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When will Google shut down Stadia?

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Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#521

Post by falcolas »

msh wrote: post #430
NotATroll wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing I don't get. Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console? But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video. So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook. + the cost of the games. How many people is this? Genuinely.

Well I bought stadia. With 3 young kids and a busy job i don't have a lot of time to game so I want something where I can just sit down and game. No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play. A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.

> A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.

Unless you have (particularly good) fiber, this probably won't happen. The bandwidth requirements are too high.

> No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.

FWIW, all of the current generation consoles (even the Switch) have a standby mode that will let them patch your games while you're not playing, meaning that in most cases when you go to play, you can immediately play. They'll even download pre-ordered games without your input.

The only time you would need to be concerned about download times is when you're purchasing a new game for the first time. That's typically a one-time event per game.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#522

Post by joshuamorton »

inetknght wrote: post #515
joshuamorton wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with these teams at Google. There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people) The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to sol…

> The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to u…

> If the sender isn't authentic, then the sender is spam.

What's your definition of authentic? Is a self-hosted email server authentic? How do you decide?

> If the user reports the sender as spam, then don't permit the sender to send more messages to the person who complained.

If 10000 yahoo accounts are sending spam emails to other websites, what do you do? Block all yahoo senders? Try to block the yahoo accounts as they appear?

> 3) enforce liability. if an ISP hosts spammers, then block the ISP.

All major ISPs host spammers. Often they don't know that they do. Is it worth cutting off all comcast users nationwide from being able to use email? If anything, this would further centralize on one or two trustworthy email hosts, because those providers are essentially their own ISPs.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#523

Post by dwheeler »

baq wrote: post #334
zerocrates wrote: post #215

"Google kills all their products" is a bit of an overused meme trotted out at any launch... But for Stadia it's a pretty legitimate concern, I'd say. The model where you're still "buying" the games ties you to the ongoing operation of the service much more strongly than in many of their services where an eventual migration might be a little painful, but it's still possible. The counterargument would be that they've d…

if you think about it, it isn't that much different from steam, there's an offline mode there and gabe promised a way out if they ever go out of business, but the concern isn't completely remediated by either. the only sure way to have your games working in the future is - unsurprisingly and unfortunately - to crack your copies.

There are fundamental differences between Stadia and Steam:

1. If Steam shuts down, Valve shuts down. If Stadia shuts down... Google is doing just fine.

2. What Stadia is attempting to do is much more technically challenging, and I've yet to see a strong reason people would want it. Steam fills a clear and unambiguous need, and does not depend on near-magic technology to work.

3. Steam works, right now, and is reliable. Stadia? It's unlikely to ever be reliable for many users. Maybe it will be, but that remains to be seen.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#525

Post by maest »

ircody wrote: post #518
maest wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a slippery argument. You can always underdeliver as long as you promise that 'products improve. This one will too'. How about I don't pay the monthly subscription/for the controller and tell Google that "payments improve. Mine will too"? I'm obviously salty because I preordered Stadia (against my better judgement) and it's terrible.

What’s terrible about it?

Latency is pretty bad (GFN by comparison works fine for me). Samurai Shodown, a brawler game, is mostly unplayable.

The overall quality is very beta (black screen in Stadia unless you disable hardware acceleration, which I have to do every time, Stadia can't easily handle multiple Google accounts, I have to change accounts every single time).

Probably worst thing is very Google-like support. Super long queues for "Customer Care", phonelines are closed at 10:30 AM because they're "Out of hours".

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#526

Post by falcolas »

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #350
mmanfrin wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass cost money, more than 10x what this cost, and that was not a signal of their long term ambition. The problem with Stadia is that it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games. What happens to those games if you stop paying the fee? If you stop using Stadia? If Google deprecates Stadia like many are worried. I'll tell you: you lose the game. If I, conversely, buy the…

PC's don't generally need a subscription service to access games or multiplayer, but your upfront hardware costs to play modern AAA games are huge. And existing consoles require you to: * pay a large upfront fee for the hardware * purchase games at full price * buy a recurring subscription service for access to updates and essentials, like multiplayer. Stadia doesn't seem unreasonable at all by comparison.

$400 amortized over a lifetime of 5 years (10, at the outside). ~$6 a month. You can also buy a console used for less than half the price at this point in the console lifecycle.

The game purchase story is identical.

The multiplayer subscription is approximately another ~$4 a month, and includes an average of two new, free, games per month. It's also not required outside of multiplayer.

So, the deal is virtually identical to (or better than) Stadia, but with much more stability in poor internet zones, and the chances of Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo turning off their entire ecosystem are much lower than Google's (they have a positive track record spanning decades on this topic).

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#528

Post by PaulHoule »

aglavine wrote: post #191
PaulHoule wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something similar is true about Microsoft in that it's had a few core products that have been big hits (Windows, Office, ...) and then to satisfy investor's growth expectations they plow the profits into other lines of business which often fail (Windows Phone, Hololens, Microsoft Band, ...) or stagger on marginally (XBox). Azure is the latest big hit. Somehow Microsoft has adapted to this reality with some grace, the…

Surface is a huge hit AFAK

I don't know if it makes money.

It's certainly helped push Dell and the like to improve the build quality, thermal engineering, etc. on their laptops.

On the other hand, the whole "Windows Tablet", "2-in-1", etc. hasn't been a big hit.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#529

Post by robbrown451 »

JohnFen wrote: post #413
robbrown451 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally a descriptivist vs. a precriptionist, but this is a different thing. Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct? To me this is the same. Can you show me anywhere "shutdown" is used as a verb (in the computer industry or otherwise) where it appears as a choice rather than a simple error? Like in the title of a well circu…

> Is there anyone arguing that, just because many people write "there" when they mean "their", that we should consider it correct? Not yet. But if that becomes common enough, then that just becomes how the language is, like it or not. I personally would hate it and would be that annoying pedant who always calls it out, but if people mostly accept it, then I wouldn't really be in the right. When usage is in transition…

Yeah, if it becomes common enough, I suppose you are right. But since this is a whole class of "phrasal verbs" that all have the same rules, it seems less likely that that is going to happen any time soon, as opposed to something like "all right" changing to "alright" which is more of a discrete case.

There is also the issue that phrasal verbs are often split up or rearranged ("when will they shut it down?" "it is shutting down", etc), which isn't all that compatible with merging into one word.

Anyway I'm glad to see they changed the title on HN, even if I got downvoted for my complaint. :) I appreciate your pointing out the value of this discussion, though! ("it's these sorts of debates that determine what the end result will be.")

I'm personally ok with the non-literal use of the word "literal," but that's a different tangent...

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#530

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

inetknght wrote: post #515
joshuamorton wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with these teams at Google. There are teams that actively (and solely) work on spam and abuse detection. They're larger than you seem to believe, though I won't give exact numbers. There's also obviously sre teams that maintain uptime. (Note I said teams, and there's a public approximate minimum size for an are team at Google of 8-12 people) The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to sol…

> The problem is that spam can't be "solved". Reputation is easy to solve: only accept email from a known list of good senders. Gmail, Yahoo, MailChimp (or not), etc. But that makes people on HN complain. So your have to try and infer reputation of mailservers on shared hosts. And spammers are always trying to beat you, and there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of spam outfits. Af they're sneaky. They try to u…

The world is so much more complicated than this.

Everything Joshua Morton said but also:

What is identity? A name? An SSN? How do you verify that for people in all the countries of the world?

How do you do that at scale? With hundreds of millions of users, you can't exactly call them up.

How many users are you going to have after you start adding measures to verify their identities at signup? How will the board of directors feel about that? And feel free to run your own company into the ground doing the right thing, but there are other email providers in the world who will happily accept the users you drive away.

What happens when people have their accounts taken over and start spamming? Were the accounts ever "real"? How can you even know?

What happens when the reports themselves are spam? Spammers will report other spammers to remove the competition. Or they'll just overwhelm it with useless fake reports to DOS your human reviewers.

You have to realize that every input to your system is a potential avenue for abuse. There are people sitting there all day thinking about how to prevent you from achieving your goals. Humanity went to the moon, we're problem solvers. If there's a way to manipulate and undermine your spam defenses it will be found.

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