The premise of Google’s streaming service, Stadia, is simple: play a game wherever you want, whenever you want. That remains an attractive pitch, but as evidenced by growing complaints in the months after launch, reality is more complicated. Google has promised Stadia will get better—it has nowhere to go but up—but in its best form, Stadia is a limited platform; the games that you already own cannot take advantage of Stadia’s technology.
whispers The answer is yes they have, it’s a pretty good service that hooks directly into Steam. Google probably has a bigger server farm so their stuff probably functions better, but GeForce Now isn’t bad by any stretch.
Also my preferred pitch for “why streaming” is “you have a dinky laptop and these dang strategy games keep getting more demanding.” A strategy game like an XCOM 2 or a Civ doesn’t demand quickness or a lack of latency, just a good enough picture and a decent enough latency to where you can control the UI without fighting it. I imagine strategy games aren’t a big enough market though to be the main thing you point to as your selling point.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, but strategy games are pretty mucht the perfect application for streaming! Especially 4x games or games where you are on the same map for an entire game, and processing takes longer and longer as the game goes on.
In light of the environmental impact of streaming media, doesn’t this make a case against stuff like this? This tech seems especially wasteful since it requires high end GPUs in addition to the usual streaming gear. Not saying streaming makes people bad, just that we should ask these companies to disclose the energy consumption of these products
My roommate bought an Nvidia Shield (the pricier $200 model) and I’m honestly really impressed with it and I don’t see why more people are not talking about them.
The thing streams games internally really well, it streams games from their servers really well, and it’s a full blown Android box with decent amount of RAM and GPU so it does not only Plex streaming amazingly but emulation up to at least N64.
If you have been considering a raspberry pi for emulation but don’t have fun tinkering or troubleshooting Linux then I whole heatedly recommend the Shield.
