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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

#581
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goolge Stadia twitter account is saying the rumour is false: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656

Google's denial takes nothing away from the credibility of this rumor. Google isn't going to deviate from their own preplanned PR campaign on any product's demise just because a rumor leaked. That doesn't mean this rumor is true, only that the denial has no informational content for evaluating the rumor. Yet on the other hand, if Google really wanted to refute the rumor , they'd say "It's not true, we have a firm roa…

> only that the denial has no informational content for evaluating the rumor.

Disagree. They could have reacted in different ways:

- a) completely ignoring the rumor.

- b) make a "no-comment" message.

- c) deny the rumor

- d) confirm the rumor

a) and b) may increase the likelihood of the rumor being true. But going for c) is clearly an indication that it's not in their short-term plans.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#582
post #535

Remember the constant rumours that Google Cloud was being shut down? Ahh, good times. What ever happened to those rumours and the suckers that propagated that rumour?

It's a little unfair to put it this way given Google's track record with discontinuing products and services.

Not really. Microsoft has shut down and killed a significant number of services and products.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its a horrible proposition: pay to watch a video stream of a game you dont own that you can control with lag. why would I do that when I can buy a game on Steam or GOG or even outright pirate it, run it on my local machine, don't need to worry about internet upstream capacity, and I can take it anywhere? it never made any sense and will never make sense.

And if I still REALLY want those mpeg encoding artifacts and lag, I can still stream the game to another computer from my gaming computer using Steam, my AMD app, probably three other programs for games I already have installed etc.

If you own a gaming computer, stadia was never intended for you, lol. It's meant to bring similar experiences to people who can't shell out 3k

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#584
post #356

False rumor or not, Stadia has very little market fit. It's no solution for budget gamers. You still need to pay for the services, the individual games and need to have an excellent network connection to make it usable. It's not exactly a solution for the "poor". It's not really a solution for most casual/infrequent gamers either. Most high-end games are not casual games, they require a time investment. Plus, in this…

You only need to pay for the games (at full price because there's never a sale!) and your internet connection. You can play at 1080p for free. You need to subscribe to Stadia for 4k and some free games. In the end, I agree with you, it's just not quite as bad as you painted it.

Fine, but even then, a PS5 costs about 500USD. Considering a lifespan of 5-7 years, that's a pretty small investment for a regular gamer.

In return you'll have a nearly endless catalog of games (including from older generations), 4K, no compression or lag issues.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#585
post #343

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.

In addition to Steam, I have GOG and Epic linked to my Steam Account, they sync my Steam purchases in their library if the publisher allows.

So I would imagine if Steam did go under, they would all be clamouring to help users transition to their platforms.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#586
post #367

Earlier 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.

I don’t think voice is as sure as you say it is. They has a push recently to kick off low traffic users. I’m concerned about my voice number personally.

Don't use it myself but friends do. Didn't know about the changes.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#587
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will leave gamers with a strong, strong anti-Google perspective.

So what? What are they going to do - start using Bing and only watching videos on Vimeo and Nebula? Google can keep doing this for eternity as long as it doesn't result in people getting ads served from someone else.

It won't change search. It will make it much harder for Google to offer gaming-related services and be perceived as credible.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "netflix for games". I am baffled that anyone would "purchase" anything on a streaming platform.

It should have been "netflix for games". If it were, it would have been hugely successful. As it was released, I had zero interest in Stadia for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. And I am the perfect target consumer for Stadia. I have a large monthly budget for games, I travel enough that it makes sense to have a portable gaming platform, and I embrace tech early. Even with all this, I had zero inte…

But so what if it's canceled if you played some cool games for $10/month. I wouldn't care if Netflix was canceled. I would just watch my movies elsewhere.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#589
The bottleneck with Cloud Gaming is physical hardware (GPUs). You need both a dedicated GPU to run the actual game, but also a fast CPU (or expensive FPGAs) to stream the video to your thin clients. GPUs are expensive, power hungry, heat up quickly, take up space, and can't be shared across multiple players.

As a Cloud Gaming provider, you need to invest heavy capital into distributed hardware across the globe, before you make your first cent. This makes this business non-viable for all but a small handful of players in this space.

Cloud Gaming providers have been trying to get around the hardware bottlenecks by introducing various optimizations (time sharing, like with old mainframes) - at the expense of flexibility and the user's experience. Your users pay a monthly subscription, but get various limits imposed on them to allow for the other players to get enough GPU time and maintain fairness.

As a Cloud Gaming provider, on-top of the GPU bottleneck, you're also going to spend a lot on bandwidth (real-time streaming at high resolutions). Your clients also need a good internet connection to enjoy a seamless experience (which is still a precious commodity, in large parts of the world).

Finally, you need to offer your subscriptions at a reasonable price. If the price you're charging is too high, your clients might as-well just save up for a new PC/GPU for a couple of months and buy their own machine from which they can play and cut off the middleman entirely.

Without solving the hardware bottleneck problem - Cloud Gaming becomes too expensive to run, as it can't scale to serve everybody the way something like Netflix does efficiently.

This seems like a fundamental problem with this business that has brought down multiple big players in the Cloud Gaming world already.

Cloud Gaming sounds like an impossible business to run in 2022.

Re: Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

#590

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…

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 didn't trust it, but we tried https://hire.google.com/ because of this belief in GSuite products being stable. It was a great product. Had to move to Greenhouse.
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