Hey Guys,
Yesterday Google announced its plans to launch Stadia, its new cloud gaming platform.
What’s everyone’s thoughts on this? 
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Really interesting concept. Will be interesting to see how others react. I think the key is going to be internet speed as you will need good up and more down speeds to run 60fps and 4K.
Making games more accessible wherever you are is a great idea though.
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OnLive 2.0. It’s great that we have better Internet speeds now but the bottleneck will be the user’s Internet speed to the cabinet. In the UK, speeds are tragic. You also can’t play the games you purchase offline. Even people in the US found input lag with Project Stream. The hardcore gamers will find that unacceptable so maybe Google are just aiming for the casual audience?
They announced exclusives so they may be in this for the long haul with that financial investment but I’m waiting to be convinced.
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As mentioned above I can’t see hardcore gamers making the switch. Being an ex- hardcore gamer myself lag is something so important, I don’t think the uks internet infrastructure is up to the task yet. Also would a casual gamer pay for such a service?? I believe Sony run something similar on their network for a monthly fee, for playing older less demanding titles and from what I’ve heard reviews on this are also mixed with a lot blaming slower internet not up to the task. Just my thoughts tho, I hope I’m wrong.
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I don’t know too much about the technical details but this sounds similar to Shadow, who enable you to access to ‘gaming computer’ in the cloud so you can use a pretty basic device to play high performance gaming. They require bandwidth of 5 to 25 Mbps & get great reviews for their service.
I’m not a user & don’t have any other motive to promote them 
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I guessed this was going to be their announcement a while ago.
It’s been flirted with before to moderate affect. Even the PSP could do basically this donkeys years ago. But now with their server / computing power and the great proliferation of high speed internet, there is no reason at all it can’t work flawlessly.
Ping will be a bigger issue than connection speed, but I have no doubt it will work well for its target demographic who will all have decent internet connections anyway.
Gaming as a service / subscription is a logical destination. Microsoft already do it with Xbox game pass and it’s worked well for them and the developers as far as I’m aware.
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Latency is the key. The controlller is connected direct to the server to try and reduce lag. It won’t be great for hardcore shooters but for things like GTA or assassins creed it should work well.
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I think it can work for SP games and possibly even MP games if they do some clever colocation of the streaming hosts and MP servers. I’d only try it with a decent fibre connection though.
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Congrats on your first post, honoured for it to be on mine 
The speed, latency, ping debate is a good one. Google must know how poor internet speeds are in mainland US, parts of the UK, not to mention parts of Asia, Middle East and Africa.
They mentioned that it shouldn’t be heavily dependant on ISPs, due to something (good) with their server. But we’ll have to wait and see in reality. For mobile devices, it should work on 4G - but then how much data will it use?
Conceptually I think its a game changer, they have the advantage and I’m sure they’ll figure out the kinks long term.
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