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Google: Stadia exclusives to have features “not possible” on home hardware


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From thousands of on-screen soldiers to Duplex-powered "believable human interactions."

 

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When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform."

 

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Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser.

 

That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game."

 

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A game like Football Manager may have an easier time selling the advantages of Stadia, though. In August, developer Sports Interactive said Stadia "will be the fastest way to experience" the next game in the franchise, using distributed servers to "ensure that more matches can be processed in parallel utilizing spare bandwidth across the whole system."

 

In any case, Raymond said Google's own attempts to utilize this cloud architecture in gaming might take "several years" to come to fruition. "It won't be four years before gamers get to see the new exclusive, exciting content," she added. "There will be some coming out every year, and more and more each year."

 

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Assuming it works well, that is the kind of idea that I think they need in order to convince people that this is a good idea. Thing is, I doubt that Microsoft is behind at all (and in all likelihood, is ahead) in pushing game elements into the cloud. They've been trying to do this for a while now, and haven't found lots of good ideas in how to actually make better games with it. If Google finds something really special that only cloud based gaming, good for them, but somehow I doubt the fundamental idea will be unique to their platform for long.

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Once they announced that Stadia isn’t “gaming Netflix” I lost all interest. I’m not opposed to a completely digital, rented library. And I’m not opposed to digital game ownership from established players in the space. Given google’s history for killing projects, I have no faith that all the content people buy will be unavailable to play in 5 years.

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39 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Once they announced that Stadia isn’t “gaming Netflix” I lost all interest. I’m not opposed to a completely digital, rented library. And I’m not opposed to digital game ownership from established players in the space. Given google’s history for killing projects, I have no faith that all the content people buy will be unavailable to play in 5 years.

 

Yup, in a few years they'll release another streaming gaming service that's shittier than Stadia and then shutter Stadia because Google.

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1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

I believe them...if games were developed specifically to use 25 GPUs at the same time to do these things (and people had Google servers in their hometowns and awesome internet connections with no latency). But they will not be, so Stadia will be worse than standard consoles.

But Google is building and buying devs specifically for Stadia, so it is possible that a small number of games do get developed.

 

 

I think part of the problem is that it's not clear what new gameplay experiences can really be made by going cloud first or cloud only. How many actual gameplay related issues are prevented by compute power?

 

There's also the question of scaling. Maybe it's profitable enough for Google to let you play games in the cloud as is (maybe it isn't we have no way of knowing), but increase the compute power you need per player enough and it certainly won't be.

 

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Alright, so lets just spitball what tech this buys you that could be useful for games, not worrying about whether Google will actually deliver.

 

Off the top of my head,

 

- Truly giant 64-bit worlds (e.g., Star Citizen, but even more)

- No noticeable loading transitions

- Procedural destruction

- High-resolution voxel geometry (lets you have much more sophisticated minecraft worlds)

 

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