A bit sad, they had the best tech by far.
Google is shutting down Stadia
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#182Heh, the comments in this thread[1] are hilarious in hindsight. >Stadia will exist by the end of the summer. You don’t have to believe me. Like I said feel free to come back to this thread in October.[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278402
Aged like milk indeed.
Writing was on that wall a long long time ago.
Thanks for pointing it out so that I could have a good laugh :D
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#183It was a mistake to get involved with game streaming to begin with.
It was never about the players, it was "everybody else is developing a game streaming platform so we should too".
In the last weeks there have been multiple streaming handhelds announce which leaves me wondering... "are there product managers who believe everything they see on TV?"
Most of the fun of a portable game console is using it on the bus, as a passenger in a car, or outside the range of reliable WiFi. If you believed everything you see on TV you might think "5G" is a solution but I have to break it to you that there are postage stamp sized plots in Washington, DC, New York, NY, and Los Angeles, CA that have 5G coverage.
Given that these e-waste devices are up against real portable game consoles like the Switch and the Steam Deck I can only hope the people who make the decisions to go ahead with marketing e-Waste products face some personal consequences for their actions, at the very least they won't be allowed to introduce more e-Waste products that hurt investors, gamers, game producers and everyone else.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#184Entirely not unexpected. Google kills an other product. Thankfully it seems they are doing right by their customers with refunds on pretty much everything.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#185I actually got Cyberpunk 2077 specifically on Stadia so I could play the meta-game of "Can I win Cyberpunk before the unaccountable mega-corpo revokes my access to Cyberpunk?" I will be losing that game.
I am impressed by the depth of your gaming!
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#186Google's reputation for not supporting things long term is finally starting to affect them in noticeable ways. Developers didn't onboard because they were afraid it would get shut down. It got shut down because no one onboarded.
Ironically, I bet if that Stadia would've done much better if it had launched with the promise of "if we do shut it down, we'll refund all your purchases"
Yes! I timidly used the service knowing that Google might kill it. If they promised me a refund I would have probably spent a couple hundred dollars on content, controllers and a pro membership.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#187You know it's gonna be bad news when you see a title like that. I've always been bearish on game streaming because it's just not practically, physically possible to solve the problem of input lag. Even an extra 10ms is going to be noticeable and unacceptable for many games.
Latency really isn't a problem in many contexts. I've got some prototype streaming solutions running in an azure region near me and I can't perceive any round trip latency compared to localhost.
There are certainly more edge cases and things to go wrong when streaming the entire experience, but the networks are only getting better over time.
Streaming games are also a big answer to many forms of cheating. Not all, but it would make a night-day difference for any competitive game today.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#188Staying clear of sunk cost fallacy too seriously to their own detriment?
Sign of rapid experimentation in a big company?
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#189Just a couple of months ago. "Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro." https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1552989433590214656
So that was a lie
I doubt it was a lie in the sense that the person who said it believed it to be false. I think this instead falls under Frankfurt's definition of bullshit: speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.
But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain.
So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.
Re: Google is shutting down Stadia
#190While inevitable, I am impressed they are refunding all purchases, including hardware. That can't be cheap.
I’m surprised, but I’m also glad they are doing this. It could be to avoid class action lawsuits. I used mine for a total of 5 minutes before throwing it in trash. It is a very unfinished product they shipped thinking they’ll solve it. But the reality is, even with the best internet in the country, the games were barely playable. I’m talking 600mbps download and a 100mbps upload speed.
Speed alone isn't what matters here - latency and jitter are more important. A 100Mbps speed test over 30 seconds is meaningless.
I've played multiplayer FPS games on a home-made setup with an AWS VM with GPU and Steam streaming (using a VPN to make both machines appear to be on the same LAN so Steam streaming would work).
This worked well, but only because it was on an enterprise-grade leased line with consistent 1ms latency to the AWS datacenter, and all wired (good wireless gear might've worked too, but forget about trying that on garbage consumer-grade hardware like your typical router or mesh Wi-Fi setup).
Is it technically possible? Yes and it works well under optimal conditions.
Is it possible for the average user who doesn't have good equipment nor the budget for it? No chance - it's a recipe for disaster. Those who do have the budget are better served by just buying a gaming machine and running the games locally.
Games streaming can be a value-add to a good ISP (such as Google Fiber) whose network actually permits this, but don't expect it to work on the majority of residential connections. The vast majority of them suck (whether because of the ISP's network or the customer-premises equipment), people don't know they suck and have no easy tools to test that, so they'll end up blaming the game streaming provider when it inevitably doesn't live up to expectations.
Until good networking setups become commonplace, game streaming will remain limited to a very small niche that have serious networking setups but for some reason don’t have a local gaming machine.