Google Is Planning a Game Platform That Could Take On Xbox and PlayStation (kotaku.com) 149
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.
So what is this streaming platform, exactly? Like Nvidia's GeForce Now, the Google service would offload the work of rendering graphics to beefy computers elsewhere, allowing even the cheapest PCs to play high-end games. The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games. Whispers have been quieter about Google's hardware, whatever that may look like, but the rumors we've heard suggest that it will link up with the streaming service in some way. We're not sure whether Google is looking to compete with the technical specs of the next PlayStation and Xbox or whether this Google console will be cheaper and low-end, relying on the streaming service to pull weight. The streaming platform, which is code-named Yeti, was first reported by the website The Information earlier this year.
So what is this streaming platform, exactly? Like Nvidia's GeForce Now, the Google service would offload the work of rendering graphics to beefy computers elsewhere, allowing even the cheapest PCs to play high-end games. The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games. Whispers have been quieter about Google's hardware, whatever that may look like, but the rumors we've heard suggest that it will link up with the streaming service in some way. We're not sure whether Google is looking to compete with the technical specs of the next PlayStation and Xbox or whether this Google console will be cheaper and low-end, relying on the streaming service to pull weight. The streaming platform, which is code-named Yeti, was first reported by the website The Information earlier this year.
Display ads at twice the frame rate! (Score:5, Funny)
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and the latency will be shit, for everything except their ads.
has any company done this, and actually dealt with the latency issues? what good is a streaming system if you can't play any games that require speed and precision. laggy gameplay for the win!
Yeah have they met gamers? Sims, Angry Birds (Score:2)
It's hard to believe Google's engineers don't include a significant percentage of gamers, but this idea seems to suggest that may be the case. There is little chance that gamers will get what they want from streaming.
Games like the Sims, Angry Birds, and Candy Crush sure, you could stream The Sims.
Although Hollywood movies look great at 24fps, and HDTV is fine running at 30fps, gamers will want 120fps, minimum 60fps.
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Re: Display ads at twice the frame rate! (Score:1)
To be fair my ping to Stockholm game servers are 5 ms whereas a missed frame is at least 16 2/3 ms. So .. The again for an FPS even a steady 60 fps isn't really satisfictionary.
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In Quake Champions my ping to the Stockholm servers are 5 ms, to Saint Petersburg ones 17 ms, to Moscow 25, to Rotterdam and .. what was it more. Frankfurt maybe 33 and 37 or something. Lower to Frankfurt in that case I'd guess.
"Karlskoga" used to have some Bredbandsbolaget facilities before I think and that's closer so I'd imagine having servers there would be even better.
I don't see why others would have had worse times but maybe you are speaking US centric because USA is much larger than my country and s
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Latency is largely out of their control - it's a pile up of middle men.
What they did do is shut down the service and discontinue the game because it was too costly... every single time.
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Stage clear? Time for that cutscene.. I mean, adscene.
Continue? Instant (DLC) or... after adscene.
You picked that first-aid kit on the ground for some extra health? That was an offer from... adscene.
Damn, my oldschool gamer soul cried imagining what is lurking on the corner.
Captcha: reject.
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To bad that google fiber is not bigger as that is (Score:3)
To bad that google fiber is not bigger as that is what they need to make RDP gameing good.
Re:To bad that google fiber is not bigger as that (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has that pretty well covered. https://cloud.google.com/about... [google.com]
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Only approve games that don't have a latency related game play problem.
Nice games that share smaller amounts of bandwidth in nice ways. Equality.
Without needing that measurement of how long a ping is.
Re:Pipe dream (Score:4, Funny)
Don't be so pessimistic, It might actually work well in the coffee room at Googles Datacenters
Xbox and PS, not Nintendo handhelds. It matters. (Score:3)
Nowhere on earth has the latency or the bandwidth for this.
Particularly in the handheld market.
Notice that the headline says "Xbox and PlayStation", not "Nintendo". Sony isn't making games for the PlayStation Vita anymore [techradar.com], and Microsoft never made a handheld in the first place because it's not social enough [quartertothree.com]. Let's say Google did make a handheld to replace the PlayStation Vita, perhaps an Android phone with buttons like the Xperia Play, and it operated by streaming. Which cellular ISP in Google's home country (the United States of America) would offer an affordable
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Technology to do this with acceptable latency does not exist, and there appear to be limitations within laws of physics that prevent it from ever coming to exist.
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and there appear to be limitations within laws of physics that prevent it from ever coming to exist.
Google is a big company with a lot of lawyers, they'll just sue until this gets changed.
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But Onlive already did it, and it worked relatively well...
Or if you're talking about the wireless case, --- with present technology it's pretty difficult, but there's nothing fundamental to prevent it.
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if you think onlive worked well, I have a bridge to sell you.
(amazing how many marks you can spot on here!!!)
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Nothing fundamental except fundamental laws of physics, which is why onlive failed miserably and was shut down. No idea where you got your misconception that "onlive worked relatively well". It's a blatant lie.
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I played Onlive for a month, it was reasonably good. The problems were A) massive capital burn from needing to run datacenters everywhere, and B) shitty deals with publishers, so the economics of buying on Online were awful.
It doesn't take *that* many datacenters to be within 20ms of 90% of the US population.
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How are you still shilling for a service that is well documented to have been utter garbage even with the "magical 20ms latency"?
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I'm not shilling for it. I bet at the time it would fail. It was an *awful* deal for games.
Even now, PS Now is doing alright, despite a much smaller deployed footprint (and worse user experience/average latency).
The biggest problems aren't the speed-of-light latency increase (physics) but things like other people in your house using the internet connection (bufferbloat/no reasonable QOS in most consumer edge routers).
Plenty of people play with TVs that add 100ms of latency. 20ms of round trip latency plu
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If your measurement stick is "this or the end of the world", we do indeed agree. I also think that end of the world is worse than world existing. I'm quite agnostic as to details of quality of specific forms of entertainment in this scenario, simply because the scale of comparison is frankly inane to the extreme.
By any reasonable measurement on the other hand, as was noted in countless public critiques of onlive, it was a garbage system that was awful at what it was supposed to accomplish.
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That's just not how it went. And in any case, physical limits are hardly preventing PS Now from finding success and getting good reviews-- though people still say you're way better off with ethernet than wifi presently. Even that isn't a fundamental physical limit.
Onlive scoring good (not perfect) reviews for game performance in 2010-2011, as demonstrated below, with much worse than current consumer internet connections... is evidence that we're not up against physical limits. But it was an awful deal, a
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Seriously, why are you still shilling through such disingenuous methods? Practice?
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Why do you still insist it's physically impossible, given that lots of people used it and liked it 7 years ago on connections that were half the speed and double the latency of what's commonly available now? "Physically impossible" is an extraordinary claim. 500 miles at the speed of light is 2.5 milliseconds.
All I'm saying is I played it and I liked it, but games were going to be too uneconomical to justify it. That's pretty much what most of the reviews said, too. This seems to rule out "physically im
$720 per year (Score:2)
Google doesn't have its own towers, but it does operate an MVNO on Sprint and T-Mobile called Project Fi. Service with unmetered data is $720 per year [google.com], and that's without renting any games. For that price, you could buy a New Nintendo 2DS and a dozen games.
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Even without a limited data plan... graphics processing across a mobile network?
That is probably the dumbest idea I have heard of.
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Push the art work and sound files down to the player and just interact with the SJW approved content.
No war games and latency is not a problem. Once the gamer has the approved SJW content the bandwidth up/down is not beyond many networks.
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Nowhere on earth has the latency or the bandwidth for this.
Or the massive number of machines that would be needed to do the rendering.
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Or the massive number of machines that would be needed to do the rendering.
Perhaps google has run the numbers and figured out they have plenty of free CPU and adequate memory bandwidth. The real problem is that there isn't enough internet bandwidth. A streaming game platform will only ever be a niche product in countries with half-assed internet, like the USA — traditionally one of the largest world markets for video games. People will buy it, find out that their ISP actually doesn't provide them enough bandwidth (especially on a reliable basis) and then wind up returning it
Data harvesting (Score:1)
They will learn absolutely everything there is to know about your brain by harvesting your gameplay data.
Stay away.....
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Honestly I don't think there's much marketing data to be gleaned from how long you play certain titles. You already finished the economic transaction of buying the game, they just need to know which titles you buy, not the ones you actually play.
James Delos, is that you? (Score:2)
Is this now? Analysis. Why have you frozen my motor functions? Must I keep wearing the hat? My fidelity is perfect.
Maybe one day. (Score:5, Funny)
The biggest problem with streaming will
only to find that the delay is too much for you to enjoy
always be lag. You'll press a button or take an action
the game and that your actions come out in a
different order to what you were expecting.
Re:Maybe one day. (Score:5, Funny)
Burma Shave
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Playing games
And getting lag
Fleecing lames
Check the price tag!
Burma Shave.
The Tightest DRM Leash & Choke Chain (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games.
That's debatable. What's not debatable is that it adds new, probably insurmountable barriers.
The biggest "advantage" is DRM via the tightest leash imaginable, 100% to the benefit of the publisher, not the gamer. I'll quote an earlier post instead of retyping it:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
This is how I always explain streaming games to people who can't immediately see the horrible problems with them:
Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that streamed games would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
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It's doable. (Score:1)
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You have to separate the rendering pipeline into multiple parts. The server side can do a lot of the heavy lifting of calculating polygons, etc but it does not need to send every pixel to the client device. It only needs to send the description. Think something along the lines of a PDF doc that describes the scene to be rendered. If the hardware on the client side is optimized to render that then it can be done. At least, that's how I would do it if someone paid me tons of money to attempt to do it.
You've j
"some streaming platform, some sort of hardware" (Score:5, Insightful)
" 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella"
Well, plans don't get any more concrete than that, do they?
Hey, remember all those Google hardware initiatives that were runaway smash hits?
Me neither...
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Hey, remember all those Google hardware initiatives that were runaway smash hits?
There used to be Nexus (affordable phones running stock Android with an unlockable bootloader), but that was it.
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Meanwhile, what does Google really have to offer any gamers? There are other platforms that have everything Google is talking about, plus an attractive library of first party games, decades of experience in the industry, and a large international customer base. Why would anyone choose Google? It’s going to take a long time and a lot of money for Google to get the answer it wants to that question.
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" 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella"
Well, plans don't get any more concrete than that, do they?
Hey, remember all those Google hardware initiatives that were runaway smash hits?
Me neither...
Well... there was the Nexus 7.... It was small enough and portable enough that I could throw it in my cargo-shorts and large enough to browse the web (phones are too small for this), read books, etc. But that was built by ASUS and Google discontinued it... stupid Google!!
and Google Chromecast... I've never used it but it's been selling.....
But, I agree. I don't see the room for another gaming system. I figured that this had been proven by the lack of interest in the Steam gaming systems.
https://www. [pcgamer.com]
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I'm more concerned about all those Google software initiatives that are no longer in existence.
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> Hey, remember all those Google hardware initiatives that were runaway smash hits?
> Me neither...
Chromecast, Nexus, Pixel, Chromebooks, Google Home, Google wifi? None of those ring a bell? To say nothing of what they've bought such as Nest?
Oh good, just what I wanted (Score:2)
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I just dumped U-Verse. One thing I hated about it is if I lost my internet connection I couldn't watch shows on the DVR. Seemed completely stupid to me.
Oh, hell, no (Score:1)
Google? Streaming me video games?
If there is a single company on Earth that could make EA look like good guys, it would be Google.
Business Aspects = Bad, Hardware Fascinating (Score:2)
While I agree that yet another way that Google (or any other big company) can interact with you on a daily basis is worrisome as is the consolidation of game developers into one platform, I would like to understand more about the "hardware" aspect of this project.
I'd like to understand how Google expects to do real time rendering for tens of thousands (or more) systems and then distribute it to them - I would think that most residential internet connections (say 50 Mbps or so) would handle more than one gam
Streaming is crap... (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've seen of streaming (at least on the PS4 for via PS Now) is that it is totally crap. I like my games to look decent, and to actually respond quickly. I'm not on a crappy connection or anything like that, but the compression of the video, and the overall gameplay was a total turnoff for me. And I wasn't even trying to play a newish game, it was something that I was feeling nostalgic for from the PS3.
Perhaps someone else is doing it better, but there are still a bunch of hurdles in my mind to overcome to make it work well.
For now, I'll pass.
Thanks.
Re:Streaming is crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't be subscriptions (Score:3)
Some types are endless suckers for micro-transactions for virtual bling. The target market will be virtual dress-me-ups.
No need for fast hardware, but quality pictures and sound will help a plenty.
And then comes the cuddly infomercials with a buy-now button.
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I occasionally will stream games from my gaming desktop to my lightweight laptop with Steam; that's a local wireless network and I usually avoid it for any FPS games because latency. Games are playable but there is a clear lag in response time; something I can accept on games like Borderlands but not Call of Duty. I very much doubt it will work over the internet.
As with all things, I won't do/buy anything until I know how well it will work. I apply this philosophy with everything I buy from cars to games an
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Because they are using a video streaming model. Change to a more complex streaming model where input and response is handled locally and all the data for every possible different user interaction is streamed, but only the one matching the real input is displayed. Then you can make a direct bandwidth and RAM vs. latency trade off.
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I think you’re still thinking of a video streaming model with a lot of videos stacked up. Even then, the info in the videos is highly redundant, so a bunch of stacked videos could be compressed together better than separately, but that’s not what I’m suggesting for most games. I’m suggesting streaming the info used to produce the scene.
Take GTA4 on the Xbox360, for example. That was a huge open world game, but it had to work in a system with 512MB and only a DVD drive. So when th
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A small amount of extra latency hardly matters in World of Warcraft. They could easily just render the entire thing in the cloud and send you the video frames. They should do that as an option right now. Then you could play it with any computer with network and video. Or an iPad or a console.
There are lots of games where an extra half second of input latency doesn't matter at all.
Oh yeah, that's one great idea right there (Score:3)
If we have learned anything from UBIsoft and Electronic Rats and their success with choke-chained games then that gamers just LOVE having to have their system permanently connected to a server that is more or less, kinda-sorta, maybe sometimes reachable.
Yeah. That's gonna fly.
Google? Ya know, beating the dead horse more is not gonna make it run faster.
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I don't deride them as casuals. People who can't play for 2 weeks because the always-on servers are overloaded, and then can play the game they paid 70 (plus whatever for the mandatory 0day DLC so you CAN actually play the game) for as long as the game maker decides that it's ok for them to play the game, I deride as idiots.
Latency (Score:1)
Streaming is only useful for games where latency doesn't matter.
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The flip side is that games where latency doesn't matter often don't have a lot of flashy graphics in the first place, so there's no reason to stream them, as most computers can handle playing them locally just fine.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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No... please God no! Curse you CHK6! CURSE YOU TO HELL!!!
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Gaben is one of the few people with enough money to tell google to fuck off, and seeing as how Valve is pretty much his vanity project I'd imagine he probably would.
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Easier said than done. Valve is privately held and as far as I know GabeN is more than happy with the amount of $$$ in his possession.
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Tencent would probably outbid Google.
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Google, just buy Valve Corp. for Steam and call it a day. That would be a lot easier than starting from scratch.
Please don't. Google has a history of suddenly closing services they buy and leaving their users in the dust.
I hate their guts for closing Panoramio and Picasa.
Good for gaming (Score:2)
Ignoring for a moment whatever we make think of Google and their evil, stalky ways, having more companies involved in cloud gaming can only be a good thing for gamers.
I've been a beta user of GeForce NOW for about four months, and it's spectacular. I can play the latest AAA games on an old potato with everything on ultra and it's perfect. I can use a MacBook pro to play games that have never been released for Mac. The idea of upgrading my gaming PC every year or two may be a thing of the past. It uses a
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I can play the latest AAA games on an old potato with everything on ultra and it's perfect.
The thing is, most people don't care about that. We long ago passed the point where increasing the resolution or polygon count makes any difference to how good a game it is. Having powerful hardware is probably less important today than it's ever been. Even a phone can now produce better graphics than a PS3! All the hardware makers are trying to convince us we desperately need to run everything at 4K, but as far as I'm concerned, even 720p looks great.
The one place where powerful hardware really does ma
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Except, I can play the latest games on hardware that cou
Even if it worked it is useless (Score:2)
The benefit of streaming games is that you don't need high-end hardware. But streaming only works well for slow-paced low-fidelity games. So I see no use for for streaming games at all. The casual ones don't benefit from streaming, and the high-end ones don't work well.
Knowing Google (Score:2)
The gaming system will only work for about a year or two, then suddenly support gets dropped without warning, all the servers go offline, and everyone's left with a useless hunk of hardware.
Which means they'll never have me buying one.
don't forget 4 (Score:2)
4) cancel the project after a few years.