Here's a bit of interesting industry news for you on this fine Monday afternoon. Alen Ladavac, who helped to co-found the Serious Sam and Talos Principle developer Croteam has moved onto game streaming.
Announcing their change on Twitter, which links to a post on LinkedIn, Ladavac wrote about how they were making games since the age of the Floppy disk but they're moving on:
[…] With a heavy heart, I've parted ways with my dear friends and colleagues at Croteam. I love you all, guys and girls, and I will never forget all the beautiful years I spent with you and fantastic things we've created. I'm super excited to announce that I'm starting at Google München, joining the awesome Stadia team to work on finally bringing gaming into the cloud. What was once deemed impossible, now is the reality - and I'm grateful for a chance to contribute to this landmark undertaking.
Considering their experience shipping games, along with helping to get games updated with Vulkan it's not a hugely surprising move. Probably a bit of a blow to Croteam though, as they're working on Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass which has no current release date set.
In other related Stadia news, Red Dead Redemption 2 has been confirmed at launch now as well. This is a huge bit of news, as it was previously only speculated that it was coming to PC but it's now confirmed for Stadia (as well as Steam for Windows).
Stadia is set to launch in November 2019, for those who put some cash up front to get the Stadia Founder's Edition. However, this edition is sold out in certain regions, with it being replaced with a Premier Edition which includes a plain White gamepad instead of the special Night Blue version.
It will be interesting to see how Stadia can capture the market. Especially since the software stack is using Debian Linux, the Vulkan API and it will work on any computer that can access a Chrome browser. Compared to other solutions which require another dedicated application, the barrier for entry at least when talking software is low. This will open up a lot more AAA gaming to be played on Linux, which is why we're keeping a close eye on it.
A hot topic though, considering how it's basically the ultimate form of gaming DRM. You don't technically own anything, the game never really touches your PC and you need to be online to play anything. Input latency and bandwidth use are big issues for some too. We've secured a copy of the Stadia Founder's Edition to cover sometime around the release for GamingOnLinux, let's wait and see if it can win us over.
Will you be trying it out? We've also opened a new dedicated forum for all game streaming topics including Stadia, Steam Remote Play and anything else.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: ShabbyX*sigh* let me be a lot more specific then: What is the latest on getting the code accepted into Chromium/Chrome to enable it the same as it is on Windows?Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: ShabbyXIronically, the disadvantage of Linux with Stadia is that chrome doesn't support hardware acceleration in video decoding, so Linux will have a (slightly) higher latency than windows...What's the latest on this, I'm a bit out of touch since I use Firefox.
The latest is what I just said?
QuoteWill you be trying it out?Will I?
Well, I am not even allowed to (remember, only US and some selected few countries are elegible).
Quoting: Alm888As I understand it, next year they will be expanding the regions so you might eventually I guess.QuoteWill you be trying it out?Will I?
Well, I am not even allowed to (remember, only US and some selected few countries are elegible).
Quoting: JoneK... DRM is the correct word here.. They won't allow the Linux versions to leak to the public, I mean Doom has an Linux executable somewhere inside ID, they didn't release it...
I think it's the same kind of pipe dream that Streaming games from Finland to Sweden and then back to Finland, makes for great low latency experience.. Only way to bring ping down is to actually fast track route all Stadia packets and get rid of bad last mile dsl cable and 4g, even 5g is slow. 9ms on last mile is too much. oh and +40ms for the packet to travel from Finland to Sweden and then back to Finland.
Yes all Google Hamina Data center traffic travels this way... Well.. maybe they will make the game data centers to Sweden..
Latency between Finland and Sweden should be well below 40ms and trying out http://www.gcping.com/ i Actually have 41ms on average round trip latency between my 4G mobile wifi here in western Sweden (Göteborg) and the Hamina center in Finland.
Quoting: ZlopezI think this situation is slowly changing after AMD started to officially support Open Source drivers.Ahh, come on! nVidia has great Vulkan drivers and has been supporting Linux since who knows when (I switched from "Windows XP" in 2008 and even then the drivers were top-notch!). Unlike ATi/AMD which can not even provide a day-1 support for the shiny "RX5700" cards.
I was a NVIDIA guy a few years back, but now I'm pretty happy with AMD Radeon RX 590 :-)
But no, we must stay vigilant! We must continue our bashing on one of the leading graphics solutions companies because it is not open-source enough.
I am speaking as the one pretty happy owning a nVidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti :-)
Quoting: Liam DaweWell, to be honest, I myself is a firm anti-DRM fighter, not even willing to tolerate Steam™, let alone this DRM_From_Hell-incarnation.Quoting: Alm888As I understand it, next year they will be expanding the regions so you might eventually I guess.QuoteWill you be trying it out?Will I?
Well, I am not even allowed to (remember, only US and some selected few countries are elegible).
And besides, technically speaking, I share the "input lag" skepticism. May be it will be tolerable in some regions, but it will definitely not cover the whole "PC Marketshare".
After all, many have tried the "streaming service" model, many have failed. And what makes Google any different? A big name? Hardly sufficient, IMO.
Yet, it will be interesting to watch how this latest attempt will disrupt the "status quo" (with Vulkan being behind all of this).
Last edited by Alm888 on 8 October 2019 at 1:21 pm UTC
PublicNuisance Oct 7, 2019
When we're talking about the consequences, Stadia will have on "Desktop gaming", I would argue, that offline gaming will die anyways, sooner or later. Developers/publishers don't want a second hand market for their games, therefore streaming is perfect for them (plus no anti-cheat necessary).
From a technical point of view: Why would any developer still bother with Win32-API/DirectX, if they a) don't want offline games anyways, and b) Vulkan exists for Windows as well.
For the midterm, this will mean: More titles will use "Linux-API", but will get released mainly for Windows, but run pretty good in a Proton environment.
Microsoft, oth, must support Vulkan for XBox someday, if they still want developers to port their games to XBox (everything else is Vulkan)
Quoting: Alm888We mast continue our bashing on one of the leading graphics solutions companies because it is not open-source enough.
We for sure should not give them a pass for bad behavior of not upstreaming their drivers. They have no excuses. They are a bad player in the Linux ecosystem and they know it.
Last edited by Shmerl on 7 October 2019 at 5:24 pm UTC
Quoting: BielFPsFor those who think's that Google Stadia will help to get anticheat games to run in Linux forget it, they probably will just remove the anticheat in the stadia versions, since in theory it's impossible to run third party software with it.Sounds very likely.
Quoting: BielFPsThe only thing stadia might help Linux games is forcing developers to get familiarized with Vulkan and to not use Microsoft media foundation (Presuming that stadia won't fail either).Not just that. It might force the makers of game engines and various game-related middleware to improve and/or add Linux support, which could be beneficial for those developers that actually do have the intention to bring their games to the Linux desktop.
Of course, it's hard to say what will come of it. I personally am not convinced that streaming will work out for gaming the same way it does for TV and Radio. And even if it did, I would at least expect that all those really fine indie games that have no chance to get onto a streaming service initially will continue to fuel desktop gaming, on Linux and elsewhere.
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