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PayPalFor those interested in trying out Google Stadia, the new streaming service, today Google held their first Stadia Connect to give out some details. Quick reminder: Stadia is the game streaming service powered by Debian Linux and Vulkan. It’s supposed to offer a “single click” experience with “no downloading required”.
On the subject of pricing: They will have a Stadia Pro subscription at $9.99/£8.99 a month which gives you up to 4K resolution with regular free games and discounts. They will also do Stadia Base with no monthly sub that will come "next year" limiting you to 1080p, both allowing you to buy games whenever you want.
However, it seems only those who purchase the special Founders Edition will get access sometime in November. This includes first access to Stadia, a Chromecast Ultra, limited edition Stadia Controller, 3 months of Stadia Pro, a guest pass to give access to a friend and the Complete Edition of Destiny 2.
First set of games includes: Baldur’s Gate III (Larian Studios) was newly announced - Trailer, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Gylt, Get Packed, The Division 2, Destiny 2, DOOM Eternal, Football Manager 2020, GRID, Metro Exodus, The Elder Scrolls Online, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Tomb Raider Trilogy, Borderlands 3 and more.
A pretty interesting line-up and there’s more they’re going to announce later, that’s just all they’re teasing for now. They also reiterated wide support for different game pads, not just their own.
You can see the video here:
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If you want to play at 1080p, Google are saying you will need a 20Mbps connection. That actually seems quite low, but even so the bandwidth use that will come along with it will likely be massive. If your connection is a bit wobbly, Stadia will keep your progress for "several minutes".
As for availability, they're launching in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, USA and the United Kingdom. They say more countries will come in 2020 too.
See more at the official Stadia website and their FAQ here.
I found it quite amusing that the video kept dying on me (seems for others too), after Google's recent outage it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about buying AAA titles to stream them through Google's network.
I remain unconvinced by it, especially now we know we will be buying games as well and you're locked to 1080p unless you also pay a monthly subscription. Buying a game, to have no real access to it with Google controlling every part of it? I mentioned before I didn't particularly like the idea of even less ownership but with a Netflix-like subscription model it might have made more sense but not if you're still paying full price.
I will add more details as I look over it all.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I would pay that subscription money if I could just run my own steam games.
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I would pay that subscription money if I could just run my own steam games.
That would be the advantage of any Google competitor if it ever appears. If Valve or Epic would launch a stadia like service in addition to their regular platform (so you can always pay 10 bucks for a month of streaming on your whole library if your rig is broken or whatever) they would have the best offer. But Epic is uninterested in spending money to add value its library and from Valve it came no indication whatsoever that it might launch a cloud service, although with SteamOS and steam link they would have the majority of the software components just ready.
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No hard drive failure in 15 years? Wow! Hardly believable.I upgraded it once or twice, so it's not 15 years of continuous use for one drive, but none has ever failed me. In fact, the only component I've ever had to replace because of a defect has been a DVD drive. Even when my Ethernet cable somehow soldered itself to its port it kept working :D
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But my point is that there was (with the PS2) and there is (with Stadia) the possibility of loosing your game library.
Sorry but it doesn't make sense at all. Your PS2 games are not hardwired to your console, you don't loose your game library at all. Your games are untouched if a console failure occurs. :|
My PC, or my console etc can break sure, but it's not the manufacturer who will break it on purpose or take it from you.
This subject is pretty similar as the DRM-Free thing. Like when Amazon removes a book you bought directly from your Kindle...
A bit off topic, but I'm seriously sad that a lot of people will probably dig into this system...
Last edited by Cyril on 7 June 2019 at 4:51 pm UTC
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Mohandevir Jun 7, 2019
Sorry but it doesn't make sense at all. Your PS2 games are not hardwired to your console, you don't loose your game library at all. Your games are untouched if a console failure occurs. :|
Nevermind. You are right, my example wasn't a good one, I already admited it and being a PC gamer, it's not a subject that's relevent to me, anyway.
I should have limited myself to this:
This said, if Stadia is a success, there is no reason to stop supporting it. Google+ was shutdown because nobody used it anymore. If Stadia is a failure, who will it hurt? It's going to die in general indifference, like the other projects Google killed.
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Mohandevir Jun 7, 2019
No hard drive failure in 15 years? Wow! Hardly believable.I upgraded it once or twice, so it's not 15 years of continuous use for one drive, but none has ever failed me. In fact, the only component I've ever had to replace because of a defect has been a DVD drive. Even when my Ethernet cable somehow soldered itself to its port it kept working :D
Imo, a hardrive failure/replacement is probably the worst. Not because it's costly, but because of the downtime involved; you have to reinstall to whole thing and if you don't have a backup, which many don't, you need to redownload all of your games. Many recent titles are 50gb-100gb... Quite long if your connexion is slow. Even if you have a backup of your files, it's not instantaneous.
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Exactly my point. So as I say, that makes it trickier for them to actually sell you the game in a "you get to put it on your hard drive" kind of way, which is what people are saying they should be doing. Mind you, I do think it would be nice if they provided that option, I'm just saying it's not as simple as it looks.... but if they're going to let you buy it they have to have a version for whatever platform you're on because most of their customers probably aren't running Stadia Linux stuff on their devices. Having a store-as-such makes the project a lot more complicated in an area where they don't have expertise.
This is confusing; no one except Google will be running 'Stadio Linux stuff on their devices', there's no such OS -- or even application -- for the end user to run. All the user has is a browser window into the 'service'.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 7 June 2019 at 5:37 pm UTC
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I don't think anyone except Google is really in a position to make even a stab at beating the latency problems. Far as I can tell, what makes this feasible is that Google already has a bunch of servers all over the dang place, so Stadia will run from Google servers physically fairly near you, wherever you might be. Nobody else can match that infrastructure, and it would not be worth building it just to run a service like this.I would pay that subscription money if I could just run my own steam games.
That would be the advantage of any Google competitor if it ever appears. If Valve or Epic would launch a stadia like service in addition to their regular platform (so you can always pay 10 bucks for a month of streaming on your whole library if your rig is broken or whatever) they would have the best offer. But Epic is uninterested in spending money to add value its library and from Valve it came no indication whatsoever that it might launch a cloud service, although with SteamOS and steam link they would have the majority of the software components just ready.
Google is kind of frightening. Really, along with Facebook and one or two of the other behemoths, they should probably be broken up and/or moved into the public sector.
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A little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.
Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
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Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.
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A little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.Apparently, yes. You don't really need an explanation, that's exactly what they're doing. Presumably it requires a pretty fast internet connection. They've been working on making the streaming work well, with I suppose good compression and so forth. And it seems they're leveraging their worldwide network of servers (used for bringing you such things as Google searches, Youtube videos and most of the world's ads) to ensure the game is physically coming from somewhere fairly close by, cutting down lag that way.
Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
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A little bit late to the party so sorry for the late question. Is there a soul among us that can explain the technology behind this to me? I mean I am too old to understand some things especially when I think about lag and response of some games in the past. I still remember Duke Nukem 3D played over a modem with a friend and what happened if the modems had to reconnect or the line was too noisy. Or the pings we got with first lan an internet connections. I mean, so many things had to work just right for it to be playable.
Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
The main change from "back then" is that the latency over Internet (if everything works as it should) are orders of magnitude lower than what you could get over a modem.
Regarding how it works, you are 100% correct in your assumption in the second paragraph. They send a compressed picture to you ala Netflix/Youtube and you send the input to them so the performance of your local machine does not really matter.
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Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.
I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.
Edit: And it surely can get way lower than that, we run one service where we receive financial press releases from various news agencies over HTTP where I've written a very low latency HTTP server to minimize latency. It calculates the latency from the moment of connect to receivment of the last byte+processing and as you can see it's in the microsecond range (this is a log from a Swedish news agency that sends from the Google Compute Cloud to one of our servers in Stockholm and each received file is between 2-3k in size):
jun 07 15:05:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [411us]
jun 07 15:10:47 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [433us]
jun 07 15:13:26 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [379us]
jun 07 15:24:10 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [314us]
jun 07 15:25:37 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [362us]
jun 07 15:30:29 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [414us]
jun 07 15:34:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 15:46:19 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [430us]
jun 07 16:00:49 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [403us]
jun 07 16:02:00 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [372us]
jun 07 16:06:46 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [329us]
jun 07 16:06:54 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [335us]
jun 07 16:08:31 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [357us]
jun 07 16:10:05 sth2 http[17190]: POST / HTTP/1.1 200 [378us]Last edited by F.Ultra on 7 June 2019 at 6:34 pm UTC
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Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.
I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.
My number is based on DF's test of Project Stream. They are measuring not just network latency but total latency from button press to on screen reaction using a 120fps camera. It's possible it has been improved and will be improved further, but it will never be as fast as playing locally on a decent PC of course. I think Stadia will be fine for a lot of games but I wouldn't use it for stuff like Doom or CS:GO, especially since I like to play those sort of games at higher refresh rates than 60hz.
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Does Stadia "beam" picture to you computer and computer sends the input to the server? Is that all? It does not matter what OS is being used on the device at home? It can be a 386sx as far as google is concerned? I will be most grateful if somebody explains this.
That's pretty much it! It's like watching a video on YouTube, but it's interactive and let's you send inputs from your controller to Googles server where the game runs. The server encodes a video stream instead of outputting the graphics to a display. The video stream is sent to your client which plays it back just like any video in your browser. For now it's Chrome only. The time it takes between your button press until you see a change on screen is about 150-200ms I think, which is about the same as a console connected to an average TV without "game mode" enabled on the TV, which means it's going to be fine for most people but it will be annoying for latency sensitive people playing fast paced games.
I think that it will be much lower than 150-200ms. I have aprox 80ms round-trip right now over mobile Internet between my home computer in Sweden and one of our servers in the UK. And Google is going to use local servers.
My number is based on DF's test of Project Stream. They are measuring not just network latency but total latency from button press to on screen reaction using a 120fps camera. It's possible it has been improved and will be improved further, but it will never be as fast as playing locally on a decent PC of course. I think Stadia will be fine for a lot of games but I wouldn't use it for stuff like Doom or CS:GO, especially since I like to play those sort of games at higher refresh rates than 60hz.
Interesting that the Xbox had 145ms there, Bluetooth in the controller perhaps plays a role there. But the article also shows that we are not talking about an additional 179ms of latency but between 67-100ms since the local PC also showed quite high latency.
This is all strange to me who works with low latency financial data where we constantly keep things well below 1ms, these numbers just look god awful to me :)
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Mohandevir Jun 7, 2019
Mmmm...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3401136/destiny-2-is-coming-to-steam-in-september.html
Will it support linux (Stadia build)? Will the Windows version run on Vulkan? Will it be playable with Proton?
Not my kind of game, but it's still a big title... No? I'm not familliar with the game.
Baldur's Gate III on Steam too... It's probably just that, but the coincidence makes me wonder.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3401136/destiny-2-is-coming-to-steam-in-september.html
Will it support linux (Stadia build)? Will the Windows version run on Vulkan? Will it be playable with Proton?
Not my kind of game, but it's still a big title... No? I'm not familliar with the game.
Baldur's Gate III on Steam too... It's probably just that, but the coincidence makes me wonder.
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Mmmm...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3401136/destiny-2-is-coming-to-steam-in-september.html
Will it support linux (Stadia build)? Will the Windows version run on Vulkan? Will it be playable with Proton?
Not my kind of game, but it's still a big title... No? I'm not familliar with the game.
Baldur's Gate III on Steam too... It's probably just that, but the coincidence makes me wonder.
its F2P and stadia is also free. i am not sure if it makes any sense to make F2P games for any other platform than stadia... maybe for slow internet connections
but if you have like 50mbit, why would you download it? you have to be online... duuuhhh when you wanna play it, it takes 0 space on your drive (steam says 105 GB), its completely silent, you dont have to pay for higher power consumption
if stadia is really that cheap, SHADOW will have a hard time
Last edited by mylka on 8 June 2019 at 4:13 am UTC
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Nevertheless Jun 8, 2019
Not going to say that you are wrong. I totally understand your point of view. But let me be the Devil's advocate, for a minute...For buying games, it sound very much like you buy them and keep them, not a Netflix model, that seems pretty clear to me. Otherwise, you're not buying you're renting.
It's not free in any form:
Base Stadia - You buy the games.
It depends on the pricing of each games and the conditions, imo. Will they be ours forever, like Steam, even if it's not sold anymore, or are these games exposed to disapearing from the store like the Netflix model? We have no clues about these aspects, yet. Personnally I expected a subscription plan, similar to Netflix, even for the base option. To me it still an interresting option.
Stadia Pro - You pay monthly, you buy games, you get few select free.
It compares to PS Plus and Xbox pass which are popular options. It's not a new formula and it's much better thant I expected it to be. This said, probably not my bag.
Also, "unfair" about paying and not having any real access to the files, what's fair about it?
Google has issues? No game.
Your net has issues? No game.
This can be replaced by: "Motherboard failure ($$$), no games, HDD failure ($$), no games, GPU failure($$$$), no games, RAM failure($), no games... Want me to go on? It's all about managing the risks. Both point of view are valid.
Modding? Haha no.
I don't think Stadia is targeted to the 1% techy educated market share that we represent or even the hardcore gamers that mods, which, I suspect, is not the vast majority. It probably has more appeal to the Xbox and Playstation players or the Windows users that have stopped gaming because of an ageing computer and/or are due for an hardware upgrade.
Personnally I see it as a complement to my Linux rig, for games that will never be playable on my Desktop, because there will be. You know "Stadia Games and Entertainment" produced games?
Okay, now you're starting to get me to think more on it. I never even thought about components breaking down, leaving you out of playing your games. Now that's a very valid point worth something.
True, but of course you need at least some hardware to use Stadia, which also could break down..
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Nevertheless Jun 8, 2019
I think I read through the whole thread (not all in one time, so maybe I missed some posts), and I wonder: Where are all those voices that keep criticising Google for its main activities, which are data mining, and learning about human behaviour via AI, to be able to do the obvious, and maybe not so obvious things.
In my opinion Stadia is the ultimate tool to reach their goals even faster. You are beeing closely watched while you play. No privacy setting or alternate software can change this. Even on "shitty" Win10 you can simply go offline and play GOG games. People using Stadia might stop buying gaming PCs and hurt that option deeply and forever.
Yeah, a gaming PC is costly, downloading games needs time, things might break down, but sometimes it's me and my game, modded, played all wrong, maybe even cheated, but mine!
This sense of privacy, and the need of beeing my own PCs master is part of why I chose to start using Linux back in 2003. So how alone am I on GOL with that opinion? :)
In my opinion Stadia is the ultimate tool to reach their goals even faster. You are beeing closely watched while you play. No privacy setting or alternate software can change this. Even on "shitty" Win10 you can simply go offline and play GOG games. People using Stadia might stop buying gaming PCs and hurt that option deeply and forever.
Yeah, a gaming PC is costly, downloading games needs time, things might break down, but sometimes it's me and my game, modded, played all wrong, maybe even cheated, but mine!
This sense of privacy, and the need of beeing my own PCs master is part of why I chose to start using Linux back in 2003. So how alone am I on GOL with that opinion? :)
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