Last week in Las Vegas while at CES, I spoke with Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Google’s Chrome OS. In a wide-ranging discussion about the Chrome platform and ecosystem, Liu dropped something of a bombshell on me: the Chrome team is working—very possibly in cooperation with Valve—to bring Steam to Chromebooks.
[…]The next question, of course, is just what sorts of games would even be worth playing on a Chromebook when run directly on local hardware. Currently, most Chromebooks have extremely limited 3D acceleration performance, with only the most recent devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook possessing vaguely passable GPUs. Liu said we could expect that to change: more powerful Chromebooks, especially AMD Chromebooks, are coming. Liu would not explicitly confirm that any of these models would contain discrete Radeon graphics, but told us to stay tuned.
This makes a lot of sense. Sure, you won’t be running the latest and greatest AAA titles on Chromebooks any time soon, but Steam has a massive library of less intensive games and older titles that would run just fine on any mid-range Chromebook. On top of that, this would open Chromebooks up to Steam’s streaming feature.
Here we go again… Let’s save everyone some time, pretend it’s 5 years from now, and declare this yet another dud – because we all know deep down inside that’s how this will end.
Now that we got that out of the way, go ahead and pretend it’ll be different this time…
I guess Stadia is already dead then. As for this, I don’t see a lot of Chromebooks with the required hard drive capacities for it to be of any use. Sure the pixel is out there, but any rational person would buy a full fledged PC or Macbook at that price.
dark2,
Regarding stadia, that’s a good point since that’s google’s own gaming platform. Reviews for it aren’t all bad, and it’s decent enough for what it is, but google over promised and under delivered. It was never going to be as good as local gaming, unless you have exceptional connection to google’s servers, then jitter and latency can be problematic as you would expect. Sure it’s good enough for casual gaming, but far from perfect. The game selection is poor, it runs on limited hardware, and despite the monthly fees there’s no discount for the games versus buying them.
In theory I could see stadia being compelling for travelers who want to game away from home, but it’s not available world-wide or even all of the united states (sorry Hawaii). According to google’s FAQ, standard 1080P quality runs at 12GB/hr, putting me over my cellular data quota at 1/2 hr of gameplay. Lower quality still runs at 4.5GB/hr, but good luck finding a public or even hotel hotspot capable of dedicating those data rates for your game. Hopefully nobody else is trying to do the same.
So, despite it competing with it’s own gaming service, I think it makes sense that google is looking beyond stadia to appeal to gamers. Of course the experience is going to be modest on a typical chromebook, but at least bringing stream in checks boxes that google cannot.
It’s 2020 and one should assume those good reviews are fake ones paid for by Google unless otherwise proven. Stadia never should have left the concept phase once they realized the insane amount of bandwidth it would take, but some executive likely pushed it through anyway.
It is 2020 and one should assume all bad reviews are fake ones paid by the competition unless otherwise proven 😉
But seriously, I don’t play games, so I am not really interested, but even I noticed there were many bad reviews even before launch. I heard at least 2 people in 2 different podcasts who where very sceptical before launch but after testing it for a while they were quite positive and certainly saw a market for it..
The idea has to be sound before it had competition. It’s definitely worth pointing out every time a company knowingly releases a product they know is terrible these days, they spend money on a small army of people to bury the bad reviews (Windows 8, fallout 76, etc.) These aren’t things that have competition that needs to spend money on a bad reciew, and it’s far more common and cheap for these companies to pay peanuts for reddit bury brigades and fake reviews now.
The idea is not sound… you can’t shove pixels *through the internet* and expect to do so with deterministic round trip latency, or even acceptable latency consistently throughout the day.
Probably people that reviewed it positively did so during work hours (which are not peak bandwidth consumption or peak couch time hours). Many reviewers are also few hops away from their data center, but even some that weren’t for example gamers nexus for example is very close to google’s data centers in the research triangle area in NC and still had a terrible experience.
Personally, I have not seen any good reviews for Stadia. However, I have been using it myself.
Works well, but the game library is quite small. There are some missing features, but not stuff that have affected gaming for me (prefer playing on the TV with a controller). I have played through Gylt and half of Red Dead, and besides a few times when the controller has disconnected for a short period, I do not really notice that I’m streaming.
I am living in Sweden though, where data caps is not a thing, and most people have a connection that is good enough for this type of streaming. So basically, if they get some more games I’m interested in before I’m done with Red Dead, I’ll probably keep it.
magni,
Out of curiosity, what are people’s internet rates these days?
Mine is officially up to 60mbps down / 15mbps up, effectively 50/12.
These are up from 30mbps/10mbps about a year or so ago.
One thing we have to watch out for here in the US is fees on top of advertised prices and discriminatory pricing for existing customers who may end up paying nearly twice the advertised prices after a year or two.
https://stopthecap.com/2018/05/29/altice-cablevision-advertises-99-promotion-but-it-really-cost-this-customer-160/
It really sucks if you live in an area with a monopoly.
I’ve tried to find the “normal” pricing for our ISP but I cannot find it anywhere, only random posts where existing customers mention what they’re paying. The ISPs will only list temporary promotional pricing such that consumers have no idea what they’ll end up actually paying. This type of deliberately obfuscated pricing info should be illegal and probably is in countries where companies are held to higher advertising standards. I do wonder what people’s experience is like elsewhere?
Does this is imply that Chrome OS will continue to support 32 bit apps? As everyone knows, the problem with Steam on MacOS is a lot of older games are 32 bit only (e.g. they use an old 32 bit version of the Unreal engine) so don’t run. Even some new games are still 32 bit.
First of all, this is not so much a technical limitation as a decision Apple made to basically force developers and users to upgrade their software. It’s the Apple way. Some Linux distros (Ubuntu) have done similar (dropping 32-bit binaries) but not all. As I understand it it’s still possible to run 32-bit software on 64-bit Linux provided the necessary libraries are installed or bundled in some way.
For a period of time it was an issue to run Windows games on Wine on the newest versions of macOS and Ubuntu, since Wine was 32-bit only. However, in the last year a lot of work has been done to get 32-bit apps working on 64-bit Wine. In fact, I expect a lot of the 32-bit Steam games on Mac would probably work fine if the publishers just got around to updating the bundled version of Wine.
As for non-emulated games, I would expect any games that are new enough to specifically target Steam-on-Linux to offer a 64-bit version anyway.
Does that mean that there will be Chromebooks with some sizeable amount of local storage ?