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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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‹wade_county› arena through week 46: Flo 149 guests 120 ronxo 103 raygun01 98 [Flo is the 2019 Arena Champion]
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The discussion about Google Stadia was fascinating, but I think everyone is giving Google far too much leeway.
First off, Stadia launched unfinished. Google is charging people to be part of a service and experience all of the beta process. Meanwhile, it ships with basic UX completely missing. No achievement UI? No ability to activate an account on anything but the Stadia app? Seriously? We shouldn’t give them a pass for lacking basic features that are now expected in a games service.
Then there’s the streaming quality. @ronxo mentioned that it’s not Google’s fault that Destiny 2 and Red Dead 2 aren’t running at 4K and it’s the developer’s fault. That’s not at all true.
Both of those games take some hefty horsepower to run at 4K. Red Dead 2 on PC has trouble hitting 4K 60 on a Geforce RTX 2080Ti. That’s a $1300 graphics card. How is it even remotely possible that a Radeon Vega 56 equivalent (Radeon Instinct MI50) GPU, which is not as powerful as that 2080Ti going to be able to deliver full 4K at 60fps? You have to drop the resolution, details, or both.
To be brutally honest, game streaming is never going to replace local gaming. It’s a fundamentally inferior experience. It always will be because it’s relying on internet infrastructure that experiences second to second variability. Once those packets leave Google’s datacenter, Google has no control over what happens to them. Things might be rendering just fine on their end, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get what was rendered on time.
Google is making a big deal about this, but right now, they’re not bringing anything to the table that isn’t delivered elsewhere. If Google sticks with it then the underlying hardware will get upgraded and things will improve on that front, but as a main way of playing games it doesn’t have a chance, especially when they’re charging the same amount of money for games on top of a subscription fee.
Next year, when the free tier launches, that will be where we see if it has any chance of surviving. The question is, did this disaster of a launch do irreparable damage to the service’s reputation?
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When has Google launched a finished product? I as a Google fan and early adopter am used to it, the only thing that bugs me is how long it might take to be 100% useful, for example with the podcast app please check my post about it 
but overall I love the Google apps and UI
Is that the bar that we’re happy with? We pay for services that kind of work? This isn’t specific to Google, this is tech and gaming in general these days. What if we’d apply that mentality to other things?
“This bridge works and you can go across it, but we haven’t put guard rails on yet. We’ll get to those in the next milestone.”
That’s an extreme example, but it gets the point across. There’s a level of done-ness that I’m willing to allow, and Google’s Stadia is falling well below that.
I might just be getting old and cranky, though. 
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Hehe we can agree we disagree, this same situation also occurred to the XBOX one (with its dashboard and UX) and Nintendo switch (with its online service) and no body is mad to them, but Google does it and everybody gets mad
Thing is we (and I am adding me in the group) gamers are so demanding of the gaming platforms to be at our level even when we do not use it, see at me, I prefer handheld and retro gaming because I hate the modern console hour+ long installations and updates and I have not any modern console… I like modern games, but I do not play them because how heavy they are
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Oh, I’ve complained about all of those things at length. The Xbox Dashboard is still not great, if we’re honest. It’s not just Google, though. I’m starting to see this sentiment manifesting against the whole AAA industry. I honestly think people are getting sick of the nonsense. I just think that Google got a big dose of it because of how much they’ve been hyping Stadia.
Modern games, particularly the AAA stuff lately are becoming more like a job than a game. I’m with you, retro gaming is a lot more fun.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to Shining Force CL. 
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I believe Google doesn’t really have their heart in gaming, but in rather what data they can glean from running a graphics-intensive streaming remote-compute service. I feel like, unless this is a real unexpected hit (like Chromecast), it will not see it’s third birthday.
Hmmm… well I got one of the Nvidia Shield Pro’s and it comes with the ability to do GeForce Now game streaming (GFN). GFN and Stadia play pretty similarly for me, but they’re different games, so apples to apples comparison isn’t really possible. The big difference is that GFN is very clearly calling itself Beta and is not charging any money [yet]. It also has a fairly decent selection of free included games, which Stadia is missing. In a lot of ways it feels like Stadia decided to clone GFN, but in a half-assed Googley way. I don’t understand how/why Nvidia can afford to do a free beta like it’s doing while Google cannot. If they had done the free thing from the get go, perhaps it wouldn’t be getting all the negative press. On the other hand, maybe by trying to charge money from day one they feel it will carry its own weight enough to survive the Google internal “cancel the money losers” onslaught.