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Google GDC 2019 Conference |OT| Floating on clouds

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MrKlaw

MrKlaw

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Oct 25, 2017
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oni-link said:
I always get the urge to start a 100 hour RPG on a whim with the game state being 10 hours in already while I'm on the bus on my phone

Game changer
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I mean - sure. But there is some value to this. Eg I thought of Scott Manley and Kerbal videos. It'd be relatively easy for him to share his setups and we could try flying his ships with a click.

I'm sure other options will be good too - it's the kind of thing that has to emerge rather then be defined in a presentation
 
ned_ballad

ned_ballad

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mnz said:
Do you think casuals will buy a $400+ console, when they don't have to, to play the new game?
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Do casual players even have the internet needed to run this?

Like can a teenager play GTA in his room, while his parents watch Netflix and his sister listens to Spotify? In the same house, on the same WiFi? With no lag at all for any of them, because they'd easily notice?
 
Fitts

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Oct 25, 2017
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I'll be honest. This was the right conference to have considering the venue. This is a pitch to get devs to support the platform. As Google gets a better idea around what they can expect from these partnerships, they'll determine pricing and release date appropriately.

The tech is (seemingly) there on their end. Hopes aren't high for how well that tech will translate to a reliable experience within the end user's home, however. Zero chance everything is as seamless as their presentation, but if the fundamentals are met this could be a good experience. But yes, latency/input lag is a very real concern and this could merely end up as good enough instead — you get the content but with added frustration.
 
jokkir

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Oct 25, 2017
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Lueken said:
Would have been nice for Google to set expectations that this was more aimed at developers. As a consumer, the questions I have were unanswered. What are costs of games to stream? What connection speed do I need? What games are available? When can I test with my setup? Very promising future, but I still don't think the internet is where it needs to be for this, and this conference did nothing to alleviate those concerns.
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It's being presented at an event literally called the Game Developers Conference
 
Dogui

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Oct 28, 2017
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iswasdoes said:
People saying 'where was the price/games etc' - this isn't e3, it's gdc. They focused on dev tools and platform capabilities

It's a huge huge huge deal
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Atleast price and bandwidth requirements are really important info for devs in their decision to work with google.

What if it requires 1gb internet? The potential userbase of your game will be really really limited.
 
Diego Renault

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Nov 1, 2017
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The presentation bored me to death.

I swear, midway through I was suddenly imagining standing on a beautiful, green, sunny hill in Zelda Breath of the Wild and listening to the environmental sounds.

Then reality hit me and the coninuted rambling about technology and computing power started again.
 
PixelatedDonut

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torre_avenue said:
Considering this was a conference meant for Game Developers, I'm not shocked they didn't drop deets on games or pricing or anything consumer-facing. It is a cool idea and if I were a dev, I'd be definitely on board. Should be an interesting summer then.
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This....this tech seems so cool for developers and would be funny to see this service have the best non-pc version of games too.
 

Nuclear Muffin

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
4,721
butman said:
This path of mixing games with youtube, watch games and deify "creators" make me so sick. They are not important for god sake! I play games for my own.
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This Stadia platform feels more geared towards Youtubers than it does to actual game players. Another tool for people to use to encourage people to engage and pay on Youtube.

I get the feeling that their main competition here isn't actually Microsoft and Sony, but rather its Amazon and Netflix. They want to pull people away from those video streaming platforms and back onto Youtube.

It's the next step after the failure of Youtube Red. Double down on the main thing that people are using their video platform for. Game content.
 
Instro

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Oct 25, 2017
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Conceptually some neat stuff, but very little to back up what was discussed. And yes regardless of it being GDC, not having a bigger focus on actual games is a mistake in the eyes of the people they were streaming this to. Apply through 80/20 rule, as in 80% of users are going to use 20% of the features. A lot of today's presentation was about features that the large majority will not care about, with no software to show why they should care about them.

Overall the platform seems very geared to YouTubers, which doesn't mean much to me.
 
OrdinaryPrime

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Majukun said:
it's almost like it was live from the 2019 Game Developers Conference and was more focused on getting developers on board of the project than to sell it to customers.
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Right. That's why they brought an 'influencer' on stage to talk nonsense for five minutes. Because developers give a crap about that...
 
Marcus Brutalius

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Oct 27, 2017
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I'm trying to be open-minded with this tech, but here's a question to the tech guys at Era:
can you compensate internet latency with a better monitor/TV? Let's say that you're used to play with 30-50ms of input-lag on a LED TV, will the best result for streaming combined with a low latency monitor (<10ms) achieve a similar result?

On another note: so we will soon have 4 big player's in this game each with their own tools for marketing that stuff:
Google can run ads on YT.
Amazon could offer trials for customers or include it in Prime AND promote it on Twitch.
Sony has the huge ww ps install base.
MS, well a mixture of everything, but I definitely don't see them dominating that market easily anymore, because they have no sexy, hot product that can get in the the big casual crowd...at least better than the competition.
That will be a tough fight...and when Apple enters, two or three of them will most likely vanish over time.

Another question: if the talks about "private internet" is remotely true wouldn't that be a smart move to circumvent the whole EU data reform madness in some form for them? I'm absolutely clueless about that stuff, just curious.
 
rpm

rpm

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Brinbe said:
Again, I think this is for travelers/people stuck in airports. How does it handle airport/hotel wifi, if it does an okay job there, then we'll talk
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The Project Stream test did not run acceptably on my connection which is much, much better than any airport or hotel wifi, so I'm gonna go with "probably not well"
 
Hooks

Hooks

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Oct 27, 2017
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I can't believe I woke up at 3:45am to watch an announcement for a streaming service and basically got zero information about it. 10/10
 
True Prophecy

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Oct 28, 2017
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Given they compared music and movie and tv to this I imagine they will take on a Netflix / Spotify payment plan sort of thing.

Its not coming to Aus anytime soon though I bet, I would be keen to try it but yeah we really need the raw numbers of what's required to make it work in a live environment.
 
Wamb0wneD

Wamb0wneD

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Oct 26, 2017
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torre_avenue said:
Considering this was a conference meant for Game Developers, I'm not shocked they didn't drop deets on games or pricing or anything consumer-facing. It is a cool idea and if I were a dev, I'd be definitely on board. Should be an interesting summer then.
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If this was a conference for game developers, why did they bring out Doom Eternal and Assasins Creed Odyssey, and told everyone they have a first party studio now? Why did they stream it to the public?

Come on.
 
XaviConcept

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Oct 25, 2017
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Really cool tech, might be the future but its ambitious. I like parts of it but Im really not interested in a streaming future where you dont own anything and are the mercy of the whims of the distributor and its licenses.
 
HighspeedRefleX

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Feb 8, 2018
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Amory said:
surprised to see so many people so down on it.

the concept is amazing and it'll keep getting better over time after launch
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Not interested in it but there are few things I wonder about. Will they be able to directly compete with Hardware especially next-gen HW in terms of stability. Will they have higher player counts in some MP modes, and can the servers calculate a greater amount of realtime physics than other versions (such as the one that was envisioned for Crackdown 3)
 
Alienous

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Oct 25, 2017
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Majukun said:
it's almost like it was live from the 2019 Game Developers Conference and was more focused on getting developers on board of the project than to sell it to customers.
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Even then it's just vague. The biggest example given is Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where Google and Ubisoft made the entire game available for free to a select audience. The hypothetical examples provided include jumping into the game from a trailer and jumping into a particular 'state' of the game, to play it between devices. How are the transactions happening? What's the model? I think that would be conveyed to developers before expecting them to redirect resources.
 
Toni

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Nov 13, 2017
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Ok.

That was a stellar presentation from Google. Their heart are in the right place but the execution is crucially flawed.

The reason Playstation is the absolute #1, is because of the portofolio of exclusive games they nurture and because of how they do it.

Locking games behind a cloud service ain't the way to do it. There were no exclusive games shown to carry this platform.
 
Lump

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All I wanted from this stream was a way for my purchases across digital platforms to be available in a centralized digital service for game streaming to various devices. It looks like Geforce Now remains the closest to what I want. I'm not interested in buying Stadia versions of games.
 
Gentlemen

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The Albatross

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Oct 25, 2017
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Not surprised by the deeply negative response here. We're a very entrenched, luddite community who is deathly afraid and skeptical of any changes to the traditional 1 game, 1 console, 1 TV experience. It's been the status quo of gaming for better or worse for 35 or more years, it's hard to think outside of that.

There were a couple of things that were really encouraging or just interesting:
  1. The controller inputs being connected directly to the cluster that you're playing on. This is a significant change from how previous game streaming services have worked, where your input is first sent to your device (PC, Playstation, etc), and then sent off to the cloud together to influence what happens in the game, and then comes back to be displayed. Skipping that step of latency going to the device in front of you cuts down on perceived input lag. I found the Project Stream to be very close to couch gaming on consoles, the difference was mostly imperceptible to me on Assassins Creed, a game that works well for that. For certain twitch based games it might not work as well.
  2. Excited to see Jade Ramond cap off the show
  3. Ubi was all over this conference
  4. Glad to see id and 2K represented, makes me wonder about other Take2 properties
  5. Lack of games shown, I'm not one of those people that was expecting (or wanted) Google to get 3rd party or 1st party studios involved, we don't need another Microsoft or SOny trying to buy up studios for exclusive games... I know that's very important to console warriors, but it's just not good for the general gaming community. But, it would have been much more impressive if they showed a demo of those new ideas with real games, not Google tech demos.
  6. I wrote in another thread about the idea of jumping from your TV to your phone to work computer to pick up on a game, and how that experience today is usually done in a weird way through mobile apps or not-native wrappers around game APIs. I liked what they showed that today, and think that it has a lot of opportunity for making new game experiences. I think a lot of people might be hung up on the idea that what you'd do on you rphone would be the same as what you do on your TV, but I don't think that's how you should think about it. Just like how you access this website from both your PC and your phone, but what you do on those devices here is different, I think that's how truly responsive gaming will be.
Things I thought were unlikely but hoping for:
  1. Announced a partnership with Microsoft and/or Xbox Live to bring the Xbox 'Play Anywhere' catalogue to Stadia
  2. Announce a partnership with Valve to bring the Steam library to Stadia (I'm not sure how this will work TBH)
  3. "ANd you can play Stadia today...." I thought the "Coming in 2019" Was a major letdown.
 
oni-link

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MrKlaw said:
I mean - sure. But there is some value to this. Eg I thought of Scott Manley and Kerbal videos. It'd be relatively easy for him to share his setups and we could try flying his ships with a click.

I'm sure other options will be good too - it's the kind of thing that has to emerge rather then be defined in a presentation
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Yeah there are elements that are 100% pretty cool, but "the future of gaming" needs to be better than a few cool features in my opinion
 
Goldenroad

Goldenroad

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Nov 2, 2017
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Stone Ocean said:
This just stinks of OnLive all over again
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I never got to use OnLive, but wasn't it a hardware based product? Like didn't you need to own their actual box or something?

This is basically, "use your existing hardware", so it's like anyone that already owns a phone or computer or tablet already owns Stadia, so that's a much bigger built in audience from the get go. I don't think this is going to be an overnite success with people on Era or other gaming forums, but there is a huge market of people out there who don't own consoles or gaming PC's, who already technically "own a Stadia", and that's going to be a big incentive for publishers to get there games on there.
 
Pop-O-Matic

Pop-O-Matic

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Oct 25, 2017
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Rocco said:
Honestly, if you really take a step back and look, only one group of passionate "fans" is threatened by this... I'll let y'all guess who :)

Everyone else is on the same page.
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Yeah, hardcore Google fans getting scared about all their shilling being all for naught, and the rest of us on the same page that this looks like crap.
 
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