Comment by newswasboring
5 years ago
> technically a good product.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
> Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"?
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
Your mileage may very depending on a variety of factors. I got a free Stadia kit (controller + Chromecast Ultra) for being a YouTube Premium/Music subscriber, and decided I'd give a good and honest attempt at playing through a full game on Stadia.
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
> You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p...pro tier...4k and comes with free games
This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is this targeting?
I think the only way it makes sense is if you can't afford the upgrade to a new console or PC, and even then the issue is that my experience with Stadia's stability and lag make it not appropriate to play response-timing sensitive games.
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
> I have no idea who this is for.
It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs