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Stadia Game Streaming Service Announced by Google


Guest_Jim_*

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This announcement has been expected for a while and finally came today at GDC. Google has revealed its video game streaming service, named Stadia. With it, people will be able to connect to Google datacenters and get their own instance of a game streamed to their device, whether that is a computer, smartphone, or television. Thanks to the company's already developed network infrastructure, the experience should have low latency. AMD is providing the hardware powering the experience, with a custom x86 CPU supporting AVX2, suggesting this may be based on Zen 2, and potentially a tweaked Radeon Instinct GPU with 10.7 TFLOPS of compute performance for its 56 compute units. Users will not be sharing the power of the GPU assigned to them.

When it launches, Stadia will off up to 4K HDR, 60 FPS video with surround sound audio though the target is to reach 8K at 120 FPS in the future. Google also has the vision of making it possible for one to simply click a button to go from watching a YouTube video of a game to playing the game a moment later. The video of your gameplay is apparently also duplicated for direct upload to YouTube, instead of relying on local capture.

One of the first games that will be supported will be DOOM Eternal from id Software. Stadia will first launch in the US, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe this year with information on pricing coming in the Summer.

Source: Anandtech and Google



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A thought crossed my mind about this that I'm now a little curious about; what is the feeling on reviewing a game on a service like this, instead of reviewing on a local system?

I know my preference is and will be to play on a local system, but would it be an issue, and how large an issue would it be, if a reviewer were to reviewer a game playing it only on such a streaming service?

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Because of Google's past transgressions regarding spying on users, I would never subscribe to this service. Google has a bad habit of collecting personal data. Not any way to run a railroad.

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I heard about this on the wan show this morning. i am intrigued. I am curious how they are going to overclome the problems that onlive (I used that service back in the day) had. Honestly, if I could get away with paying like $10 a month, play any game in the library and never have to upgrade again i'd go for it. Yes i'm a heretic.

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I heard about this on the wan show this morning. i am intrigued. I am curious how they are going to overclome the problems that onlive (I used that service back in the day) had. Honestly, if I could get away with paying like $10 a month, play any game in the library and never have to upgrade again i'd go for it. Yes i'm a heretic.

I wouldn't call it heresy, but I am one who will always prefer playing on local machines. But, I would be happy to see this applied for game demos. Click a button and just start playing for however long without any installation, then decide if you want to buy the game.

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I also prefer playing on local machines, and I will only buy games digitally or on a disk.

 

Data stored on EPROMS eventually becomes unreadable, preserving your games is only possible if gamers have access to the original files, either through physical means or by way of being able to download them locally.

 

Cloud gaming does away with that process entirely, also means you're entirely reliant on servers for that game, or the platform holders that offer them, being online forever.

 

Good luck with game mods if using cloud gaming,.. will developers have to build new systems and models to make existing mods playable in a cloud gaming context? Do new editors have to be made for people to access the files? Or does that functionality just disappear altogether?

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I would think it could be possible to have 'modded servers,' like already exist for some games, but I would think someone would need to pay for the server time. Basically I think it would still be possible to apply mods, but impractical. Of course, one could argue those who mod their games are also ones who would want to own a local copy.

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