"Scary" -- today's leading Condescending word. "Change is scary" coming along right behind.
How TF do they know what you find "scary" or not? Or does it just let them weasel out of the fact that you just don't believe them?
Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
501–510 of 633 posts
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maps, Voice, and Docs, seem to be here to stay. Not sure about anything else. Except Search, of course, I suppose they won't close that down any time soon.
Voice doesn't seem too well. It had no new features in a long while, and some essential features, like connecting to third party voice number, still require logging into old website... I use it daily but I worry that it will be gone any time.
I've been idly looking at migrating my stuff away from voice, but it's problematic because some 2FA stuff is on the underlying phone number because various stuff refused to accept Google Voice numbers due to it being a SIP number... and not everything will allow you to just disable 2FA while you're doing the switch, some stuff wants to always be tied to a functional phone number.
Thinking the solution may be that next time I upgrade my phone, I get a new SIM and run both phones at the same time for a month, transfer the google voice number to the new phone, and then do all the 2fa transfers to google voice (now AT&T) number.
(if anyone has any tips to get google voice numbers to be recognized as a cell and not a SIP I'd be delighted... that's the major functional complaint I've got with GV.)
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> this reputation of Google doesn't exist. To be fair, most gamers I’ve talked to don’t even know what Stadia IS. By definition, gamers play games. To do that, they almost always own a console or gaming pc to do so. As a result, they have no need for Stadia in the first place.
This is why I think things like Stadia are targeting a very small market.
You have casual gamers, that are perfectly happy playing natively on their phones or laptops at low settings.
Then you have “serious” gamers, that tend to be happy spending hundreds of dollars to make sure they have up to date hardware to get the most of their games (and thus, likely won’t be happy with the latency or game selection of Stadia).
Somewhere in between is a market of people that say “gee, I really want to play Destiny, at full graphics, and I’m ok with a little latency, but I can’t or don’t want to buy a better PC or $500 box for it”.
I’m sure that market exists, but it’s gotta be rather small in the best of circumstances, right?
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#504Earlier 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…
> I have a few hundreds games in steam
those are rookie numbers, a couple months of humble bundle and your library can be full of shit you'll never play
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#505"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…
“You will own nothing and you will be happy”
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#506"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 right here is why I couldn't give less of a shit about google's C++ replacement.
All they do is build hype and cancel without any trace even when things are successful.
I'm convinced they only kept search and gmail for ads and tracking.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 bec…
It seems reasonable for developers (as I’m not a developer) as Steam was just selling licenses.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geforce Now was probably the most consumer-friendly version of game streaming possible and every game publisher shat their pants and blocked it. Hell, even some indie developers blocked it. From a user perspective it's equivalent to renting an EC2 instance and installing Parsec and Steam on it, just automated. But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming servi…
> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service. nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.
It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#509I'd like to be a counterpoint for the Stadia bashing here: I'm not much of a gamer, but I've always been interested in playing Red Dead Redemption 2. However, I neither had a console nor a PC with a decent enough graphics card. This spring, I picked up a Google TV with Chromecast, and realized I could pair any bluetooth device with it. I bought a cheapo PS4-like controller off of Amazon, saw that RDR2 was on sale on…
> casual gamer Same. I had a month off between jobs and used a week of my evenings off to play through red dead. I don't particularly care about losing the license, because I just wanted to play the game through. Haven't touched it since then. Stadia's ideal market wasn't "real gamers" -- those folks will buy rigs. Their ideal market was people like you and me, who don't have the time or interest to justify purchasin…
Another same here. I didn't need to buy a console, a tv or even a controller. It feels like unlimited power to be able to access RDR2 on just another tab - 13 year old me would have gone crazy :)
Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down
#510Earlier 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.
I've already resolved that if this were to ever happen, I would go back to my teenage ways of pirating every video game I want to play.
I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.