Story time. I left Google in 2017 after Fiber (which I worked on) was unceremoniously mothballed. I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.
Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never went anywhere because the team didn't want a presence in NYC.
Anyway, as soon as I heard about the project I said there's only two words you need to kill this project.
"Input lag"
The conversation should've ended there as the games where this isn't a factor are so niche it doesn't justify an entire product and engineering team.
I really don't understand how projects like this get signed off. Well, I do actually. It's a pet project for someone who doesn't really understand the domain they're operating in (ie games).
Don't they have competitors that are doing better than Stadia? Eg, geforce now?
TBH, I played quite a bit of Madden on Stadia and input lag wasn't really an issue. I think there are a lot of games that actually worked really well there.
I was really skeptical that this could work before trying it myself on GFN. There are network problems, and it can be a pain when it happens, but this is standard connectivity stuff (my ISP connection fails or I have a problem with my wi-fi) and the input lag just isn't perceptible to me. I was really surprised and impressed at how well it works. At that point I was sold.
> I mean it still exists bu tall expansion palns stopped and it went into maintenance mode.
Google Fiber is currently microtrenching in front of my house, and continues to move into more cities here. Did they restart, or did their mothballing just mean that they aren't entering new geographic regions?
TBH, I'm super excited about it because the only other high-speed option we have is Comcast and it is super unreliable and the data cap sucks, but I'm also mentally preparing for the day they get bored of it and shut the whole thing down.
They knew game streaming wasn't ready for prime time. The strategy, I imagine, was to get in early and suffer some growing pains to cement a toehold that positions Google as a major player if/when game streaming goes mass market. I guess the bean counters at Alphabet decided the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
I played God of War (2018), the Last of Us games, and some other stuff on PS Now (Sony's cloud gaming platform). There were some issues but overall it worked pretty well. There are some games where cloud gaming can't give you low enough input latency, but I disagree that it is as many games as you think.
Before leaving one of the teams some of us considered joining was the then unlaunched Stadia team. This was an effort out of Cloud I guess to create value added GCP services. Ultimately it never went anywhere because the team didn't want a presence in NYC.
Anyway, as soon as I heard about the project I said there's only two words you need to kill this project.
"Input lag"
The conversation should've ended there as the games where this isn't a factor are so niche it doesn't justify an entire product and engineering team.
I really don't understand how projects like this get signed off. Well, I do actually. It's a pet project for someone who doesn't really understand the domain they're operating in (ie games).
This should've never been greenlit.