Quick Look: Google Stadia

Google, Amazon, Facebook: Three companies I do not want having any control over gaming’s creative future. I don’t root for products to fail very often, but I’ll greatly enjoy Google’s eventual “sunsetting” of this.

Ok, who is making the gif of them dancing?

@lordloc: Google's messaging has been so, so terrible on this stuff. My understanding is this:

• The service has a free tier (1080p max) and a paid tier (4k)
• Games have to be purchased on the service - though they keep talking about nebulous discounts
• The paid tier will come with a game a month, which you keep if you return to non paid status. They have not said anything about which games, beyond founders getting Destiny

Google really needed to simplify and amplify the messaging on Stadia. There is so much confusion around it it's unreal (and completely Google's fault).

I watched a video recently where James May unveiled the latest 2 cars he bought - a Tesla and a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car. He said that he's not sure exactly how motoring will evolve in future, but he wanted to be involved in the experiment. That's Stadia to me - the future of gaming involves streaming in some way; I don't know how, or to what extent, or even what companies will be at the fore - but I want to be a part of that experiment.

Just to add to the data cap conversation. I live in Orange County CA, have friends in LA county, San Diego and Pheonix AZ and none of us have data caps and have faster enough internet for the service. But I am always wondering if our ISPs will bring it up.

Didn't really expect anything and still felt underwhelmed. Worth it for that Just Dance though.

[channeling Rob Zacny]

Oh, hello.

@gruxkaban: hey man, talk shit about GoG and you get GOT! But seriosuly, all these streaming platforms are just ok. Steam is the best because it's the oldest and set the template but Valve's passive nature towards it really hurts it in the long run.

@noobsauce: what? i was genuinely asking. gog is awesome, i finally got the gog 2.0 invite and having everything in one place tickles the part of my brain that would organize my itunes library for hours. if i get Cyberpunk it’ll be there. DRM free? heck ya... but also steam is still the default. like you said theyre the oldest.

i use the steam controller, enjoy big picture and continue to have most of my games on there. i hope the rumour they cancelled/shelved In the Valley of the Gods isn’t true

if that just dance segment doesnt make the best of giant bomb, this world has failed me.

I genuinely think I missed hald the Just Dance section due to laughing too much. Howling.

At least so far, according to the Digital Foundry review, it's not 4k60fps. Seems like most games are running at lower settings than even the console versions, and being upscaled to 4k. I think the Verge review got in touch with Bungie and they say Destiny is running on medium PC settings.

Can Jeff just be required to review all of the Just Dance games from now on?

Clean desk...............

This seems like a real piece of work.

@undeadkink: There is hundreds of Stadia-reviews out there. It's not just Giant Bomb reviewing it. No need to be an asshole.

If you're the kind of person who would upgrade from a base console to the "pro" refresh, then you'd be a "pro" user of Stadia. That's $120/yr, or basically what it'll cost you to upgrade to the pro console.

I'm not sure I'm seeing the value save you're talking about.

@cocowawa: With just a guitar, just a mic?

@klynn: ps plus and having ps5 base to begin with.

Although I want the tech to be more than functional to consider stadia.

I definitely get how this doesn't seem to have much of a place right now...

But I can also definitely imagine a future (this time next year?) where someone is looking to play a big multi-platform game, (let's say the next Tomb Raider) and are willing to pull that $60 trigger... but then they also have to consider either pulling the multi-hundred dollar trigger of upgrading to the new console that the game will need, or putting that off by just playing it on Stadia.

If Stadia is just good enough to delay having to drop new-console money, that's not totally unappealing.

Giant Ellish was the best part in this video. LMAO!

@brackstone:

Yeah, I mean, ultimately Stadia is AMD's high-end 2018 PC gaming experience; the fact that it's running in a rack somewhere is largely incidental. If a moderately-clocked gen2 Ryzen CPU and RadeonVII GPU aren't enough on a regular PC to deliver 4k 60fps on game X, then it's not going to deliver it on Stadia either. I'm predicting there's going to be a huge lurch in user expectations and perception when the next-gen consoles roll out and Stadia's hardware advantage goes away and is no longer able to deliver parity with what a $400 box can offer.

The idea that Stadia is going to be able to abstract the rendering away from the hardware such that it can seamlessly pool a bunch of instances together and arbitrarily scale performance to match (or surpass) a top-end PC just doesn't pass the smell test. We're living in a world where PC gaming (engines, developers and hardware vendors) are moving away from SLI/crossfire support. Those multi-GPU rendering modes tend to work by pipelining/interleaving alternating frames, which adds latency and doesn't work well with engines that rely on data from sequential frames.

Yikes, put that song on the worst of the 80s list. Half-audible mumbly nonsense.

@julmajuuhan: It was a joke. I wasn't attacking anyone. No need to call people assholes, bub.

This might start out okay but I have a feeling it'll take a nosedive next month when people get their internet bills.

So maybe I'm old and out of touch with the kids, but did anyone else find the opening of Gylt... unbelievable? I know kids will be really shit sometimes but the idea of the bullies harassing the girl about her legit missing cousin and then basically attempting to murder her seemed a little over the top to me.

Oh it's the "Watch your favorite twitch streamer" console.

I just dont see the benefit over simply having a console or PC.

Though I could say the same for other platforms and services, I am by first impulse reticent of having anything to do with Stadia it could be my reactionary boomer impulse, but one more corporate throttle/ filter of what I get to play puts me off. Though I am a slave to you-tube, even to the point of tolerating a purple something advert for 5 seconds. When they break up a song on an album, that breaks me.

Just the same, I am happy or at least okay with obtaining games as they are now. Eventually grasping the fiducial wisdom of eliminating upgrading pc's or waiting for the 'pro' versions of consoles may happen. But having it channel through GOOGLE, not thrilled. I will not be an early adopter and will care little if something about my ISP service doesn't make it practical.

@hughj: That's what blows my mind, a decent chunk of their messaging has been raw power, that we'd see the kinds of games that couldn't run on any other platform. I never believed it, but I believed that they'd be able to offer greater performance relative to a current pc/next gen console. That they can't even meet an Xbox One X's visual quality is just insane.

@gruxkaban: sounds like his ideal service is communism

When they three of them were playing Just Dance 2020 to Billie Eillsh the only thing I could think of what watching Ben was to think he gives off a "Boomer" vibe.

I feel so out of touch with the technology sphere. At the start they're talking about Chromecasts, Rokus, and Apple TVs, and I have no idea what any of those are.

**NOT MY U-PLAY POINTS!**

The trouble with Stadia isn't the tech - eventually I would HOPE they can solve this wired-only controller thing, and get it on non-google phones. The thing is that if you're going to be restricted to a streaming thing that could disappear at the whim of some big company, it makes way more sense to be on a game subscription rather than paying the same as you would for a disc version.

If they can't sign up more games to their Pro service in a hurry, Microsoft is going to roll right over them with xCloud and Game Pass. Particularly if xCloud will immediately work with things you own digitally on an Xbox or Windows store.

I think gb needs to add the caveat that their BUSINESS internet is probz filled with protection/firewalls/what have you that normal users wont get. Not this video in particular but the usual one where the team has tons of issues during a stream getting players and they find their home set up fine and blame the game and devs. Sometimes the game's not to blame for disconnections and lag etc.

I think the hate for stadia is unwarranted from fans. Its good to have competition and most of the negativity boils down to WELL MY INTERNET IS SLOW. No doubt having this thing become popular will incentivise faster internet from big wigs and not just a customer who you can bs and push around with claims for a gamer's internet sub. I think big wigs will contract and eat most cost of developing faster and cheaper internet if it means more people subscribed to services giving infinite money yearly and added info they can take and share from you. Your info on likes and dislikes is the most important to them.

surprised if this doesnt go the way xbox game pass did before release with tons of people hating game pass and saying its just psnow and how dumb it was to people loving game pass and saying they never said anything bad or sceptic about it. Stadia is great for simplicity. If you told me 10 year old me wouldnt need to get out my seat to switch games and systems and would have tons of games on demand off a cheap pc id jump for joy. Gamers today instead huff and puff that its not good enough day 1.

Couple immediate thoughts but I only just started, forgive me if they cover it:

• What is the internet connection like that they are running this on for the coverage? They should've covered that relatively early. I wanna see a live SpeedTest.com run lol If they've got some high-end business internet, it'd be worth comparing that to a mid-low range typical home internet speed.
• The part that almost everyone has glossed over leading up to this launch (Jeff finally mentions it in this video) is bit-rate. Digital Foundry seemed to be the only people to talk about it back when Stadia was announced. I think your average joe gamer probably doesn't know what that is? So they see 4K/60FPS and think.. Wow this is better than consoles or PC stuff.. But those numbers aren't that important when the whole image looks rough.

why not edit out the part that is wrong, and just have a card up (or whatever) that says "skipping past the part where we were wrong about something" or whatever?

Side comment: I love chromecast, and "flinging" from the phone is way better than fiddling with a slow interface or apple tv remote.

I think this makes the most sense if it's like Netflix regardless if you own a PC or not. Being able to sample things you don't really want to buy to find out you hate could be a great selling point.

do people still believe “The Power of The Cloud” is real? Microsoft already fooled us all with that one before, why are people still being fooled by it? The cloud is not going to give you more power than local hardware. That’s just not how it works.

If you believe that then you truly have lived under a rock. And fyi, MS Azure isn't a joke. Utilizing someone-elses-computer-that's-much-more-specced-than-you'll-ever be™ (or "Cloud") is something that's being used plenty already, for instance Eve Online.

The new flight simulator will use this as well.

Stop being an ignorant.

So, @unastrike and Jan, you've got ears so you can obviously hear the horrible audio quality of UPF or anything in this studio the last few years, right? Are you actively ignoring it or are you trying to make improvements? I'm actually curious as to why nothing's improving.

@larmer: Then why do companies have more than one employee?

Very soon I will have gigabit internet ( 1 gig up/1 gig down ) available in my area with no data caps, and I fully intend to upgrade, but even so, I still don't see myself signing up for Stadia. Google will need to do more to convince me.

@Coreus: that’s not how it works. You can’t just throw more CPUs and GFX cards into it and make the games do amazing stuff that your high end consumer PC can’t do. Crackdown 3 ring any bells? How about SimCity 2013? We keep being told that the cloud is going to solve processing bottlenecks and deliver awesome graphics/physics rendering/pathfinding/agent simulation and every time the final product comes out we discover that the cloud isn’t actually doing very much. At this point it might as well be the promise of a perpetual motion machine or water-powered car. I guess there’s always new rubes to fool out of their money.

Did they ever mention how it compares to other platforms graphically? I skipped around a bit, but it didn't seem like it. Does it look better than a base Xbox or PS4? That's why I initially pre-ordered one (since canceled. I thought the subscription came with the games). I expected to get the graphics of a pretty high-end PC. Is that the case, does the 4K tier subscription get the high-end PC stream? I was initially excited, but this just doesn't really fit in my life. I wouldn't be surprised if I cut out consoles all together next generation. Unless, of course, Sony brings some real bangers.

now you're gaming with google

or anything else instead

But seriously, give this tech like 5 more years development and library, and we might be talking...but likely not about Google as the go-to for this method of playing games over Azure services or what the heck sony is scrambling with to compete down the line..

Can anyone explain the naming philosophy behind Stadia? With names like that, you figure trackmania would be a frontrunner. Smalljoke, the f do i know,

Jeff's blank stare at Ben after his bad joke at 40:30 is a beautiful moment.

I freaking love the dancing