[HN Gopher] Resident Evil Village in the browser through Stadia
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Resident Evil Village in the browser through Stadia
Author : sph
Score : 140 points
Date : 2022-06-10 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (play.cid.capcom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play.cid.capcom.com)
| dvh wrote:
| Well, I never really played any AA or AAA game, but even though
| it is janky and slow, barely playable really, I think it would
| help me to decide if I want to buy this game or not. Slightly
| better than watching playthrough on youtube.
| random_moonwalk wrote:
| Very cool. Script a bit awkward though judging by the intro -
| 'Daughter?... Oh yes my daughter who I have travelled to this
| remote village to find, now I remember.'
| hartator wrote:
| I mean it's super impressive but there is still a noticeable lag.
|
| I don't fully get the vision behind it. GPUs - even mobile ones -
| can power these kind of graphics for comparable or less power
| consumption. And the future is even brighter with M1/M2 chips and
| progress in the like. But the lag issue to have server side
| rendered graphics will never be solved. As it's a physics
| constraint.
|
| Maybe for a new kind of massive multiplayer games made possible
| by having everyone on server side graphics? But it doesn't seem
| to be the way these services try to work on.
| daenz wrote:
| It seems like Google really underestimates the experience of
| lag. It's a deal breaker for many gamers. Yes, this is a super
| impressive demo, but having your screen glitch and lag
| frequently is infuriating enough to quit.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The latency is so low that a lot of gamers don't notice it,
| which is low enough.
| [deleted]
| Shank wrote:
| > I don't fully get the vision behind it. GPUs - even mobile
| ones - can power these kind of graphics for comparable or less
| power consumption. And the future is even brighter with M1/M2
| chips and progress in the like.
|
| From a cynical point-of-view, I actually kinda see the
| thinking. Aside from latency, this is actually a pretty good
| demo. If you look at games like gacha games and more recently
| Diablo Immortal as not video-games, but value extraction
| systems, getting it in the hands of as many people as possible
| is the thing you want. If you can deliver a compelling
| experience without needing the user to invest upfront in
| hardware, you can immediately start charging them and getting
| them in the funnel.
|
| Honestly, the chip shortage is a pretty compelling argument for
| Stadia, on its own. The catch is that Stadia didn't invest
| heavily in GPU power, so it doesn't deliver quite the
| compelling vision that's needed to compete with latest
| generation GPUs. If Stadia was the equivalent of a datacenter
| of 3090 Ti cards though, I think it would've actually done
| quite well when GPUs were extraordinarily expensive for people
| who just wanted to play a couple hours of games every week.
| j7ake wrote:
| It seemed to work well, but then my MacBook crashed for some
| reason.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Respectfully to all the devs that poured their soul into this
| tech. Maybe physics and reality just make this an impossibility.
|
| I've played this game on a great PC and my PS5 and it looks
| incredibly good. Almost fake how good it is.
|
| On this, it's blurry and makes my eyes hurt because it's like
| they are trying to compensate for being out of focus. I'm in a
| metro area, Miami, with a gigabit fiber connection. I'm the
| poster child for this service but it's not good.
|
| Game streaming may just not be possible to do.
| finiteseries wrote:
| It is entirely possible to do, and even surpass the quality of
| a local Xbox Series X: https://youtu.be/oSMt43BOyeU
|
| Stadia ports/limits games on top of underpowered hardware and
| limits the bitrate to ~44Mbit/s with a "4K" stream, ~30 with
| 1080p.
|
| It was amazing 2 years ago or so, it's quite far behind
| competing services like GeForce Now nowadays with double the
| bitrate, true 4K streaming, ray tracing, Steam/Epic support
| etc.
| tehlike wrote:
| You are missing a large segment. A lot of people don't care
| about things you care about. Most spend lots of time looking at
| a tiny screen and playing games there that have graphics
| quality of a 90s game.
|
| That's the segment you could target with more interesting
| games.
|
| I sometimes get bored at work, and want to do something
| different during lunch. This could be it. I sometimes open
| quakejs to play for fun. I can't install a 30G game onto my
| corp laptop...
| edibleEnergy wrote:
| dang, that is slick! (Apple M1 Macbook Air)
| unsignednoop wrote:
| >SORRY. CAN'T DELIVER.
|
| Can I just say that I adore Jenglish? These silly translations
| have become less common though with better translation apps
| available.
| orloffm wrote:
| I've used Nvidia GeForce Now recently, and turned out that the
| lag issue can be pretty much mitigated by buying the 19.99$
| subscription and switching to 120FPS. Games render at that
| framerate internally, and somehow it's much, much more responsive
| than the default 60FPS, even with V-Sync off. Highly recommend to
| anyone.
| dmix wrote:
| I've been using Xbox Cloud for months on my Macbook, Android TV,
| and iPhone with an Xbox controller and it's been amazing. I never
| experience lag on my fiber connection.
|
| I'm happy I didn't bother buying an Xbox. For everything else I
| have a remote Windows box on https://paperspace.com which even
| lets you stream VR games to my Oculus Quest via Parsec.
|
| Stadia works fine but the Xbox is way more affordable, Stadia's
| 'pro' game selection is weak, while Xbox has had far more games
| with one single price and new ones come on multiple times a
| month.
| gundmc wrote:
| Agreed - Microsoft's ability to stream anything that runs on
| XBox vs Stadia's Linux requirement means XBox Cloud's selection
| is miles ahead.
|
| I have a powerful gaming PC, but use streaming as a console
| replacement for games not on PC. I've used Stadia and XBox for
| streaming and while I prefer Stadia's tech, I spend 99% of my
| time on XBox due to game library (particularly MLB the Show).
| [deleted]
| georgia_peach wrote:
| Pro: I couldn't tell that it wasn't native.
|
| Con: On Linux, it pegged my CPU worse than native.
|
| I guess this is more of a revenue-guarding technology than a
| practical one.
|
| For people who care about truth and posterity, having a
| disconnected "final" copy is an indispensable testament--even for
| toys like video games. Without that, "creators" will make
| "adjustments"--for not-so-altruistic purposes--and act as though
| they had never expressed such things in the first place. The
| number of internet articles I have seen "disappeared" in the past
| 10 years is chilling. It is no comfort that technology has made
| real-time editing of history economical for interactive media as
| well.
| flatiron wrote:
| is it me or the official stadia controller is not listed as an
| option in the controller section?
| starstripe wrote:
| I tried Stadia and really wanted to like it but I cannot get over
| the input lag. I play a lot of FPS so it really matters. Even in
| this demo I feel my aim is way off because of the input lag. I
| also get motion sickness with this input lag.
| smarkov wrote:
| I also experienced a good amount of motion sickness, likely
| attributed to the input lag but also due to the narrow field of
| view which I couldn't find an option to change.
| redox99 wrote:
| When I played RE Village I used a trainer ("cheat software")
| to increase the FOV, because it was giving me motion
| sickness. And I have never in my entire life felt motion
| sickness when playing a game (and I play all the time).
| mentos wrote:
| Yea but there are virtually no cheaters on streamed games so
| might be a worthy tradeoff?
| bb010g wrote:
| If I'm playing Risk of Rain 2 on Stadia, why do I want to
| restrict myself from modding?
|
| Not every FPS is competitively multiplayer.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I'm still unsure exactly who the market is for Stadia/streaming
| games.
|
| People with a console/PC are going to just buy it outright. I
| could see it used by someone who travels a lot, but hotels aren't
| going to like the massive bandwidth hit, nor will mobile
| carriers. The most obvious candidate is people who cannot afford
| a console or PC, but having just played through this demo, the
| graphics look like last-gen consoles anyway. I'm sure there is a
| use-case for this somewhere, but I can't think of it.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Currently sitting in a hotel with 282/170 mbps internet
| connection. I've never streamed a game before, but the demo
| runs beautifully, better than you'd expect possible.
| danrl wrote:
| AT&T, a mobile carrier, explicitly asked their customers to
| stream a game. They brought online a game from the Warner
| Brothers catalog just for that, using the same technology. So I
| am not sure of the bandwidth argument holds for all mobile
| carriers.
|
| https://more.att.com/playnow/
|
| Disclaimer: I work on Stadia.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Hilarious. The same company that aggressively caps their
| "unlimited" plan, and justifies it with the "limited
| bandwidth" argument encourages all of their customers to
| waste incredible amounts of bandwidth on an advertising
| scheme.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just because they asked you doesn't mean it'll run well. What
| it will do well is burn through their data cap in a heartbeat
| so obviously they want this to happen.
| [deleted]
| porcc wrote:
| The incentives here are great for AT&T right? If the push
| towards cloud gaming is successful they get to upcharge for
| bandwidth/bandwidth limits
| [deleted]
| mysterydip wrote:
| This person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31693294
| odessacubbage wrote:
| as someone who travels a lot, i just keep my ps4 in a travel
| case. the whole gaming setup ends up being smaller than my
| laptop bag or work bag. ps5 looks less portable but ''''next
| gen'''' hardware like the switch & steam deck are both
| incredibly travel friendly.
|
| >people who cannot afford a console or PC
|
| used hardware tends to run incredibly cheap and i doubt someone
| who can't scratch up 150-300 dollars over the course of a few
| months has access to reliable high speed internet. the best use
| case i have found so far for game streaming is fishing in ff
| xiv while cooking dinner.
| dageshi wrote:
| There's certainly a use case for publishers to demo their games
| to prospective customers. Hell, google is probably quite
| capable of having you watch a game trailer on youtube and the
| last frame of the video transitioning to a playable demo.
| loudmax wrote:
| There are many significant benefits to streaming games. There's
| enormous flexibility to streaming, and it strongly lends itself
| to massively multiplayer online games. Stadia's problem was
| that Google's management worked out a platform and pricing
| model that undermined all of the benefits and conferred none of
| the advantages.
| achairapart wrote:
| For a very casual gamer like me, that likes to try a game or
| two once a year or so, Stadia is perfect. No need to buy (nor
| upgrade) consoles or other hardware. Works flawlessy on Mac and
| a Chrome browser. Or on TV with a Chromecast.
|
| I'm also totally ok with the ephemeral nature because I'm just
| looking for a few hours of fun.
|
| Really don't know if this niche is enough for keeping the
| lights on. I hope so but at the end, at least for Stadia, it's
| Google, so people should enjoy it while it lasts.
| bogwog wrote:
| Wouldn't it make more sense then to buy a console? If you
| only play a few times a year, it doesn't make sense to be
| paying a subscription. Sure, you could start/cancel it
| whenever you want, but you still have to buy the game you
| want to play on top of managing the subscription. And if the
| sub fee is cheap enough that you don't care about paying it
| every month, it would still be cheaper to buy a console,
| since that purchase will be good for many years. In that
| case, it'd only make sense if you specifically don't want to
| deal with having a physical console.
|
| Also, starting/stopping the subscription to play a few games
| every now and then seems to be counter to Stadia's business
| model, so that type of customer is probably not who they're
| targeting.
| mertd wrote:
| Subscription is not needed. One can just purchase single
| titles.
| achairapart wrote:
| Stadia "Pro" is something like the PlayStation "Plus"
| subscription - I think. Every month you get new free-to-
| play games, some discounts plus some perks like 4k and
| surround.
|
| But that's totally optional, so you can just buy a title
| and play it whenever you want, without any running
| subscription.
|
| Besides, even if a subscription was needed to play, maybe
| I'd still feel that as a better option than buying a
| physical console that is mostly gathering dust, also
| considering it will be obsolete within a few years.
|
| But - again - this is from a very casual gamer POV. Once
| someone spends more time playing, and/or any
| fetishistic/collectible desire kicks in, then buying your
| own hardware makes much more sense.
| mertd wrote:
| It's not that niche. I grew up playing games but got
| relegated to the _casual gamer_ category because life brings
| other responsibilities and interests. I know that much of my
| friend circle is in the same boat as well.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Right now, I am a little ambivalent on the market as well.
|
| I think if you can get the latency situation more under
| control, then I see an opportunity for extremely high-end
| competitive gaming experiences to unfold. When your gameplay is
| streamed to you as x264, it becomes far more impractical to
| cheat at the game. If you never played a competitive shooter,
| the psychology of this may seem alien to you. There is a
| substantial impact on the amount of fun many players experience
| in high-stakes gaming situations when there is even the
| remotest sense that someone isn't playing by the rules.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > I think if you can get the latency situation more under
| control, then I see an opportunity for extremely high-end
| competitive gaming experiences to unfold
|
| This is basically never going to happen. Really competitive
| gamers complain about the most minimal lags in response time
| that are to most eyes completely imperceptible, will crank
| down settings to get there, and pay for high-end equipment
| where necessary. On the other hand, streaming over my local
| network from my gaming PC to my phone introduces lag that's
| noticeable to _me_ , very much a non-competitive gamer.
|
| There's a hard limit to how much the lag can be reduced here.
| Unless it can be essentially eliminated through some kind of
| AI magic competitive gamers will care.
| mmargerum wrote:
| laptop users
| fallat wrote:
| Honestly, playable.
|
| 1. Input lag for this doesn't matter 2. Lower resolution hides
| the lower texture fidelity as well
|
| Clearly though very game dependent.
| kubb wrote:
| To you it doesn't matter, sure.
| fallat wrote:
| I meant "for this game" - RE is not reaction based.
| the_doctah wrote:
| It may not "matter" per se because it's not a MP shooter,
| but input lag of any kind feels sluggish and bad to play.
| fallat wrote:
| "of any kind" is not really true. My old large LCD TV had
| terrible input lag, but your brain eventually adjusts. I
| eventually replaced it with a quality large LCD TV
| because the lag really mattered when combining controller
| + online play + fast FPS. Otherwise, I was able to beat
| all the Dark Souls with what I'd say is input lag
| equivalent to that demo.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I think the situation is not so black and white. I've not
| used Stadia before, but I played a lot of God of War
| streamed from my gaming PC to my phone using a controller
| accessory. In GoW I essentially didn't notice any lag
| after a few moments. But in other games that are more
| reaction-based I absolutely did notice, and that never
| got better. So it does seem to depend on what kind of
| game you're playing and how much lag there actually is
| ... I'm sure I would've noticed 200ms of lag, but
| 15-30ms? Not really.
|
| That said, I don't know how much lag there is using
| Stadia (I launched the demo here but didn't play beyond
| seeing that it worked). Maybe the lag from streaming over
| the internet is too large for good experiences in
| general.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I tried the initial walkabout segment in 720p, IMO the image
| quality was decent but the lag was quite jarring. This is
| especially true since this is a first-person title and the
| screen was taking time to react to my mouse moments. You could
| probably get used to it but I would not find this enjoyable
| especially once you begin combat segments.
|
| This is on DSL with around 7ms to a major city exchange (there
| is Google infra there but not sure if it has Stadia servers).
| Likely performance will be improved if you are on fiber and are
| in the same city as the game server.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| sam537 wrote:
| I wonder how many of us got sidetracked into playing at work
| today.
| 762236 wrote:
| Just played on my phone. Impressive.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Compared to the steamed games we saw back in the day (~2012) this
| is hugely impressive. Felt smooth and responsive enough on a
| mobile connection. In fact, it played better than in home steam
| streaming over wifi did.
|
| Granted, I still hate the idea of not owning anything anymore,
| but technically this is very impressive. Kinda like a really well
| executed prank by a school bully.
| Sakos wrote:
| The whole cloud streaming games thing is weird to me. It seems to
| be something that only appeals to people who don't have any
| gaming devices at home. If I'm at home, where I have the best
| connection and it's okay to use, I have consoles and my desktop
| PC. If I'm not at home and I'm on my phone with a very good 5G
| connection (300Mbps) and fairly low latency, it feels awful. If
| I'm visiting a friend or at an office (in Germany), where I don't
| have any of my gaming devices, it's likely the internet there
| will be awfully slow too.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I suppose kids with parents that don't want to buy a whole
| console or devote the space could maybe fit into this category.
| Maybe Google expects gamers to be wowed away from console
| hardware? I don't really see it, though.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Any amount of jitter will ruin it, and mobile networks without
| jitter are hard to impossible. You can probably find an in
| between of these two extremes playing on WiFi.
|
| Most services also recommend to be connected to Ethernet
| outright.
| Sakos wrote:
| I don't think I was having issues with jitter. It was just
| noticeable latency for inputs. If it had been a turn-based
| game, it would've been fine.
| some-guy wrote:
| I have an ISP in the SF Bay Area (Monkeybrains) with very
| good throughput for the price (I get 700 up and down, static
| IP, no data cap for $35/mo), but Stadia / XCloud is basically
| unusable due to jitter since it uses a mesh microwave
| network.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Some mobile networks are pretty low latency compared to old
| copper ones. LTE here has 14ms to one of my servers, while
| the wired connection has 22ms. Most of this is probably owed
| to more modern hardware.
|
| Small amounts of jitter could be compensated for by adding
| some artificial latency, ad-hoc, when a connection with
| jitter is detected.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| There's also a free demo on Steam.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541780/Resident_Evil_Vil...
| brunno wrote:
| It's region locked to some countries: SORRY.
| CAN'T DELIVER. Which area can I play in? You
| can access this streaming demo from the United States, Canada,
| the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain,
| Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium, Ireland,
| Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania,
| and Hungary.
| onychomys wrote:
| They really oughta alphabetize that list.
| nominusllc wrote:
| it's in order of importance
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Sort by shithole rank
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Still, should it not be sorted by "easiness to move in"?
| After all, if one is crazy enough to emigrate just to be
| able to play Stadia, that's probably the most relevant
| metric by which one would chose the destination country.
|
| Also, there is something intrinsically hilarious about the
| denials of end-user service statements of "sorry, your IP
| address is in the blacklist; please consider changing your
| Internet provider and/or country of residence" kind.
| delecti wrote:
| What ranking of importance? Germany is twice as big as
| Canada, and is also bigger than France or Italy.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| US, next to US; UK; list of countries in Europe.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Ranked in order of importance for the international but
| still largely US-based company.
| the_duke wrote:
| Those are the countries that Stadia is available in. [1]
|
| You really need servers to be close by for game streaming to
| work.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9566513?hl=en
| Titan2189 wrote:
| Annoying for me (NZ) as well, but understandable. If they don't
| have servers close enough it'll be a bad experience.
|
| So better not get bad press and directly deny access.
| maxfurman wrote:
| Very impressive! The one-click demo works like a dream compared
| to the old PC Gamer demo disk. I did have some stuttering and one
| moment where my character kept walking for a second after I let
| go of the button, but not a deal breaker for a demo.
|
| The biggest technical problem I saw is that right clicks aren't
| fully captured (I'm using Safari 15 on Catalina) and they open a
| context menu over the game.
|
| If I were to keep playing this game, it wouldn't be through
| Stadia, for the reasons listed above. But I am much more likely
| to buy a copy for my PS5 than I was before. Good Job, Capcom
| Marketing Team!
| haunter wrote:
| You can also play Fortnite permanently free in Xbox Cloud (no
| Gamepass sub needed). Honestly it's pretty good as far streaming
| goes. https://www.xbox.com/play/games/fortnite/BT5P2X999VH2
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff? If in the
| future, all software will only run on servers, more and more
| control will be taken away from users. If Google shuts down the
| service, or bans your account with no recourse, as they like to
| do, everything you've purchased is gone.
| meibo wrote:
| AAA publishers will 100% push for this as soon as it's
| technologically viable, even if it's a "worse experience".
|
| It basically eliminates piracy and unsanctioned modding
| altogether - I'm expecting to see timed Stadia/GeForce
| Now/whatever exclusives in the next 5 years. Google was just
| too early again and went all in when the market wasn't ready
| yet, they should have slowly ramped this up.
| fallat wrote:
| Would be nice for someone to keep and publish a list of
| exclusives so we can track this.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I would be much more comfortable with their service if they
| offered the ability to migrate out purchases, though there
| would need to be limitations in place to prevent abuse.
|
| I wonder how long it is until Valve offers a similar service,
| but you can use your current game catalog. It would be the
| perfect accompaniment to a higher screen resolution Steamdeck.
| fartcannon wrote:
| You can already stream your current steam library from your
| home computer. It works best on LAN, but not limited to it.
| Termitiono wrote:
| There will always the mainstream consumer side and the open
| source side.
|
| Am I scared? No.
|
| And let's see if games are becoming only available through the
| cloud. Perhaps than it feels as good as steam etc.
|
| Perhaps you will be the old dude complaining that there is no
| bank around anymore ;)
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Been buying games for cheap on Epic games store and playing
| them on Geforce Now in my browsers for 2 years now.
|
| IMHO that's the right model. I have a dirty cheap laptop I
| change every 2 years, it's good enough for running a VM but the
| GPU is crappy. So I play the games I bought on Epic games store
| in my browser.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| I honestly think it's amazing for online games that don't work
| without an online service anyway.
|
| EVE Online recently got a streaming version, and with how weird
| that game handles latency and command queueing it's a genuinely
| good option to ensure more fair play. It used to be that
| alliances specifically put members close to the datacenter in
| London is particular roles because they were more likely to
| lock in a single command frame. (This is not a reaction time
| issue, it's an "when within the 1s frames does your command
| arrive" issue.)
|
| For games from Riot, I'd much prefer a streaming client. Better
| than installing their kernel mode anticheat.
| izacus wrote:
| What do you mean "in the future"? On Xbox One Series S/X, most
| games don't boot without internet check anymore and can't be
| modified or copied.
|
| This future is already here and you sold it via the 90 year IP
| protection laws and defense of DRM systems. For your safety you
| see?
| account42 wrote:
| The difference is the scale of the effort required to
| preserve the game. For DRM (whose complexity and invasiveness
| remains limited by how much it is allowed ot impact
| performance) this a lot more feasible than for something
| where the code was never available to run locally at all and
| you would have to essentially recreate the entire thing from
| scratch.
| izacus wrote:
| In the case I mention, the game data doesn't even exist on
| disk anymore (just old, partial version). It needs to be
| pulled from the server and it's encrypted at rest.
| npc12345 wrote:
| Don't purchase DRM'ed or hosted bits.
|
| There's the solution.
|
| I haven't bought software or games in years.
| hourago wrote:
| Telling people to just stop participating in society seems an
| extreme approach. Playing games with friends use part of
| growing in current society.
|
| Laws for consumer protection seem a better time tested way of
| aligning consumer and companies goals.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Where did they say that? You can get lots of drm-free games
| and software. Going out of you way to do that is like only
| getting fairtrade whatever, a bit unusual and restrictive
| but hardly "stop participating in society".
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Yeah, but my friends may not care. Unless I select my
| friends based on free software views or enforce my dogma
| on my friends, participating in society will often
| require compromises.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| True that compromises of some sort are always necessary,
| but I think you folks are overstating the degree to which
| refraining from DRM would be tantamount to withdrawing
| from society. All sorts of people could in principle
| almost entirely limit themselves to DRM-free software and
| media with minimal withdrawal from society. You happen to
| have friends you want to play online games with, but my
| brother doesn't, and neither does my girlfriend, or other
| people I know.
|
| There are other challenges (maybe they work with
| companies that require them to use Office 365), but they
| _could_ limit their contact with SaaS or DRM in their
| personal lives. They won 't -- they frankly have no
| particularly good reason to from their perspective -- but
| they could.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Sure, just like going for a non-fair coffee with friends.
|
| > will often require compromises.
|
| That is true for everything and hence an incredibly
| boring argument.
| treis wrote:
| Eh, the expectation of going back to play games doesn't usually
| meet the reality. For the most part it's play for 1-2 months
| and then never pick it up again. Out of the couple dozen games
| I've bought on steam only 3 games really get significant repeat
| play. If that library went poof I'd only be out $50 or so.
| Compared with the cost of replacing a gaming computer it's
| insignificant.
| [deleted]
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I have a hard enough time actually finishing games, I rarely
| if ever go back to repeat them. The only games I've ever
| played more than once (IIRC) are Dead Space I & II and Hollow
| Knight.
| raducu wrote:
| > Am I the only one who thinks this is super scary stuff?
|
| I want to play certain VR games that I can't without a powerful
| PC. I don't have the physical space for a PC and it seems such
| a waste to buy such a PC for a few tens of hours played. I
| don't have any such service in my town (lag is really important
| in VR), but it would be perfect for me.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Basically what's going on on steam for years now.
|
| I hate that there's no way to buy boxed editions. I'm using
| Linux and the only games I can still play (or run within wine)
| on my not-gamer hardware are the games I bought before steam
| existed.
|
| Nowadays every publisher tries to push their own shitty
| platform, and they regularly don't work, are shut down or sold
| to someone else...including the "allowance" to play games.
|
| On these platforms, you don't own a copy of a game. You own a
| license to download it, temporarily. And that's what I hate
| about DRM. It made everything worse. Nowadays if a company is
| broke I can't play their games anymore. But I can still play
| the old Westwood Studio games because I have a physical copy.
| morsch wrote:
| You can play loads of games on Linux, it's way easier than it
| has ever been. You just refuse to do so, on principle.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Both GOG and humble bundle sell some DRM free games. I do
| dislike the push to DRMs and online platforms but at least
| there are still some alternatives and I try to only buy from
| DRM free sources.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Steam sells some DRM free games. Steam leaves the DRM
| question up to the developer\publisher of the game.
| hayd wrote:
| "you'll own nothing and be happy"
|
| !
| moduspol wrote:
| I'm with you, but I'm pretty impressed by this demo, too. It
| wouldn't surprise me at all if this concept took over gaming
| the same way F2P games did.
|
| In a perfect world, I guess ideally publishers would make (at
| least) a single instance of the server-side game platform
| available open source, or freely available. Even if the game
| itself isn't. That way there's at least some way for the game
| to live on regardless of the lifespan of commercial hosting--
| even if 99.9% of customers won't want to buy hardware or jump
| through the hoops to ever deploy it. I don't know how we'd
| align incentives for that, though.
|
| I guess to me there's too much value in having games of this
| quality as accessible as this demo is, and the forward-looking
| factors (internet speed, thin client video stream rendering,
| cloud GPU processing) all point to it becoming more feasible in
| the future.
| circa wrote:
| yes, i agree. Its the same reason I still buy vinyl w/ music
| downloads and even 4k blu-rays of my favorite movies. Call me
| crazy, but I want the media in my possession!
| avereveard wrote:
| Or they lose your saves:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525920
| jeroenhd wrote:
| For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards (Intel
| iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming is the
| only way they'll be able to play games on their devices.
|
| If this trend catches on eventually this might throw a wrench
| into Apple's plans to get companies to develop against their
| proprietary graphics standard. Why buy two new Metal-optimised
| games that'll only work on your Mac when you can play every
| game on Steam/Epic/whatever through Shadow.tech?
|
| There's a hefty monthly fee but the separation of the game
| stores+cloud saves and the servers you run your games on allows
| you to cancel your server subscription and keep all your games
| ready to play within minutes, or to switch to real hardware
| down the line. It's an excellent value proposition that often
| gets ridiculed because of how new the model is.
|
| The ban risk is always there but that's no different from Steam
| or any other games store. Very few people have all their games
| on a disk drive and ever fewer also regularly download updates.
| The hundreds or even thousands of terabytes you need to backup
| a moderately sized game library these days don't come cheap.
|
| In reality, all you really need to backup for single player
| games are your save games because if you get banned, you can
| just download a cracked copy of the games you like.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Regardless of much 3D API hate Apple gets around here, small
| reminder that game consoles never cared for Khronos APIs
| either, any junior engine dev is quite capable to write a
| pluggable 3D engine, and it isn't even what is more relevant
| on a full blown game engine.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There's a difference between consoles and macOS, though.
| Anyone buying a console is in the market for games, but the
| same cannot be said about anyone buying a Mac. It's worth
| dealing with the proprietary API for PlayStation because
| the PS5 can sell games at huge quantities, and with DirectX
| you not only get the Xbox market, you get the PC market
| practically for free. You'll need to do some fine tuning to
| get PC levels of compatibility, but that's less work than
| writing against an entirely different graphics API.
|
| Mac users generally don't tend to game on Mac. This also
| means there are fewer experts on writing game engines for
| metal than there are for alternative platforms. I don't see
| why that would change any time soon, and that's why I don't
| think programming for Metal will be worth the extra effort
| and cost.
|
| I definitely believe that this can be done. It all boils
| down to drawing triangles real quick and Metal is just a
| new way of specifying how to make those triangles appear. I
| just think it's economically unfeasible to invest much time
| into Mac gaming.
|
| I think it's much easier and probably cheaper to just throw
| the game on Stadia/GeForce Now to reach
| Mac/ChromeOS/Android gamers. All they need is a browser and
| a decent internet connection.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Games for iDevices aren't created out of thin air.
|
| All relevant AAA tooling already do Metal for a while
| now.
|
| As of Metal 3, Khronos APIs are now the only ones left
| without any kind of support for mesh shaders or optimized
| API for texture IO.
|
| No worries, they will probably get a few more extensions
| to load per GPU vendor, making it no different than
| having a proper plugin infrastructure in place.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I don't disagree with you generally about developers
| making native macOS games, but "all they need is [...] a
| decent internet connection" gets dicy. My purportedly
| 400mbps connection doesn't do a stunning job at cloud
| gaming, and most people (around here anyway) don't even
| have that. Add in the fact that almost all devices to be
| used for cloud gaming connect via wifi and the experience
| has the potential to be less than superb.
|
| I don't really see that changing in the very near future,
| which makes me think that the jump to cloud gaming won't
| be as quick as some companies want it to be. Whether this
| changes the calculus WRT making native macOS games I
| guess I can't say, but even without cloud gaming picking
| up the porting slack I don't expect to see much happening
| here unless Apple decides to throw a bunch of money
| around to make it so.
| account42 wrote:
| > For people without consoles or powerful graphics cards
| (Intel iGPU, Apple chips, etc., mobile phones) cloud gaming
| is the only way they'll be able to play games on their
| devices.
|
| Only way to play state of the art graphics-focused games at
| the limit of what personal computers can do, sure. But not
| the only way to play games period.
|
| Laptops and even phones these days are quite powerful and can
| achieve a lot. Due to diminisshing returns with even more
| powerful hardware, the gap in graphical fidelity between what
| a top end PC can run and what a cheap laptop can run will
| only get smaller.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Similar to the web has evolved to eat RAM and CPU because
| of ever faster browsers and machines, games have become
| harder to run even for similar graphic fidelity. The close
| to the metal, often hacky, super complicated performance
| trickery that was necessary years ago isn't relevant
| anymore. Like the rest of modern software, improved base
| specs are allowing for more developer comfort at the cost
| of some performance, bringing out more features quicker
| rather than running simple games at incredible frame rates.
|
| There are titles that will run on pretty much anything with
| a moderately powerful GPU (league of legends, rocket
| league) but you'll have a hard time running Cyberpunk on
| integrated GPUs, no matter how much you crank the settings
| down. On my laptop I've tried running Skyrim (the latest
| rerelease) on my 10th gen Intel integrated GPU and the
| results were choppy and nearly unplayable.
|
| It all depends on the games you want to play and how well
| they've been designed to operate in restricted performance
| environments. For sure a laptop made five years from now
| will run current high-end titles at decent frame rates if
| you set them up right, but that doesn't solve the problems
| of wanting to play a game now, or wanting more than the
| minimum graphical spectacle at playable frame rates.
|
| A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it could
| run Windows, and that's the performance level many people
| are at. Developers like their shiny, fast, expensive
| machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their 3080s and
| 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have any of that.
|
| Both AMD and Nvidia are still finding ways to squeeze more
| performance out of their chips and even Intel is joining in
| with competent dedicated GPUs from what the leaked specs
| seem to indicate.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > A $500 Chromebook won't play most games even if it
| could run Windows, and that's the performance level many
| people are at. Developers like their shiny, fast,
| expensive machines and PC gaming enthusiasts love their
| 3080s and 6900XTs but your average person doesn't have
| any of that.
|
| Yeah, a $500 chromebook won't, but a $500 gaming laptop
| will. Gaming laptops are far cheaper and more capable
| than people expect. They just aren't super thin, are
| heavier, and they tend to need a beefy power supply. My
| laptop is like 4 years old or so, has a 2080RTX, and cost
| I think $800 at the time. It's been able to run
| everything I've thrown at it at max settings, save VR.
|
| Including RE Village
| jeroenhd wrote:
| A 2080 in a laptop for $800 must've been quite the deal,
| even with GPU prices dropping I can't find anything
| similar to that in price/performance ranges right now.
| Even right now the price for a new laptop with that chip
| in it seem at least 1.5x to 2x higher. $1200-$1500 seems
| to be the bare minimum for a laptop with that chip, and
| the cheaper ones tend to come with worse cooling and
| power caps that will significantly hinder its
| performance. Are you sure you're not forgetting a 1 in
| front of that 800 dollar price tag?
|
| I can't find any new laptops with dedicated graphics for
| $500. You can find laptops with an AMD 5500U for that
| price, but I doubt you'll be playing RE Village on that.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Not advocating for this laptop in any form, and I would
| encourage waiting for good sales, but first result on
| amazon looking for an RTX laptop gives
| https://www.amazon.com/Acer-
| AN515-55-53E5-i5-10300H-GeForce-...
|
| $749 for an RTX3050. probably fine for pretty much
| everything but vr
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It'll depend on the types of games you play, but the 2080
| will blow the 3050 out of the water, it's no close
| comparison. Nvidia's budget spec GPUs, especially for
| laptops, isn't as impressive as the similarity to its
| bigger siblings might suggest. You can probably play
| plenty of games on it, but they definitely won't be as
| smooth and beautiful as playing games through streaming
| services.
|
| The extra $250 spend on a laptop puts it at 1.5x the
| price of a decent 500 dollar Chromebook. That's over two
| years worth of Stadia subscription at the current price.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I realize I'm adopting the language of trolling here, but
| a laptop 3050 is basically trash tier. I can't imagine
| playing more graphically intensive games on it; I doubt
| it could get 30fps on something like Cyberpunk even with
| settings on low.
|
| I _have_ seen a laptop with a 3060 for $800, but it 's
| rare. A laptop that can actually play AAA games at decent
| frame rates will run you $1k or more.
| nightski wrote:
| Setting the bar as Cyberpunk is pretty hyperbolic. It's
| the most demanding game in existence that I know of right
| now.
| Titan2189 wrote:
| Sooo, I take it you have 0 games purchased in your Steam
| account then?
| cloogshicer wrote:
| At least there you could crack it and keep it running if the
| service shuts down. But I agree, the dependence on Steam is
| concerning too.
| memorable wrote:
| I like how the OP and your account both created in 2018.
| Titan2189 wrote:
| what does that tell you?
| bhelkey wrote:
| I think they are implying you two are the same person? I
| am not sure.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Far easier to crack in the worst case of service shutdown. At
| least if you have downloaded the game. Of course also not an
| ideal solution.
| Thaxll wrote:
| You think people have their entire Stam lib on disk... at
| most they have 4-5 games.
| account42 wrote:
| Depends, I have a couble of TiB of Steam games installed
| right now but not my entire library. At least with Steam
| you have that option preserve the games and perhaps more
| importantly, pirates^Warchivists have the option to
| backup the game for those of us that did not have the
| foresight/care to do so. A potential future game that is
| streaming only will be gone for good once shut down.
| wincy wrote:
| I know 5 torrent sites I could go to right now and
| download the cracked versions of every single game I own,
| though. That would be impossible if the binaries never
| existed on my machine.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Not impossible ( as movies have shown ), but definitely a
| lot harder. Not to mention, cracked games deal with their
| own issues that make people like me hesitate ( malware
| and so on ).
| shkkmo wrote:
| There are significant fundemental differences between
| copying a video being streamed and a game being streamed.
| The former is just capturing the bits sent to the screen
| and doing some math, the latter is trying to reverse
| engineer code for an application when all you have access
| to is the UI. The only practical way to do the latter is
| to find an exploit in the game that gives you control
| over the server where the game is running.
|
| So pirating streamed games is both significanttly harder,
| and requires breaking more laws.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| "So pirating streamed games is both significanttly
| harder, and requires breaking more laws. "
|
| This is not what I intended to mean ( although clearly I
| left too much to interpretation ). What I thought I was
| saying was 'Even if there is a perfect digital lock,
| there is always the human component.'
|
| edit: laws part; i misread the comment
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I have my entire Steam library installed to disc. Over
| 160 games. It's less than two terabytes. I also have my
| entire PS4 library (purchased games only, since there's
| no point in archiving F2P or PS+ games with always-on
| DRM) archived to a 2TB external drive.
| jquery wrote:
| I have a large steam library and it's all locally installed
| (and backed up) for precisely this reason.
|
| while cracking is an option, legitimately purchased games
| on steam don't need to be cracked, offline mode is designed
| to work indefinitely - https://steamcommunity.com/discussio
| ns/forum/1/8649699535721...
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Many steam games don't even have DRM to crack.
| bambataa wrote:
| It serves a niche but I hope it doesn't become the standard for
| everyone.
|
| Stadia was great for me because I wanted to play RDR2 but
| didn't want to buy a TV or console.
| redox99 wrote:
| Nah, it will never happen. Cloud gaming might become more
| popular, but will never fully replace local gaming.
|
| First of all, I don't think we'll ever a get a datacenter full
| of GPUs 10ms away from every person.
|
| And even then, you will always have the hardcore gamers who
| will not tolerate the latency. Especially as monitors and
| hardware get better, those 10ms of network latency will be more
| noticeable.
|
| You might say that hardcore gamers are too few and will be just
| ignored. But the "PC Master Race" segment seems to be growing
| each year.
| zython wrote:
| People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we
| are.
|
| PC Gaming is a big initial investment for some people so
| making it more accesible will maybe also attract some of the
| mobile market who want to play AAA titles but dont want a
| console or a PC.
|
| That being said I dont think we'll be saying goodbye to the
| desktop gaming PC anytime soon.
| redox99 wrote:
| What did people say about mobile gaming?
|
| But anyway it's probably minimal the amount of PC gamers
| that migrated to mobile gaming. And cloud gaming will
| probably be similar. In fact I think it's doing pretty
| poorly already in terms of adoption.
|
| Remember I'm not arguing that cloud gaming will never
| become popular. I'm arguing that we shouldn't worry about
| gaming becoming cloud only.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| >People said the same about mobile gaming and look where we
| are.
|
| ... With whales subsiding the industry due to gambling
| addiction?
|
| I for one expected mobile gaming to revitalize story-
| driven, turn-based traditional RPGs like 2d Final Fantasy,
| Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, etc...
|
| Boy was I wrong :|
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Mobile gaming is ultimately nothing like PC gaming. It's
| become a weird offshot of monetization and different
| mechanics. Very very few games are the same between the two
| and I double that anyone who plays PC games would be
| satisfied with mobile as a replacement.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| No, it isn't scary. These are just additional options.
| Personally I prefer Geforce Now which lets me use my own Steam
| catalog versus buying specifically for a niche service, but
| people make their own choices.
|
| Often the loudest fear mongering occurs by the hoarders
| (digital or otherwise) who think they are amassing some grand
| asset pile.
|
| I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it again
| ever. I'm not scared about the prospect of losing access to it
| years down the road.
| account42 wrote:
| > I buy a game, play a game, and then often never play it
| again ever.
|
| Just because you don't care about preserving our culture does
| not make those that do hoarders or fear mongerers.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| [deleted]
| havblue wrote:
| I think it's scary in the conventional drm sense. You are
| correct that Google has not been known to support it's products
| sufficiently so it's far less likely that this will remain
| available than, say, a similar cloud streaming product from
| Microsoft.
| snarkyturtle wrote:
| Not a new thing. SEGA had a service that let you play games
| through a coax cable for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel. It loaded
| everything into RAM and got deleted as soon as you reset the
| console.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for
| software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the purse.
|
| Also anyone old enough remebers the days of having single
| servers on the university campus or at work, and everyone had
| thin terminals that connected to them.
|
| The PC revolution is gone and the Cloud is the revenge of
| timesharing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But... people ARE willing to pay for software; RE Village
| sold 6.1 million units worldwide and the RE series is good
| for 100 million units sold [0].
|
| What companies want however is recurring income. Games like
| the RE series get remade so that they earn money off of
| previous investments again. Movies are remade, leading to
| things like the Lion King CGI film selling more than the
| original cartoon (somehow). And everything is moving to
| subscriptions and other forms of recurring income.
|
| Another one to remember is that software products like MS
| Windows and Office and Adobe's products HAD to basically add
| features or redesign themselves every year, because why else
| would people buy new versions of the software? I think those
| companies started to see that, people stopped buying newer
| versions of their software because the previous versions
| worked just fine. Microsoft saw that with e.g. Windows XP and
| Office 97, so many people didn't see the added value - or
| feared the changes - in the newer versions.
|
| Adobe is a subscription model. Microsoft gave out their OS
| for free (effectively) or OEM only, in favor of pushing the
| office365 subscription model. I'm sure the break even point -
| where the O365 subscription income overtakes that of loose
| sales of licenses - is somewhere like 2-3 years, especially
| since there's no retailers in between that take their cut
| anymore.
|
| And finally, why pay $600 for a new console + game + a
| subscription for the online services if you can also pay a
| $15 or whatever a month subscription fee? From a consumer's
| point of view, the break even point is years, and given there
| are newer versions of consoles every 5-10 years as well, it
| does start to make more sense, especially if you don't play
| games that often.
|
| (disclaimer: I dislike subscriptions and prefer to own games
| + consoles, just saying I get where they're coming from).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_Village#Sales
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > What companies want however is recurring income.
|
| You can't blame them for trying. Especially in Google's
| case, when they have more servers than they know what to do
| with. Why not offer customers something new? Freedom from
| expensive hardware purchases, and interesting capabilities
| like playing on a phone or in a browser.
|
| That said, it's not a deal that interests me. Especially in
| Stadia's case when they were trying to make you pay full
| retail price for a game (are they still doing that?),
| creating an ever-present threat of losing everything when
| the service shuts down.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Games like the RE series get remade so that they earn
| money off of previous investments again.
|
| Seems a bit disingenuous. The RE2 remake was fantastic and
| significantly different from the original in terms of
| gameplay. Remaking a game seems very different from
| remaking a movie. I've got high hopes for RE4's upcoming
| remake. I can't imagine being excited for a remade movie
| barring some reason to think it will differ. The lion king
| is the weirdest remake of them all, being mostly shot for
| shot but with weird CGI.
| thatfunkymunki wrote:
| The RE4 remake for Oculus is truly an amazing experience.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Are there any details on how different re4 remake will be
| from the original?
|
| After hearing it announced I just kinda rolled my eyes
| since it's not all that old (maybe because playing it
| feels like yesterday) and a remake of an existing title.
| But then, to your point, remembered the re2 remake and
| thought, "eh they'll probably make re4 worthwhile/even
| better".
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Details are very light at this point. There was some
| noise about capcom moving heads around because they
| wanted to make sure it felt like it was doing things
| differently but who knows. There's a barebones teaser
| trailer that doesn't show anything unfamiliar at this
| point. I feel like they've been on a roll since
| revelations 2 / RE7 so I'm optimistic.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ic2z3_xp0
| morelisp wrote:
| RE4 will be 18 years and 3+ console generations old when
| the remake comes out. It just feels like less because
| it's been re-released a ton in the intervening time, and
| because it was such a high point for the series it was
| still the main point of comparison for 5-Village.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Yeah a better point would be all the times they have re-
| released RE4.
|
| Originally released for the gamecube and then ported to:
|
| PS2, PC, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Mobile, PC again, PS4, Xbox
| One, Switch, VR
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not everyone, they get zero money on resold used games, a
| dorn in the eye of the gaming industry.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Not everyone, they get zero money on resold used games
|
| I'm not sure how to parse that. The people buying those
| used games _are_ paying for them; they're just not paying
| the original publisher. Just like they wouldn't for a
| used book, or cd, or whatever.
| morelisp wrote:
| Also, in theory if everything is efficient, the publisher
| can still extract value from used game sales as that
| supports higher initial prices.
|
| (Of course in practice platform owners are assholes and
| gamers are dumbasses so it's not even close to
| efficient.)
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| You parsed it just fine. Just like books, CDs or
| whatever, publishers don't like that. Hence you get
| frequent "revisions" of textbooks, online registration
| codes etc..
|
| Relatedly reselling steam games or windows licenses have
| quite a few news stories to them.
| yessirwhatever wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| But also we need to accept that this is also happening
| because software startups (SaaS or otherwise) are functioning
| more and more like predators than value providers these days.
|
| At this point, it's not just the aggressive
| subscription/upselling models, but the various dark patterns
| in their design, the abusive immediate various newsletter
| subscriptions, the constant emailing, the popups, the little
| help widget thing at the bottom right corner of every startup
| that's there to supposedly help you, the hostile data
| collection, and many many other insulting and abusive
| patterns that's more or less a standard now.
|
| And yes, FAANGs do this, but people are comfortable with the
| abuser they know and already are prey to than the one they
| don't.
|
| There's nothing wrong with "the cloud", it's all the same
| tech behind the scenes whether you own it and run it or not,
| but it's the mercilessly hostile, incredibly ruthless and
| vicious attitude that these startups display that makes
| people not want to pay for them.
| cguess wrote:
| I had that in 2005, well after it should have been phased
| out. I got sick of it and just... installed Netbeans on my
| PowerPC MacBook Pro. My professor was shocked it was even
| possible.
| highwaylights wrote:
| To be fair, issues with lag aside, this is a pretty perfect
| use case for timesharing.
|
| Most people pay a lot of money for expensive components
| (games console or gaming PC) that they get limited utility
| from because they have other interests besides playing video
| games all the time - why not switch the model to be using
| those resources (that cost a lot of money) closer to 100% of
| the time if it saves money _and_ hassle for everyone
| involved.
| dron57 wrote:
| I haven't run the numbers on game consoles or PCs, but in
| my day job of machine learning it absolutely makes sense to
| buy expensive hardware. Even accounting for the costs of
| electricity, full time system administration and hardware
| depreciation.
|
| AWS is making a killing on selling GPU time to startups
| that should put in the effort of getting their own on-prem
| compute. The market inefficiency here is that AWS knows
| that startups don't want to get distracted by system
| administration and they're squeezing it like hell.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Not just startups, established companies as well. My
| employer (technically not itself large but a wholly owned
| subsidiary of a high-ranking Fortune 500 company) has
| been undergoing a long process of moving almost
| everything into the cloud and deprecating on-prem
| resources.
|
| The way they've done this was almost comically silly at
| first: letting every one of our scores of data scientists
| provision 32 or 64 node clusters all day, every day,
| without (initially) any thought or guidance given as to
| how to control costs. At some point they decided this was
| too expensive and switched cloud providers, even though
| the cloud provider _wasn 't the problem_.
|
| Now I have people breathing down my neck every time I
| need a decent amount of compute for something ... it
| pains me to think of what kind of on-prem setup they
| could have stood up for the tens of millions (or more?)
| they've spent moving to "the cloud".
| highwaylights wrote:
| Right... but this is a thread about a video game running
| on a video game service running in a web browser?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Because it ends up not saving time, once the space is
| suitably fragmented, and not saving money, once the price
| is increased to what the market will bear.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I don't know that timesaving was mentioned, but it still
| would save time in terms of jumping in and out of games
| on the browser.
|
| I don't see how fragmentation alters the cost-benefit of
| only paying for the timeshare of compute resources
| actually played. Cost saving would be assumed to actually
| _increase_ due to fragmentation in the space.
|
| For example, if I want to play AAA games on my own
| hardware my options are (basically):
|
| 1). Gaming PC
|
| 2). Xbox Series
|
| 3). Playstation 5
|
| With streaming the options I can think of (OTTOMH):
|
| 1). Google Stadia
|
| 2). Microsoft xCloud
|
| 3). PlayStation Now
|
| 4). Amazon Luna
|
| 5). GeForce Now
|
| 6). Smaller gaming-pc-in-the-cloud providers (e.g.
| Shadow)
|
| 7). Rent a remote machine and set up Steam/Origin/Epic
|
| 8). Whatever Apple gaming-in-the-cloud me-too comes along
| in the future
|
| I'm not sure it's a market that's struggling for
| competition.
| [deleted]
| na85 wrote:
| >That is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for
| software and SaaS is the only way to make them open the
| purse.
|
| No, this is what happens when lazy developers prioritize
| their own convenience over what's best for everyone.
|
| They want to write JS once and have it run everywhere, so we
| end up with abominations like wasm and node.
|
| People are perfectly willing to pay for games, just look at
| Steam.
| alophawen wrote:
| So, wasm is not an abomination but has a very interesting
| future which built upon many years of previous experiments.
|
| Multiple languages including rust already compile directly
| to wasm. This would be your own best pro-wasm argument if
| you're such a js hater.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| Stadia is running the actual game (which is probably a
| native binary generated from C++ code) on Google's servers,
| then streams the video/audio/input to/from the browser.
| roansh wrote:
| Slightly off topic but:
|
| It is in money's interest to turn everything into service based
| model?
|
| Read some news recently that, big corps are buying up houses
| shooting up their prices enough that common man can't afford
| them.
|
| I guess once the acquisition is large enough, they can force you
| to pay more money for shelter.
| honkler wrote:
| everybody loves to earn rent.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Oof. What a bad experience. The video quality is pretty bad for
| smaller details. And the latency while looking around is
| nauseating for me. All this while on a wired gigabit connection
| that is reported as excellent. Only games I see having a good
| experience is slow paced games were immediate feedback is not
| required. Think turn-based combat games, or card games.
|
| One on hand I'm sad this technology still is unuseable after
| years of research. But on the other hand a future where
| everything is running remote on BigCo servers is very bleak.
| libertine wrote:
| This is where I thought Stadia would shine - they could bring
| back game demos that are accessible through a link.
|
| It's like the magazines with demo CDs times all over again, where
| I actually tried games instead of experiencing them through the
| eyes of a influencer.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Even better, imagine the opportunities this opens up. I could
| see a group of friends all playing the same first person game,
| taking turns directly from their own browsers. Or a streamer
| getting frustrated with a game, and letting one of their
| viewers take over to help them out.
|
| Pretty cool possibilities.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| It's better than that, for developers at least. Instead of
| having to provide a custom build for the demo, they can ship
| the full game to a service like Stadia, and then Stadia can
| enforce a time limit on that demo.
| bogwog wrote:
| That seems like a very small value proposition. I doubt the
| reason we see many demos nowadays has to due with the burden
| of creating a custom build for the demo.
| sph wrote:
| Of course it doesn't seem to work on Firefox :(
| rvz wrote:
| Firefox itself is a failure and it is not early days. We've
| given it enough time to be better than Chrome and it is still
| declining.
| solar-ice wrote:
| You mean web standards are a failure, because Google keeps
| creating products that only work in Google Chrome.
| account42 wrote:
| If only it was just google that equated the web with Chrome
| :|
| rvz wrote:
| I see. It's something else's fault. Mozilla Firefox had
| more market share than the declining IE and the opportunity
| to get further ahead at one point and it still lost. Even
| the CEO was confident in competing against Google if they
| were to release their own browser at the time and believed
| that they would not be >80% dependent on the companies
| revenue. [0]
|
| The inability to recognise responsibility of past failures
| is perhaps the reason why Firefox has failed and the parent
| Mozilla is still totally reliant on Google's money.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.
| compu...
| solar-ice wrote:
| When Google develops a product (Stadia) and does not
| adhere to web standards in developing that product, I do
| not know who else to blame for Stadia not working on
| browsers that support web standards, which was the
| criticism here.
| rand49an wrote:
| It doesn't seem to work in the latest version of Edge either,
| works for a few minutes and closes.
| neogodless wrote:
| My experience was it not working in Firefox, but working in
| Edge.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| I don't know about Stadia but changing your user-agent to
| Chrome with something like User-Agent Switcher makes Nvidia
| Geforce Now work on firefox.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Hey! It's not antitrust because Google is not a monopoly. Just
| go demo Resident Evil Village in your Firefox browser through a
| different provider. /s
| izzydata wrote:
| Firefox should shut themselves down so Google can be sued.
| reflexco wrote:
| It doesn't seem to load on both Firefox and Chrome so I'm not
| sure the browser is the problem. Their servers are probably
| overloaded.
| pja wrote:
| It worked in Chrome for me, but not Firefox.
| dont__panic wrote:
| "Connecting" for minutes, with no visible progression feedback,
| then "Loading" for minutes, with no visible progression feedback.
|
| Exactly what I expected.
| FpUser wrote:
| Crashed but the intro was responsive
| mariusmg wrote:
| Amusingly bad experience when compared with "local" copy. In
| Stadia it loads for ~3 minutes and then it fails with a "The game
| couldn't start, but try opening it again now."
|
| With my PC copy, i'm playing in around 15 seconds.
| malka wrote:
| Of course it's shit
|
| > The game had to close Sorry about that. Reopen the game to
| keep playing
|
| (in reality it never opened)
| berdario wrote:
| I've seen this kind of issue with people who have a custom
| firewall setup. You probably need to configure your firewall to
| allow playing.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Then what the heck is that error message? I'd expect that
| error message from a junior developer.
| Sakos wrote:
| It's not the kind of thing Google's internal metrics for
| job performance cares about. It's a generic/useless error
| message because there's no incentive for their developers
| to improve UX. It's probably been there since the first MVP
| they made.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You're glossing over the 30 gig download and install.
| bogwog wrote:
| If your internet connection is fast enough to use Stadia,
| downloading a 30gb game probably isn't a big deal.
|
| Out of curiosity, I opened up Steam and downloaded the game
| to see how long it would take. I started the download at
| 12:36PM and it completed at 12:43PM, so it took ~7 minutes,
| with Steam reporting peak speeds of 83.2MB/s download
| (fast.com reported 960mbps before I started the download). I
| think the download might have even been limited by my hard
| drive since my Steam library is on a regular old HDD rather
| than an SSD.
| inb4_cancelled wrote:
| You can stream games on a 25 Mbps connection if your
| latency is low enough. Now imagine downloading not a 30GB,
| but a 90GB game, and on this 25Mbps connection instead of
| your 960Mbps one.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Worked great for me on a Macbook. The game binary doesn't even
| run on macOS.
| onion2k wrote:
| I was playing in Chrome within about 30 seconds, with graphics
| looking better than my integrated-graphics-only Macbook can
| manage. It's quite impressive when it works.
| sumy23 wrote:
| I was impressed at first too, but after playing for 20
| minutes, I hit multiple instances of lag and the slight delay
| in controls was annoying.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| Impressive, but still not really playable on Safari on M1
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Right-click in Safari brings up the context menu (so you must
| play in Chrome) but I'm not sure it's an M1 Safari thing.
| bogwog wrote:
| This is a good demo for the game, but I personally wouldn't play
| it like this. I tried it on a 27 inch 1080p monitor, and it
| looked really bad. The compression artifacts were clearly visible
| in dark areas, and there was a lot of aliasing. I think it may
| have been running at sub-1080p with upscaling.
|
| The camera felt sluggish, but tbf that's probably from the game
| itself. I own this game on Steam, but haven't played it in a
| while so I don't remember exactly how it feels.
|
| For a high fidelity cinematic AAA game like this, the latency
| isn't a big deal, but the low quality visuals are hard to accept.
| The "load" time was also worse than launching my local copy.
| Sure, I didn't have to download it, but considering you need a
| pretty fast internet connection to use Stadia at all, you
| probably shouldn't have a hard time downloading the game anyways.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > compression artifacts
|
| It's bad enough having to accept this from streaming
| services... Now video games as well? It's like we're going
| backwards.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I just ran a AAA title game at, let's call it 90% quality, on
| a laptop with an onboard intel GPU.
|
| This is unequivocally moving forwards.
| hbn wrote:
| I don't have the greatest internet ever (50 down, 5 up I
| think?) but it's well within what they claim to be acceptable.
|
| I hate everything about the idea of purchasing games that you
| can only stream, but when they were offloading free Stadia
| Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) to Google
| Play Music subscribers I grabbed one and committed myself to
| playing through a game entirely just to say I gave it a fair
| shot. I chose Superhot: Mind Control Delete which is a game
| where you go around a kill a bunch of mannequins that are
| trying to kill you, but time only moves forward when you do
| (meaning you can stand still and the game is nearly paused).
|
| I managed to make it through the whole game, but there wasn't a
| single play session where I didn't have multiple spikes of lag,
| or a several seconds of frozen frames that take a bit to catch
| up. Thankfully because of the nature of the game I was able to
| just stop moving and I'd usually be safe by the time the game
| was working again, but it wasn't a good experience. If it was
| any other game that required constant twitch-reaction
| throughout the gameplay, those lag spikes wouldn't be
| acceptable.
|
| Even if it works well 99.9999% of the time, that 0.0001% where
| it's not working is frustrating, and not something you have to
| deal with playing locally. The idea that someone else in your
| house could kick off a giant download that suddenly makes your
| game unplayable feels like we've regressed to the days of dial-
| up where your mom kicks you off the internet because she needs
| to make a phone call.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's geoblocked. At least they tell you where to go. But the
| dream of a border less internet seemed a lot closer in the 90s
| than today
|
| > SORRY. CAN'T DELIVER.
|
| > Which area can I play in? You can access this streaming demo
| from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France,
| Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark,
| Norway, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal,
| Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Money ruins everything.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It is due to the location of the servers. Outside of these
| regions there are no local servers so the lag would be
| unfavourable.
| numlock86 wrote:
| How come Google hasn't shut down Stadia yet? Serious question, no
| rant. Early adopter here. Service has a terrible pricing model
| and business numbers since the start.
| colinplamondon wrote:
| This might be what that looks like.
|
| (1) Kill the subscription
|
| (2) Immediate Priority: Biz-dev deals, make sure every major
| release's early demo is available on Stadia. Expose people to
| platform without requiring them to switch from a console.
|
| (3) Secondary Priority: Focus SDK development on indie
| developers. Offer generous streamed minutes for all developer
| accounts. Charge per streamed minute after that. Let developers
| pass on the cost however they want.
|
| With open pricing, open enrollment, open SDK, developers could
| do really amazing things with Stadia: and would figure out the
| business model.
|
| Google could focus on driving down the cost per streamed minute
| as low as humanly possible, with the broadest possible access.
|
| Amazon certainly will.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Focus SDK development on indie developers. Offer generous
| streamed minutes for all developer accounts. Charge per
| streamed minute after that.
|
| This would be horrible for everyone involved. First you're
| focusing on games that wouldn't need the high-end hardware in
| the datacenter to begin with, and second your revenue model
| incentivizes the worst possible mobile game style grind.
|
| Google would burn through players as fast as possible most of
| whom would eventually turn to just playing on their iPad
| directly, developers would have to deal with yet another
| middleman, and players would get addicted to the shittiest
| games imaginable.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Maybe they believe the tech itself can play an important role
| in the future, perhaps in AR/VR so it's worth keeping stadia
| alive as a testing ground.
|
| But most likely they're fully aware of the reputation Google
| has and they'd rather put stadia on life support for a few
| years.
| sylware wrote:
| SaaS is an efficient way to force ppl and companies to pay a
| monthly rent.
|
| They will change file formats to work with only SaaS then slowly
| kill standalone apps.
|
| But some of the SaaS mafia will not want to depend on the client
| software from google and will have to code their own. Chrome is
| google lock-in by complexity and size, SDK included.
|
| Yep, this makes me feel very uncomfortable, this is a significant
| loss of control.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I'm gaming using the excellent shadow tech service.
|
| I have fiber, and playing nervous games like hades work great.
|
| But I would not play lol, dota, falling guy or call of duty with
| it. The latency, no matter small, is a handicap when timing win
| or break a game.
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