271–280 of 633 posts
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Have you looked into using Geforce Now with your friend? It's a fantastic service and works on OSX.
Yes, used this before Stadia and it was rubbish. No where near as good and as stable as Stadia, also the monthly fee is a pain. With Stadia you can just buy the game and then play when you want, I don't think there is anything else like that.
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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…
>>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 GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved i…
The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.
The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!
The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:
* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)
* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games
The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.
[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.
AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.
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.
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…
XBox cloud is way better than Stadia, it's very smooth in both Chrome and on Nvidia Shield on my TV. Stadia's offerings are weak, buying licenses you don't control doesn't make sense, and the things like the Ubisoft integration is awkward and expensive. If I was going to use a non-Xbox Cloud service it would mostly just be a way to play Steam games on a cloud pc. But that's what I use https://www.paperspace.com/ + Pa…
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>Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help as great as that would be, the corporate-run governments of the world would see that as tantamount to legalising video game piracy, one of the few (if not, the only) media that have actually succeeded in making online piracy difficult
It would be difficult from a security perspective, but if they provided their own flash drives for backing up games it could be the best for consumers and the manufacturers. Nearly all software produced currently ships out with the assumption that updates can easily be pushed out. As a concrete example, twenty years from now I don't want to play the original Mario Kart 8 that shipped when the switch was released, I w…
Be careful what you wish for. You don't want them to have a dead man's switch on your physical copy.
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The obvious difference is that games downloaded from steam are on your machine and are yours to keep forever - if Valve goes bankrupt you can still have copies(whether they would launch or not is a different question, but I'm sure someone would find a technical solution). When Stadia shuts down that's it, the games are gone, because you can't make an offline copies of them.
If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios. Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of busine…
You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.
You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.
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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.
(I agree with you, if that's not clear: it didn't even create/define the market or take in any way significantly away from the incumbent.)
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> I wouldn't call Stadia a joke What kind of gaming platform randomly bans high profile game devs. because an automated Youtube bot told them to? A bad joke of one. > It does in fact work quite well. Didn't they fake high res video streams by up scaling bad renders? Haven't used it but as far as I understand there was quite a bit of overpromising and underdelivering going on. > other first-party console alternatives,…
Google's auto-ban/content moderation issues are a separate issue from the tech, which is fine. I never noticed issues with resolution or rendering, and haven't heard complaints about it from friends who tried it. We all ended up abandoning Stadia due to there being better options elsewhere, not because Stadia itself (aside from game selection perhaps) was bad.
You mean the same friends that "just stopped using it"? There is something weird about the combination of purely positive feedback and everyone you know dropping it.
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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.