Then again. HFT systems did solve the latency issue. It is expensive and arcane, renting point to point microwave links for hundreds of miles.
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Yes! We can have beautiful and complex worlds that we traverse at rates more akin to the real world. There’s so much scope when it’s all in the cloud to dramatically change the experience.
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Indeed. We should celebrate it over on our Google Plus pages.
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What does that mean?
Games are designed to favor the players already. Games which don’t tend to be annoying or boring to play.
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Sony already has a cloud-based game streaming service called Playstation Now, which is essentially similar to this Google thing. That is, it renders the games on a server somewhere and streams the game to you as video.
I tried out the demo version once using my 100 Mbit, 3 millisecond ping fiber internet. Just in case these numbers don’t mean anything to you, 3 ms ping is very good. The game console was hardwired into gigabit Ethernet as well, of course.
It… worked. I guess. I tried a Tomb Raider game that wasn’t very twitchy, and while the controls were noticeably laggy, they were tolerable. The connection crapped out a few times per hour, so it was a good thing it was a single player game and they paused it automatically.
There are games this will work OK with, but it’s certainly going to be flaky. Especially once your ISP downrates the stream and intentionally introduces packet loss and jitter to push you to whatever service they own or received the best bribe from.
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I still miss Google Reader 
I moved everything over to The Old Reader, and while it’s nice, it doesn’t quite feel right.
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Will it run Fortnite successfully? If yes, it can be a huge success.
However, the problem with latency isn’t getting all the players to run at the speed of the slowest. It is that more than a few milliseconds of lag between pressing a button and seeing the result on screen starts makes the game frustrating.
Suppose you’ve got players on the east and west coasts in your game, there’s about 3,000 miles gap. Even if the game they are playing is running on a data centre in the middle, say Kansas City, the signals still take over a 100th of a second to get there and back.
Even Google will never find a way to avoid the speed of light.
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I don’t know if this would kill modding. I mean, modding is free content for the game manufacturer. A good modding community can keep people interested in and buying a game for years. The only real danger for the IP holder is that modders might make stuff that the owner would prefer to be available as DLC 
Certainly on Steam, the workshop makes it easier for people to share mods and to keep them up to date.
Having said that, I can easily imagine some arsehole executive screwing the whole thing up. If the internet has proven anything, it is that people with deep pockets and no poetry in their souls can make a pigs ear out of anything.
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Best, most insightful comment I’ve seen about this, and summarises wot I think, but haven’t been able to put quite so succinctly.
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You have a point there. But i’d still prefer to not run anything on the servers of our evil overlords.
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Maybe. But I remember when Netflix introduced streaming, lots of pundits claimed that it was absurd because even a lot of broadband users (like on early DSL) didn’t have fast enough speeds. What the advent of streaming video did of course was to make sure that watching video in standard definition became the minimum acceptable level of broadband.
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I have all of that in the South-East of England (so hardly the middle of nowhere) and found that the latency was so shit that the games were unplayable even when single player at sub 720p. I last tried a couple of months ago and there was no improvement.
It seems that what I am looking for and what big tech wants to sell me diverged years ago.
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We all know that google starts another one of these bad ideas every year. Burning money on failed projects is part of their business model. What else could they do with their billions, pay taxes maybe? 
I agree with you that it doesn’t need it (especially in the case of self driving cars) but that doesn’t mean people aren’t predicting soon we’ll be playing VR MMORPGs or going outside our house with some descendant of Google Glass constantly spoonfeeding us data about what we’re looking at? As well as ads of course.
Confession: I was replying to that Kevin Kelly Mirrorworld article without saying as much.
Streaming games in your browser…?
I look forward to testing it on my Raspberry Pi.
A lot of games don’t support modding and some publishers view modding in a very hostile way.
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I was a beta tester for Google’s Project Stream - the service that’s now rolling out as Stadia. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran surprisingly well on my 60 Mbps connection. I tested it on a couple PCs - one low end laptop hardwired and the other a custom built PC on WiFi. Response time was good, but not perfect. In extremely busy/hectic situations I definitely noticed some lag. The visual quality was also pretty variable - the graphics often looked “soft” or nocked down a few notches during peak hours or in more detailed and busy areas. The best play experience seemed to require having a wired controller and a wired internet connection.
I could see this being an appealing service for occasion or casual gamers looking to check out AAA titles without needing a console or killer PC. The end user’s experience will hinge more on their internet connection and ISP, not their hardware, as this article points out. My concern with this service is not so much the visual quality and response time, but Google’s fickle nature when it comes to their products and services. How well will Stadia need to do to keep Goggle’s interest, and what happens to game saves and trophies if Google pulls the plug?
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Gaikai didn’t fail, it was bought by Sony and turned into PS Now, an actual working streaming service.
The revenue the likes of Geforce Now and PS Now generate is absolutely miniscule, so I fail to see why Google thinks this is the future. The latency is kryptonite to a gamer and very noticeable even in perfect conditions.
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Or any racing game, I think you underestimate how ANNOYING input lag is to a gamer.
