Stadia will turn out to be the industries eighth major attempt at cloud game streaming, the previous seven either having failed or been put on indefinite hold.
Stadia imagines some user that cares enough about gaming that the want something better than low-end GPUs available in inexpensive devices, but doesn't care about video compression artifacts, the variable latency and reliability of the Internet, and on-going subscription fees. Do these users exist?
While the Stadia presentation talks very generally about gaming, it seems like a console competitor. Mobile gaming is growing like gangbusters on cheap smartphone GPUs, and doesn't seem to need any help from the cloud. Not to mention that streaming games over a cellular connection doesn't seem viable, at least not for very long. PC Gaming is defined by mouse and keyboard control, and Stadia isn't doing that, they have a console controller.
Industry trends say mobile gaming is huge and growing, PC gaming is smaller and growing, and Console gaming has been in decline for a decade, and while 2017 was a comeback for console units shipped, the bulk of that comeback was Nintendo Switch, which is arguably a mobile gaming device.
So Stadia seems positioned to take over the lagging console market, maybe even revitalize it?
One of the biggest issues for cloud game streaming is Internet latency... Realistic internet round-trip latencies of 30-150ms are a nusiance for client-server games but make game streaming services somewhere between unpleasant and unviable.
Yet Google rambled on for over an hour about Stadia without ever mentioning latency. No round-trip latency goals, no measured results during their test, no strategies for improving it with amazing connectivity. The only mention of latency in the entire presentation was a short reference one user made about Project Stream having "no percieved input lag". Highly scientific and confidence inspiring. Instead Google talked on-and-on about framerates, visual quality, and resolution -- including not only 4k, but 8k!
In the real world, passionate gamers (the one who spend lots of money on gaming software and hardware) have long accepted that better visual quality beyond a point is inferior to better response latency. In the real world, gaming luminaries like John Carmack rant about how the importance of tackling latency, back in 2013 saying "about the only thing that's not going well in displays is latency"... "in our limited bandwidth budget, i'm afraid it's going to come down to doubling resolution, wheras doubling the resolution or doubling the frame-rate, at this point I'd take doubling the frame-rate." He was talking about moving to 120hz here.. and fortunately, in PC gaming, we've gotten what we actually needed, which is G-sync and Freesync, and more and more gamers are playing on 1080p displays at 144hz, with less than 6% of Steam users playing above 1080p according to the Steam Hardware Survey.
With 144hz displays and g-sync, PC gamers are approaching 15-35ms latency between their fingers moving and their eyes perceiving the changes. What kind of latency can we expect from Stadia? Some PC Gamer tests suggest we're looking at 160ms. That's 5 to 10 times worse than PC gaming latency.
As a PC gamer, after watching reviews of Geforce Now, I wouldn't consider a game streaming service unless it had an end-to-end low-latency guarantee where I don't have to pay if the latency doesn't meet an expected target, and an exception to any data-caps with my provider - where they don't count constantly streaming game data. And even then I'm unlikely to be impressed, because I'm used to gaming on 144hz G-Sync with 15-35ms latency. Oh, and I don't use controllers. I only want to play mouse-keyboard. In the end, I don't think PC gamers are the Stadia target market.
Stadia wasn't that far off the console latency though, so maybe Stadia could be an end-run on the console market... The shrinking console market. If it wasn't for latency variability. Any good looking latency test of Stadia is only a best-case result. Anything between you and Google servers could add response latency at any time, including the family member who just booted up Netflix in another room of your house.
And lets talk about Cost
Another thing Google's Stadia announcement ignored is cost.
Fans of Cloud gaming like to point out the gaming rigs, whether a $300 console, or a $2000 PC, cost a good chunk of change, but cloud gaming can let you just click and play on virtually any computing device. While this is true, there *is* a cost to letting you use that GPU in the cloud.
In 2019, we have huge headlines about Fortnite, and how Free-to-play games are becoming massive franchises.. including League of Legends, Waframe, World of Tanks, PUBG Mobile, and EA's APEX Legends. Some might say we're on the eve of a free-to-play gaming revolution, where the most popular, most played, most watched, and most monetized games are all free to play.
Which begs the question, How do Stadia GPUs fit into a free-to-play world? Will Google be subsidizing F2P gaming on Stadia GPUs and taking a backend cut of gaming revenue? Will Google make F2P developers pay Stadia fees, subsidizing their free users in a gamble to unlock their paid user revenue? Or will Google try to make users pay usage fees directly to Stadia, positioned as an alternative to the cost of buying dedicated gaming hardware? All the promise of "play now" in their Stadia launch announcement suggests they won't do the latter, but someone has to pay for these GPUs. Who is it?
Unique solutions to problems
Stadia does has a couple interesting ideas.. In particular their quick and under emphasized launch of a Stadia controller that talks directly to the cloud over wifi -- cutting out latency introduced by sending controller inputs through a local computing device (which I estimate at 10-50ms). And the legitimate and seriously cool benefit that Stadia prevents client-side cheats that plague big free-to-play titles like Fortnite.
However, they also made some serious gaffs. Like claiming that Stadia mutiplayer is going to be better than traditional lagged Internet multiplayer. When client-server games lag by 50-150ms, it creates occasional discontinuities in game events.. If Stadia is lagged by 50-150ms, it will be unplayable. So what are they going to do? Bring a Google/Stadia fiber to every house? Give me a fancy quality-of-service router to make sure other users on my home network don't impact gaming? I don't understand how they are going to magically make IP latency variability go away.
In the end, Google announced their new Stadia gaming platform in a fashion that thematically resembled Apple's big keynotes, but it was sadly missing the most important part.. The traditionally Jobsian move of staring into the eyes of the beast and telling us how they conquered it.
We want to know how Google solved the latency and cost issues that have plagued cloud gaming thusfar.
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If Google was a bit more in touch with the industry, this presentation could have been... "Everyone knows we've been experimenting with game-streaming. What they don't know, is that we realize Internet streaming latency means that game-streaming is the on-ramp for our new gaming platform... Where players can buy, share, and play games on the best hardware and software they can afford, whether that hardware is located in the cloud, or under their desk."
What this presentation was... "We've built the latest and greatest game-streaming platform on the planet. Despite seven other game streaming platforms failing because of latency and cost issues, we're not going to talk about latency and cost. We're just going to stand up here and tell you we're all on the eve of the cloud gaming revolution. Because like Alice trying to make it home from Wonderland, if we say it enough times, maybe that'll make it so."
Good luck Google.
...I'm going back to playing APEX Legends, the latest free-to-play PC battle royale, on my local-computing gaming rig at 1440p 144hz G-sync on a 4ms LCD panel, with incredibly low (sub 50ms?) finger-to-eye response latency.
...I'm going back to playing APEX Legends, the latest free-to-play PC battle royale, on my local-computing gaming rig at 1440p 144hz G-sync on a 4ms LCD panel, with incredibly low (sub 50ms?) finger-to-eye response latency.
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