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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

#241

"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.

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stoppe…

Yeah, I'm always very skeptical of new Google services. I use GSuite and Chromebooks, but I know those are heavily used internally at Google and I believe that they'll continue to invest in those. But every other service, nah.

Between their inability to provide support while a service is up and their consistent lack of long term vision/ investment for the services they create, it's just not worth it.

I can't imagine I'm the only one making significant financial decisions based on this sort of thought process.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#242

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…

Plus you can play more than the ~100 games Google's hand-picked to play on their platform.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#243

You would really hope there would be some far reaching repercussions for senior leadership at Google on this one. There are lots of projects that Google has tried and failed on, and sure, that happens. But this one is probably the clearest, obvious failure of execution. There is an absolutely crystal clear playbook of a Tech company forcing its way into the Gaming business. So how Google has managed to enter, complet…

No. In fact, the incompetent people at the head of those projects fail upwards. Take Phil Harrison, who is at the head of Stadia (not Stadia Games and Studios): - Worked at Sony Entertainment, handling the software side of things, was there to help for the massive fuckup that was the PS3 launch. - Got fired (or "resigned" in C-level speak), joined Infogrames (soon to become Atari) and majorly fucked up, saying that s…

One of the reasons for this is probably that all (minus Stadia, it seems) of the products you've mentioned might have had bad starts but ended up gigantic successes:

>PS3

performed extremely well, beating Xbox 360 by a fairly thin margin.

>Gaikai

sold for $380M USD to Sony (most people consider this a success, even if you think it should have been more.)

>Xbox One

lost to the PS4 by a factor of two but was still successful (50 million est. lifetime sales)

Even if every single thing he was in charge of failed catastrophically, anyone who isn't looking closely is going to see someone with a huge amount of industry expertise working on some of the largest and most successful products to ever exist full stop (not just in gaming.)

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#244
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stoppe…

Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.

Geforce Now seems to be doing alright.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how all of this works. If Valve went out of business then you wouldn't have any legal right or way to get the games you purchased on Steam. If Amazon shut down Prime Video then you couldn't watch the movies you purchased on it. This is not a unique problem to Google Stadia.

I believe Valve has promised to unlock all games purchased through their platform in the event that they go out of business. Whether they stick to that is another story, but it should happen for at least some games. They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power. Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.

They have a backup option built into the Steam client, so you're free to do that anytime. Offcourse, there's no guarantees with multiplayer games or always-on DRM as that's always been the case with publishers who choose to go down that route.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#246
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how all of this works. If Valve went out of business then you wouldn't have any legal right or way to get the games you purchased on Steam. If Amazon shut down Prime Video then you couldn't watch the movies you purchased on it. This is not a unique problem to Google Stadia.

If google were going out of business I'd agree with you, but they're not. As a business they have plenty of money. What they're (possibly) doing is shutting this service to save some money. I suspect they'll refund or at least credit the relatively small number of people who purchased games on the service. It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Go…

I doubt they'll credit anyone. Why would they? You purchased a license to play a game through their service. Their service is no longer there. I haven't gone through any terms of service for Stadia but I can't imagine that they aren't covered for this.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#248
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stoppe…

Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.

A better strategy would be to win the markets and profit from them.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#249
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't sign on to anything new google does for a few years now. It's going to be buggy but promising initially, then be poorly supported, and then be cancelled leaving you high and dry. If I was a large shareholder I'd be yelling to ditch Sundar everyday. The guy is a total idiot just floating by on ads dollars. Google could be so much more if they reorganized into conventional dedicated teams and stoppe…

Actually, this strategy works for google. Google enters these markets and then kills it for any possible future competitors. In the short run, it's a loss, in the long run, you nullify new possible competitors.

That only plays out if you offer anything to customers once the competitors are gone. Also: there’s still PlayStation, Xbox and even Apple Arcade doing perfectly fine in this space

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is highly unethical to take away copies of the game that players had to pay full price for. Stadia owes them a retail copy of the games they purchased.

That is how all of this works. If Valve went out of business then you wouldn't have any legal right or way to get the games you purchased on Steam. If Amazon shut down Prime Video then you couldn't watch the movies you purchased on it. This is not a unique problem to Google Stadia.

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