Google Stadia

[Jimboxy]

What does he mean by streaming games they didn't pay for? IE paid to be able to steam them, or paid for the game?

[HandsomeDead]

He's suggesting that streamers should have to pay for some kind of licence to the developer / publisher.  Hitting streamers with a DMCA for music is stupid as it is.  A game like Among Us would disappear into obscurity without the exposure it gets from streamers.

[one-armed dwarf]

Developers also wouldn't see any of that money 90% of the time anyway.

 

Alex Navarro works over at Giantbomb so a measure like that would severely impact what they could do.

[DisturbedSwan]

RIP I guess. 
 

The tech is great, it was just a bit before it’s time and had no worthwhile exclusives. Still seems a bit premature to close before their first big AAA game is released but presumably is haemorrhaging money.

[DANGERMAN]

yeah, I was going to say, it's somehow lasted even less time than I expected

 

I hope they leave the servers up for the people that bought games for years and years. Or refund everyone

 

I've still got my OnLive console and controller. At least the Stadia stuff can still be used in some form

[one-armed dwarf]

Will this tech ever be 'for' its time tho, I just think latency is one of those unsolveable issues. Reason being is I remember playing onlive on a tremendous (for the time) 100mbps connection back in 2011 or so while living in Sweden and while it was impressive it was clear then how out of reach it was to most people. Super fast internet and a great home connection (WiFi) is something which a huge number of people don't have due to their location or the shitty routers that ISPs typically give their customers. To me there's nothing a company like google can do to magically make it better. They will argue otherwise but the barrier to entry for Stadia is probably higher than consoles or PC when you really get into it, unless you're just well situated.

 

The only future I see for tech like this is as an optional extra like Microsoft or Nvidia are doing. Google have this middleware now that they'll probably license out to some other company. That way the infrastructure does not go to waste and maybe there will be some decision makers with better business sense about the whole thing. As well as a greater level of interest in streaming video games, something I doubt Google had any real stake in after the first couple weeks of this thing's launch. They are constantly scuttling projects

[DisturbedSwan]

16 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

Will this tech ever be 'for' its time tho, I just think latency is one of those unsolveable issues.

Latency was never an issue with me for it, I used it over WiFi with my 70mbps connection and never had issues even with racing games and such. 
 

I know others weren’t so lucky though, but I can only speak from personal experience. For me the tech worked, there was just no reason to get it, they rushed it to launch without any games and then closed everything down before they had time to develop one. Indies like Gylt just weren’t enough of a draw.

[AndyKurosaki]

Hardly surprising. Google is famous for jacking stuff in, and until superior connection speeds are across the board (which we are way off), it just wasn’t going to work for a lot of people.

[Maryokutai]

What baffles me a bit still is that a company like Google thought this could actually work. And I'm not necessarily talking about the technical side of things, but the entire concept of how they wanted to sell the product. It was always a concept that should have been aimed at the less hardcore fraction of gamers and yet they never really managed to get to that demographic. Just the other day I read on a videogame board how someone recommended playing Cyberpunk on Stadia and the first response was that their laptop was too old. I mean if you fail to even reach everyone visiting a videogame board, then good luck going more mainstream.

 

And then the pricing, which was just laughably stupid. Paying full price for the rights to use a license for as long as the platform holder wants you to is just a horribly bad deal no matter how you put it.

 

And when both next-gen systems sold out last year, what did google do? Nada. They had the platform to make people, at least temporarily, jump ship because they could sell next-gen graphics without big investments but from what I've seen they mostly remained silent.

 

Oh well. I said this was dead on arrival in 2019. I suppose I was off by a year because I forgot to take into account the latency.

[mfnick]

2 hours ago, Maryokutai said:

Oh well. I said this was dead on arrival in 2019. I suppose I was off by a year because I forgot to take into account the latency.

Ha. 
 

Basically same. Have no idea who this was far. Just did nothing to compete with the established big players, the value was terrible and there’s the potential technical and data issues. 
 

2 hours ago, Maryokutai said:

what I've seen they mostly remained silent.

I will say around Xmas adverts were all over Youtube for it touting the no updates or waiting benefits. But I don’t know if they were targeted ads since I subscribe to a few gaming channels. & I am definitely not the audience for this. It needed to be aggressively marketed towards a casual audience. 

 

 

[DisturbedSwan]

It just seems ill thought out from the process, like they rushed it to market so it wouldn’t compete with the next-gen consoles coming out the following year but somehow expected it to do gangbusters with no AAA exclusive games and pulled the plug before any it had spent money developing had come to fruition.

 

The business model was all wrong, if they’d of adopted a Netflix style all-in-one subscription and the price was right then it could’ve had some success, even without the AAA exclusives. The store prices being more expensive than physical copies of games and no gift cards available like on PSN/XBL made it less viable buying digitally on there than elsewhere.

 

The messaging around it was never right. Who was it for? No one seemed to know, my own interpretation was that it was for us hardcore guys that didn’t want to buy a next-gen system, get all those shiny next-gen games with no up front costs, brilliant I thought. But that was never really emphasised and never really had long enough to come to fruition either, there were glimpses in things like Cyberpunk 2077.

 

For me personally, I was optimistic about Stadia at launch and used it up to about May last year but never touched it again since - aside from the Immortals demo. I was tempted to buy a few games on there in Doom Eternal and Cyberpunk 2077 but the high prices always put me off trying them on the platform. For me on the technical side, it ran superbly well in every game I threw at it but without the AAA exclusives there there wasn’t any reason to keep me going back to it.

 

I would’ve liked to of seen how it would’ve done if a huge AAA game on the scale and grandeur of something like Half-Life or The Last of Us had launched on the platform but we’ll never get that chance now.

 

Ultimately I was wrong about Stadia and wrong about a possible streaming future, all the naysayers were ultimately correct about it and even Google pulling the plug prematurely. I will always maintain the technical side of it was superb, there was never any latency for me but everything else they got wrong from start to finish, they never should’ve launched it without a huge AAA game and if they didn’t have one, keep it in the development stage until they did, at least then it would’ve had a fighting chance to succeed. All in hindsight now though.

[shinymcshine]

It surprises me that neither Sony or MS produce a stand alone controller interface for direct access to PS Now or Gamepass streamed games - or that neither of them allied with Stadia (where they'd benefit from monthly subs for those services).

 

Or perhaps it's just a dumb thought as maybe the tech is all too different?

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't think a AAA game would have changed anything tbh. It would still be a game that lots of people like me would be unable to play no matter how interested we were (except perhaps on ethernet).

 

Cyberpunk was a weird edge case for the platform cause the console versions were so poor, so stadia was like a 'close enough' way to get something close to the intended version of that game. Perhaps this is an indication of how the tech should have been pitched. High End PC (like 2080ti level) but with the caveat of you need really good internet and uncongested WiFi (good luck in a house share with lots of people connected to the same router on the same channel). But if you're competing with PS5 and Series X, lol no chance.

 

MS will probably do a direct access to their streaming service at some point I'd bet. The gamepass streaming stuff is probably not as good as Stadia yet though. Seems more like a long term thing for them.

[DisturbedSwan]

2 hours ago, shinymcshine said:

It surprises me that neither Sony or MS produce a stand alone controller interface for direct access to PS Now or Gamepass streamed games - or that neither of them allied with Stadia (where they'd benefit from monthly subs for those services).

 

Or perhaps it's just a dumb thought as maybe the tech is all too different?

 

 

You can use PS Now on a PC with a DualShock 4 (presumably now a DualSense too) but yeah there's no way of directly accessing it through a TV, phone etc. I believe unless through Remote Play.

 

With Game Pass you can use an XB Controller on an Android phone to play stuff and there's talk of an Xbox Game Pass app for Samsung TVs but I'm not sure that's a thing yet.

[Jimboxy]

People have sideloaded the Xbox android app on to other android powered devices like TVs, steaming sticks, fridges etc and used it to play Xbox games, seems to work ok.

[shinymcshine]

Cheers, so it might have made sense for either Sony or MS to partner on Stadia, since the above methods are a bit faffy and rely on you already having some gaming hardware and not viable if you want to play on a TV - albeit IIRC that would have required the enhanced Chromecast for Stadia to do that.

 

I'm sure there was a business decision made as to why it didn't happen.

[one-armed dwarf]

The director of Terarria had this account banned by google, which means he lost access to his google mail, google drive etc all cause of the stupid way google force a single login to all their services and automatically ban people for cryptic reasons

 

So now he's claiming he will just cancel the game cause it's been 3 weeks with no improvement on his case.

 

 

It's not specifically a stadia problem  but the thing is you can lose access to stuff like pension/healthcare if you use gmail to get into them. Something like this happened before also where people were spamming emotes on a youtube stream and had everything banned, google are awful

[mmmark]

 

[Nag]

So this is still a thing then?

[Craymen Edge]

"We hope you agree"? Am I supposed to know what Google employees are doing at work now?