A “standard mid-range gaming rig” is still really expensive for most people, especially if you want to keep it mid-range for more than a year or so. No one, not even Google, is saying this is a perfect, zero-compromise gaming option. It’s $10/mo for better looking games than you could probably afford otherwise. Sure it’ll have latency issues, but compared to the infinite latency of not owning a PC, it might be pretty good.
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It could easily end up costing people with data caps an extra 100 a month if you aren’t careful.
Unplayability of a lot of genres aside, that’s why I think it is a non-starter in most of North America.
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I suppose you can be addicted to bandwidth as much as you can be addicted to commuting to work.
We had a boarder at our place once. In all the time we’ve lived here, we seldom hit the bandwidth cap ceiling (or even halfway). Enter the boarder, and it became a chronic problem, which made getting work done more difficult.
I had to take time out of my work day to ensure services to Steam, some Google things, and other sites were blocked at the DNS level.
Will it have the new Breath of the Wild game?
(Edited to add: I probably should get around to finishing that first one first. Good thing I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for that, or it’d be super costly to have.)
it’s interesting tho. if you’re playing a client server based game, you’ve already got your roundtrip to the server.
typically the client does a whole bunch of prediction and interpolation to hide the lag, and i dont see a way that a generic stadia client could do that - but if you moved the prediction server side: send the frames you expect the client to need - maybe you could hide some of the average latency.
it’d take a specially built game - maybe something like running a client with your predicted lag on the remote box, but - given that any mp game client is always time delayed from the server - maybe the result wouldn’t feel as bad as people think.
you’re not going to get the instant “turn your head and look around” feel of a local client camera - but they might be able to simulate that too if they send you panoramic/pvr frames, and use a specialty client to unpack your current camera slice.
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That’s a fair point - the data cap thing is an issue. I assume they’ll have controls for that (“restrict my stream to 1080p” or whatever) but that cuts into the “better graphics” value prop.
That’s a better explanation than my ‘software trickery’ explanation but yes… this.
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I’m going with about four or five years.
[t=0] It’ll release, and uptake won’t be as good as they predicted. Initial reviews will say performance in real world situations is disappointing.
[t=1 year] They’ll slash prices on the hardware and people will buy it as much for that as for the service, but this’ll get them a decent user base to start with.
- Uptake will still be slow because they don’t have any unique titles.
[t=2 years] They’ll get some unique titles, thereby pissing off a big portion of the games-buying public who are annoyed that $Whatever 7 isn’t on the platform all the previous titles have been.
- This will still not significantly increase their user base, because they won’t get even 100% of the fanbase for the $Whatever franchise.
[t=3 years] They’ll begin to slash the budget to the service and we’ll see titles being removed and upcoming releases cancelled.
- It’ll putter along on life-support for a year or two until eventually they pull the plug.
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In terms of ‘software trickery’ of the sort you’ve described I wonder just what it is Bethesda’s Orion system is doing and just how well Doom (2016) is going to stream via said system.
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source
(Internet. FU in particular pinterest, and FU google image search in general.)
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Dividing data cap by maximum bandwidth will give a grossly underestimate of playable hours. I guess that average bandwidth used would be 10-20% of maximum (i.e. 5-10 times more hours)
And if you play more than 4/6 hours every day, probably you have one or more dedicated gaming systems
I’ve never understood the utility of Pinterest. I do use google image search. Do you have an alternative?
to;dr: Not really.
I use DuckDuckGo, but results vary considerably in quality. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just pops out irrelevant pics.
Google image search seems to have tweaked their algorithm against Pinterest hijacking, but it still pops up every now and then and returns unusable stuff.
Generally, indexed images nowadays seem to lead more often to a website without that picture than not. Direct copypaste doesn’t work any longer, at all.
I started to search reaction GIFs via gboard when mobile, but for some reason Discourse does not allow direct embedding from there. This leads to annoying visits to (mostly) downscaled version of the image I. question, and I can then use Google image search for similar pics, and then search for other resolutions.
If I’m lucky I find sources different than tenor.com and giphy (which both suck, and make embedding here a pain). The Imgur search function is broken beyond repair. I don’t even understand what the Giphy android app is for, that useless pile of “social” garbage.
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Ok. I wasn’t sure what your angle of criticism was in the first reply.
Yes, functionally a variety of changes in recent times has made searching for good images to post an unnecessary difficulty. iPhone also has made changes where you have to drag the image upward to get to the menu to save it locally but sometimes the menu snaps shut before you can get to the menu item and sometimes it navigates to a page the image links to rather than letting you save the image. Five attempts later I finally get to work what used to be simple. The pain is real.
Another point of grievances is that most aggregators (like Pinterest) don’t lead you to the source. If I can use the original content, I do. Send people that way, someone did something. Hell, given metadata I would even have a proper legal attribution.
But we digress from the pipes to the inner circles of hell that Dante could not even imagine.
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Agreed. Sometimes I use reverse image search to find the source. Sometimes when I can’t find the source and it’s clearly from an individual and not conglomerate made (such a as movie clip) I will just not use it.
So… I honestly would like to see Stadia or something like it succeed. As I have gotten older I just don’t run out and pay big bucks for the AAA titles and then play obsessively like I used to. I now have a speed bump of laziness/apathy. But if I could just skim through a list of titles and jump into playing easily and affordably in seconds then many more games would get my eyeballs.
Yes, I guess I did say run out, because… it’s be awhile and there used to be these stores, with games. Yes, I have steam account but I didn’t use it for so long that I am now locked out. To unlock it I needed to find the something-something from the physical box of the original Half-life game that I attached to steam when half-life was new. I actually found the box when I moved and have been finding it contents in other boxes of nerd related stuff. I need to go find the email from steam to see if I found the code they want to unlock my account. All that to say, Stadia sounds like less of a pain in the ass if they can get past the technical issues of latency.
My last game bought physically was probably Deus Ex.
And it was actually the last “new” game I played extensively. I revisited the LucasArts adventures from time to time, I checked on some cuties like Yarn (was it called yarn?) but lost interest immediately after being distracted by real life™, and never looked back really. I grew out of computer games when science work started to absorb nearly everything in my life, and the rest needed to social life as a counterbalance (and some procrastination, as on BB BBS, and formerly also tw@tter).
I give as much of a fuck for Stadia as I do for Google Play Games. That is: I register that it will probably make some people a hell lot of money, and I can’t figure out who the people are that have enough time on their hands to actually play the content. I don’t meet them any longer. My social peer group tries to manage families and work, and that’s all they can fit into a day.
So, I read this topic/thread and the discussion about latencies and stuff with bemused incomprehension. This is a window in a world which I apparently lost contact to about two decades ago, when latency was a thing which was relevant at our LAN parties…
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The last 10 years of marriage killed my gaming. And honestly, I wasn’t complaining. But now I am single and life is much simpler and I do have free time to play. I don’t care to play as much or as intensely as I used to but would like to find a happy medium.
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It’s a morgue.
(It’s for folk who want to keep track of organized images for inspiration or reference.)
(Also, they haven’t threatened civilization in any way, so they’re currently my favorite social media site.)
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I checked Wikipedia on them and I am astonished how much money there is in such a worthless pile of images clogging the image searches on the web.
Also, why the hell the founders billionaires?
Regarding your assessment, IDK if " Like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest now lets marketers access the data collected on its users." does still qualify as not threatening civilization, but then I also didn’t understand why their platform is a social network, at all.
I’m just to old for this shit, I guess. Otherwise I would have made my first billion years ago.
All those kids are so unbelievable wealthy… And not putting their money to any use beyond making money, I wager.
TBH, as of the late 1980s, I consider all businesses not actively trying to prevent the destruction of the biosphere as a threat to humanity and the planet, but apparently that’s just me. And civilization, well… How to define it without including the self-destructive parts?
Jesus. I just meant I interact with far fewer Nazis on Pinterest than anywhere else I’ve ever been. It’s not like they’re getting my money or I’d even miss them if they suddenly vanished.
It wasn’t necessarily about you or what you’d do with it.
Normally at this stage I’d advise folk to get a grip, but. You kind of do have a point here.
Maybe you can’t, and being aware of the destructive elements is a requirement for preserving civilization.
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