Google livestream

Brave

Hopefully we should be able to watch the livestream here if this works. 5pm UK time 🙂

Brave

Think that should work now

Brave

Interesting little icons showing up in the holding screen while we wait. Think they’re clues to available games. Think we might see rdr2, and possibly l4d?

could be verry wrong mind 😉

Brave

Stadia?

Brave

Phil Harrison now. I still think he was Shatner =)

Brave

Cross platform!

Brave

Well. It was clearly attuned at getting Devs on board but there was a lot of very interesting stuff there.

Launch date a vague 2019.

Alex

Well, it’s all very interesting, especially with the might of Google behind it. Some very fancy tech, but will need to see the games and business model before we know just how good it’s going to be. Also, I think there will be an initial hump of scepticism for consumers to get over.

DrDamn

Very next gen like spec for one “unit” too. I take it they haven’t mentioned pricing yet?

Brave

DrDamn no mention of price, but they’re really going for that immediacy / impulse angle. I reckon there’ll be a mix of traditional pricing, subscriptions, and ad supported.

Alex

Digital Foundry hands-on.

Interesting bit is the latency measurements they made.

Gammerz

Chart of BT FTTC (VDSL2) speed against distance from the cabinet, download speeds falls to about 60 Mbps when located 500 m from the street cabinet, and about 28 Mbps when located about 1 km from the street cabinet.

So DF’s test of 200 Mbps is unrealistic unless you pay for expensive FTTP? One of my Xbox Aussi friends has trouble playing with Euro friends due to lag and that’s without streaming. I guess the system will be as good as the weakest link: the connection. So there are potentially additional hidden costs of increased broadband rental if you’ve not already got fast fibre.

Like G+, DOOMed?

Alex

Gammerz It’s the latency that’s the important bit, bandwidth is secondary. If I recall in the Google announcement they said you’d need about 8mbps+* to stream 1080p@60. I have FTTC at 34mbps I can stream 4K Netflix without a problem. The point of the chart was to illustrate that the input latency of Stadia in ideal conditions was only 21ms more than Xbox One X. If that is the norm it means that Stadia is totally feasible.

Edit: * actually I think they said 15mbps

Gammerz

Alex I realise that latency is the issue. However, why were the perfect conditions run using such a wide bandwith? The narrower bandwith figures have higher latency. Maybe you need to purchase expensive FTTP to get those perfect latency conditions, which you won’t obtain with a meagre copper wire or FTTC connection? What kind of broadband connection would you need to get these perfect conditions? The project success may not be based upon their dev but on consumer’s broadband infrastructure (which is out of their control).

Alex

@Gammerz Read the article dude, that’s his home internet connection, also they were specifically testing latency, so the amount of bandwidth is not relevant.

Alex

Good Oli Welsh op-ed about Stadia from EG.

Brave

Yeah I think he nailed it tbh

Alex

One thing people miss in the whole “Microsoft were just an office productivity company”, while largely true, they also had a long history of making games, way back to the DOS-era. There were loads of MS published and developed PC games, like Age of Empires, or Flight Sim. But Google have no history of that at all. As the guy joked, the only game Google have ever made is the Easter-egg that comes up if you have no internet connection in Chrome. Anyway, just thinking aloud.

DrDamn

I think the other huge thing in MS favour is that the games are already there for their cloud platform for the most part. PC or XBox. It doesn’t need to be rewritten/ported. Ok so it’s Linux and lots of support for industry standard tools and engines. It still needs porting. They need to make that as quick and easy for people as possible.

Kafkaesque

“The promise of video games has always rested in the idea of something magical, a crackling spark of imagination, happening in the direct interface between player and machine. With streaming, there’s a worry that this urgent connection will be broken.”

From the EG article (thanks for sharing that). Interesting to see that argument still being put forward. I get it, I really do - I still have fond memories of physical purchases. I remember how exciting the bus ride home was as a kid clutching my musical purchases on vinyl, opening the gatefold and reading the cover notes end to end before I had even heard it. I remember the buzz of queuing up for big game releases at midnight.

Things have changed though. I have very few CDs these days and don’t purchase them. My CDs are on a HDD. New music is streamed. I have some vinyl I have an emotional attachment too, but it sits in the cellar and I have no means to play it. My DVD collection is in boxes in the same place while I stream my viewing. Most tellingly my kids have always known streaming to be the norm, anything else is an exciting novelty, a sideshow of daddy’s olden days. This is long term strategy stuff, and long term it’s the generation(s) which have grown up with streaming as the norm that will be critical to long term adoption, and this is the norm for them.

Even with my PS4 I baulked at the idea of digital downloads. How would I trade them in? What if I ran out of hard drive space? The convenience of buying a game on my phone while out and it being ready to play when I got home won out in the end.

So while there’s still an element of waiting to see how the tech works, and what games will be on what platform, I love the idea of gaming of a service. It can’t be that long until it’s just connect a controller to your tv, log in through a smart app and off you go. Whether it’s Google or one of the gaming giants who get there first, it’s exiting.

One personal bone of contention is how smaller software houses and indie devs will fare. Probably on “traditional” devices, it’s what the market looks like if the player base migrated onto GasS. Let’s see what happens with platform exclusives too. Imagine if everyone adopted the same platform and it was just like choosing an ISP.

All that aside, the clincher is still going to be performance. The infrastructure for streaming 4k is there now as has been noted above, with the subtle caveat that watching 4k streamed media doesn’t match 4k discs. Anyone who works with tech will have seen the steady migration of data centres to “the cloud”, but even before that with virtualisation I’ve been using virtual desktops on and off for some time. And it’s not always the best… for all the convenience, it’s very frustrating typing a Word doc and waiting for the words to appear sometimes when you’re typing, or waiting for Excel to show the right cell so you can edit it. Now my work may be as fast as greased lightning but it’s not in the realms of twitch gaming where people allegedly feel the difference 5ms makes. Digital Foundry doesn’t help with its metric-heavy performance circle jerk either.

All that said, the games need to feel good, that’s the acid test. And if my VDI struggles to make typing an email the unbridled Joy it should be, I hope they have the means to make it a better experience for gamers.

Good luck to them. It’s hopefully one big step towards The Next Big Thing.