Google Stadia

[Sneakytiger]

i'm a xbox xcloud guy my self, love playing gamepass games on my mobile they carrying it on my xbox.

[BrotherTobious]

Stadia does the same, and will do on your rig and TV.  But the xbox pass is a much more mature system.  Not heard much about the cloud side.

[Sneakytiger]

basically tobi you download the xcloud app on your phone and bluetooth a controller (any bluetooth controller) and u can play gamepass xcloud games on your phone.and soon pc .
[video=youtube;IhT-OBk_nEs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhT-OBk_nEs[/video]

[smilodon]

Lets not have a p*ssing competition about Stadia vs Xbox. Stadia stuff in this form and Microsoft in the Xvox forum thanks.

[Sneakytiger]

wheres that coming from smilo?, i was just talking about the xcloud , if i'm not aloud to give my opinion then i'll leave , eg. this community.

[smilodon]

Apologies I completely misread the thread and it's intent. I wrongly thought a Google vs Microsoft spat was brewing. Reading the thread more carefully I was very wrong. Carry on and ignore me.

[TeaLeaf]

And it is so easily done!  

What's the phone gameplay like Sneaky?   I've never tried it myself, I always figured I'd be too many thumbs in too little screen space, is phone gaming actually feasible or do you end up restricted to certain more suitable game types?

[Sneakytiger]

well actually tealeaf its very good, u basically use the phone as your display and use a controller or you can get controllers that fit around your phone.

[TeaLeaf]

basically use the phone as your display and use a controller or you can get controllers that fit around your phone.

That's the bit I had not grasped!   Thanks Sneaky, now I understand a little better why they might be attractive.

[albert]

That's the bit I had not grasped!   Thanks Sneaky, now I understand a little better why they might be attractive.

It also works very well on a cheap Chromebook with a nice clear display. I use mine for Stadia and having a little more real estate than a phone is more comfortable.

[albert]

Stadia seems to have a few rather good offers right now.

Buy Cyberpunk and get a Stadia Controller and Chromecast Ultra free.

https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077

Borderlands 3:

https://stadia.google.com/store/details/be080ad40b434ca289166031d3e88623rcp1/sku/26b18a6d45254ea79afdce75b76ddabbp

Quite good for a tenner.

[albert]

Whilst we're talking about comparisons. GEForce Now allows you to link to Epic, Steam or GOG and they wil literally run games you own on other platforms on their streaming network. That is a very flexible thing IMHO. It also has native ChromeOS support. Gotta say, setting it up and running Control from my Epic account was easy. It even enabled Ray Tracing High and felt responsive to a level better than running 1440p on my 1080Ti gfx PC. I got it as a 1 year freedbie with the 3080.

[smilodon]

That for me would be the clincher. If Google and others followed Nvidia and had a monthly subscription where as long as you owned a game from a recognised source you could stream it over their service then I'd be sold for ever.

I do wonder if this is the very beginning of the equivalent of the death of DVD and Blue Ray. Netflix, Sky and Amazon have killed the solid media rental industry in a few years. I think sooner or later technology will win out and maybe gaming rigs in general, be they Xbox, PlayStation or PC will go the way of Blockbuster, DVD rentals and Blue Ray?

It seems telling that a company like Nvidia, which lives from making graphics cards are at the forefront of developing Streaming gaming. Maybe they know their gaming GPU business has a limited lifespan and don't want to become the next Blockbuster Video?

[Sneakytiger]

I  don't see stadia replacing consoles or pcs anytime soon, were not going to going to a future LAN  with just a chrome tablet in hand, streaming services are ok for playing on your mobile or tv, but I cant see the big company's standing by while google puts  them out of business.

[smilodon]

I don't think companies like Google, Microsoft or Nvidia are going to worry that much about whether we have a good time at our LAN. They are going to make billions and not even know we exist. All these companies seem to be working on or releasing streaming services that do not require much in the way of hardware to run.

First it was music that had fairly low requirements for streaming. Just a few megabytes per song. Now we can all stream decent quality music straight over the internet to our phones, computers and media devices. High street music stores selling physical media (CD's and vinyl) are gone, or have become very niche. Artists and labels have had to bite the bullet and accept that almost all music is now rented and streamed and not bought on physical media. That's where their revenue is and while the whole Napster Wars thing showed what happens when you try to hold back the advance of technology everyone is pretty much on board with this now.

Then came visual media. Much higher bandwidth requirements are required but as soon as streaming became a thing Netflix rose to become a multi billion dollar company while Blockbuster Video became nothing. Now we're asking for that streaming in 4K. Companies know it's pointless to try to say "no it's too much bandwidth, you'll have to do without." As soon as just one company says "Yes we can do that for a sensible cost" it's all over. We get to stream 4k content and anyone else who holds out becomes another Blockbuster. Again Netflix and Amazon already offer plenty of 4K content.

We also had SAAS (software as a service) No one buys software in a box any more and many applications don't run on our computers at all. Microsoft Office 365, Google Drive, Gmail, Outlook, a mass of business software. The list is endless. I'd argue more software runs on remote servers than actual desktop machines. I very happily use a Chromebook and almost everything I do on it is cloud based.

Now we have computer gaming. Most of our game libraries sit with Steam, Epic etc Only the games we actually play sit on a hard drive. Likewise consoles can download game direct to a console from a library of our owned games.


So we don't 'need' iPods, CD players, Blue-Ray players or shelves full of software any more. Companies that only sold those things and didn't evolve are dead, New companies that saw the opportunity are billion dollar firms.

The last bastion of needing to own a powerful and expensive physical machine to run or play something is gaming, itself a multi billion dollar industry. We still need to buy consoles, graphics cards, PC's etc. But now for the first time we mostly have the bandwidth to stream the games direct to a screen. It seems inevitable that at some point (sooner rather than later IMHO) we will move away from downloading games to consoles and high end PC's and will use Stadia, X cloud, PlayStation Now, Nvidia Go. The technology might not be quite there yet but blink and it will be. All we will need a 4K monitor or TV, a Sonos bar and a fibre optic broadband service and we're good to go.

 Already the big players are lining up to take our subscriptions. So I do think as with music, movies, software and Thanos... "It's Inevitable" that things are changing and changing fast. We may be seeing the last of the generations of consoles and gaming PC's. That Microsoft and Sony are moving into the game streaming, platform independent world is very telling indeed. I'm sure both would just love to be gatekeepers to their services, get out of consumer products and just rake in the money. It's widely believed that Microsoft make almost zero profit on their console and likewise probably Sony. They make the big bucks licencing games on their platforms. It's a no brainer to get rid of the annoyance of making hardware for huge effort and precious little profit if these companies can invest that money in server farms and just stream it to us direct.

Thomas Watson the president of IBM in 1943 famously said

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

It's often sited as one of the dumbest technology predictions of all times but I'd argue it was an inspired view of the future. Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft. :norty: