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Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

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Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#41

I'm sort of surprised anyone bought Stadia. What problem does it really solve?

There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2 games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#42

In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too. They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.

Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays seems a lot more trivial.

That's a quite different situation, Artifact is a dead product while Stadia is a recently launched product.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#43
post #5

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competito…

Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of the year (many of them mediocre, but still). When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

All the consoles go through the same thing every time there's a new generation. The consoles have never been backwards compatible, each generation invalidates your previous library. And they always begin with tiny libraries.

Here we are in 2020 and only now have Sony and Microsoft begun talking about backwards compatibility in future console generations.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#44
post #21

Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll lose even more momentum there.

On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own expensive consoles or PCs to play games.

I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of the year (many of them mediocre, but still). When you’re a massive global video game streaming service, you’re supposed to plan ahead a bit, don’t you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

It's tough to compare a company's first few steps into gaming to the established machine that is Nintendo.

Especially since the Switch eShop was pretty slow at launch. Not to mention a certain other Nintendo product that ends with U.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#46
post #5

1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competito…

What does "excuse" mean here, as opposed to "reason"?

Excuse implies a value judgement that the explanation is acceptable and therefore blame should be reduced or completely forgiven. A reason is simply the explanation with no judgement of acceptability or blame.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little bit silly about how on one end people stand united with gamedevs about the poor work/life balance and excruciating crunch time, yet they will complain when a company doesn't release any update during the holidays.

You're conflating two different sides of the industry (as is the parent comment.) A game dev studio is not expected to have monthly updates for any but the largest games. A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content. Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away seve…

> A store or platform, on the other hand, lives and dies by its content.

I agree that content is important, but if you're talking about new games, Google doesn't have much control, the developers works on those not Google.

> Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar

But this isn't about the free monthy Stadia content. Stadia has been giving 2 free games the first of every month since launch and has not slipped a single day. The two games for February were just announced.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#48
post #20
post #12

I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes. Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3]. I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the…

Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the consumers are so brutal and unforgiving. Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn'…

Companies might be cavalier about these things because the consumers are so often brutal and unforgiving (irrationally so, in so many cases).

There's no winning the PR game on Reddit or other social media sites when you have some motivated psychopathic shit-posters drumming up the negative sentiment - especially when the conversation gets titled that way early. There are a few sacred cows, but almost every other noteworthy game or console at some point goes through a similar phase. If the company keeps things afloat long enough while iterating on their product, the shit-posters generally get bored or move on to something else.

Many good products succeed despite it all.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#49

On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.

Related - I think instead of Stadia being pitched as a competitor to cutting edge gaming platforms it would have been interesting if they had started out with offering "classic" gaming content. A cloud service which offered me the ability to switch between (for example) Atari 2600, SNES, NeoGeo, Dreamcast and old school PC games is something I might consider depending on the price model. Yes, emulators exist but they…

There's nothing stopping someone from adapting an emulator to Stadia's rendering framework, although I'm not sure Google would approve the result. I agree with you that Google acquihiring (for example) Good Old Games might have been cool, but IMHO Google is pitching the other end of the performance spectrum: play AAA games on a Chromebook.

If they had done both then they could have released GOG titles as filler between AAA releases and that would have been something.

Re: Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support

#50

When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infr…

Another example of how google index it’s criticism and use it’s PR mechanical turks or staff to downvote critical comments.
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