A visitor plays a cloud-game at the stand of Google Stadia during the Video games trade fair ... [+]
Google Stadia continues to sit on the knife’s edge of what could be a world-changing addition to the video game landscape, or being a Google Glass-level miss. If it works, it could eliminate console hardware entirely within a generation. If it doesn’t, well, the boxes may just keep on coming.
The latest confusion surrounding Google Stadia is an interview in EDGE Magazine with Google's VP of engineering Madj Bakar, as relayed by PCGamesN. Latency is obviously the largest point when it comes to Stadia working or not, and Google has some…interesting plans to try and reduce that. Not just reduce it, but Bakar claims Stadia could be more responsive than local machines soon. Wait, how does that work exactly?
“Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally regardless of how powerful the local machine is,” Bakar told EDGE.
The term “negative latency” is brought up, in which Google aims to reduce latency by boosting FPS, but also by predicting user inputs. As in, Stadia will predict what button you’re going to press in a given context in a game, and then press that button before you even do it, which will make it feel instant when you do press that button.
This, naturally, has everyone confused.
This has sparked debates about the “autoplaying” of games if the system is just going to predict all your movements for you, though I don’t really think that’s what it would be like in practice. But rather, a more important question is what would happen if the system predicts wrong, which could end up resulting in even more latency if the system has to course-correct.
Visitors play the cloud-gaming based "Doom" at the stand of Google Stadia during the Video games ... [+]
There is some amount of prediction already used in many games, especially in multiplayer as a way of getting around online latency issues there, so this is not exactly as revolutionary a concept as it sounds. But those games are also not running on a streaming-only service.
For many, this sounds like Stadia getting ahead of itself. The first test is to see if Stadia can consistently be at least on par with local machines and it can worry about beating them later. I have seen a variety of early Stadia previews ranging from “it really works!” to “it works most of the time,” and if the experience has players running into latency issues even some of the time, it may be enough to sink the concept.
Stadia also faces other questions, like why it will be anything other than a secondary purchase for most players, as it does not have a stable of exclusives titles like Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo. There are still issues to contend with regarding internet data caps, especially in places like the US, concerns which so far have been mostly dismissed on Google’s end, as they are literally just assuming ISPs will get with the times and increase/remove those caps.
Google Stadia launches in November of this year, one year ahead of the next generation of consoles, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett, in 2020. Whether it shakes up the industry or does nothing of the sort we’ll have to see.
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