"Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Let us know if you have other questions."
Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
311–320 of 633 posts
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> "..they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own.."
Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Is Apple Arcade doing fine? In my small world I don’t know a single person who uses it.
Still doing better than Stadia will be after shutting down, assuming this rumour pans out.
At least with Apple you know the service is gonna hang around for awhile, even if it doesn’t set the world alight.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#314"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.
> Q: If the Stadia service is discontinued, do we know what (if anything) will happen with game purchases? > Andrey Doronichev, then Stadia Director of Product: > We get this a lot. I hear you. Moving to the cloud is scary. I felt the same way when music was transitioning from files to streaming. I still have all my old CDs in the garage… although it's hard to find a CD player these days :) > The same happened to Mov…
Seems like he left and got into Crypto?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doronichev/
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#315Prediction: the Google brand will be shut down at some point to make room for a brand that won’t have the stigma of shutting down products. Or a new Alphabet venture arm will be spun out so Google can buy them.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#316"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 will leave gamers with a strong, strong anti-Google perspective.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#317Not gonna say I called it, but...
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#318Three 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…
> 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.
I agree! They really gave Console as a Service a shot. But back in the day when it was launching, my take was that the "new console" part of it was secondary. The core goal would have been to get a foot in the game streaming market for their Android TV / Cast platform.
> dug in instead of pivoting
If this rumour is true, maybe that's exactly what's happening. They've proven that the experience is good enough for people to play games on it, and even pay for the privilege. So it's technically sound (depending on geography).
Gamers aren't going to play through the entire new Skyrim on Stadia, Google knows that. But what about Gamers (in the right geographical location) watching a Youtube video on their smart TV being served an ad? That ad for the new Skyrim has a "Play demo now" button, no download required, instant gameplay. Now that's an expensive ad if I've ever seen one.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 succ…
You'd expect that at this level of responsability and salary, the background check would be more than just a single scroll on his wikipedia page, but then again a clown is pretty much only hired for a circus, half of those taking those decisions have failed upwards themselves too.
Everything you mentioned has gotten successful both late in its existence, and very much after Harrison left.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#320Earlier 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.
The result of this will be that Google will be an anathema in the gaming space.