There's A Lot To Worry About With Google's Stadia
WE'RE ALL GOING TO GET PLAYED
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On Tuesday, Google announced Stadia, a video game service that will run exclusively on streaming technology. Editors Mat Olson and Steve Rousseau, who enjoy playing video games very much and have found themselves talking about them in the past, chat about why one of the largest technology companies on the planet muscling into the games business is suspect at best, and potentially harmful to the medium at worst.

Mat: Tuning in on Tuesday to the Stadia reveal, I don't know exactly what I expected. I think I anticipated a little bit more in the way of actually showing games, and showing potential? Maybe that was expecting too much of Google, where no matter what they presented they'd have ended up looking new to this just because they are. If you look back at Microsoft's early Xbox conferences — and games press conferences looked different then, granted — they were fighting against the perception of being a total outsider wading into the space.

Google came off as wanting to be the YouTube company, really wanting to be in Twitch's position and only understanding games — not how they intend on delivering them, but video games themselves — at a superficial seeming level, to me. That's an area where they can and probably plan to improve. This reveal was at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which is not really a consumer-facing event. If this was intended to be "for gamers," then it was for a very narrowly defined type of player and it really wasn't about games as an art form.

Steve: It is interesting that they decided to announce this at GDC, especially considering the launch trailer for it. I'm sure some people online have said things far more eloquently than I'm about to, but it was just full of platitudes about video games. It felt odd to be displaying that at a conference for developers. Stuff like "games bring people together," and "games should be for everyone." I don't think anyone will disagree with that sentiment…

 Google

… so the issue I have with that is, there's always been this distinction between "gamers" with big scare quotes — they're the people who buy video game consoles and buy games like "Assassin's Creed" and other AAA blockbusters — and the people who play "Boom Beach" on their phone, who are somehow excluded when it comes to announcing things like Stadia. It's like, "if only we could get the people playing mobile games to play 'Assassin's Creed'," which just perpetuates stereotypes of who counts as a player of video games, and what playing games looks like.

Mat: In a sense all the "hardcore gamer" stuff is a selective history, it's a consumerist history, and in reality it's a vocal minority in the world of gaming enthusiasts.

This messaging from Google comes not even a decade after everyone was talking about how mobile games were where all the money was at, and about how the mobile business model threatened full retail price console and PC games. Now, there's this wholly new business model cribbed from streaming companies that has to, at once, appeal to that limited and stereotypical "gamer" audience (many of whom are now fine with digital purchases and recurring monetization) while also trying to bring in people who they think would play titles made to appeal to that audience if those titles are offered up like Netflix offers movies and TV.

It's weird to me that they're messaging this like everyone wants to play "Assassin's Creed" or "Doom Eternal." Let alone the question of whether those games will be viable as streaming titles. There are plenty of games that would work great as streaming titles right now, games that millions of people play, but that wasn't the messaging they gave. Implicitly, the messaging implies that those games aren't the games enjoyed by their target audience, or by — big scare quotes — "real gamers."

Steve: There are a lot of contradictions here. On the one hand, they're saying Stadia's about "games for everyone," but on the other hand part of the press conference was really technical talk about how Google's data centers can deliver games in 4K at a rock-solid 60 frames per second. Assuming it works, that's amazing. OnLive [a now-defunct cloud computing game streaming service launched in 2010] only managed blurry 720p.

Even with YouTube's video compression, you can see the difference between a local machine and OnLive. 

Mat: Right, but Google's not alone in making this push. Microsoft's got xCloud, Sony's PlayStation Now has been running for a couple years, and Nvidia — a graphics card manufacturer — is getting into the streaming business now. If any company can solve the technical problems here, if only by throwing money at it, it is Google. They've got the capital for these data centers, and this is essentially an offshoot of YouTube. They managed to make high definition streaming video on a massive scale work when people doubted the feasibility of that.

Say one of these companies gets their service to as close to seamless as possible. What OnLive proved is people are reluctant to settle for a compromised streaming experience. If I have the option of either downloading "Doom Eternal" or streaming it, I'm picking between knowing the hardware is the cap on the game's performance versus knowing my internet connection and the operating status of a data center determines my experience. Google had a cheeky slide about long download times for games, but I would much rather wait for installs and patches than constantly struggle with a fluctuating connection.

Steve: Think of all the times that you have watched some form of streaming video on your computer or phone where you've had small hiccups, like maybe Netflix's quality dips or you lose cell phone service while looking at Instagram stories. That's frustrating, but with video games, the fact is that you're making inputs that the game responds to. I didn't try the Project Stream beta, but I know that your input has to go to the data center, it renders a frame of the game and then sends it back to you. If that transit is slow you get input lag, and if you're playing a game like "Doom Eternal" or a multiplayer game in the same vein as "Fortnite," any notable amount of lag will make a huge difference.

For a large amount of people who don't play shooters or other input-sensitive games, they're probably not going to care. But it's something that I don't think Google can get around, just by nature of… the speed of light, I guess?

Mat: I'm somewhat on board with the opposite. Google did make the point at the keynote that with a typical multiplayer game, if you're playing on Stadia you're cutting out a bunch of middleman connections between you and the server that's calculating which person edged the other out. That has promise for leveling the playing field somewhat between people with different connection speeds.

What worries me, and what I think makes it a harder sell, is that you risk turning off the audience you think has always wanted to play games like "Assassin's Creed," single-player games, if when they hit a button, their character takes a noticeable pause before stabbing a guy. If AAA single player experiences are the bait, and they run perceptively worse, it's a horrible sell. Google is trying to frame this as having the ease of Netflix or Spotify, but there's not an example of an actual game streaming service they can point to in order to say "look, the technology works really well." Everything so far has been, at best, not quite there.

Steve: The whole Stadia project is couched in the notion that everyone has an up-to-snuff internet connection. The infrastructure of the internet in the US is hit or miss. On top of that, since Net Neutrality was dismantled in 2017, does that bode well for pinning the future of gaming on streaming technology?

Mat: Yeah, the before you even pay for Stadia, the barrier to entry is how much you pay for a good internet connection. So many people don't have good broadband access, period. On top of that, no matter what price point Stadia or its competitors enter at, the hidden price is the data they're collecting off the users.

Steve: I guess the counter argument to that is that the internet's only going to get faster. At the same time, Google's tearing out its own fiber lines in Louisville. I think it's also troubling that the move from the traditional ownership model of games to a streaming model suggests a similar path to what YouTube took. You can see a world where instead of buying a game, you pay to subscribe to a feed of a developer's games, or the games are free and supported by advertising.

Mat: Yup. Also, with platforms like Steam we've already seen the need for game publishers evaporate to a large extent: small developers can take the chance of putting their games right on a marketplace and hope that whatever advertising and word of mouth they do muster will get the game out to enough people — or that they'll luck out and go viral. Now imagine the same problems, compounded with the issues of revenue share or royalty models.

Steve: Yeah, it's not a perfect 1-to-1, but that's the direction we can expect to head in. You won't necessarily be buying from developers; they'll be hoping they get enough plays to get a cut of the ad or subscription revenue that Google doles out.

Mat: We've already seen the open marketplace model lead to an explosion of titles, which isn't bad if you design the marketplace to be as open as possible while also filtering out garbage. But those principles are often at odds with the profit motivation. What you have now with Steam, where purposefully repugnant games, asset flips and game clones poison the well because the barrier to entry has been pushed so low, that's not even my concern with a streaming service. A streaming service will have to lead with strong titles, but what you risk getting eventually (and people have pointed to Microsoft's poorly-reviewed "Crackdown 3," available on their Game Pass subscription service, as a glimpse of this) you'll get these Greta Van Fleets or forgettable Netflix Originals of games. Games designed with the passivity associated with streaming subscriptions in mind: you'll be more inclined to play whatever, even if it's only OK and especially if it sorta-kinda reminds you of a game you do care about.

 

Also, consider this: Say I'm Toby Fox, and I make "Undertale" — it's offbeat, not trying to compete with AAA games and then boom, it becomes a phenomenon and sells a bunch of copies. Now, if I'm making a game like "Undertale" and I put it on Stadia, is it even surfaced well on this platform? Maybe it's easier than ever to get people to play, but are they purchasing my game or am I a tenth of a cent from of all my players' Stadia subscriptions for the month? Am I forced to go the streaming route because it has captured the audience that would've bought my game?

Steve: I would definitely want to hear from a developer about this. At least in the last decade of casually watching the video game industry, there are now plenty of game distribution services to use now — at least in the indie sense. It's nowhere near as prohibitive as it was to release a game nowadays, and it's easier to play them.

I don't think Stadia is going to move the needle in terms of getting more people to play games. Maybe that's too pessimistic?

Mat: On top of not necessarily expanding the audience of players, how is a streaming model going to help inspire people to make games if, as game programmer Rich Whitehouse points out, they're not able to tinker with them as much? One of the primary paths to becoming a game developer starts, if not with modifying games, at least beginning with an interesting in picking at the code and putting in cheats. There's no reason to believe that'll be encouraged in a streaming business model, and if it is it'll likely be as a play for user generated content. The same way Google will let you stream your gameplay to YouTube so ads can be run against it, if you're given the tools to tweak games then they'll want to monetize that as well.

Steve: I feel what I'm about to say is both very real and very, um, tin foil hat-y, but Google is one of the largest tech companies on the planet; they make almost all of their money from advertising. I almost feel like I sound like a conspiracy theory nut as I say this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they would add whatever you do on Stadia — whether that's playing a game, how you play a game, how long you play it, the kinds of games you just browse through on YouTube — to the advertising profile Google already has of you. Then they can use that to better target advertising elsewhere to you.

Mat: Oh, absolutely. I can do you better on the tin foil hat stuff. Epic — makers of "Fortnite" and the Unreal engine — were just talking about their new tool kit that evolved out of the explosion of "Fortnite." It's essentially a hyper-detailed dashboard that presents granular data about how players are playing a game. Even if a system like that doesn't have direct hooks to advertising models, it's not hard to then import that data into profiles of your audience or even individual customers. Again, Google is not alone in moving to streaming and I'm sure they wouldn't be alone in doing something like this.

Here's my really big conspiracy conviction, though: one of the few game tool demos Google showed was this idea of AI-driven Style Transfer. It was pitched as being a revolutionary tool that'd free up artists to really create the game they seen in their head, etcetera etcetera. Really what it speaks to the next step beyond what Stadia is.

A condensed version of the GDC Stadia keynote — Style Transfer demo begins at 8:20. Engadget

Stadia aims towards getting rid of the box, i.e. the computing power you own. The ideal of the cloud-based everything is not that you, the user, have a powerful computer and are thus empowered as a user. Instead, you have a minimally viable point of entry to 1) being served content and 2) giving over your data. The step beyond that the Style Transfer demo and other AI-driven art stuff offer a glimpse at is cutting away at the resources needed on the production side of things. The end result of that isn't automating the entire process of game development, but it does make it easy to drop personnel. What if popular tastes are pushed in a direction such that developers don't feel a need to employ environment artists because AI-driven tools can automatically populate game worlds with decoration? Maybe those artists are then swallowed into the user generated content racket — they license models, textures and styles out for pennies so that AI can populate game worlds with them.

That's tin foil hat shit, but automating what would otherwise require labor intensive artistry is literally what they were talking about on stage.

Steve: Here's — well, I dunno if it's a more realistic example — but there are folks online dedicated to using AI to essentially upscale older games. Things like pre-rendered backgrounds in "Final Fantasy." The entire subindustry of re-releasing high definition game collections, something that's largely the domain of smaller studios that are looking for contract work to keep the lights on while they work on an original title, is now something that AI is encroaching on. It's already threatening to take that opportunity away from small developers.

So, Stadia. It'll presumably emulate a streaming business model and introduce AI that phases out jobs? It's like the most capitalist video game system out there.

Mat: Yeah… yeah. But, y'know, it'll probably be like ten bucks a month (ignoring the costs of your fancy internet connection and the device you play on). So… it's a steal!

Steve: Totally.​

<p>Mathew Olson is an Associate Editor at Digg.</p>

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