Google's Stadia Cloud Gaming Service Will Launch on November 19 (engadget.com) 44
Google's Stadia game streaming service will launch on November 19th, the company's Rick Osterloh announced today at the company's fall hardware event. From a report: In a separate blog post published during the keynote, Google added that servers will open to the public at 12PM EST/9AM PST. Besides the US, Stadia will launch in Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. At launch, you'll be able to purchase Stadia's Founder's Edition for $129.99. The pack, which has been able to pre-order since June, includes a Chromecast Ultra, limited-edition Night Blue controller and two three-month Stadia Pro subscriptions. The Founder's Edition grants you access to Stadia's library of games at up to 4K resolution, 60 frames per second and with both HDR and 5.1 surround sound. Next year, Google plans to offer a Stadia Base subscription that allows you to buy games individually and play them at 1080p and 60 frames per second.
I remember when the cloud was free (Score:3)
Re:I remember when the cloud was free (Score:4, Funny)
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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eh, yah.
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Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Remember when Pepperidge Farm cookies were made with butter, and not with palm oil? Pepperidge Farm doesn't, it went senile. Milano used to be one of my favorite cookies, now it tastes like plastic and makes my mouth feel like it's full of wax.
TL;DR: No they fucking don't
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Re: I remember when the cloud was free (Score:2)
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Yep, the good old days where our PC's had a public IP address without any sort of firewalls, with a game that opens up a port for nearly anyone to take advantage of.
The likes of Linksys and Netgear had brought affordable and easy to use firewall and routing services (where before we had to use a hub, which our ISP needed to give a separate IP Address to each PC) This actually has helped protect our PC's to a high degree of level.
However due to all ports being blocked by default, this means online gaming s
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Yep, the good old days where our PC's had a public IP address without any sort of firewalls, with a game that opens up a port for nearly anyone to take advantage of.
The likes of Linksys and Netgear had brought affordable and easy to use firewall and routing services (where before we had to use a hub, which our ISP needed to give a separate IP Address to each PC) This actually has helped protect our PC's to a high degree of level.
UPNP is almost universally supported by present day router vendors.
However due to all ports being blocked by default, this means online gaming services needs a server in the middle to facilitate communication. I expect we can probably do some TCP/IP hacks that bypasses the handshaking so after we have authentication between the two PC's we can get them to talk directly, by some clever rerouting. However that will probably trigger some alarms.
In the absence of CGN it's not particularly difficult to prime a direct UDP communication channel between peers both sitting behind a NAT+SPI. Even if the port maps are scrambled birthday paradox can be used to prime it.
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No. Those times were never there. Best case was entering their IP adress after googleing (or probaly even altavistaing) for hours on which ports you need to forward in your NAT router to get this %$&$!" to work.
I remember the time when you had to install a network card first and then run a length of BNC cable to your friend....
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No. We simply always were behind a router.
I had some friends who I played by knowing their Fido node number.
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Yes. It was a pain in the ass. Gamespy was a god send.
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Great! (Score:3)
I can't wait to see how "negative latency" works in the real world!*
* in case you can't tell, I'm being extremely sarcastic right now.
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Should be fast enough for (Score:2)
Oregon trail and Adventure.
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Isn't Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo Switch) build this way?
The game always deliver 60fps with no visual lags regardless of your connection, and there is some kind of AI making milliseconds decisions based on the last know online player action. When the AI makes a mistake (the green shell hits on your screen, but on reality the player did some last instant magic and was able to avoid it) on your screen you see the hit but the player keeps on as if nothing happened.
There are some erros but it is great and fun way to
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Does the switch still not have anything new that isn't simply a port minus Zelda?
Most notable Switch games are ports, INCLUDING Zelda:
Breath of the Wild is a port of the Wii U game.
Cadence of Hyrule is a skin of Curse of the NecroDancer.
Link's Awakening is a remake of the GameBoy game.
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With the right drugs, I expect negative latency will be quite entertaining! I had not noticed that Google does drug-dealing now though...
Subscription AND purchase? (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I reading that right? Subscription fees and then you have to buy a game on top of that? Sounds very consumer hostile, so I'm guessing I'm missing something.
Re:Subscription AND purchase? (Score:5, Funny)
You did not read that right:
- you need to purchase the hardware
- you need to purchase the games
- you need to pay for the service
- your monthly data quota will be used in less than a month
- you will be charged for going over your monthly data quota by your ISP
- you will max out your credit cards
- your wife will leave you
- you will end up homeless
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comcast like priceing (Score:2)
comcast like priceing
ADD ON's
$10/mo 4K fee
$5/mo 10G of saved game data
$5/mo fastpass VIP
$9.99/mo sports plus Choice or higher needed
$19.99/mo adult games Choice or higher needed must be 18 or higher or $8.99/12 hours
Now basic
$4.99 games basic (mainly free games + access to ppv games)
$39.99/mo games Choice (forced to by EA sports games and ubisoft basic games so that is why it's $39.99)
$49.99/mo games Prime (more the best games to play)
$199.99/mo (games complete all games you love + the best subscription gam
Still need that 25 Mbps? (Score:2)
Fiber-optic all the way down?
Death Pool (Score:2)
There's no prize for winning and the only losers are the people who spend any of their time or money investing in this soon to be dead service.
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Since it's a Google service, anyone care to start a friendly death pool for Stadia? Let's say week long blocks starting on a Saturday (to coincide with the launch) and running until the following Friday. I'll go with February 13, 2021 - February 20, 2021.
There's no prize for winning and the only losers are the people who spend any of their time or money investing in this soon to be dead service.
You fucked up. It's launching NOVEMBER 19th, a Tuesday. OCTOBER 19th is a Saturday.
I claim April 27th to May 3rd, 2021.
Here We Go Again (Score:5, Insightful)
The same old rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive. I guess Stadia is a little worse than average because they're using the "buy permission to buy the games" model that even Onlive abandoned pretty quickly.
20 years ago, the worst DRM dystopia anyone could imagine was still better than one in which your entire game library literally vanishes as soon as (and I do mean the same second) someone tells the DRM server to stop responding. That is the reality for every streamed game of any genre.
Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn’t even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn’t even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you’d expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to behave like the equivalent of a “freeze” or “hang” that you’d NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a 100mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game’s video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that’s spot on (except that a streamed game service would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you’d expect from any DRM system.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
dead on arrival (Score:2)
remote pinball has killer lag it's small but that (Score:2)
remote pinball has killer lag it's small but that really makes the game feel off.
https://www.surrogate.tv/game/... [surrogate.tv]
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Yeah, I tried the Playstation online gaming service and the performance was just horrible. Some games worked ok. games that didn't require quick reflexes worked fine. Buy any game that was twitchy like Sonic, First Person Shooters, NBA, Fighting Games, and many other titles were simply unplayable. Google would have to have some huge technology differences to make it even remotely playable (no pun intended).
Crickets (Score:2)
Google will abandon this in less than a year after its bean counters discover no one on earth cares.
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Just what I was thinking. Mobile gaming is king, people want download some crappy little "match 3" game and play it anywhere anytime for "free". They will tolerate ads every couple of minutes to get a "free game" on their phone. Serious gamers build their own rigs or use dedicated console hardware, so they won't be interested. Can't quite see the audience Google think they're attracting with this.
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They will probably even abandon it if it just brings in less profit than expected. All these "innovative" Google projects seem to basically just serve to keep some of their employees happy for a time and then they get dumped. Using a Google product for anything that still needs to work in 5 years or later is pure madness.
buy games that go away after X years or less? (Score:2)
buy games that go away after X years or less?
while you run up your bandwidth bill?
Let's take bets on how quickly it'll shut down (Score:1)
SubjectIsSubject (Score:3)
Games as a service, because go f*ck yourself, peasent.
But when will Google sunset it? (Score:2)
Somehow, I find that I do not care (Score:2)
I expect that my just updated gaming PC will fill this need nicely, no subscription, no shenanigans by Google, etc. If they offer a free demo, I may have a look, but that is it.
Canada? (Score:2)
Have these morans even seen what we get for internet options up here? Nobody's going to waste their monthly caps for streaming the video+audio of games they're playing. It's bad enough with Netflix, Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime. Hell, Netflix even has an option that doesn't exist in most other countries so we can use even less bandwidth if we choose to.
Stadia needs to support 720p or even 480p with regular stereo audio to have any chance of being popular in