I haven’t followed too much either. But as I’ve heard its gonna be a ‘online only’ type thing. stream games to you console, nothing ‘saved’ there, nothing permement, no disk, just ‘access our library and play’ type thing.
which means if your net goes down…
Interesting idea here tim…
‘we are legion’ type idea, very neat.
Basically, you can stream any game from their library on anything that runs Chrome. They handle the hardware, so no more spending money to upgrade your comp every 5 years when you can play ultra high graphics on a chrome book.
And… how many people have that kind of consistent ‘net access? That kind of uptime? I live in the US. In Iowa. I can handle half a gig an hour downloads. I could get better if I lived across the street, but it’s the family home. And “better” still ain’t the pie in the sky latency you’d need for this scheme.
Pushing a niche product that can’t be used by 70% of the planet is… well, it’s been tried several times and this isn’t actually promising anything different. It’ll work fine at google headquarters and almost nowhere else.
Monthly data cap? That’s the real nightmare! It still amazes me that they exist in some places. I have had unlimited fiber optic broadband for 5 years now and I am still surprised to hear people talk about data caps when they aren’t talking about a phone plan
It’s probably not as “unlimited” as you think. Check the contract. The potential problem with stadia is streaming 4K video requires a LOT of data, data that can burn through even some currently “unlimited” data caps.
Most of these unlimited plans I’ve seen refuse to name an actual limit, they basically just have some wording about ‘normal’ usage and an explanation that anything that 95% or 99% of their users fits is normal.
If Stadia caught on enough that 10-20% of the ISP’s users are using it and downloading that amount of data, there might not be much they can do; too many users would be using it for it to be considered outside ‘normal’.
Note that bandwidth capping is usually done to avilate the most common routing problem: congestion. The easiest way of fixing congestion is to get better hardware… but that takes money, so of course the ISPs monitor everyone’s usage instead and go after those using “more than the norm”. The other easiest way of fixing congestion other than the above? Lag out EVERYONE. Either on purpose or because the hardware is struggling, a lagging connection actually use less bandwidth than advertised when the ‘no traffic’ hiccups occurs, thus “stretching out” the streaming data and enabling the hardware to catch up… …… Read more »
Try living in a place where ‘top speed’ is like 5 meg a second… meanwhile talking to friends who have like ,150 meg… you download a 70 gig thing, and it takes you 4 or 5 hours.. they do it in 20 minutes :S
GarlynSav
5 years ago
I wonder if the next comic will be about Microsoft’s xCloud and/or PS4 remote play.
(Oct 2018 Had a Microsoft blog post about it with video)
FITCamaro
5 years ago
Please make the Stadians like Predators. Invisible until they strike with their controller knives.
I’ve got mixed feelings on Stadia. On the one hand, I’m not a fan of consoles (despite owning two of them). I hate having to use them to play exclusives, especially when there’s stuttering and lag because of their crappy hardware. I also like being able to mod. I also HATE to think of my gaming being tied up with my ISP service, which SUCKS, and is constantly involved with all sorts of legislative and corporate shenanigans. But I also understand getting a console is usually much cheaper than getting a gaming PC, and for the most part, you’re able… Read more »
Microsoft has its faults, but owning an XBox isn’t getting a console from a company that sent cars out to create nice pictures of the whole country and just happened to attempt to every wireless network as they drove by for giggles.
It’s a terminal interface+access to the ultimate SkyNet… either a group of satellites pretending to be the Death Star, or simply millions of towers huddled in pods as humans were in The Matrix…
Stadia is likely akin to a hive mind…
“We aren’t among you, we are above you, up in the sky… towering, looming over you, watching you live and die… foolish mortals… we will live forever, in a VR world… while you suffer in your mortality…”
I suggest eldritch monstrosities from beyond space-time. (Rack after rack of dimly lit servers, waiting for the network lag to align before manifesting…)
chris waldrip
5 years ago
FWIW, I just F***KING LOVE THESE Console Wars comics. L-O-V-E!
Tue
5 years ago
It might have no actual body for the games, but there is still a controller and something you have to connect through.
James Rye
5 years ago
Ah man, our poor Consoles are so f***ed. How do you fight against clouds? With a vacuum cleaner?^^
Hey kids, wanna pay full value for a game you don’t own in any way? Have your max internet data hit every single time and charged more by your ISP for it? Be totally shit out of luck if you have less than 30 mbps all to yourself? not be able to play when the servers go down..at all? No? Yeah.. fuck Stadia.
Pevinsghost
5 years ago
The online writers consensus seems to be that Stadia is garbage, it’ll never work well. But all the Beta testers I talked to have said it already works well.
I’m just worried about Google getting bored and pulling the plug. Especially since they are about the most feedback resistant company I’ve ever seen. Impossible to engage with them.
The problem with it is, while anyone can buy an Xbox and reasonably expect to get the same performance from it, Stadia will be entirely reliant on your internet connection, which varies across a broad spectrum in the US. So as a concept, it’s amazing. But its potential failure is based on things Google can’t even control.
Actually I think Shadow looks like a better system, though I’m still an old school PC gamer and probably always will be. I still remember using GEM Desktop on our Amstrad PC 1640, back when hard disks were a luxury and PCs didn’t ship with mice as standard.
Then to get into the minutia of it… input/feedback lag. Arguement already can be pretty thick about wireless vs corded responce times for various games. But now add in the extra time waiting for the signal of you pressing a button to go through whatever you’re interfacing with (giggity xD ) to their servers, then have their server interpret that and send the action back to your device.. (and compacted by crappy local internet speeds, depending on service..) . . Aaaaand.. I didn’t quite buy into their ‘live demo’ they showcased on stage. Continuous shots from on device to another… Read more »
Stephen
5 years ago
Ok. I’m ready for Console Wars to get its own TV show now. Or at least get the animated web series treatment.
Crestlinger
5 years ago
Joke’s on them. The thing’s already hiding in his flashlight.
Tumbleweed
5 years ago
Does $1 get me around this paywall?
Pants
5 years ago
lol
foducool
5 years ago
the stadia is a good idea, except it’s way ahead of its time we don’t have the infrastructure to support it
24
That scared look….it’s just adorable 😀
Haven’t really followed on the Stadian thing, though, so I may not get the whole joke 😀
Great work, Tim, as always! d-(^.^)-b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Stadia
I haven’t followed too much either. But as I’ve heard its gonna be a ‘online only’ type thing. stream games to you console, nothing ‘saved’ there, nothing permement, no disk, just ‘access our library and play’ type thing.
which means if your net goes down…
Interesting idea here tim…
‘we are legion’ type idea, very neat.
Basically, you can stream any game from their library on anything that runs Chrome. They handle the hardware, so no more spending money to upgrade your comp every 5 years when you can play ultra high graphics on a chrome book.
You also have no idea when you can´t play your single player games anymore either – since they can cut you off at any second.
And… how many people have that kind of consistent ‘net access? That kind of uptime? I live in the US. In Iowa. I can handle half a gig an hour downloads. I could get better if I lived across the street, but it’s the family home. And “better” still ain’t the pie in the sky latency you’d need for this scheme.
Pushing a niche product that can’t be used by 70% of the planet is… well, it’s been tried several times and this isn’t actually promising anything different. It’ll work fine at google headquarters and almost nowhere else.
its a game streaming service. anything with chrome can play games at 60fps ultra settings, so you could play AAA titles from your phone.
but they wouldn’t just not have bodies. they would have some high end servers out somewhere and indoctrinate your devices into a hive mind.
I think that Xbone might already be possessed. Look at his freakishly huge eyes.
Next page: he will be possessed and will kill that poor newbie.
I was wondering how you were going to portray the Stadia. I like it.
It’s like a zombie invasion, only the zombies can only attack for about an hour or two per day or risk going over their monthly data cap.
Monthly data cap? That’s the real nightmare! It still amazes me that they exist in some places. I have had unlimited fiber optic broadband for 5 years now and I am still surprised to hear people talk about data caps when they aren’t talking about a phone plan
It’s probably not as “unlimited” as you think. Check the contract. The potential problem with stadia is streaming 4K video requires a LOT of data, data that can burn through even some currently “unlimited” data caps.
Most of these unlimited plans I’ve seen refuse to name an actual limit, they basically just have some wording about ‘normal’ usage and an explanation that anything that 95% or 99% of their users fits is normal.
If Stadia caught on enough that 10-20% of the ISP’s users are using it and downloading that amount of data, there might not be much they can do; too many users would be using it for it to be considered outside ‘normal’.
But that IS a lot of catching on it has to do…
Note that bandwidth capping is usually done to avilate the most common routing problem: congestion. The easiest way of fixing congestion is to get better hardware… but that takes money, so of course the ISPs monitor everyone’s usage instead and go after those using “more than the norm”. The other easiest way of fixing congestion other than the above? Lag out EVERYONE. Either on purpose or because the hardware is struggling, a lagging connection actually use less bandwidth than advertised when the ‘no traffic’ hiccups occurs, thus “stretching out” the streaming data and enabling the hardware to catch up… …… Read more »
It’s not much more data than Youtube or Netflix (also in HD and 4K).
Try living in a place where ‘top speed’ is like 5 meg a second… meanwhile talking to friends who have like ,150 meg… you download a 70 gig thing, and it takes you 4 or 5 hours.. they do it in 20 minutes :S
I wonder if the next comic will be about Microsoft’s xCloud and/or PS4 remote play.
(Oct 2018 Had a Microsoft blog post about it with video)
Please make the Stadians like Predators. Invisible until they strike with their controller knives.
PC Steam is the predator
I’ve got mixed feelings on Stadia. On the one hand, I’m not a fan of consoles (despite owning two of them). I hate having to use them to play exclusives, especially when there’s stuttering and lag because of their crappy hardware. I also like being able to mod. I also HATE to think of my gaming being tied up with my ISP service, which SUCKS, and is constantly involved with all sorts of legislative and corporate shenanigans. But I also understand getting a console is usually much cheaper than getting a gaming PC, and for the most part, you’re able… Read more »
and don’t forget that buying any google product you are basically wiretapping your own house and letting google record everything you say or do.
Which is basically true of all major tech companies now so I don’t understand why singling google out…
Microsoft has its faults, but owning an XBox isn’t getting a console from a company that sent cars out to create nice pictures of the whole country and just happened to attempt to every wireless network as they drove by for giggles.
Is a console with no body even a console?
Welcome to my dilemme XD
It’s a terminal interface+access to the ultimate SkyNet… either a group of satellites pretending to be the Death Star, or simply millions of towers huddled in pods as humans were in The Matrix…
Stadia is likely akin to a hive mind…
“We aren’t among you, we are above you, up in the sky… towering, looming over you, watching you live and die… foolish mortals… we will live forever, in a VR world… while you suffer in your mortality…”
Sounds like Russian terrorists……
Seems like it’s no different than calling Netflix or Hulu “DVD players”.
I suggest eldritch monstrosities from beyond space-time. (Rack after rack of dimly lit servers, waiting for the network lag to align before manifesting…)
FWIW, I just F***KING LOVE THESE Console Wars comics. L-O-V-E!
It might have no actual body for the games, but there is still a controller and something you have to connect through.
Ah man, our poor Consoles are so f***ed. How do you fight against clouds? With a vacuum cleaner?^^
Mega-Maid!
“Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck!”
Hey kids, wanna pay full value for a game you don’t own in any way? Have your max internet data hit every single time and charged more by your ISP for it? Be totally shit out of luck if you have less than 30 mbps all to yourself? not be able to play when the servers go down..at all? No? Yeah.. fuck Stadia.
The online writers consensus seems to be that Stadia is garbage, it’ll never work well. But all the Beta testers I talked to have said it already works well.
I’m just worried about Google getting bored and pulling the plug. Especially since they are about the most feedback resistant company I’ve ever seen. Impossible to engage with them.
The problem with it is, while anyone can buy an Xbox and reasonably expect to get the same performance from it, Stadia will be entirely reliant on your internet connection, which varies across a broad spectrum in the US. So as a concept, it’s amazing. But its potential failure is based on things Google can’t even control.
Rip people still stuck with 1.5 MBPS
Actually I think Shadow looks like a better system, though I’m still an old school PC gamer and probably always will be. I still remember using GEM Desktop on our Amstrad PC 1640, back when hard disks were a luxury and PCs didn’t ship with mice as standard.
Then to get into the minutia of it… input/feedback lag. Arguement already can be pretty thick about wireless vs corded responce times for various games. But now add in the extra time waiting for the signal of you pressing a button to go through whatever you’re interfacing with (giggity xD ) to their servers, then have their server interpret that and send the action back to your device.. (and compacted by crappy local internet speeds, depending on service..) . . Aaaaand.. I didn’t quite buy into their ‘live demo’ they showcased on stage. Continuous shots from on device to another… Read more »
Ok. I’m ready for Console Wars to get its own TV show now. Or at least get the animated web series treatment.
Joke’s on them. The thing’s already hiding in his flashlight.
Does $1 get me around this paywall?
lol
the stadia is a good idea, except it’s way ahead of its time we don’t have the infrastructure to support it