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Google: Stadia exclusives to have features “not possible” on home hardware From thousands of on-screen soldiers to Duplex-powered "believable human..

CyberPanda

CyberPanda

Banned
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."

That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

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." “Believable human interaction”

Those kinds of promises echo ones made by Google's Phil Harrison in April, when he called out the potential for Stadia to handle "complex multiplayer going from hundreds to tens of thousands in a very sophisticated world... every change that I make to my world can be instantly, in microseconds or less, be distributed to every other client... You can't do that with a discrete box."

But Raymond went further when talking to GI. Drawing inspiration from Google's AI-powered natural-language virtual-phone-call-assistant "Duplex" project, she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated dialogue. She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly.

Amid the excitement for the new technology, though, Raymond also acknowledged potential growing pains in the new space of cloud-exclusive game development. Just because Stadia lets you be in a battle with thousands of simulated soldiers, for instance, doesn't mean that battle will actually be any more fun than one on a smaller scale. "Is that going to be cool, or just too chaotic?" Raymond wondered rhetorically.

That could be an important question for the makers of Orcs Must Die 3, a timed third-party Stadia exclusive announced back in August for a spring 2020 release date. The developers said at the time that the game will feature massive armies of up to 500 enemy monsters clustered together in a tight space. "Everyone gets that same massive [processing] power," Jones said of Stadia's distributed cloud architecture.

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."
Click to expand...

arstechnica.com

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

From thousands of on-screen soldiers to Duplex-powered “believable human interactions.”…
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
 
lukilladog

lukilladog

Member
iu
 
Shmunter

Shmunter

Member
It’s possible, they can bolt 10 servers per instance and the processing power would eclipse anything at home, including the most powerful pc’s. Wait and see.
 
Heimdall_Xtreme

Heimdall_Xtreme

Hermen Hulst Fanclub's #1 Member
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daninthemix

daninthemix

Member
I don't understand how that's financially viable. Selling (apparently) huge computing resources but at a cost that doesn't turn people off.
 
Zaffo

Zaffo

Member
So they charge 10 bucks a month if you want to have a decent quality stream, how much it's going to be to rent a game that uses a whole server rack to render a better than life human?
 
Bitmap Frogs

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
I'll give it to them: it's bold to to attempt to peddle the power of the cloud marketing bull right after microsoft had a rodeo with the concept.
 
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ZywyPL

ZywyPL

Banned
It's true. Absolutely true. Imagine games running on something like NV DGX-2. They can surely do it. But until they sort out the latency issues none of it matters.
 
Woo-Fu

Woo-Fu

Banned
If we wanted to get technical about it there isn't any hardware google can put in a datacenter that you can't put in your home. Not only that you'd have a lot less latency to deal with. :)

Not saying it is practical, just saying it is possible which directly contradicts what the Stadiots have been spouting in interviews lately.

What I don't understand is who they're trying to convince, investors? Gamers gonna sit back and say, "show us these magic games first.".
 
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Yautja_Warrior

Yautja_Warrior

Member
Well they are basically streaming a PC game, so games could maybe run with better graphical settings compared to consoles but they really should stop making all these bold claims that might not be true, especially with next gen consoles coming next year, which will be a lot more powerful than current consoles.

They have a lot of things to prove to stop Stadia being a big flop.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
ZywyPL said:
It's true. Absolutely true. Imagine games running on something like NV DGX-2 . They can surely do it. But until they sort out the latency issues none of it matters.
Click to expand...
And how much would it cost if i want to play a NV DGX-2 (or equivalent) powered game 8 hours per day?

I know Google is a huge company. But can they afford millions of super-computers to support millions of players? Forget the computers themselves, just the electricity to run one of these things would cost way more than the subscription and renting the game fees per player.
 
D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
Yautja_Warrior said:
Well they are basically streaming a PC game, so games could maybe run with better graphical settings compared to consoles but they really should stop making all these bold claims that might not be true, especially with next gen consoles coming next year, which will be a lot more powerful than current consoles.

They have a lot of things to prove to stop Stadia being a big flop.
Click to expand...
Basically they are arguing that Stadia could use beowulf cluster supercomputers to run games, which is technically true. But what is not true is the idea that it would be remotely affordable. Powerful hardware cost money to run, money that has to come from somewhere. Stadia is arguing about a gaming future that has no gamers because no one could afford to pay the costs.
 
Lupin3

Lupin3

Targeting terrorists with a D-Pad
The developers said at the time that the game will feature massive armies of up to 500 enemy monsters clustered together in a tight space. "Everyone gets that same massive [processing] power," Jones said of Stadia's distributed cloud architecture.
Click to expand...

I'm sure that will look good. As long as they won't bland together and share the same animations. Which they probably will. And what difference does the individual processing power even do in this case?

But hey, surprise me!
 
Barakov

Barakov

Gold Member
So, we have Phil "Rumble is a last gen feature" Harrison and other people going to bat for the "Power of the cloud" which is the one of the things Microsoft boasted about in 2013 and it was a whole lot of hot air. I'm actually looking forward to this clusterfuck of a launch.

Infinite_Daremo said:
I’m having flashbacks.
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It's like Google is 2006 Sony and 2013 Microsoft in for one failed console launch.
 
Makoto-Yuki

Makoto-Yuki

Gold Member
i'm getting sick of Googling going on and on about this.

They say this and say that but we've seen next to nothing. Do your talking when we can actually use your product for goodness sake!
 
mcjmetroid

mcjmetroid

Member
They said it before and I just saw a piece of news that there literally just set up their first first party studio... When's this coming in 3 years, 4 years?

The fuck.
 
M

MadAnon

Member
Technically it's true. But I would like to see a launch content which is made to take advantage of these data center features instead of just talking about those possibilities.
 
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Griffon

Griffon

Member
In theory it is possible to have a single instance in a single server and just have the input and graphics being decoupled to clients (without any logic prediction on the client part, basically like a big massive local MP game instead of an online one). But in practice, you're just offloading the lag from server lag to input/video output lag, and it's gonna play like hot trash.

The current paradigm of local client/distant server works so much better, because the client can predict a large part of the simulation locally without delay. What google speak about might sound find in some executive head, but in actual reality it's gonna be so much worse to play.
 
Vawn

Vawn

Banned
To me, this is the ONE advantage streaming could have over an actual console. The machines you are streaming from could be significantly more powerful than what is realistical for the average person to afford.
 
Clear

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
mcjmetroid said:
They said it before and I just saw a piece of news that there literally just set up their first first party studio... When's this coming in 3 years, 4 years?

The fuck.
Click to expand...

This is the single biggest problem for any corporation trying to get in on the high-end gaming space, lead time on product is so long nowadays how do you keep your platform fresh and appealing in the meantime?

And of course not only does the flagship need to be great, which is less than a certainty, it needs to be appealing to what the market is like 3-4 years out from its inception.
 
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