Google gets into game streaming with Project Stream
techcrunch.comReally feel sad about recent prevailing sentiment across HN. Some comments seem to suggest Google needs to provide the following for this kind of "tech test":
* Available for all browsers and comply all web standards.
* Available for all languages across all regions, with accessibility features.
* Promise not to "launch and shutdown in a few years".
* Imply a real future product.
But I'm guessing what Google wants to do is to just prove if "game streaming" is technically / financially viable for mass crowds based on their technology in hand. If not, maybe shelf and wait for a couple of years without dumping a lot of resources and drawing bad sentiment.
What requirements are you thinking which should be applied to such a "tech test"?
They can do whatever they want; I signed up for the trial, but bullet points 3 and 4 are why I would be extremely hesitant to pay a dime for it today.
In contrast, I made a Steam account back in 2003, right when they launched. In college and grad school, I fell out of gaming, but when I came back in around 2012 with a brand new computer, all my old games were still available in my account, ready to be downloaded.
This seems to be a test that may turn into a future cloud product? Google has a lot of Pops which provide great latency for users, If they start filling these pops with gpus so that companies like ubisoft or epic or $gamecompany can pay for the infrastructure and let users pay them a subscription and then I don't have to drop 500+ dollars every year to stay relevant with AAA titles, maybe it all works out?
This is the reason MANY people don't get into PC gaming and opt instead for a console. Yes, it's a downgrade from what you can get with a PC, but having to drop $500+ every other year on the latest graphics card is not something many want to do.
And the browser-based approach seems like a great solution for the platform issue. Being a Mac user I often miss out on steam games since they are mostly focused on Windows releases.
I'd like to see a contingency in the agreement that allows one to download the games you own if they shut down the service. Would have been nice if OnLive had done that.
Good luck getting agreement from the game publishers.
These are the sorts of projects that make sense to me for Google to be playing around with. Namely, they are highly experimental and pushing what might even be possible, but have the potential to (especially if Google shows success) suddenly boom into a large market since games have a high demand.
It also makes sense for Google to push for this sort of usage since it's more data going through pipes. Data they can analyze in some way, make money, etc.
The Google projects that make less sense to me are projects that are largely about data retention, long term stability, and are generally considered solved problems. I.e. email and office suites.
Those long-term solved projects can be sold to other companies as part of GSuite.
I'm honestly not sure how that wasn't obvious to me.
> highly experimental and pushing what might even be possible
This is hardly true, Nvidia already does this, charges for it, and it works really well on a good connection.
I know where you are coming from, and I am sympathetic to Googlers who just want to do a quick test.
But "Google" means something specific in regards to quality for Billions of people, and you start to have a responsibility to the brand regarding dependability at some point if you want to do things under the Google Banner.
But it's so easy to give these projects their own name, branding, and websites while they are in this tech test phase. If they hit on something great, then they should absolutely fold it in with the rest of the G Suite, but until they know why not sell to people with out the Google connection to see how it does?
Or you can read the large text that says "Test a new way to play" and calibrate your expectations.
Does this mean I'll now need a Steam, Uplay, and Google account all simultaneously logged in to play an offline game by myself?
And if something goes wrong, I can expect absolutely zero tech support?
And I'll lose access to all my games in 11 months when Google kills it?
And it'll post my Achievements and owned games to my Google+ account automatically and try to make it Social?
And if I get banned from the games stuff for some reason, I'll lose my other Google accounts like Gmail, since they're all linked?
With all that value-add and free extra latency, I basically HAVE TO sign up! What a deal!
Well since this is a streaming service, there is no such thing as an "offline" game as you need to be connected to the internet to stream it. I"m guess they will have some sort pay for play time model rather than a full game purchase. This would be the streaming equivalent of renting a red box title, but hopefully cheaper.
Offline meaning single player, streaming not withstanding, that's a lot of crap to go through (managing and maintaining many accounts and clients) to boot into a game that you're going to play by yourself (not multiplayer), and a lot of points of failure between you and your small amount of recreation time after work.
You already have to do this to play any AAA title? I really don't see the issue?
The issue is that it doesn't have to be that way, didn't used to be that way, and isn't that way for pirates.
Just because it's the state of affairs doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Consoles are arguably a better experience in several regards, and I want the PC to be as enjoyable, considering PCs cost more; e.g. you can play Diablo 3 without an internet connection on PlayStation, but not on PC.
You can play some random AAA game on a console without having to put in a key or maintain an account or a third party client (or multiple third party clients!), where on PC you have to do those things.
You can sell a console game or give it to your friend when you finish playing it, but on PC it's "already activated".
Google is going to take all the above and make it worse, so they can get their % of the sale too.
Just because some company wants us to do something or behave some way doesn't make us obligated to do so.
You're perfectly entitled to your own opinion of why you think it's terrible and why it will fail and is useless, etc (and I would agree with some of your points). But I just don't understand:
> Just because some company wants us to do something or behave some way doesn't make us obligated to do so.
Don't use it if you don't like it ? Google launching something doesn't mean you're "obligated" in any way, so I don't know what you're trying to say with that sentence.
You can opt out in the beginning, but later it becomes a monopoly.
You can't even buy a game on a DVD anymore without it requiring Steam to install, activate, and play.
So, in theory, if they succeed, it won't be optional anymore.
"Oh then you can just stop playing games!" ... yes, but I would prefer not to. I would prefer a fair exchange of money for an unencumbered product.
Hopefully, if I speak out now about the potential and likely dangers of such a service, then I may hinder its adoption and prevent the further decline of an art form that I hold very dear.
Then support gog.com and accept that you won’t have access to all games, but you’ll own the games you buy.
I know this is the exception and not the rule, but cdpr games are DRM free on GoG.
Clearly you are not happy with the announcement. :-)
Rather I'm not happy with the foreboding.
I really like video games, and they keep getting worse... not the games themselves, but everything around them (due to "business" concerns), such as my above concerns, and IAP/DLC, and Xbox Live/PSN/Nintendo all charging money to play games on your already-paid-by-you internet connection, where it used to be free (since you can act as a server).
For DLC, in some cases, it's never sold on physical media, so for example you buy a playstation game, and half the game is DLC, and then 5 years later Sony shuts down the service that delivers the DLC, and you're left with half a game, so when your kid turns 10 and you want to show him this cool game, now you only have half of what you paid for.
Games now require mandatory updates to play alone by yourself (GTAV needs gigabytes of updates, no option to play the game offline alone and update later)... so you get home after work and want to play for 30 mins but have 2 hours of updates to download or more.
And a million other little things. Pardon me for not wanting Google to pour more gas on the garbage fire.
I understand the concern.
To play Devil's advocate, I would love to see real data on how much these older games get played.
The idea is that we buy a game and will continue to play it off and on for YEARS. But is that reality? Or do we finish a game or get tired of a game and then move on to a newer title and never return to those older games we thought we'd continue playing in the future?
I have MANY PS3/PS4 games I thought I would pick up again eventually. My PS3 has now been donated to goodwill after years of being disconnected and gathering dust in my media room.
And on my PS4, the disc games I can't even find. Most titles are digital buys and I've actually deleted from from the console since I'm not playing them. I find myself moving from new game to new game every 6 months or so. A few multi-player games I'll stick with periodically while it's active, but once the sequel is released I'll move on too.
To be fair, many of the problems you just described are specific to console games. But more specifically to your point this service would actually eliminate the need to keep the game up to date, as the centralized server would maintain an update product. So this might actually improve your game experience, as you would never have to wait for an update again!
Plus it runs in chrome so you don't even have to worry about installing/tweaking settings/finding the disk anymore either.
This will be adding those problems (centralization of services, recurring costs to play your existing games, and to play multiplayer) where they don't already exist.
PC game companies are already making single player games that run on your local machine require an "always-on" network connection to "thwart piracy".
I've posted more above, but I have also posted this yesterday detailing why these multiple-clients-required games can and will personally sting you, and are a benefit to absolutely no one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111288
tl;dr: steam doesnt tell uplay you own the game, uplay uses a separate key, it takes days to go via tech support to fix your game, or just minutes to pirate it. Google is going to amplify this already crappy situation.
Have you checked out my company https://parsecgaming.com? We offer this but also the ability to connect to your own computer and invite your friends to connect to your computer too.
I think you're being down-voted because the comment is kind of advertise-y (maybe that'll be different in an hour).
Since it is your company, do you have any insight into potential challenges that the average reader wouldn't consider? I understand that a benefit to "game streaming" is that a game originally not networked (like splitscreen only) can be played by multiple people over a streamed connection.
Hey. I have a lot to say :), and I provided a lot of thoughts to this FastCompany article about the industry - https://www.fastcompany.com/90225352/microsoft-is-the-right-.... Generally, as we have seen media wants to be streamed. And in this case, streaming is a great solution for distributing content and unlocking games from the hardware they've been walled off in. That being said, streaming video games is a very different proposition technically and financially. People have been asking for the Netflix of gaming for a long time, and companies really want to build it because it puts them at the center of an entertainment industry that is growing extremely fast and grabbing more attention every year. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics now says that the average American's day includes 60% more time playing video games than it did in 2011, and people who do play games play for 2.4 hours each day. Most of the technical challenges with this have been worked out.
Streaming video at 60 FPS or greater and at 4K is possible. We do it all day at Parsec, but the economic challenges are real due to the requirement that you need to render video in real-time. Rendering in real-time requires each user to have access to a GPU or 1/2 of a cloud GPU until newer technologies allowing for true virtualization appear on the market. Cloud GPUs are generally very expensive to operate, and as many of us know, the cloud providers charge a lot to use them for gaming and/or ML. Companies with scale can lease them at lower rates and have lower energy costs lowering the overall cost to serve, but they are still very expensive to operate. Even if you get the rates down to $0.15 per hour, you're still looking at overall hardware costs at $10 per month. Your subscription price will have to cover the hardware and the content license. The content itself is very expensive to license as well because we consume games very differently from the way we consume TV and media. When people binge on Netflix, they're binging on many shows or many movies. When people binge on games, they're playing 1 game for 100s of hours. You can see this in the Steam Spy data. The median Steam customer only buys 1-2 games each year - https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260. Many cloud gaming companies and game companies are aiming to increase the market for AAA games via streaming from the cloud. They're trying to reach the latent gamers who don't play games any more. In our opinion, that's a lot less exciting than delivering something valuable to current consumers of games. Consumers don't switch to a new distribution technology because it's a cool technology. They switch when it gives them something unique that they couldn't get before the technology existed.
This is why, at Parsec (https://parsecgaming.com), we're focused on delivering unique experiences around games via streaming technology. We make it so you can find other people around you and invite friends to play local co-op games with you online. We're recreating the couch gaming experience we love and making it available online. This experience brings a new element to gaming that gamers today benefit from and enjoy.
> I think you're being down-voted because the comment is kind of advertise-y.
It would have been upvoted if it was a reply on one of the top comments that complain about Google, though. Placement.
I've really been enjoying Parsec, for whenever I wanna casually drop into a Windows game (am mainly using macOS).
Great job!
Thanks!
I used Parsec for the first time maybe a week ago and I was really impressed by the site and software. It worked exactly for what I needed it for and was one of the easiest signup and setup processes I've seen.
It was all-in-all easy, fast, and worked which is becoming more and more rare imo.
So happy to hear this, and I shared with the rest of the team. Thank you!
What game were you playing?
A Hat In Time, it's a fun indie platformer. Co-op was just added but it's only local co-op for now but me and a friend wanted to try it out even though we live a few hours apart.
Setup was super easy but my friend did say he was having a few visual issues because I was hosting and I have a 3440x1440 monitor. I didn't get to see what the issue was like but he did say it was manageable.
I've been using Parsec to stream games from my Windows PC to an Raspberry Pi connected to my TV. It's really cool!
Sounds like basically a home-brew Steam Link, any pointers on more information about how it's hooked together?
I rather enjoy my Steam Links, although I'm not sure how much traction they really got - not too long back I picked up a couple more on sale for like $10 a pop...
Hey. This is an old blog post (we have some new ones coming out soon), but it details our approach to this. https://blog.parsecgaming.com/description-of-parsec-technolo...
I think Valve might be moving to a software Steam Link instead of the physical box. You can download the software, also called Steam Link, on Android devices. I think you can also install it on some smart TVs, but I'm not sure.
Yeah they have an app for modern Samsung TVs at least, I think 2017- models
Steam Link is definitely a good value on sale, but I feel it's still pretty buggy. Often time the desktop will flicker and the controller support is still not great. Definitely doesn't feel as polished as running a console.
It seems like a cool concept however when I use it the image comes out as near-pure black, everything seems to be incredibly dark for some reason.
I've used various game streaming services and have found parsec[0] to be the best in this domain. Their service prioritizes latency above all else and it performs well though there's alot of artifacts. It runs on top of amazon services so server placement is a non issue.
Correct me if I'm wrong but these services are quite different no?
The idea of Parsec is that a machine you own is rendering and uploading a game that you also own. Google seems to be playing around with the idea of games as a service, where they render a game you don't own on a machine you don't own, and let you play it for presumably a monthly subscription.
Well you don't upload but parsec provides everything google is planning on offering with the freedom of allowing you to use it as your own computer. So I am not sure what you are getting at.
Unless google undercuts competing small businesses in the same space, they're dead on arrival. They do not offer anything that's not on the market today.
Thanks :). Really appreciate your support.
The biggest bottle-neck to any game streaming service is latency and I've some major doubts that they're going to be able to resolve it unless the client is located really close-by to servers. I messed around with Steam InHome Streaming, Xbox Streaming and PS RmotePly a bunch from work where we have the same ISP as I do at home. The speed between the two is around 6-700mbit and yet the added latency can still be felt and I don't live very far from work.
From my own experience the extra delay can be tolerable in a few game genres, especially on console-optimised games where, to my knowledge, developers optimise controls for higher latency due to a possibility of a slower tv. Obviously PC FPSes and the like suffer the worst. It does work really well on the same LAN, though: I decided to use a tiny SteamLink for my living room gaming needs instead of messing around with long HDMI cables and the added fiddliness of having to directly use the desktop launch games.
I wouldn't really sign up and pay for a service operated by Google, tho.
By the way, while a future affordable game streaming service that works well might lower the bar of entry to the hobby, I have a serious fear of such a thing enabling the worst parts of the video game industry to take over. The software-as-a-service model and renouncing the last vestiges of actually owning a copy of a game seems like a terribly tempting way to turn the entire industry off of actual creativity and onto even more "whale-chasing".
Looks like there is an older article but it didn't float as quickly as this one [0]. This is a direct link to the signup page [1], and this is a link to the about page [2].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18115445
[1]: https://projectstream.google.com/aco/signup
[2]: https://blog.google/technology/developers/pushing-limits-str...
Link 2 is really the link I'm looking for. It's the source to all of these other 3rd-party articles.
Sidenote: can't stand how much space the header and footer (related articles) takes up on that page on desktop. The scroll-up-to-view-the-header pattern is disgusting with an header that big.
AFAIK Ubisoft was already planning to stream AC: Origins to the Nintendo Switch in Japan (it's not coming to the Switch outside of Japan, I think). I wonder if they'll sell it on cartridge; that'll have to be one of the first games where the publisher can turn off the server and you now have a cartridge that doesn't do anything.
It's nothing new in Japan, it's normal.
https://kotaku.com/in-japan-the-nintendo-switch-is-streaming...
Doesnt even work on firefox or IE. It tells me to use Chrome which I recently ditched due to privacy violation concerns.
I don't see problems here. It's a tech pilot, not a product. The goal is to prove it viable, maybe the team size is even small. Spending much time on browser compability too early may not be that wise if they just need hundreds or thousands of testers.
It's amazing how Chrome has become the Internet Explorer 6 of the modern web era.
Instead of ActiveX I wonder what would be an appropriate way to describe it.
Trojan?
This is literally testing streaming to Chrome. I'm guessing that optimizing this required some serious client side support, so it would make sense why it would only work for Chrome. That being said if it takes off, I can easily other browsers supporting a standard.
It is an outrage. I also opened it on Lynx, and all I saw was some weirdly rendered characters. Why, Google ?
How is this different from https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/ or http://onlive.com/ ?
Seems similar to me, I've been exclusively using geforce now for the past 6 months. Works extremely well if you're just a casual gamer with no dedicated gaming computer (I'm playing on my Mac). I'm curious to see how it stacks up against it and what the price of it would be
> OnLive is in the process of liquidating its remaining assets
it is not on liquidating (at least not yet)
The company may be liquidating but the service looks identical.
Timing and the amount of funds / data centers available to sustain this, at least.
OnLive came out in 2010. I assume that there has been a significant improvement in average consumer Internet connection speed in the last ~8 years.
The big challenge here isn't the tech side, it's getting the games that people want to play. Many, many companies fail to compete with the likes of Steam for instance because they can't attract enough interest from developers and publishers, meaning their libraries are lacking.
Google partnering with Ubisoft is promising here, but the question will be whether they could get the likes of Activision, EA, Square Enix, Capcom, Konami, Take Two, etc to work with this service as well. If they can't, they'll end up with the streaming equivalent of Origin or what not, while whoever does get everyone on board will take the market.
Whoo another streaming service that will be bad
If anyone has the resources and technical expertise to make it work, it'd be Google.
I don't have much hope. Hangouts is still rarely a flawless experience whether due to software or connection issues.
My experience so far as a beta tester has been very positive, for what it's worth.
Resources and technical expertise don't matter if you're as bad at deploying and maintaining non-critical-to-your-business services as Google is
GeForce now has been great for me
Oh good, the company that constantly bails on it's ventures is starting a new one in a space that is far from being realized still.
Seriously, if what's the goal? Being a supporting network for gaming infrastructure?
I'm sorry but this joke is getting really old.
HN loves to point fingers when company stands still. Heck, we made a teaching moment out of Kodak and others who failed to innovate and relied too much on their cashcows.
On the other hand, we proclaim nice-sounding ideas such as being aware of sunk cost fallacy and how everybody should say no more. We talk about being data-driven and dont go by what gut says. Beware of the vocal minority. Dont be afraid to pivot or let go. We tell others dont wait for your products to be perfect to launch. Get it out there, test the market and iterate.
HN has their biases (I can build that in a weekend!) but the recent discourse of "OMG! they are going to desecrate it" is very silly.
>I'm sorry but this joke is getting really old. HN loves to point fingers when company stands still.
Joke? There's no need for the false dichotomy.
Google in particular has the organizational attention span of a goldfish on meth, and many of us have been burned one, two, or three times by their recurrent habits of setting something awesome up and then killing it off a short time later with no sane alternatives in place.
This reputation is entirely earned[1]. The safe thing to do if you don't want to sign up for a sudden migration headache in the future is assume that any new Google product is another symptom of their "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" mentality, and that it won't last for more than a year or two.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
(For bonus points, do a mental exercise and note how many of the "absorptions" lack the features of their standalone counterparts)
All of this would be resolved if Google called these projects experimental.
This is a significant distinction. It's also a massive deterrent. Who builds on experimental? Google isn't incentivized to do this. So, everything new Google puts out is hence, experimental.
It's not an old joke. You're just getting tired of it.
You're basically invalidating all of these engineers who believe in a thing called "trust," and undervaluing it with a statement like this.
They're calling it a "technical test", how is that not equivalent to experimental?
Google's promotion and incentive structure is built around launching products. This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
> This will launch, putter along for a couple of years and then get shuttered unless it's a surprise success.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but isn't that effectively how Silicon Valley as a whole operates? Most startups putter along for a few years before running out of money and getting shuttered. A couple become surprise successes and take off.
Google is effectively just a single corporation acting like a hive of startups.
If they make it work, Chromebooks just magically turned into gaming machines.
Chromecast, too.
Sure, though technology or ideas from products that aren't successful is often incorporated in future projects.
Honestly there's a really good blog post/article waiting to be written grouping and classifying shuttered google projects into groups based on purposes, because for a lot of them, they aren't created to be successes or make money, but for other business reasons, legal precedents, creating competition or disrupting a particular business segment, etc.
Whether the motivation for their behavior is because of a promotion-based incentive structure or some sort of deep 3d chess corporate strategy, neither makes me excited to use their products when released. Fool me once...
I'll wait until my mom tells me about it.
One of the services I really liked is Google’s url shortening. I wonder why they discontinued it?
Without knowing any details (and too lazy too look it up) it might be just the case that this was built on some old framework/technology that now has been deprecated and the effort to bring it up to date was not worth it.
Because if your connectivity and their servers are able to handle the load, this reduces the need for a gaming PC for a lot of people which in turn makes Android and ChromeOS very attractive. Or, promising the ability to play it within Chrome the browser regardless of platform, this would be the dream of games being truly cross platform. Pay for it on PC, play it on an Android device? Awesome. Release Chrome for PS4 and/or Xbox One and that same game works there? Very, very nice.
Admittedly, there are other people in this space, but I figure they'd find a way to make the incentives pretty hard to pass up.
Another rent-seeking opportunity on subscriptions that would allow AAA games on underpowered Chromebooks?
"Sorry, this project is currently open in the U.S. only" can someone make images of the webpage, please. thank you
I tried, but it's also only for Chrome https://i.imgur.com/xcqYdjA.png
So following Google’s gold-standard for accessibility then: both geo AND user-agent blocked.
How could it possibly fail?
Because it is a test. One would imagine they want to limit the scope initially and expand out as time (and gravitation towards being a full fledged product) allows.
This doesn't seem particularly shocking. Shadow just recently (I believe) opened an east coast data center which now allows for their streaming service to work on the east coast, so perhaps Google is only allotting their US data centers to support this (one would assume initially and that if it is a hit/worth continuing, it'd expand out). Chrome is their browser so either: a) they're wanting to keep support requests limited to things within their control (or at least, reduction of variables is important in the phase they're going). b) they're wanting to be a full fledged gaming platform so they're not interested in supporting others.
Any US visitors to that particular URL will see the same thing you're seeing. You probably want this page, though currently it just lets you request an invite: https://web.archive.org/web/20181001174931/https://projectst...
Their blog post has more information: https://blog.google/technology/developers/pushing-limits-str...
As well as the help and FAQ support articles: https://support.google.com/projectstream/
I hate that Google can pour money from its infinite ad revenue into other things and beat out competitors by virtue of being able to sustainably run unsustainable (for others) businesses.
EDIT: For people who are interested in this, I would recommend studying the history of AT&T, especially the 1956 consent decree.
When has Google succeeded in doing this? To me, it seems like Google burns a lot of money on a project just to deprecate it a few years later.
The other player at the moment happens to be Amazon. So any competition is a good thing.
Amazon? Are you thinking of Twitch, because this isn't that.
Parsec, Paperspace, GeForce Now, Shadow, ...
Microsoft are also reportedly working on their own game streaming service.
PlayStation Now is interesting, mostly because Sony has a pretty great exclusive game library.
That's how the big guys can kill innovation.
Pretty much all major tech companies do this. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.
If they can push the industry forward I am all for it. In general some innovations are not sustainable but are still beneficial for the end users, getting these otherwise neglected fields funded through other income streams doesn't seem too bad.
> beat out competitors by virtue of being able to sustainably run unsustainable (for others) businesses.
Is there other providers of similar services?
Wow, never thought of there are so many contenders in this area. I thought Google is the only one having the tech to provide the service in a large scale that possibly can transform the industry.
Then your statement makes sense. I was fantasizing that Google is actually innovating before others. Turns out there is indeed no new ideas in IT.
As a user I am strictly better off that way.
A fundamentally better service may be strangled in the cradle by Google operating at a loss for years and then shuttering the service, raising prices, or making some other negative trade off.
Not necessarily. It'll always be a small project for a company like Google and will eventually be merged into some larger corporate structure (YouTube Game Stream or whatever). It'll take product cues from that larger entity, so won't be as dedicated to propose as a small start-up would be (already in this thread we've discovered the site is Chrome only). But it'll still dominate enough of the market that the small start-up will not be viable.
In the old days, Google would have bought an existing player and scale it. Now seeing Google bootstrap this kind of mainstream business seems awkward. Also I personably am very doubtful of any new app/service that Google releases.
Google has always bootstrapped services, especially stuff from their 20%-time program. Orkut, Google Lively, Google Video, Wave, Google Offers, Google Health, and on and on.
Not to be overly negative, but could they have come up with a less inspired and creative name than that?
“Project” also make it sound like a ongoing effort of sorts, and not a (finished) product.
I think you read it correctly. As described in the post, it's a "technical test", not a product.
The gap between a "test" and a product is huge. I don't think it's wise to dump resources into building a product based on unproven technology.
I think there's something to be said for choosing an obvious and informative name such as "Project Stream" over a flashier but non-intuitive name.
Also, at least for now it really isn't a finished product. Perhaps they'll re-brand if the test pans out and they actually start selling a service, or maybe they'll just keep the moniker like Project Fi has.
I'm sure if the test is successful, they will change the name or integrate it with Youtube Gaming.
Totally valid criticisms