this is oooold [wikipedia.org] news. Asheron's Call had no shards... in 1999. It was shut down in 2017 by Warner Brothers, which had bought it. EVE Online also has no shards, and it's been going since 2003.
The heyday of MMOs is long past, anyway. The number of people willing to spend that kind of consecutive time on a game has dwindled rapidly. GenX and the oldest Millennials were those gamers, and they got old, got married, had a kid, got a smartphone, and
Yes, such as DRM (Score:2)
Does anyone else think "gaming on cloud" is actually the ultimate DRM?
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Does anyone else think "gaming on cloud" is actually the ultimate DRM?
It's not worth the cost. People have been arguing for years that the cost of piracy and theoretical "lost profits" to the game industry are negligible and there have been studies [arstechnica.com] demonstrating that. If this turns out to be any good then sure some people will use it, otherwise they'll just use one or more of the dozens of other gaming platforms out there.
Performance (Score:2)
More promises about pushing the limits of console technology?
I'm just waiting for my 60 FPS and zero lag back.
Minecraft... (Score:2)
With smaller blocks.
I'd like to play in a buildable, destructible world like Minecraft's, but the units are decimeter (or centimeter!) sized, instead of meter sized.
Start with a full scale copy of Google Earth...
Er, what? (Score:2)
"She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.
So, like a hyperlink, I'm watching a video about this game so I can click and go to the game hosted on Stadia? Woo ...
Or some sort of magical AI that will recreate the game from scratch for me to play, just by having some video of it?
Giant LAN Party? (Score:2)
It's true that the reason for why we don't synchronize minute cosmetic details across players in multiplayer games is mostly bandwidth/latency (also, complexity). However, with the bandwidth and latency requirements Stadia has, it already has to operate more like a LAN connection to the end user as well.
I also don't necessarily see the complexity of networking implementations going down in Stadia, because they still have to synchronize game state across datacenters since the whole concept only works if the
It's good in theory. (Score:1)
I have my old trick that Stadia can't do (Score:2)
Not have to push through glass to control my characters. Mods things how I like. Retain control over the game files even if licenses are revoked. Just the little things.