Comment by brundolf

I used both. When time came to Play cyberpunk, I went for Stadia.

It runs a lot better (streaming quality, glitches, start-up times) are incredible. Using Stadia in general is a polished (yet basic) experience. In contrast Nvidia very much felt like a hack. Log-in in my steam account, seeing weird window glitches.

I see a lot of comments negative on stadia here,based on bias rather then actual experience. Stadia is nothing short of tech star even with its downsides compare to the rest of the market.

Yeah I don't see how nVidia doesn't dominate this market. Their product just makes way more sense.

To even get on Stadia you have to port to their custom Linux distribution, which is a pretty huge ask for most games.

Unfortunately Stadia is the only one that supports 4K (I'm a casual user of Nvidia's service since it was in beta)

Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding), and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if you do make the port, they will be about 1% of your users. Or less. So, to summarize, mac support is expensive, difficult, and not profitable. Should we still do it? I tend to think you're better of spending your time on linux support.

Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work

But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it

Yours is a thoughtful post and doesn't deserve a quick, dismissive response, so I want to hedge the following just by acknowledging that.

I'd say your problems 1-3 can be summarized by saying you don't think there's a market for it. I don't think I agree. The prospective market for it is probably console gamers who want to play PC games that aren't ported to their console.

Even CP2077 might be an example of this, because from what I've heard the performance is absolutely terrible on consoles, and if you haven't already spent heavily on an upgraded computer with a graphics card that's going to set you back $1K, you probably can't play it there either. So if you're the stereotypical console gamer, who doesn't care about perfect graphics and the lowest possible latencies, Stadia is going to sound like a pretty decent deal.

And that's before you get to exclusives.

I hate doing this, but I feel like I need to pick at each of your described hurdles, because I think each of them make assumptions or assertions that don't hold up.

1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to build and revel in the machines that run the games I own. What isn't true is that those same people, people like me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.

2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games that people play on the many devices that already exist. It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those devices to play more games.

The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales. 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia means that people can play more games on their devices.

And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on my iPad that's a few generations old. That's very attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I'd even argue it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.

First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it even easier to play games on those devices that don't exist for those devices, or will at some future date, optimized to run on those mobile devices.

I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day before I could run it on my PC, and after the first several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.

3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser? You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You buy the games, and they cost the same as console games. So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern browsers, you don't need to buy a console.

4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to react to your button press or mouse movement. There are indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms. It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then show you what changed. But that's not the only constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good, it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the clock.

So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.

And that's on your PC. No networking.

What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi. With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS competitively? Probably.

Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.

But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.

One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad as you'd think

Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games

(This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)

You don't need to buy a Stadia controller to play Stadia.

It's free with an optional subscription for games and 4k.

> Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable

This failure was more political in nature though, the technical solution is there

>The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review.

The last sentence is key: 'for human review'. Google feels humans are damage to be routed around. If there was a way to everything in ML they'd go for it, but if your solution requires human review it's a no-go.

Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When something needs updating the console will get a ping, download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things much easier.