We Talk Over: Stadia Connect (06/06/19)

Google Stadia, the highest quality streaming and seamless, no console, internet based-- loading... --gaming platform that is made extremely accessible for everyone.

I’m kind of less interested in Stadia after this presentation, to be honest.

Baldur’s Gate 3 trailer was cool though.

Ohhhh, ya burnt.

I feel a weird anxiety about Google entering the videogame market. Although I am a programmer with friends who work at the company, it does seem a bit too big to fail rather than a passionate option for gamers to embrace.

Oh well, hopefully they gimme a job and I can work from the inside of the Behemoth to fight "the Man"...

But will it have any strand games?

I don't think I've seen anyone make the comparison but look at Chromebooks. Googles attempt to make laptops 'in the cloud'. They aren't a complete failure but they are extremely niche and nothing google can do will change that until they can deliver perfect network connectivity. They tried being an ISP and have already pulled out of cities where they made mistakes rather than pay to fix the mess (They tried digging shallow trenches, cables quickly got exposed).

There's so many great talk overs, I can't wait till they all get listed in this category.

BG3 eh? Larian has been doing some great work with the Original Sin series, can't wait to see their take on Faerun.

I am feeling the same way. I'm not finished watching yet, but I haven't seen anything about high frame-frate. If 60 is the cap, then I kinda don't care about 4k.

The quality is still limited to the power of 1 video card (run in a data center) as almost no new games support SLI/crossfire (which makes me sad as a user with 2 SLI systems.) The CPU side might be interesting as google servers could have a ton of them.

Even with the video compression funk. It might be better than a console, but it won't be better than a high end PC - but for a MUCH cheaper price. :)

One can OC their local video card and no video compression with a local PC. I hope google goes with the faster card options. (which is nvidia now.. but hopefully others will step up in the future to keep pricing down.)

The fact that the whole “play on every browser” thing won’t be hitting until next year is a major whiff. That’s the one feature I really care about!

Can't watch it. I press play and then a youtube version appears on top and the first video continues playing underneath the Youtube.

Gaming platform that appears to be accesible to everyone actually is only accesible to a select few.

I have a bone to pick with them, being one of the many countries left out of "the future of games". If this is the case, then their magic tech that makes your internet connection not matter is solely depending on your proximity to a metropolitan area. I'm guessing that they can make some investments and place data centers strategically...but if you don't seem like a good investment demographically you are out of luck.

It looked at first that this no console future would give more access to more people, but in turn, this platform service is probably the most cost prohibitive to date. Not because of the actual cost, but because it's meant only for people who can statistically already afford the alternatives. Speaking on a large scale.

So... now that we know we have to buy all the games AND pay for the pro sub separately (wonder if they'll tweak the model when the free tier launches next year), I'm fairly underwhelmed. I imagine Xbox will come out with a similar pricing model.. but when you can also play the games natively AND (presumably) link up with Game Pass, doing it 100% a la carte on yet another store seems redundant at best.

Edit: I also love their "We're working with tons of developers!" splash image when you have things like.. Zenimax AND Bethesda AND id... 3 logos with all the same games. (I mean Arkane is there too.) Nothing nefarious, just a bit silly haha.

Hahahahaha, not a fucking chance, hard pass. I'm interested in seeing more of BG3 but no way I'll be playing it or anything else on Stadia. Pretty terrible conference with hardly any useful info as per imo.

Bakalar is not listed in 'Cast'. Boo. He is the most essential cast member!

They have their work cut out for them to make this more appealing. Right now there isn't much reason to get in on Stadia unless you don't have any kind of console/PC in which case...do you even want this?

I’m totally with these guys that this all completely hinges on the technology being proven, *but*, that opportunity to test the technology happened with the Project Stream beta. I’ve gone into this game streaming idea with arms crossed for sure, but that beta sold me. It felt like playing Assassin’s Creed natively on my laptop, it was wild. So now that I’m sold on the tech, I’m very excited to see where this goes.

I forgot this existed, actually nobody around me was excited for it.

Nice to see more details about the thing google will sunset in 2022.

But eesh. Such a typically tone-deaf Google presentation.

No box needed, but please please please preorder this $125 set of accessories.

We won’t tell you what goes into the $10 service other than “some games,” but please sign up as soon as we allow you to.

Will you save money “purchasing” full-priced retail games you have no access to offline or if Google gets bored and moves on? Who knows.

Glad Google isn’t paying its way toward exclusives, but are they really spending no money on first/second party game development to give their service a hook? When even Apple is investing more into game development than you are, that’s bad.

I also realize how shallow this sounds, but Phil Harrison is not a good frontman for this band. Always comes off as cold and a little creepy and the weird framing of this video accentuated that. Plus he always seems to pop up when a console/game service is about to ride the arrow pointing downward for a bit.

Wasn’t sold on buying into Google’s ecosystem before this, and I’m more confidently unsold now.

I'm a squid now...

I am so simultaneously stoked and terrified for Baldur's Gate 3.

On the one hand: it's the sequel to the best-written RPG from a character perspective I've still ever played, and that is an almost IMPOSSIBLE act to follow.

On the other hand: there's some true cringe in that great writing and the gameplay has aged like a fine mayonnaise.

And putting mind flayers front-and-center as the Big Bads is a great way to get me interested.

is anyone else having audio problems with the video?

I am so ready for our streaming future. I'd have liked more details, but I am super excited to see how this works in the wild.

Having to pay a subscription and then also buy the games is a hard pass for me. And then the games that I buy won't stream above 1080p...? Sorry, no dice. The most I might do is dip in for one month if there's a good free game, but I'm not wild on the idea of being restricted in how I stream a game I bought. Didn't buy this 1440p monitor to not use it.

I might like this for coop games for myself and my girlfriend. Itd save me from buying two consoles, and potentially both copies of the game.

That guy looks like a high res model of Jason but they used one of those combine face morphs and missed the mark.

im afraid of change and desperately want this to fail

The reason for the controller to connect to the data center is so they don't have to synchronize client and server side data by having both connections separate and having their systems monitor and control the packets rather than your local hardware.

@curiosus:

I don't know where you are but in the UK and Europe, Android and Chromebooks are more of a thing. I get the impression in the US it is more Apple cnetric.

No one's talking about the "No need to Patch" thing and uh... that's a terrible selling point.

this is just OnLive 2.0, prove me wrong

There is no dev I would trust more with BG3 than Larian.

Pre-ordered. Not like me, to be honest, but there's something exciting about this, and it may need upfront support to make it actually happen. It'd be cool, if I can take my controller wherever I go that has at least 35 Mbps download and an HD TV, and play my games at full quality. If this thing works, I won't need to keep upgrading my computer to get the best version of a game; I just pay $10/month. Developers don't have to worry about a PC player's computer configuration, just Google's, to maximize performance (at least on server side). $130. Exclusive controller variant, Googlecast, 3 month pass X 2, Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, and Founder's name (I guess first dibs on a gamertag, maybe?). All things that have value for me, so not too difficult a choice. Now to convince a friend to get on board...

Me: "I will never go for streaming games, I love to collect and play physical games!"

Also me: *puts thousands of hours into F2P online-only games and never touches physical game collection*

@dracomaster01 said:

Why would I want to prove an opinion I think it correct wrong?

I've used the Nvidia streaming gubbins (out of curiosity more than anything) and it wasn't at all bad, even with my rural ass Internet... But I'm struggling to see who Stadia is actually for. I'll give it a go, especially if there's an app for the Shield TV, but can't see it being much more than a 9.99 one-off. Plus, I like mods so there's no way this can come close to replacing my PC.

Whatever Microsoft and Sony bring out will be more interesting to me since I'm already deep in their respective ecosystems.

This is cool and I'll be playing my steam backlog until the end of days anyways, so it's not like no longer owning games is going to be a problem for me.

@noblenerf: They've said it hundreds of times. Bakalar isn't in the system because he doesn't technically work at GB.

@mikemcn: You do own your Steam games; if Steam was ever to go down, Valve will release their DRM hooks, at which point you'll be able to copy the games to limitless storage devices. In reality, PC gamers have more possession over their games than console gamers, because they can actually access their game's data and mod them and whatnot, in ways console gamers can't.

If anyone's curious, the song on the Ghost Recon Breakpoint trailer that Vinny said it reminded him of Hotline Miami is one of Gesaffelstein's most well known songs, Hate Or Glory

Guess you've got to be a NATO country or European NATO ally for Stadia...

As much as I'd love to go all in on Stadia, I live in a tiny part of Australia that managed to get a good fibre internet connection. I don't want to put money into a Stadia library or controller just to move out of home and not have the internet for it anymore.

WOW.... stadia.com leads to NOTHING in Australia. It literally points to the google store and has nothing about it. Incredibly promising if you can't even look it up in Aus.

Whatever, I preordered it. I wanna check it out and hope the sub model will prove to be convenient and enjoyable like Netflix. It might even make me play stuff I normally wouldn’t. I wonder if I’ll like it enough to prefer buying the games I want day one. I’m interested for sure, and looking forward to a quiet, well I guess it’s not a console but.. gaming machine. I’ll use it on my big screen. Here’s hoping it works well. I’ll still get a PS5 cause I love Sony’s exclusive games, but I’m excited to check this out.

I am interested in seeing how this works, I don't believe it will have no latency especially for fighting games. Not to mention you will have to deal with local networks, how people have their internet set up, how much bandwidth they have between a household, people on wifi and Nat Settings. And how would online games work? I think it will be a better version of onlive, which for me was actually decent when i didn't have a great pc. I only tried a few demo games though, playstation now didn't work at all for me

why would you pre-order a chrome tab? lMao

Still completely skeptical on this. Project Stream was only praised because it blew past people's expectations, being someone who played during that, it was decent. There was a LOT of artifacting on my pc through a wired connection and it was down right unplayable wirelessly on my laptop. If this gets fixed, good, my internet is actually pretty good so it was confusing.

@zurv: not just a cheaper price. You can play it on any PC or tablet anywhere. At work with absolutely nothing to do? Open chrome and play a game.

@one50nine: That's "the future" it was bad enough to have to always have to pay 30 to 50% more because of tariffs. This new platform that cannot be imported, exported or sold is something one simply has no access to.

It feels like internet service providers and the video game industry have very different views of how the internet is going to work in five years. Data caps seem to be looming on the horizon, but for some reason the games industry seems weirdly gung-ho to implement a bunch of streaming services that are going to be effectively gridlocked sooner or later. Either that, or they seem to be assuming that people are going to be so wow-ed by streamed gaming that they'll suck up the extra $50 bucks per month or so they'll be paying in data fees.