Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.

2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.

3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...

4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction

Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:

An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.

That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.

Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).

And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.

But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.

Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above

Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.

In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally).

FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.

Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is wasted trying to re-register their new email with every single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer, youtuber, etc.

The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more humans or not.