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Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

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Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#201

Post by ohgodplsno »

game-of-throws wrote: post #10
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #2

Three sure bets in life: * Death * Taxes * Google shutting down services Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.

Does Google usually fire people when they shut down a service? I thought they were transferred internally to help build the next messaging app.

Now now. Google has cleaned up their acts and no longer has multiple messaging apps.

Can I interest you in a sixth, incompatible rewrite of Google Wallet instead that will only launch in India while you make Google Pay 7.0 ?

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#202

Post by hbn »

falcolas wrote: post #95
sithadmin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Stadia a joke. It does in fact work quite well. But it's not really positioned to compete with the other first-party console alternatives, nor does it have compelling features that make it a better choice than products let you DIY an experience (e.g. Parsec + self-hosted gaming rig, Steam Remote Play, GeForce Now, GPU-accelerated VDI as a service like Shadow...). For a while Google was literally givin…

Stadia works quite well if you live in a big city adjacent to their data centers. It’s pretty ass otherwise.

Yeah I gave it an honest shot when they sent out free Stadia Premiere Editions (controller + Chromecast Ultra) and committed myself to playing through Superhot: Mind Control Delete.

And let me tell you, the only reason I was able to finish it is because the entire gimmick of that game is that when you're not moving, time doesn't move forward. So I could just wait out the regular lag spikes that happened every single play session. I would never choose to play a game like that.

I live in a moderately-sized city in Canada (~250,000 people?)

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#203

Post by Karunamon »

macspoofing wrote: post #171
Larrikin wrote: post #18

"The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again. But…

>There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again. The problem is that there really isn't a way to legislate it. The content is tied to the service (either the platform service like the Switch, or the game service itself), and if the…

Mandate keeping the servers open. Or to put it another way, mandate that purchases which were advertised and sold as purchases of content (not "licenses", as the wink and nod legal fiction the industry likes to fall back on when questioned) remain fit for purpose, or the buyer is entitled to a full refund.

Then let the industry figure out the technical details. Most of these services amount to a bog standard download of encrypted files. There is absolutely nothing about this that requires any more than the most basic infrastructure anybody reading this could set up.

Alternatively, we force them to describe these time boxed, locked down, lacking basic consumer rights things we're purchasing as the rentals they actually are.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#204

Post by OskarS »

havblue wrote: post #153
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #15

"there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show. This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.

I would think it would be trivial for them to pay to let another service transfer the licenses. Of course, this would benefit potential future competitors' market share. So I guess they think it would be better to screw their customers? (Granted, it's all a rumor so far)

My guess is that they're gonna. Google is starting to get a reputation for this, and this would be an ESPECIALLY egregious example. Nobody would ever buy a digital good from them again if they didn't do some version of this (lots of people are skittish about it already, but this would make it so much worse).

I don't think it's "trivial" though. They probably have to do some negotiation with both Steam as well as each individual publisher of games on the service.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#205

Post by fluoridation »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #104
tokai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would still have your games files and be able to run them. Steam is not a rental or streaming service.

That's how GoG works. That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear. Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential ha…

You're not describing how Steam is meant to work, but rather how things are likely to play out for a lot of titles if Steam ever shuts down. Yes, if Steam shuts down, any game that (due to technical requirements) requires Steam to be up will be left unusable, and the customers will be left with pretty much no recourse. Not because legally they're not entitled to the products they paid for, but because it would be impractical to enforce such a right.

No, Steam sells permanent licenses.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#206

Post by OskarS »

nickthegreek wrote: post #80
spywaregorilla wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why did you do that?

I had already tried Stadia with Cyberpunk, which was a great experience and better than the console launch of the game. So I actually preordered 2 copies of the Baldurs Gate 3, as I wanted to play with my wife who does not have a gaming computer. I figured $50 gamble was better than a $1,000 computer investment. There was an early access component to the game, which is why I preordered instead of waiting for final re…

Played Cyberpunk on Stadia as well, mostly just to try the service out. Not a bad experience, honestly. Stadia had the technical stuff pretty nailed from day 1. It was just the business model that was out of whack.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#207

Post by black_puppydog »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #15

"there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down." It lasted less than three years and will leave players with nothing to show. This is what people were predicting when Stadia lauched and part of the reason why it had poor adoption.

Mandatory XKCD piracy reference:

https://xkcd.com/488/

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#208

Post by xxs »

horsawlarway wrote: post #189
Ken_At_EM wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re of course entirely correct. Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing. Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve…

Gaming rigs don't cost 3k. You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone. And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms). Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you…

you can buy a decent system that runs the games better than stadia under $1k. you need 6600xt ($330), 16MB ram ($50), virtually any cpu ($150), motherboard $120, SSD - $80. That leaves you >250 for case, keyboard and mouse.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#209

Post by bastard_op »

I was interested when Google announced Stadia, as a full-time linux user gaming is still wishy-washy, but in Google's infinite wisdom, they would not let me use my paid gsuite account as a "business". Even though my gsuite account is simply my name and in no way business related. Same with Google Pay and other things, they will disallow you from using other paid Google services because you pay for your email, just ass-u-me'ing only a business would pay, unlike their 100m free(loader) users. Either way, do you want money or not Google, please take it! At that point I cursed Stadia service to fail, spit in their general direction, and went back to my playstation.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#210

Post by VyseofArcadia »

dougmwne wrote: post #48
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #2

Three sure bets in life: * Death * Taxes * Google shutting down services Admittedly, google stadia was kind of a joke since the beginning, but I feel for consumers who buy into googles promises and even a bit for the google engineers who may be out of work soon.

You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry. They had hired a gaming industry executive to lead the effort, started several in-house game dev projects, and starting negotiating streaming exclusives with many studios (much to the annoyance of people who owned games on GeForce Now who had them removed). I…

> Hope they sell the tech off to Sony or Microsoft which is actually capable of building sustainable consumer products.

No need. Sony and Microsoft have their own (quite good) tech for this.

Sony's actually been in the game streaming game for nearly a decade. PS Now launched in 2014. I haven't used it personally, but I hear it's great.

Microsoft xCloud has been available for almost two years, in preview for a year before that. I got home once and found my wife playing Dragon Age II. I sat and watched for a little, then she quit the game, and only then did I discover she had been streaming it. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea that it was being streamed. Truly impressive tech.

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