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Google's 'Overpromising' Led To Stadia 'Disappointment,' Says RDR2 Publisher (arstechnica.com) 44

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A year ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he was "pretty optimistic" about Google's Stadia game-streaming service. The concept of "being able to play our games on any device whatsoever around the world, and to do it with low latency, well that's very compelling if that can be delivered," he offered in May of 2019. Now, though, Zelnick has changed his tune a bit. In an interview given during the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference late last week, Zelnick acknowledges what has been apparent to industry watchers for a while: "The launch of Stadia has been slow," he said. "I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver and some consumer disappointment as a result."

While major publishers like EA and Activision stayed away from Stadia's "Founders" launch last November, Take-Two provided three of the service's highest-profile games in its early months -- Red Dead Redemption 2, NBA 2K20, and Borderlands 3. And Zelnick said such Stadia support will continue in the future "as long as the business model makes sense." (Take-Two's PGA Tour 2K21, WWE2K Battlegrounds, and the Mafia series are currently planned for future Stadia release.) That said, Zelnick was pretty bearish on how much of an impact the streaming business model will really have on Take-Two's bottom-line sales. "It's not a game changer," Zelnick said. "People who want our games now can get our games now. The fact that you could stream them and not have to have a console interface is really not that big of a deal."

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Google's 'Overpromising' Led To Stadia 'Disappointment,' Says RDR2 Publisher

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  • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @07:07PM (#60133196)
    The same reposted rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:

    Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.

    The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.

    Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.

    Then there are the bandwidth requirements.

    Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 100mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).

    Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that a streamed game service would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).

    Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.

    P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I don't mind renting a view of a game.

      At rental prices.

      Studio shareholders say lolno to that price. And I say lolno to theirs.

      So we both walk away and go back to local fidelity and things I somewhat own, or at least can directly manipulate by nature of being locally-run code.

    • I did think that there would need to be some GPU breakthrough for this to work. If you do gaming (I do not) I think you need a decent GPU which does a stack of work to render just 1 view. If you are streaming games for thousands of players then I am guessing all this work needs to be done in the cloud or at some data center. It seems to be the wrong approach, just do the final processing to render close to the display as it is unique to that players point of view. Or did they suddenly invent a super GPU tha
      • They do have pretty beefy GPUs in their data center, but despite that they've been upscaling instead of rendering natively at the promised 4K. But upscaling doesn't have to be a problem; NVIDIA's recent demos of AI-supported upscaling look pretty good. The bigger issue seems to be that the video compression is making everything look a bit washed out.

        Doing parts of the rendering on the client would require streaming much more data than sending the final image. Without compression you can send a pixel in 3 by

        • Well I think that MMORG games do the rendering in the client at the screen location and do not need to send much data (they do need the database of objects and their 3d info to render them and the map.) then you just need to know the vector of each object including the player view.
          • If you do all of the rendering client side, you need a console equivalent GPU to run that on. Plus you need all the textures and geometry data on the client, so you run into the problem with long loading times unless you either scale back detail (making it look worse) or use client-side storage (even higher hardware requirements).

      • by ELCouz ( 1338259 )
        IIRC they use Nvidia Tesla cards designed for VMs.
    • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @08:05PM (#60133340)

      startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them.

      Obviously, Google learned from that mistake. Instead, they hand-waved the pesky problem of physics away with magic fairy-dust technology that promised negative latency.

      • I wouldn't be surprised if there were some good systems architects at Google who figured out exactly how much latency would exist and how it would affect gameplay, who were completely ignored by the marketing department that were more interesting in promising the moon and care far less about facts and statistics.

        Even if they were honest about the gameplay experience you could expect, who the fuck would want to use this service? You're still paying full price for games that you won't get to keep when Goog
        • Yep, full priced or rented games. Or full priced AND rented. They're not going to suck up their precious storage space for you for free. DRM has been all about keeping prices high and keeping resales and gifting low. Online prices for a game drop very sloowly compared to a physical copy of a game. Now with rented games it'll be worse.

          MMOs have done a good job making some stuff free, but with a drawback for many of inconvenience features designed to make you spend in the store or switch to subscribing.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Instead, they hand-waved the pesky problem of physics away with magic fairy-dust technology that promised negative latency.

        Obviously you never tried streaming services. I suggest doing so, because there is some serious voodoo going on where the latency IS hidden somehow.

        It's not just that the services are good for non-twitch games, but even in a non-twitch game there are actions where latency is still a problem (think camera movement - if the camera response is delayed it's much more annoying even if it doe

      • startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them.

        Obviously, Google learned from that mistake. Instead, they hand-waved the pesky problem of physics away with magic fairy-dust technology that promised negative latency.

        I remember seeing incessant CISCO ads about how they're making the world a magical, better place. They prominently featured a school in the US teleconferencing with a school in China, in real time, with no lag, with the midday sun shining in both locations.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For non-twitch games I would actually like a service like Stadia because e.g. it's not worth buying a PS4 just to play GT Sport and nothing else. For a casual, occasional gamer the slightly higher latency is reasonable compromise.

      Problem is it's so expensive. If I could rent GT Sport for say a couple of bucks a month and it kept my save games intact I'd probably give it a try. Then again they don't even support PS4 games.

  • Nobody wants (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
    To wake up one day and find out they're locked out of their gaming library because they misgendered bashthefash0501. What a surprise.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Hasn't stopped people buying Xbox and PS games online.
      • Xbox and PS are much smaller ecosystems compared to google. Although to be fair, getting locked out of my PS account would also lock me out being able to access the Sony Store on my camera (a6000). Could still run the programs i have, just not add any new ones.
  • Unless Google breaks the laws of physics, nothing will change.
  • Alphabet has a history of launching services in a half realized state and abandoning them. I don't think anyone can trust them outside of mail, search, and office suite, and even then there are privacy issues.

    Games have been slow to come to the service, and the prices aren't competitive. They have been slow to roll out support for devices to use with the service as well, mobile phones supported are trickling out.

    They don't have much exclusive to the system either that people can't check out elsewhere. On th

  • Uh you mean exactly what OnLive did a decade ago? This is me running it on a really basic / crappy Android slider phone back in the day.

    https://www.facebook.com/danea... [facebook.com]

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      FUCK Facebook.

    • by astyanax ( 8365 )

      Except the experience on Stadia (as someone who tried both) is SUBSTANTIALLY better. Everyone always tries to compare the two but the actual experience is vastly different, from a latency perspective anyway. OnLive's latency was enough to cause me motion sickness (which IIRC was also fibre optic internet) after as little as 10 minutes. I have played over 2 hours sessions in Stadia and not felt any ill effects, and am fairly sensitive to such things.

      Stadia can always stand to be improved, but it's starting f

  • While unkept promises like "4K 60fps" made things worse, if they had been clear and honest about the specs at launch I think people would still have been underwhelmed. People might accept games that look slightly worse and are a bit less responsive if there is something that offsets it, but as Zelnick said: "If you're going to pay $60-plus in US dollars for a frontline release, and more internationally, are you really unwilling to buy a $300 console?"

    Now that Stadia is out there and not doing so well, peopl

  • by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Monday June 01, 2020 @08:13PM (#60133356)

    Leave it to a privacy rapist [urbandictionary.com] to rape your expectations as well!

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      "Google's 'Overpromising' Led To Stadia 'Disappointment"

      Translation: We said it would be good... But it was shit.

  • With the advent of 5G it might be very possible to do so in the right cities.
    I think we're about to get a massive bandwidth bump for the same price of service today. Color me naive, but when Verizon says they can be a home internet provider for $60 a month and blow cable out of the water, I'm in. Screw cable.

    I'm optimistic for the future.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      With the advent of 5G it might be very possible to do so in the right cities.

      Technically possible, sure. But after a few minutes of "streaming" your "inclusive data volume" is gone, and from then on you either pay $$$ for additional data volume for every minute of playtime, or stop playing for the month.

      I cannot rule out the possibility that countries might exist were data volume is not excessively expensive via mobile carriers, but I have not found one, yet.

      • your "inclusive data volume" is gone

        What is this? Is this some American thing?

        • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

          your "inclusive data volume" is gone

          What is this? Is this some American thing?

          If only it was... if you can refer me to any mobile phone carrier in e.g. Europe offering unlimited data volume (without artificially throttling transmission speed) at a reasonable price, please provide a URL.

    • With the advent of 5G it might be very possible to do so in the right cities.
      I think we're about to get a massive bandwidth bump for the same price of service today. Color me naive, but when Verizon says they can be a home internet provider for $60 a month and blow cable out of the water, I'm in. Screw cable.

      I'm optimistic for the future.

      Since you gave us the option...you're a bit naive.

      Really, it all goes back to the math. The least expensive, Stadia supported, 5G phone available from my carrier is $700. A Playstation 4 Pro costs $400. We're already not-winning on cost.

      They want a subscription for access, but the game library available with Origin Access dwarfs the total number of available games on Stadia. Yes, I'm switching goalposts and ignoring the cost of the PC required for OA to be useful, but the point is that comparing only the su

  • Kinda unusual for one giant company to be anything less than massively optimistically effusively positive about a partner's products when they're a big high profile Google-like company. I would interpret this as they're stunningly disappointed with how it's working out and wish they'd listened to the nerds that were using words like "latency""

  • Executives at Google have no idea how important latency is to the feel of a game. Add a 30ms input delay to any gamer and they'll feel it immediately and try to fix it, it makes a HUGE difference. It's like putting a pebble in your bed. It seems tiny from a numerical analysis, but it will totally ruin your experience. Even if Google didn't have an extensive history of abandoned products, stadia was doomed from the start (I hope).
    • It actually works OK on turn based games, but when you try to play a racing game or a first person shooter... oy. If you're like me, you'll start feeling queasy after 15 minutes.

  • ... soley on ultra tech savvy core silicon valley residents with a bazillion mbit bi-directional minimal latency connections.

    Guess why consoles still have optical drives and probably will have for a long time to come.

  • the negatives without the positives of PC gaming and the negatives of console gaming without the positives. Surely 2 negatives make a positive right? never would of guessed this would be heading the exact way it has gone for every other attempt at this in the past.
  • It's not a game changer to stream existing games; it's just a delivery platform. Sure, in theory folks with underpowered devices can enjoy more visually compelling content as long as the internet connection is up for the job. The Game Changer would be to use this technology to do stuff that have not been possible; now we actually can run massive-multiplayer simulations with "unlimited" number of concurrent users. The traditional model is to broadcast all changes in the game world to every connected client -

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