Yes there will always be some latency.

My point is that stadia and xCloud are downright unplayable over a lot of home connections. For example, my Xbox has a wired connection to fiber and I often can’t LOAD a Xbox cloud streaming game. I either look at the stupid rocket ship screen forever, or the game straight up freezes when it does load.

In order for streaming to stand a chance, things like data centers need to be in the right places and stuff needs to generally work if you pass the connection speed tests.

Stadia did work for me in my area. There were a couple ms of lag that made me not want to use it for PvP games, but it worked perfectly for other stuff. In order for streaming to take off streaming has to work like this for more people.

Because the technology for reliable real time video isn’t there yet. It works in some places, but even in major metro areas you can’t be guaranteed that Stadia or xCloud will have a fast end to end connection.

Of course people are going to buy dedicated hardware when the alternative is totally unreliable for half of the people that try it.

At some point broadband infrastructure will be beefy enough to reliably stream high res video in near real time. When that happens streaming gaming will totally take off. This is inevitable.

It’s basically unusable here. Games won’t load or freeze every couple seconds.

I would argue that streaming is a nice-to-have for most game pass customers. The real value is the large selection of AAA titles.

I could argue that they kept pricing low so they could claw back their old market share from Sony. And they’ve kind of done that, and now that Sony has raised prices, it’s safe for them to follow.

MS is competing with Sony, not Google or Nvidia.

Problem that doesn’t exist?

Expensive hardware that gets outdated, long downloads and installs, giant updates every time you load a game after not playing for a few weeks, PC quality graphics can’t run on a mobile device… I could go on.

Those are very legitimate problems.

Yeah, but xCloud doesn’t have nearly the reliable coverage that stadia has. It’s terrible in my area, and I’m in the area on fiber. Stadia wasn’t.

The writing has been on the wall for months with Stadia. Almost 2 years ago they shut down their studios. Money printers stopped going brrr even when everyone was swimming in government COVID money.

It was great for RPGs, but for competitive stuff, the latency was a little tough. And I’m hardwired into fiber in Silicon Valley, so it ain’t like I’m on satellite out on the farm.

It ain’t just the US with shit ISPs.

Given how most other manufacturers handle Android updates, I still think Google is one of the better options for an phone Android.

Yeah, should probably find a better tech subreddit. I’m only still subscribed because I’ve had a Reddit account since the Digg v4 revolt.

Looking at the homepage of this sub now, almost every article is about the misdeeds of technology companies. No one actually upvotes articles about interesting tech anymore.

This sub downvotes everything in new. It’s a surprise anything makes it onto the front page at all.

A link to The Register? They’re still around?