Google jumps into gaming with Google Stadia streaming service, coming "in 2019"
At the Game Developers Conference, Google announced its biggest play yet in the gaming space: a streaming game service named Google Stadia, designed to run on everything from PCs and Android phones to Google's own Chromecast devices.
As of press time, the service's release window is simply "2019." No pricing information was announced at the event.
Google Stadia will run a selection of existing PC games on Google's centralized servers, taking in controller inputs and sending back video and audio using Google's network of low-latency data centers. The company revealed a new Google-produced controller, along with a game-streaming interface that revolves around a "play now" button. Press this on any Web browser and gameplay will begin "in as quick as five seconds... with no download, no patch, no update, and no install."
"With Stadia, this waiting game will be a thing of the past," Google's Phil Harrison said. He then demonstrated Stadia gameplay on a Pixel 3 XL, followed by "the least-powerful PC we could find." The following gameplay was advertised as "1080p, 60 frames per second." Harrison confirmed that existing "USB controllers and mouse-and-keyboard" will function with Stadia games as well.
See also: The 9 biggest questions about Google's Stadia game streaming service
Previously: Google and Microsoft Eyeing Streaming Game Services
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The Goog posted a teaser video clip about its vision for the future of gaming to be revealed on Tuesday at an annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The clip cycles through an accelerating collage of scenes one might find in video games, but says nothing about what Google will announce at the event, which will be live-streamed on YouTube.
In a potentially related bit of prospecting someone uncovered a recent patent
that Google filed for a video game controller [which] hinted that the tech firm might be planning to release its own console and controller to go along with a streaming service.
Microsoft appears to share this vision,
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said late last year that a keenly anticipated "xCloud" streaming service was in "early days."
Amazon also has a related pre-existing entry into this same space with it's popular Twitch game play-streaming service, and I can't imagine they are sitting still.
The US video game industry generated a record $43.4 billion in revenue in 2018, up 18 percent from the prior year, according to data released by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and NPD Group.
I suppose that's just too attractive a pie to leave in the hands of customer-centric game developers like Activision, Sony, and EA.
Are you ready for the 800lb streaming gorillas?
Apple just announced Apple News Plus, a news subscription service for $9.99 a month
Apple announced a new subscription news service, Apple News Plus, on Monday during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Starting Monday, the company said, Apple News Plus will curate articles from more than 300 news outlets and magazines via the Apple News app for $9.99 a month.
Apple says magazines and articles included with the Apple News Plus subscription will appear in a new tab on the Apple News app in a redesign released later Monday as part of an iOS software update.
Apple News Plus will feature content from several major news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times as well as the more than 300 magazines that were included with Texture, the digital magazine app Apple purchased last year. Notably absent among national news brands are The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Though Apple's app offers a significant discount for publications like The [Wall Street] Journal, which charges $19.50 a month for an all-access digital subscription, it appears that Apple subscribers will not have full access to all the partners' content. Reports Monday cited an internal memo as saying only some Journal articles, for example, would be offered via Apple News Plus, with The Journal's business reporting remaining exclusive to direct subscribers.
Apple Arcade Announced: New Game Subscription Service Coming To iOS, Mac, Apple TV This Year
2019 will be the year that sees some of the biggest tech companies in the world diving into the cloud streaming business for games. Google announced its Stadia platform at the Game Developers Conference 2019 for a launch scheduled later this year, Microsoft confirmed plans to publicly test Project xCloud in the coming months and even Amazon is rumored to be readying its own cloud-based streaming service.
With competition often comes strife, and in an interview with the Telegraph (locked behind the publication's paywall), Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer for Xbox Mike Nichols didn't pull any punches when he discussed the weaknesses of the upcoming cloud-based streaming platform.
While he admitted that Google has the infrastructure (7,500 edge node locations) to pull it off, Nichols pointed out that unlike Microsoft they don't have strong ties to game developers and publishers to deliver the content that fans expect.
[...]Microsoft CFO Mike Nichols also went on to reiterate that regardless of the availability Project xCloud, the 'local' experience users can get on an Xbox console or Windows PC will remain superior to the cloud in terms of quality.
Previously: Google and Microsoft Eyeing Streaming Game Services
Google Announces "Stadia" Streaming Game Service
Google Stadia requires $130 upfront, $10 per month at November launch:
Players will have to pay $129.99 up front and $9.99 a month, on top of individual game purchase costs, when Google's previously announced Stadia game-streaming service launches in November. A free tier will be available some time in 2020, as will a paid subscription tier that doesn't require the upfront purchase.
The Stadia Founder's Edition and its contingent Stadia Pro subscription will be the only way to get access to the Stadia service when it launches, Google announced today. That $129.99 package, available for pre-order on the Google Store right now, will include:
- A Stadia controller in "limited-edition night blue"
- A Chromecast Ultra
- Three months of Stadia Pro service and a three-month "buddy pass" to give to a friend
- First dibs on claiming a "Stadia Name"
After the first three months, Stadia Pro users will have to pay $9.99 a month to maintain their membership. For that price, they will get access to Google's highest-quality streams, at up to 4K/60fps with high-dynamic range (HDR) and 5.1 surround sound. In 2019, users will not be able to sign up for Stadia Pro without investing in the Founder's Edition hardware package, and Founder's Edition packages will only be available "in limited quantities and for a limited time."
Also at AnandTech, The Verge, and Wccftech.
See also: Is Stadia Already Screwed?
Xbox One And PS4 Don't Need To Fear Google Stadia, Which Is Mired In Contradictions
Previously: Google and Microsoft Eyeing Streaming Game Services
Google Announces "Stadia" Streaming Game Service
Microsoft CFO: Google Stadia Lacks Content, Local Experience Will Remain Superior to Streaming Games
Google will shut down its Stadia cloud game service on January 18, 2023. All Stadia hardware and software purchases made through Google will be refunded:
Stadia's technology will live on as a Google Cloud product called "Immersive Stream for Games." Google has made some headway pitching the feature as a way to run games on underpowered devices, like Peloton fitness equipment.
Google Stadia never lived up to its initial promise. The service, which ran a game in the cloud and sent each individual frame of video down to your computer or phone, was pitched as a gaming platform that would benefit from Google's worldwide scale and streaming expertise. While it was a trailblazing service, competitors quickly popped up with better scale, better hardware, better relationships with developers, and better games. The service didn't take off immediately and reportedly undershot Google's estimates by "hundreds of thousands" of users. Google then quickly defunded the division, involving the high-profile closure of its in-house development studio before it could make a single game.
Competitors include Nvidia's GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Amazon Luna.
See also: Stadia controllers could become e-waste unless Google issues Bluetooth update
Stadia's technology will go on to do greater things, but no one really cares anymore
Stadia died because no one trusts Google
Previously: Google Announces "Stadia" Streaming Game Service
Google Details Pricing, Hardware for Stadia Streaming Game Service
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @01:45AM (1 child)
Will it give us the ability to put Muslims in gulags like the Chinese? Or are we just going to censor information [theintercept.com] for the government that does that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @05:52AM
you can build your own game and do that
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @01:47AM (2 children)
I have been trying to double my AMD shares for under $20 each basically this entire year. It is getting annoying and I know as soon as I give in Trump/Powell?Xi will speak the magic deflationary words and everything will crash, dragging AMD stock price down with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @02:02AM (1 child)
So now people who RTFA and know what they are talking about are off-topic here?
From the same techcrunch link: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/google-scores-a-custom-amd-gpu-to-power-its-stadia-cloud-gaming-hardware/ [techcrunch.com]
And whatever happened to my submission about those whales?
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday March 20 2019, @07:36AM
I did a Sub about Type D Orca( before "seeing" yours ). So it became a Forbidden Story. A Donald J. Trump story. And, my Sub was Rejected w/no explanation. Yours, I don't know, possibly they Erased it. Looks like they Erased. Too bad because these Orcas may be our best bet against Great White Sharks. Can we call them the Great White Hope? But, you'll never get the message out on Soylent News. Try Gab!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @03:47AM
Several stories today mentioned "GDC" but none of the summaries spelled it out for those who didn't recall what it was. I'm still technically assuming it stood for "Game Developers Conference" conference in all those stories ...
IOW*, I'd like to add the Anonymous Coward vote for adding a way to clarify acronyms used in summaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @05:59AM
So, basically, containers or Snap (in Ubuntu), available through the OS.
Nice, building on the ideas of others. I wonder if they will try to patent it.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday March 20 2019, @06:53AM (9 children)
I've been beta testing GeForce NOW for going on a year now, and I'm telling you guys, these game streaming services are going to transform computer gaming. I know those of you who have not tried these services are going to give me all sorts of reasons why it can't work, why the lag must be awful, but I'm telling you, it does work and even on a shooter or racing game, the lag is not noticeable unless there is maintenance going on with the servers. Maybe I happen to live close to a server, but they're building them out all over the world and there are a lot of people hitting these servers day and night. It just works.
A lot depends on how much they end up charging for these services, but they're really pretty cool.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @08:59AM
and here they are.
1) Running the game remotely doesn't actually save much money. With most cloud stuff, you can divide the load efficiently, sharing a server among many users simultaneously. With gaming, it takes an entire GPU and most of a CPU - always. You can still time-share, but it's like the difference in pricing between a car, a taxi, and a bus. The taxi is really not much cheaper than the car; you need the bus to really save money, and you can't do that with gaming.
2) GPUs still get obsolete, even in data centers. An old web server is still quite useful. An old GPU isn't (although to be fair, GPU development is starting to slow as CPU development has). This means you still have to replace GPUs all the time, and that's got to be paid for. "Cloud" doesn't mean "free."
3) Licensing isn't awesome. With PC game developers, you might get some to go along. Nintendo and Sony are not going to get on board, though. You'll quickly run into the problem we have with streaming TV, where developers either charge so much that it's not profitable to let people actually play, or so little that they don't make any money, and there's not much middle ground. Netflix has effectively thrown in the towel on reselling content and basically become their own movie studio. Is Google going to become a game developer for this?
4) Lag is real. Like, the fact that you say it's not noticeable doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Anyone playing a shooter or fighting game will be massively disadvantaged compared to someone playing locally. It's basically impossible, under the laws of physics, to reduce the lag penalty to under about 150ms, which is roughly the difference in reaction times between an 18 year old and a 60 year old. Stuff like VR is totally out of the question, adding that much lag will give anybody motion sickness.
4.5) It not being perceptible is plausible, though. Like, people 15 years ago who were early adopters of LCDs played with monitors this laggy and some of them didn't notice at all - but they still lost the games. Gamers today worry about even 15ms of lag, much less ten times that.
5) This is not the first time it's been tried and it didn't work before. Has anything changed? Other than now it's Google?
6) Playing on phone isn't real because the controls don't match. Sure, you can run a demo on a phone, that's not the same as actual customers being able to actually use it. Consoles already have the same hardware everywhere and built-in DRM, there's no reason to play a console game remotely, at most you might see some new licensing plans for consoles. This is strictly a PC only thing.
It's really just hard to find a market segment where this is going to actually pay off. It's got to be a PC game, one that's demanding enough that you can't run it on any old potato, but not so demanding that the lagginess is a problem. It probably can't be free to play. Try-before-you-buy isn't much of a reason because Steam will let you play anything for two hours, although maybe you want more time with it than that.
The only real market I can think of for this is Mac users. (Linux users have WINE, VMs, or just reboot to Windows).
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 20 2019, @11:17AM
Streaming the game can't possibly be quicker than streaming the other guy's position and let a sufficiently powerful local pc handle the situation. I have Sauerbraten at > 100fps on 1024x768 res with some FX disabled on a 512M radeon which isn't even supported after debian 7.
Having said that, I agree with you because people don't care. If they cared everybody would be PC gaming, using geographically near servers, owned by the clan members and public outrage would follow any unavailability of classic games starting from the arcades of the 70s. People don't care, flashier will win.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday March 20 2019, @11:19AM (2 children)
Clearly you don't live in Australia...
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:05PM (1 child)
Google has a decent edge network. I'm in WA and getting ~55ms to the Sydney datacenter right now, and it doesn't get much worse than that if you're not on satellite.
I don't have high hopes for stadia, but google has a lot of experience providing a usable experience over constrained networks. There are so many more interesting ways to fuck this up, why would they settle for a boring technical one?
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Thursday March 21 2019, @11:41PM
Oh, you mean like when they decide to scrap it for no apparent reason six months down the track? Or when they decide to "enhance" the UI and make the whole thing pointless and useless? :D
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday March 20 2019, @03:25PM (3 children)
Does anyone else think this is another subscription nail in the coffin of yet more media we are going to be encouraged to no longer own because Cloud?
I won't even get into that always on microphone built into the controller that has a 4G connection to a google backhaul. It's the non-firewallable IoT microphone that people will get because their kids demand it.
The cynic in me is saying that games on the platform will mostly provide a better experience for people with low end to modest PC hardware, because games installed locally will have sloppy DRM that only serves to encourage the on-line only alternatives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @07:13PM
You have to remember that Google basically owns the low-end computer market thanks to their Chromebooks. Plus, many people don't leave Windows world because they have one "killer app" that they need Windows to run; for a huge chunk of the population that would be AAA games.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday March 20 2019, @07:13PM (1 child)
That's not how it works (at least on GeForce Now). You still have to buy the games yourself. You just install and play them on nvidia's server. You are still free to install them on your own computer. I have most of my games installed locally and on the GFN server so I can A-B them. Not all publishers allow this yet, probably because they're looking into their own game streaming service. Origin, for example. But anything on Steam, Ubisoft etc will work on GeForce Now. Then, you can play them on your Macbook, even if there is no Mac version of the game, or on a PC that doesn't meet the system requirements for that game. However, it does eat up a lot of bandwidth, so I wouldn't recommend it if you deal with low caps.
As I said, it's currently free because it's in beta, and we'll have to see what price point they pick.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday March 23 2019, @04:13PM
I am one of those strange people that alters the config files of the nvidia driver installer and removes the telemetry and thus the geforce now stuff as well. I never understood the game-ready driver concept--if the product didn't work until then, then what the hell are they doing. Then I learned it was something about game profiles. These are always user customizable; I've always tweaked them or made my own to work on my system the way I wanted it to work on my system... but that's just me. I cause myself more problems by clicking the advanced button on application installations... more and more these advanced options are being eliminated in favor of crowd cloud settings.
So anyway, with this Stadia--people aren't going to install anything, but will sync something. What you've described is a different approach for gameplay, the ownership and the licensing.
Google will have the product installed on their hardware. What users will pay for is access to it on a subscription basis, maybe free with ads, maybe extra money for multiple GPU rendering for better graphics. They did outline that there are better tiers, but those tiers dont' equate to performance--they equate to how pretty it is. People will not have to worry about upgrades or licenses for any of this, because they won't have that choice.
They will need a decent amount of dedicated bandwidth to receive the graphic stream, and it'll increase the higher the resolution, framerate, and something not really mentioned in their product reveal, competing with the concurrent use on such a connection.
The controller will connect to their backend over their service (the 4G) from what they said, as an ideal means to reduce latency. Failing or barring that (price? problems?) other options are wifi or direct USB, but they caution this wifi and usb fallback is not ideal to use , because you end up experiencing additional atency by now becoming dependent on the upstream traffic on what might every well be a saturated link streaming all this data to you--and also competing with whatever else is on the link and further upstream.
Multiplayer, screen shots, sharing to youtube, etc--all hosted in house (theirs, not yours). Two people sitting next to each other on their respective chromebooks and Stadia controllers will not see their data meet in the same room under ideal circumstances, except for the received perspectives. If you want to play 4k gaming multiplayer for a lan party, you need 25mbps per person for it to be smooth; If you want to play it locally, you... can't with this service. Everything goes to and comes back from Google. Nothing is installed locally except for the browser except maybe an add-on to make it feel like an application shell or something that is mostly a cosmetic wrapper. The only secret sauce is in the controller; since that's the only truly required unique hardware, I imagine firefox and other browsers will be allowed to play nice on the service at some point, but that's just for receiving the streams...
But just imagine the future--an always on game controller that listens to the same ultrasonic frequencies that phones and TVs do in order to communicate what ads to play based on what they hear around you. Before long, that chrome browser and android based smart tvs will start showing ads based on what the controller heard. It's not like they have to make something new in order for that to work.
Anyone read how one changes the battery or turn it off yet? The fact its always listening means it is likely a lithium non-user replacable battery that requires a usb cable to charge off what is hopefully an internet connected device so it can sync or something. Nest trackers/google home listeners, etc, are always on and always connected to the network and power, so something will be a little different with the controller that requires user intervention to keep the juice flowing.