It's a lot cheaper. You can imagine the cost getting down to basically the cost of the controller if users already have a streaming device (eg Chromecast) capable of running the streaming client. Putting aside Cyberpunk's overall problems, it performed a lot better on Stadia than last gen hardware https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22167303/cyberpunk-2077-...
You're still paying for the hardware somehow, even if it's not in your home. Theoretically nobody's going to play 24/7 so you could share the hardware between multiple customers, but in practice latency means that your DCs need to be close to them anyway. The only way Stadia (or some other bullshit like it) could possibly be cheaper would be: 1. Price dumping 2. Preferential game pricing from publishers (to instead h…
How close do you think the user has to be to the DC? It seems like you're dismissing the hardware sharing out of hand.
From my perspective, I probably average 8 hours of gaming a month, so there is plenty of opportunity to pack my usage onto some shared hardware.
Well to be fair Stadia was an idiotic project that was doomed to fail due to physical constraints(getting sub 80ms latency, and that's VERY generous for input latency that people are used to), which are unsolvable. No ML does not fix that, because if game predicts your inputs are you even playing it, not to mention the frustration when it mispredicts. That's the sort of thing you have engineers for - so you don't sin…
The engineering side did a great job on a complex technical task. It's satisfactory, kind of works, not great, not terrible. What boggles the mind is that nobody is able to formulate who is Stadia even meant for. Who are the target customers? Draw a Venn diagram of people who: - care about gaming - are OK paying full price for their games - are OK paying 10 euros a month subscription - are OK buying an extra controll…
But Google makes all decisions based on data and research, we keep getting told.
I honestly don't see how Stadia could go away without refunding users for their games. So yes the worst case if you just have to buy it on Steam with the refund you get.
what do you mean? why would they? Does it indicate anywhere in the ToS that refunds will be made if your account is disabled? I'm a happy Stadia user and I'd love for this to be the case, but I think it's incredibly unrealistic. If Stadia shuts down we'll be lucky to get 3 months warning, let alone refunds.
There aren't many precedents to work from, the closest is GPM but that's not quite a match and there your purchases were mostly transferred to YTM and you could also download your MP3s. On Microsoft side, they closed their eBook store and refunded everyone's books, as well as extra credit for people who had annotations which were lost. While Google does deprecate products, almost all of them were free / small experimental services, so while we don't know how they would handle this case, I still just don't see how they can shut it down without either transfering your licenses to another service or refunding you. Do you have any examples of them leaving people completely high and dry on something people had paid for? Or any other tech company for that matter?
They shipped Outcasters and just today Journey to Savage Planet. Admittedly I believe both those games may have been in development before the studios were acquired, but they are both first party exclusive Stadia games.
Journey to Savage Planet is neither first party nor exclusive. It has Switch and PS4 ports. You'd be on the mark for Outcasters though.
Journey to Savage Planet was made by the studio they had acquired (Typhoon studios) which they are now letting go again. You are right that it's not exclusive, though I still think it would count as first party (or maybe second party?).
Like all those people who paid for Google music for years and then when it was killed and replaced with YouTube music lost out because some stuff wasn’t on there, or wasn’t available in their country, etc right?
Did they actually remove purchased tracks? Or just couldn't stream the same songs? You buy the games on Stadia so the comparison only works if it is the former.
I believe you can still download the mp3, just can't stream it since they don't have the streaming licences, though they have been re-acquiring a lot of licenses over the past year for YTM.
Nvidia literally throws you in a VM, where you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer. You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit. It also again assumed you have a Steam/Epic account to begin, or else that's another layer you have to deal with. With Stadia, you press one button and you're in the game 5s later. It also has deep integration, allowing friends li…
> you have to log into Steam and use it as a computer If I recall correctly, you have to do this once , and it can save your log-in details for next time. > You & I may be gamers or computer users, but normal people don't want to deal with that shit. Gamers are their target audience. > By having games integrate with Stadia's API, they can do other kinds of optimizations, like having simple optimized options, compares…
> Gamers are their target audience.
I don't quite agree on that one. If you already have a 2000$ gaming PC with a huge Steam catalog, Stadia is most definitely not targeting you. Nvidia is.
Stadia is targeting people who want to play the latest AAA game or EA sports game, without having to invest in a $500 console or $1000 PC. You just play $60 and you're good to go on your laptop you use for Facebook, or spend $100 to play on your TV. They're trying to expand the gaming pie, trying to get all those people who will play games on their phones because it's easy and low friction, but won't invest in high friction setups like a gaming PC.
And why would any 3rd party studio invest resources into a platform the platform owner isn't willing to invest in? With SG&E shutting down Stadia is dead whether they admit it or not.
I've seen this comment a few times now across HN and article comments. Can you say more about why you hold this opinion? It seems clear to me that Google deciding not to focus on game development is showing a level of awareness we should want to see. In fact, by redirecting those resources they are directly investing in the platform instead of content for it that, let's be honest, probably would have flopped. I've be…
You need to put yourself in the shoes of the game developer, not the shoes of the consumer. As a game developer, you have a range of platforms you could potentially target, and because you run a business your decision of what platform(s) to target is a purely financial calculus. Each platform you target involves significant costs (including not just engineering but marketing, support, QA, etc.). As you make decisions about which platforms to target you are thinking both about how many copies can I sell per year at what price and what is the risk that platform ceases to exist before I recoup my porting costs. With new platforms, the later risk is statistically very high (not just re:Google) so you look closely for any signals you can find before going that route. A heavy investment in first party titles by the platform owner is traditionally one of the strongest signals of commitment to a platform. Without seeing that commitment, most professional game developers will conclude the risk of platform shutdown is too high to justify the costs. Unity3d is arguably the counter example, but at this point their market presence is strong enough to provide other signals to potential developers. Absent that strong first party commitment, most game developers will only port to a platform if they are paid to do so, and while Google almost certainly did that in the beginning the signals that they are continuing to do so are weak, again suggesting little reason to belief game sales will remain strong on the platform and little reason to believe the platform itself will remain alive.
I'm dumbfounded at Google's lack of planning on this. I tried Stadia, and they had (have?) so few games that they seem to have neither search nor pagination on the list that you can play. None of the games are ones that I care about. It feels like they could have—at the cost of short-term profit and pride—partnered with Valve and shipped something mind-blowing. But instead we're left with a bunch of AAA games that fe…
Everyone knew this was a bad idea, and the truly curious thing is, how does anyone who greenlit this on any level still have a job? Stadia had a narrow set of interesting use cases around features deeply integrated with Google products: Zero of them were ready for launch, and I think all but one are still unavailable today. The value for gamers is debateable at best, but exclusive titles would be the only serious way…
I think it was a worthwhile project. The shame is abandoning it imo
GeForce Now can be used with Steam quite seamlessly. In fact, GeForce Now's value is to play the games you already own on various platforms on their hardware. They're not trying to be another games store.
To clarify the other commenter's point, I am a founders edition of geforceNow and it used to have just everything. Like if it was in my Steam library, I could play it. Early editions just basically launched a slimmed down RDP session with Steam being started. It was awesome. Now, they put you in a weird virtual zone where your library is restricted to only the game you are currently playing. And if that game is not a…
> You're a tiny minority among the people who spend money on games. Source?
Literally every single statistics out there on game ownership. In fact among high spenders there's a troubling statistics showing a lot of people buy games yet never even launch them : https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o... >Nearly 37% Of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played Steam's most played games list tend to change very slowly over time, with a few slots occasionally taken b…
I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make. My point was that I very rarely come back to a game to replay it. 37% of games going unplayed on Steam is orthogonal to that point, at best.