Comment by buffington
5 years ago
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.
>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.
People can perceive delays smaller than their reaction window. For argument I'll say it's 50ms is the perceivability barrier, since we seem to throwing numbers around here. I can get 50 or 60 ms lag on my wifi often, and I would say that I have a pretty good connection. So therefore, the input lag potential with stadia is significant. 60 > 50.
I think the more important fact is that people can be affected by small amounts of latency, even if they can't react that quickly or perhaps even discern that latency is occurring.
The obvious example here is a precision platformer like Celeste, but you can say the same (with less and less applicability) to other games, starting with FPS.
In Celeste, there are a handful of frame-perfect inputs in the game. This means you have less than a 20 ms window to get your input in, or you're dead (the game's only failure state). How is this possible, if human reaction time is only ~100 ms at best? It's because there's a difference between reaction time and timing. Reaction time measures your time-to-react to an unpredictable stimulus. Timing is your reaction to a predictable stimulus. Most of the time in games you are reacting to a stimulus that is at least somewhat predictable.
So with a little training you can reliably make that frame perfect jump. But if Stadia adds 60 ms of latency, that means your character is over 3 frames ahead of where you think she is. You're going to miss that jump a lot until you can reprogram your brain to account for the latency, as much as possible. And even then you'll probably find it harder. Throw in a little variability to the latency, so you think the character is 3 frames behind but she's actually 4, and you're doomed.
Granted, not every game is a precision platformer, so there are diminishing returns for low latency in other types of game. But if you, say, enable cross-play between Stadia and non-Stadia in a shooter, the local players are probably going to have a huge advantage. Even making it work against an AI opponent would require some significant work to make the AI's reaction time keyed to Stadia's measurement of latency, not whatever you originally hard-coded into the game.
You reacting to something is not the same as reacting + seeing the rendered frame.
There's an entire chain of things that contribute to latency, and network latency is only one part of that chain.
From what I've experienced on a pretty normal, non-optimized wifi connection (meaning I just plugged a cheap TP Link router in and did nothing to its default settings), I don't notice the latency that Stadia contributes making any difference compared to whatever amount of latency I get on my capable PC.
That's not to say network latency doesn't matter. It matters a lot to pro CS:GO players, for example, (who have reaction times in the 130-300ms range, for what it's worth). Those players are will to pay for high poll rate mice to shave off a few milliseconds from input latency, or build $5k+ machines stuff with insanely fast CPUs and GPUs, with $2k+ monitors with 1ms latency.
But Stadia isn't for that kind of game play.
Like I said in another comment, the talk around streaming games is almost identical to people who scoffed at services like Netflix when they first started streaming. You had Laserdisc nerds freaking out about how the streaming would produce compression artifacts, and people like Mark Cuban saying that people were crazy to think streaming video was the way to go, (all while pitching his HD satellite service).
Having used Stadia as a "normal" person might, I'm certain that in the not too distant future, streaming based gaming services will be as mainstream as Netflix is today. Despite whatever compromises it has to make.
> What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms
I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no load) and 100ms (normal).
There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia is going to be a better experience than local.
My internet is also shared with other people, in a country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia), the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient device.
> I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
OT, but I'm curious, what kind of router do you have? That seems really bad. I tested this on my laptop (over WiFi, in a very heavy traffic apartment building) and see the following:
I don't say that to brag, I really think that's definitely expected for any LAN device.
I’m on my phone at the moments, so I’ll paste proper numbers when I’m back, but when I tried it last week it was like 18/370/60/1478/etc ms. Bear in mind, this was In the same room as the router.
Finally got a chance to test:
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I never said Stadia would be better than local when it comes to latency, though I wouldn't blame you for assuming that's what I meant. Latency will be increased.
An argument I was trying to make is that for other reasons, and for a lot of games, Stadia is better than local when you take the entire experience into account. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of where the overall experience is subjectively better. My RTX 3070 based system renders the game and its bugs beautifully, far better than Stadia does. But is that $4500-worth of eye candy worth it compared to the $0.00-worth of totally acceptable Stadia? Lag-wise, I don't notice a difference.
I prefer playing the game on Stadia now because it's just so simple. I can use a controller or mouse and keyboard with my iPad and play from anywhere in my house. And not just my house - I've played it over a LTE connections several times without issue.
As far as latency goes - people tend to get hung up network latency when it's only a small part of the latency story. Granted, at 100ms, it becomes a bigger part of the story, but people either don't know about, or forget, that there's more:
There's peripheral latency, "system" latency (which includes CPU, render queue, and GPU), then display latency for single player games.
Stadia, or any streaming service, adds network latency. For me, with a pretty normal American internet connection provided by a craptastic provider (because it's the only choice I have), it works great.
For what it's worth, I've also played with some of the "local" streaming tech. No joke, Stadia performs better than streaming using Steam's local streaming app, by a long shot. There's the iPad app (the name escapes me at the moment) that lets me stream my XBox to the iPad, and it's better, but still way worst than Stadia.