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[GamesRadar] There won't be a Google Stadia open beta before launch, so you're going to have to trust that it works

CyberPanda

CyberPanda

Banned
Eager to try Google Stadia out for yourself in your living room before you commit to a purchase later this year? Sadly, you won't be able to. Phil Harrison, Google's vice president and head of Stadia, confirmed as much in an interview with GamesRadar earlier today. That's right, there's no Google Stadia beta en route.


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Of course, this is incredibly pertinent given that the Google Stadia experience could – in theory, at least – differ wildly from player to player, depending on a variety of external factors outside of Google's control, from your broadband speed to the way your ISP handles high-bandwidth traffic during peak times. Some prospective users had the ability to try out Stadia for themselves last year, albeit unwittingly; Project Stream let players launch Assassin's Creed Odysseyright from their browser window, accessing the new AAA experience on a high-end performance and graphical configuration regardless of the machine that you had in front of you.






In many ways, it's the perfect test of Google Stadia. It's a showcase that it can work for players in live environments. Of course, given that it could be accessed by so few players – and in only one territory – there are still questions on whether Stadia will actually work. "It was unfortunate that we only ran the Project Stream test in the US, and even then it was only a relatively small subset of players, but you've all experienced it for yourselves and you know it works," Harrison tells me.

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Of course, this is something that Google will struggle to answer definitively without giving players the opportunity to try it for themselves. We've been impressed by everything we've seen and played of Stadia so far in professional capacities, but we are also still yet to see how it performs with our home internet and router. So we put it to Harrison, as Project Stream wasn't available in the majority of the territories that you are launching in this year, have you not considered running a separate test ahead of release to ease these fears?




"Geographically, the US is the most complex place to test; just because of the size of the country. And actually, Europe – and particularly the UK – are much... relatively, they are relatively easier to launch. So we are not going to do another test in the UK or Europe. If we had time we probably would have done so, but we don't need to."


What are the roadblocks stopping that from happening? Was it a question of allocating space in the data servers or something else entirely? From what we can tell, it sounds like Google is now far too deep into launch prep to divert resources to such an endeavour. "Just in terms of the scheduling of building out our data centres. The US schedule was started first and came online first, and the UK/European one came online second. It was just a sequencing of geographies and there was no intention to the meaning of that."


We will have more from our Phil Harrison interview later this week. In the meantime, you may want to read our Google Stadia interview with Google's Director for Games, Jack Buser, as he attempts to detail why this isn't the start of the next-generation of gaming, it's something else entirely.


If you want to get some idea of whether or not your internet might be able to handle game streaming, it's worth noting that there is an official Google Stadia speed test which should give you some idea of what your connection will be capable of delivering.
Click to expand...

www.gamesradar.com

There won't be a Google Stadia beta before launch, so you're going to have to trust that it works

Worryingly, you won't be able to try Google Stadia out in your home before it launches
www.gamesradar.com www.gamesradar.com
 
Spukc

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
I wonder how google will compensate day 1 users.
After the obvious clusterfuck.

hehehe maybe they will give me 1 year of premium instead of 3 months.
Who knows.

I will be surprised if all goes fine honestly,
I still have a double feeling and diablo 3 error 37 flashbacks
 
D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
LordRaptor said:
disappointing, when you consider the long list of consoles that had open betas prior to launch.

that list in full:
Click to expand...
It isn't the console itself, it is about beta testing the online feature. And it is standard to beta test online features, because otherwise you get a Diablo III launch disaster.

A more recent example is the Path of Exile game. PoE used to use Beta Testing for all their new expansions. But then they stopped doing that. And straight after, every single expansion ended up with at least 1 month of buggy disasters at launch, if not longer. Because you have yo bug test the online fuhnction at some point, and if you don't do it with a beta, then that means you have to do it AT launch.
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
Panajev2001a said:
Stadia is an online service more than a HW / console product... it would be a bit disingenuous to compare it to a lack of open beta console releases lol...
Click to expand...

DeltaPolarBear said:
It isn't the console itself, it is about beta testing the online feature. And it is standard to beta test online features, because otherwise you get a Diablo III launch disaster.

A more recent example is the Path of Exile game. PoE used to use Beta Testing for all their new expansions. But then they stopped doing that. And straight after, every single expansion ended up with at least 1 month of buggy disasters at launch, if not longer. Because you have yo bug test the online fuhnction at some point, and if you don't do it with a beta, then that means you have to do it AT launch.
Click to expand...

the underlying technology isn't a consumer problem, its a google problem, and if they fuck it up they'll face the same backlash as - for example - MS did with the RROD.

From a consumer perspective, its just a console. Albeit a 'virtual' one.
 
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D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
LordRaptor said:
the underlying technology isn't a consumer problem, its a google problem, and if they fuck it up they'll face the same backlash as - for example - MS did with the RROD.

From a consumer perspective, its just a console. Albeit a 'virtual' one.
Click to expand...
You don't get it; this is a highly unusual decision that can only be interpreted in two ways.

1. Stadia managers are incompetent and did not realize that nearly all online services get stressed the hardest at launch, and that if you don't iron out the bigger bugs with a beta test then you are going to fail even harder on launch day.

or

2. Stadia managers realized that a beta test would damage the entire platform, with many potential customers realizing their internet are incapable of doing game streaming, and thus cancel their subscriptions before any dollar was committed.

Basically, Stadia is going to collapse catastrophically at launch as a near certainty, without a beta test. The question now is if this disaster was expected and accepted by Google or not.
 
Saber

Saber

Member
Relax guys they just want you to

Endmymiseryjpg+_b5a9233e788c0f3e516f8eed31bb3505.jpg
 
P

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
LordRaptor said:
the underlying technology isn't a consumer problem, its a google problem, and if they fuck it up they'll face the same backlash as - for example - MS did with the RROD.

From a consumer perspective, its just a console. Albeit a 'virtual' one.
Click to expand...

What? Of course is a consumer problem... Google is just trying to get any eventual backlash post purchase/subscription start. You are playing with words now :).
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
DeltaPolarBear said:
Basically, Stadia is going to collapse catastrophically at launch as a near certainty, without a beta test. The question now is if this disaster was expected and accepted by Google or not.
Click to expand...

It might, but they're already ran a beta test, and it didn't.

Panajev2001a said:
What? Of course is a consumer problem... Google is just trying to get any eventual backlash post purchase/subscription start. You are playing with words now :).
Click to expand...

I really don't think the 'founders pack' is anything more than a soft launch, and I really don't think the actual mass market adoption is going to be subscription fee based.
Whatever tiny percentage of people are willing to pay upfront AND have the necessary infrastructure setup to want to, is going to be small enough to not cause a DDOS.
The actual load testing is going to be on the free service.
And they won't need an 'open beta' because its a fucking free service and people can see exactly for themselves how it operates.

Its pretty insane to think a company is trying to smuggle something they know doesn't work and hide that until they've been paid, and then... what? whats the follow up on that for a large publically traded company?
Get sued? Fined by various statutory authorities for reneging on refunds? Why are you convinced this whole thing is some kind of scam?
 
D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
LordRaptor said:
It might, but they're already ran a beta test, and it didn't.



I really don't think the 'founders pack' is anything more than a soft launch, and I really don't think the actual mass market adoption is going to be subscription fee based.
Whatever tiny percentage of people are willing to pay upfront AND have the necessary infrastructure setup to want to, is going to be small enough to not cause a DDOS.
The actual load testing is going to be on the free service.
And they won't need an 'open beta' because its a fucking free service and people can see exactly for themselves how it operates.

Its pretty insane to think a company is trying to smuggle something they know doesn't work and hide that until they've been paid, and then... what? whats the follow up on that for a large publically traded company?
Get sued? Fined by various statutory authorities for reneging on refunds? Why are you convinced this whole thing is some kind of scam?
Click to expand...
You seriously think those in the game industry wouldn't do this? We just had Fallout 76 and Todd Howard stated on record that he deliberately released a broken game because it is the norm. You sound like you are inexperienced concerning the horrible buisness practices that are out there. And that public beta are absolutely necessary unless you want a week long launch disaster.
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
DeltaPolarBear said:
You seriously think those in the game industry wouldn't do this? We just had Fallout 76 and Todd Howard stated on record that he deliberately released a broken game because it is the norm. You sound like you are inexperienced concerning the horrible buisness practices that are out there. And that public beta are absolutely necessary unless you want a week long launch disaster.
Click to expand...

What? The two aren't comparable at all.
And again - stadia has had a beta already. If this was a free service that everyone is going to pile onto to check out day one, yeah, its going to be DDOSed to shit.
It might be DDOSed to shit anyway.

Thats not a thing you can 'beta'. Thats not even a thing a company will give a fuck about, because a launch spike is going to distribute itself into regular usage within a 24 hour period anyway, and the only thing to alleviate it is buy a ton of servers that then go unused.

But there's no requirement for every new piece of software to be 'open betad' or it definitely breaks.
If MS announced that the next Halo is launching with DirectX 13, I don't expect there to be a Halo Open Beta to play through to make sure DX13 works as advertised.
Because its not a consumer problem. If it doesn't it'll get shredded. If it does, nobody fucking cares what the underlying tech is.
 
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xrnzaaas

xrnzaaas

Member
The amount of bad press Stadia keeps getting is surprising, you'd think that Google would hire a small army of influencers to get people excited over it. Or is it still coming?
 
Vawn

Vawn

Banned
LordRaptor said:
the underlying technology isn't a consumer problem, its a google problem, and if they fuck it up they'll face the same backlash as - for example - MS did with the RROD.

From a consumer perspective, its just a console. Albeit a 'virtual' one.
Click to expand...

If I pay for something and it turns out to work horribly, how is that not a consumer problem?
 
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LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
Vawn said:
If I buy something and it turns out to be garbage, how is that not a consumer problem?
Click to expand...

It obviously is, and you would demand a refund.
The underlying technology isn't your problem. The fact it doesn't work is.

e:
If you buy a car and it doesn't run properly, you don't give a fuck if its electric, diesel or petrol based, or how many cylinders it has. You care that it doesn't work.
 
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DeltaPolarBear

Member
LordRaptor said:
It obviously is, and you would demand a refund.
The underlying technology isn't your problem. The fact it doesn't work is.

e:
If you buy a car and it doesn't run properly, you don't give a fuck if its electric, diesel or petrol based, or how many cylinders it has. You care that it doesn't work.
Click to expand...
Actually i am confused anbout your position.

Are you saying Stadia didn't need a Beta Test?

Or are you saying Stadia would fail at launch, but it doesn't matter some how?

The latter is just unbelievable. How is it not a problem, for a product to fail to work properly on launch day?

Are you telling me people would buy Stadia just to have it, and that they don't need to actually use it?
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
DeltaPolarBear said:
Actually i am confused anbout your position.

Are you saying Stadia didn't need a Beta Test?

Or are you saying Stadia would fail at launch, but it doesn't matter some how?

The latter is just unbelievable. How is it not a problem, for a product to fail to work properly on launch day?

Are you telling me people would buy Stadia just to have it, and that they don't need to actually use it?
Click to expand...

Right, there are three different things you are possibly talking about when you say "stadia";
1) Stadia as the collection of APIs that developers are using to create a Stadia game - you as a customer don't need to know shit about what those are or how they work.
That is a developer + google problem. That has gone through and is presumably still is going through extensive beta testing, and none of that testing ever needs to be open or public, in exactly the same way you don't need to know what changes the latest Vulkan or DirectX APIs offer

2) Stadia as "online service" that needs load testing for network traffic; which needs a widescale beta to see what kind of network traffic is involved and likely requirements for load distribution.
Which its already had. As an open beta. And its pretty likely that the numbers involved in that test equate to the number of "founders packs" made available to purchase day 1.
That's why it likely doesn't need an open beta - it already had one. It is 'soft launching' to people prepared to pay money for early adoption.
An actual Open Beta would effectively guarantee a DDOS day 1, because even the people who fundamentally hate the entire concept would check it out purely just to shit on it.

3) Stadia as "new console"; which from a customer point of view you do not give a fuck what the underlying technology is, you just want to play games on a TV with a controller and expect that to just work. That's a binary proposition, and not an objective one, because some people are going to be more or less tolerant to input lag, to visual artifacts, or to any of the other potential flaws. And if you don't have the necessary infrastructure setup for 4K streaming, you're not going to pay for that now. Meanwhile the people who do and are, are going to be providing a fucking ton of telemetry as to how they need to scale up for a wider release (the non-sub option), which I suspect is going to be rolled out in waves rather than any kind of "everyone use this now and guarantee a DDOS" fashion.
 
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D

DeltaPolarBear

Member
LordRaptor said:
Right, there are three different things you are possibly talking about when you say "stadia";
1) Stadia as the collection of APIs that developers are using to create a Stadia game - you as a customer don't need to know shit about what those are or how they work.
That is a developer + google problem. That has gone through and is presumably still is going through extensive beta testing, and none of that testing ever needs to be open or public, in exactly the same way you don't need to know what changes the latest Vulkan or DirectX APIs offer

2) Stadia as "online service" that needs load testing for network traffic; which needs a widescale beta to see what kind of network traffic is involved and likely requirements for load distribution.
Which its already had. As an open beta. And its pretty likely that the numbers involved in that test equate to the number of "founders packs" made available to purchase day 1.
That's why it likely doesn't need an open beta - it already had one. It is 'soft launching' to people prepared to pay money for early adoption.
An actual Open Beta would effectively guarantee a DDOS day 1, because even the people who fundamentally hate the entire concept would check it out purely just to shit on it.

3) Stadia as "new console"; which from a customer point of view you do not give a fuck what the underlying technology is, you just want to play games on a TV with a controller and expect that to just work. That's a binary proposition, and not an objective one, because some people are going to be more or less tolerant to input lag, to visual artifacts, or to any of the other potential flaws. And if you don't have the necessary infrastructure setup for 4K streaming, you're not going to pay for that now. Meanwhile the people who do and are, are going to be providing a fucking ton of telemetry as to how they need to scale up for a wider release (the non-sub option), which I suspect is going to be rolled out in waves rather than any kind of "everyone use this now and guarantee a DDOS" fashion.
Click to expand...
So in conclusion. your argument is that the launch IS the beta test, and that Google is going to allow it to fail because they only care about the wider release later. Interesting that, to say that Google would allow paying customers to have a bad launch because the only subscription customers are somehow the only ones who matters.
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
DeltaPolarBear said:
So in conclusion. your argument is that the launch IS the beta test, and that Google is going to allow it to fail because they only care about the wider release later. Interesting that, to say that Google would allow paying customers to have a bad launch because the only subscription customers are somehow the only ones who matters.
Click to expand...

???

No, I;m saying the beta test was the beta test.
It has an initial limited rollout of people prepared to pay money, and they know exactly how many people will be using the service day 1, because they literally have the receipts for that.
Whats an open beta test going to do other than create the problem you think it needs to perform to solve?

if MS decided to do an "open beta test" of the next xbox, and anyone vaguely interested would get a free Xbox and free XBL beta acount go with it, guess what would happen?
XBL would fucking crash.
Would giving everyone who has any vague interest in playing Xbox for free tell you anything about normal usage scenarios of XBL?
 
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Vawn

Vawn

Banned
LordRaptor said:
No, I;m saying the beta test was the beta test.
It has an initial limited rollout of people prepared to pay money, and they know exactly how many people will be using the service day 1, because they literally have the receipts for that.
Click to expand...

That was not a beta test. Stadia had not even been announced by that point.

Sure, if you had happened to try playing Assassin's Creed at the time, you might have an idea if Stadia will work semi-decently where you live. But, as there was no announcement that it was meant to indicate how an upcoming paid service will work, very few potential Stadia customers had used this service.
 
LordRaptor

LordRaptor

Member
Vawn said:
That was not a beta test. Stadia had not even been announced by that point.

Sure, if you had happened to try playing Assassin's Creed at the time, you might have an idea if Stadia will work semi-decently where you live. But, as there was no announcement that it was meant to indicate how an upcoming paid service will work, very few potential Stadia customers had used this service.
Click to expand...

Like I said above; there are three different things that "stadia" means.
The thing that needed testing 'in the wild' is the thing that they did an open beta for; is game streaming using their backend technology a viable proposition?
The results were mostly positive. They don't need to 'beta test' "if playing games that way is a good enough method of playing games, will people pay money to play games that way" because thats literally a business model.

You can't 'beta test' that.
Either people will pay for that or they won't. You don't know if they will or won't unless you actually try and sell that product to people for actual money.
Giving everyone a - from a customer perspective - free console with however many free games doesn't tell you shit about how successful that console will be,
 
Yoda

Yoda

Member
They kinda had one w/Project Stream, but that was exclusively limited to AC if I'm not mistaken. Short of an amazing marketing campaign I think this is a mistake for Google. Core gamers will be their main customer base out the gate given the price, and they're the most likely to be skeptical of a streaming service.
 
D

Deleted member 752119

Unconfirmed Member
Is there a free trial period? If so I don't see an issue. They already tested things on their end with the beta last year with free access to AC Odyssey for people who got in. Now it's down to whether people's internet can handle it so having a free week or two with no fee for canceling is a must. If they skip that they're going to get a ton of blowback from people who buy a and/or a game they can't play and have to hassle with trying to get refunds.
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
I have no interest in this but no beta doesn't instantly mean no way to try.

Isn't there a free tier? There might be demos or something, or a free trial for the premium version, or at very least more than just brand new $60 games so people that truly can't wait to test them out can get a cheaper game to try it out.

It's Google so you never know but I'd be really weird if they released this with absolutely no way to test it out for free, even if it's just for a day or a couple of hours
 
K

Kokonoe

Banned
That's weird. I've used Nvidia NOW and they have a beta and it was pretty good. That's kinda ballsy to release this without a beta.
 
The Scrivener

The Scrivener

Member
You know that feeling in life where you know what you are doing is wrong and you should stop before it's too late? I wonder if Google are feeling that now.
 
Alexios

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
It's free, why do you need a beta? Well, I guess you'll need to buy a first game if there aren't any demos or free games available on the store? Will there be any? Thought they already beta-ed with Assassin's Creed or something, no?
 
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Pagusas

Pagusas

Elden Member
I thought the Assassins Creed Odyssey was the beta? I even got a free game out of it for helping them test the service.
 
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