F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.
While I am not a fan of many F2P games, their popularity and impact are undeniable. The trap that you should avoid falling into is assuming that's the only way games can thrive. F2P games are huge and dominate the conversation, but I think indie games are the best they have ever been. My favorite game last year was Into The Breach, and by all accounts it sold well in the same market that Fortnite dominated in. Games…
Into the breach was a great game, but it is unlikely to have sold as well if it wasn't for FTL's success.
I really hope the latency we've seen in the live demo was due to the venue's poor internet connection because otherwise this will make some games unplayable. They mentioned that Doom Eternal will be available and that it would be a good benchmark for the service's latency but I'm waiting to see some independent reviews to believe it.
Also I don't really understand who's the target audience for this, I doubt people who currently own a console or a gaming PC will care unless the prices (of games or subscription) are extremely competitive.
The only thing that got me excited is that the infrastructure runs on Linux and AMD, this could have a great impact on Linux gaming.
..and I'd bet competitive gaming is out (need for low latency).
That's what everyone said about controllers for FPS games, yet there's still console tournaments for Call of Duty and the like. If everyone is playing with the same handicap, it's still a fair match. And sometimes mass appeal is better than playing at the top level.
Its special Olympics, average k&m players beat console FPS "champions" every single time.
I disagree. The natural business model will be a mix between subscription services and free to play games with micro transactions. Microsoft (and others like EA) is already moving in that direction with game pass (monthly subscription gets you all first party games plus partner games). The biggest concern is going to be internet availability and data caps. I tried the beta for Project Stream (now Stadia) this past wi…
F2P games are the incarnation of grindy.. and more of them is the worst thing that could happen to gaming.
For some people, the grind is the main attraction, especially if it's well balanced. Look at Path of Exile, that's one hell of a grindy game and people absolutely adore it.
I'm skeptical they'll be able to overcome the latency problem. At some point there's a hard cap that only infrastructure can help with - not software - and Google's already given up on rolling out their own infrastructure.
Google has more of "their own infrastructure" than any ISP you could name or any of the transit networks that people think of as "tier 1".
So, who wants to make a bet on how long this "experiment" will last? I'm thinking 2 years before Google gets tired of it and abandons it, and another year before it's taken behind the shed.
This comment has gotten so predictable and tedious on this site; I really don't get it. Google launches products. Some of them fail. That's life. Depreciation schedules for cloud services are one thing. Consumer products are another.
There likely would be no offline option for this if (when? Ha!) it gets shut down.
It’s not like a photo site where you can just download your content. Whatever is built to run on Stadia will not run on your home machine or anywhere else.
The computer scientist in me is giddy with excitement. If it is as good as it sounds, we are in a new age of gaming. Kudos Google.
> The computer scientist in me is giddy with excitement Why? What part of this is interesting?
Oh, I don't know. How about the world state saving part? Or what about the ability to instantly jump into the same game as your favorite streamer? Or how about the ability to play a AAA game instantly within 5 seconds without spending hours installing it and then hours patching it. Come to think of it - did you even watch the demo?
Rewrote this a few times. Overall I think this would be really bad for the gaming world. Not buying consoles would be nice, but the natural business model will be ads or pay per hour or pay per MB. This is going to further drive the industry to towards mass multiplayer and grindy games I think. More accessible but worse content. Indie shops would probably struggle even more under this model. The cost per user will va…
I think undoubtedly, I would bet on the longevity of a streaming service from Valve or Amazon more than I would one from Google. But Google's past history of killing free side services doesn't offer the most relevant precedence. This is a service into a mainstream (and growing) industry that gels with Google's strengths, particularly scalability and AI. YouTube Premium/TV would be better precedent, though the jury is still out on those. I think there's still a difference, though, in that YT+/TV entered a market with already dominant leaders (traditional cable, Netflix, free YouTube). If Stadia can satisfactorily mitigate the problems inherent to streaming, and get it out before Microsoft's rumored Xbox development, it will be in a prominent position in a new field for gaming.