(This is an article where I try to play Nostradamus)
I love gaming, especially PC. There’s a level of freedom not found in any other digital media. You have full access to the game’s files and memory. This can lead to funny, memetastic, or completely original mods by people passionate enough to take the time to learn an engine and express their creativity.
Games for console have tried in ways to allow such freedom through map makers, and other “mods”, but those playgrounds are so restricted due to console resource limitations, developer investment, and possible console security issues that they’re becoming rarer and rarer. Not to mention the nigh impossible task of designing a controller-friendly UI for level creation for your specific game. Though some make games around it to rousing success.
Stadia has great potential to essentially re-factor the gaming to fix it’s increasing complexity issues for end-users, and in doing so could greatly increase the potential audience.
Today’s complexities
There are so many hurdles people have to jump through to play a traditional video game.
Ecosystem
Each platform has its own store / friends list. This has only gotten worse over time as publishers insist on users also having an account on their platforms (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), which have their own separate friends lists / stores / etc.depending on the hardware platform.
On PC, there are about 10 different stores you could buy from, each with a different game launcher / friends list (off the top of my head: Steam, Windows Store, Twitch, Epic, Battle.net, Origin, Discord, Uplay, Rockstar Social Club). Compound that with upstart stores buying exclusivity rights to games so that users must use their launcher, and the hoops the end-user must factor in become that much more complex.
Multiplayer
Further complicating that ecosystem equation is multiplayer. Once you’ve chosen your platform and game, you’re essentially locked in to only playing with that community. This splits a game’s user base, leading to situations where a community settles on the most populous platform for the long-term. So if in a year you wanted to play last year’s hot fighting game online, you’d have to research to find that most Dragon Ball Fighter Z players are on Playstation 4, a platform you might not have access to. You’d likely be pissed if you bought it for Xbox when it first came out, only to see it’s playerbase dry up. Oh and if you do move platforms, your progress and ranking is completely reset.
Only recently have platform owners been willing to allow cross-platform play for some games. You still can’t easily play with friends however.
Another factor is cheating. PC users have direct access to files and memory, leading to an arms race between publishers / developers installing any number of anti-cheat measures on user’s machines, and cheaters becoming more and more clever. It may be less of an issue on consoles, but it still exists and can be rampant for unpopular and popular games alike.
For console games, latency issues between players can also lead to frustration as the server will often cater to person with the highest ping, causing out of sync issues and terrible control inconsistency.
Cost
Current generation platforms have a relatively high upfront cost for the hardware, especially if opting for the higher performing consoles because you want games to run better. No, the system interface will not be quicker with better hardware, as your time is apparently not valuable. Additional controllers are about $60 too, but of course there are higher cost options for those too.
Traditional “triple A” games are generally around $60 on release. But don’t forget the season pass for the hot new game, it’s only $30-$60 more.
Oh and if you want to play online (on console platforms anyway), that’s an additional $20-$60 a year depending on the platform.
Patching
That brand new game you just got and desperately want to play? Sorry, you’ll need this 5 GB patch installed first. If you have slow internet, I guess you’ll have to play it tomorrow.
And hey, if you haven’t turned on your console in a while, you’ll probably have to patch the system too in order to use the store / online functionality.
Future planning and cycles
Traditional hardware cycles used to mean that a platform’s next hardware sequel would be about 4-8 years out. The platforms have been releasing iterations (slimmed down, more storage, etc.) to pad out the lifecycle and fix hardware issues, but with this generation we saw iterative hardware that also increases the power available to games. This is yet one more variable users may have to consider when making their decision.
PC gaming can be more fluid with the incremental upgrades (swap out individual hardware when it becomes a bottleneck), but the upfront cost of the hardware and research time is a huge disadvantage for new users. That deep-dive hardware culture has pushed the component manufacturers in positive ways, but the market is incredibly dense for the average user. Do you know what an IPS G-Sync 144 HZ 1440p with a low latency response monitor is and why you need it?
How Stadia can change this
Those variables are very likely a huge turnoff to potential gamers. While no solution will solve all of those issues, there is potential to re-factor, improve, or actually replace a lot of them.
Cost
This is potentially a huge simplification of the cost breakdown depending on how Google handles it.
Streamlined store transactions
To keep publishers happy and spur early game developer adoption, it’s likely that they’ll allow publishers to sell Stadia games on their existing stores. Where I see the publishers loosening those store requirements is with the discoverability highlighted by the Youtube and Play Store integration.
Google may also insist on more transparent store purchasing / user accounting; perhaps tying publisher user accounts to their Google account, and using their existing Google account payment information.
Subscription model?
Google could also go the subscription route. Xbox Game Pass seems to be incredibly popular, and it certainly helps simplify the cost structure with other media: see Netflix. But it doesn’t include all games.
The larger issue for this model is that games are incredibly expensive to produce and maintain. Especially if you’re tailoring a game to a specific platform, you don’t want it to disappear from that platform, dissimilar to Netflix since that media is licensed based on time. Games are very different in that regard.
Another issue with that model is how they can calculate reimbursement to the publisher / developer. I don’t think it’s possible to base it on the game time as that varies a great deal from game to game. You can’t do it based on install, which I think is how PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass work, because there is no install; you could essentially hit “Play” on a game accidentally with how simple it is.
Problems that go away
Based on some interviews with the Google Stadia team, a number of current factors could go away.
Multiplayer latency
Because of the very fast private pipes between data centers, multiplayer latency could become a non-event and open up more compute intensive games that weren’t possible before.
While Google and Microsoft are supposedly onboard with cross-platform play, we’ve yet to see how the cloud gaming platforms will interact with each other in terms of latency.
(Unfinished sections)
- Makes the initial cost of playing graphically intensive games incredibly low*
- Available compute grows over time
- Play on any screen
Fluid hardware and Google’s cloud
In removing the requirement for a local, compute-intense system, the data center hardware can be changed more often, scale up on-demand by devs / automation, and move between locations. This is all transparent to the user in theory.
This also removes the major upfront cost to the user, and takes away a considerable amount of the onus for hardware testing by the game developer. Thermal testing would presumably go away.
Mitigating input lag and controller pairing
Bluetooth controllers are mostly a wonderful thing. They’re able to be used with any number of devices since Bluetooth is so ubiquitous. In order to use Bluetooth you must pair it with a device, and if you move to another device, you’ll have to pair again. This seems like a minor inconvenience, but as more devices are able to be used, so scales up the annoyance.
The surprise announcement that the Stadia controller would use Wi-Fi to directly connect to the datacenter is a really smart way to:
- Skip the streaming device entirely to reduce input lag (skips 1-2+ hops)
- Allow for even more screen devices to be used without issue (some TVs don’t have Bluetooth, and lol if you think I’m using a wired controller in 2019)
- Eliminates the pairing step. Move from one TV to another without re-pairing.
- Reduce Bluetooth range issues and latency costs (Wi-Fi has less latency and higher bandwidth)
New problems
Ownership
As we’ve seen with various digital stores, ownership is becoming muddled, confusing, or just disappearing. The publisher / developer could have direct control over your ownership and possibly even revoke it if no restrictions are in place.
The problem is exacerbated when we consider Google’s recent shut down spree. I would like to think that since this is a pay-for service, the incentive to make users happy long-term is enough for them to guarantee access to purchases.
Steam has a similar issue in its early years, and Gabe even announced that if Valve died, they’d release the master key. A similar promise from Google might help encourage customers, but they have a lot of rebuilding of their brand with tech enthusiasts.
Speaking of Google, their reputation for killing services has only become more fraught with the death of Google+, a company-wide effort to break into the social media market. The internal passion for it seemed top-heavy and half-hearted, and it was soon fairly obvious that it wasn’t panning out.
I knew a lot of users who jumped on simply because it was Google, but the magic didn’t last and it presumably did long-term damage to their new service adoption rate .
Another multinational controlling yet another mass market
Google owns more than half of search. Their email service is probably the current leader. Their phone operating system is on more than half of the world’s phones. I’m typing this article in Google Docs. Do they really a piece of this market?
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