Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

gamerant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 633 posts

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#461

Post by googlryas »

bushbaba wrote: post #355
lelandfe wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Funny as stadia might have seen huge adoption IF they didn’t have a reputation of killing services and leaving the service user to hang. Killing of stadia only reaffirms peoples fear to use google products. This includes GCP.

They don't really have a reputation of that, except on forums like hn, which is not indicative of the broader market. Even among gamers, this reputation of Google doesn't exist.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#462

Post by toast0 »

somenameforme wrote: post #312
MichaelCollins wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#463

Post by MichaelCollins »

Aeolun wrote: post #445
MichaelCollins wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of first party games owned by Valve, they may earnestly intend to do as they say, and consequently aren't lying when they say it. Nevertheless, such promises about what will happen when the company is departing are worth approximately jack shit. Whether it's Gabe (or his heirs) later deciding to sell the company or creditors carving up the company after it fails, there are many scenarios in which those ea…

> they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam? I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.

Such a term would be poison to most game developers, particularly in the early days of Steam when it had nothing more than a handful of first party games. Before Steam achieved market dominance, how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#464

Post by corrral »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #365
lelandfe wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The same happened to Movies and Photos and my Docs and other files… And it’s great When I think about it, my family still has photographs from 70 years ago sitting around in family albums. Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

> Whereas I now struggle to find pictures I took 7 years ago.

The only reasonable solution today with the current volume of photos is to put them all in some service and let it use machine learning to auto-tag everything for you, and compile highlight reels, organize things by person/location/event, et c.

As with everything else, the only solution that doesn't eat tons of time (so, will actually be accessible to most people, who'll neglect hand-organizing thousands of photos) is turning out to be search, and letting AI find the important stuff.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#465

Post by js8 »

Ekaros wrote: post #343
cptskippy wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong. All my games are in the cloud and it is great; it's just not Google's cloud.

You know why I keep buying stuff on Steam? This is why... It is putting all the eggs in single basket, but at least it is the sturdiest and oldest basket.

I backup all the games I have on Steam locally. If they ever go under, I will get a DRM crack.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#466

Post by SkyMarshal »

lelandfe wrote: post #298
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.

> 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…

I didn’t even realize Stadia required you to actually buy games. I assumed the whole point of streaming is you pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to content. The business gets a cashflow it can securitize and sell on Wall St., and the customer gets unlimited content access, everyone’s happy. Really weird that Stadia required you to (also?) buy each game you wanted to play. If not for that, they never would have had to answer difficult questions like this.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#467

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

mrighele wrote: post #328
MichaelCollins wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Steam’s DRM “just works” and that’s why gamers don’t complain much about it. Also it’s the best way to play games under Linux. I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because: - I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on L…

Steam's DRM is also completely optional, publishers are under no obligation to use it and many don't.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#469

Post by jldugger »

hatware wrote: post #386
Gareth321 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Former Director of Product at Stadia. >Former Director of Product at Google AR/VR. >Former Head of Mobile, Group PM at YouTube. Ouch.

Ouch? In todays economy that kind of title inflation can get you places. You might run everything you touch into the ground, but hey who cares?

> You might run everything you touch into the ground, but hey who cares?

In a more perfect world, when this resume hits the hiring committee's desk, they read it and think "this leadership role is too important to fill with someone who's never managed a downturn."

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#470

Post by dougmwne »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #210
dougmwne wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

I have not used Sony’s game streaming. I have used Xcloud and it is technically the weakest compared to Stadia and Nvidia. I find there are a lot of compression artifacts and that the quality tends to degrade over an hour or 2. I have used it on several different gigabit connections and devices. Latency has always been good. I suspect issues with the data center Xbox hardware/software, not the connection to Azure.
Post reply on HN