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Google is shutting down Stadia

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Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#191

Post by KMnO4 »

TillE wrote: post #17

You 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.

I’ll disagree on that. An extra 10ms is not perceptible in 99% (99.9%?) of cases.

Consider that a good gaming monitor has input lag of ~3ms, a TV in game mode has input lag of ~12ms, and in regular mode the input lag is >100ms.

I would argue that our brain is just really good at correcting for minuscule timings like that, and less than 1% of the population could even tell the difference between 20ms and 30ms lag.

I’ve used Game Pass Ultimate to stream hundreds of games with 80ms ping, and I can attest that you adapt very quickly. Even first person shooters were easily playable. The only ones that gave me trouble were Forza and GRID, both very fast paced racing games.

But let’s face it: there are many people who are happy to stream Civ, XCOM, and even Elder Scrolls, where input lag isn’t as much of an issue.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#193

Post by outworlder »

TillE wrote: post #17

You 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.

10ms is completely fine for any game you can possibly think of. Including competitive FPS e-sports. We are not superhumans and your monitor alone probably adds more lag than that.

What's not acceptable is jitter. If it's a constant 10ms delay, it's easy to compensate - for both humans and machines. That's even more so if everyone is subject to a similar delay.

If latency is constantly changing, that's where it can become unacceptable. Your machine better be on a wired network. If it's on wifi, this whole point is moot.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#194

Post by james33 »

Not surprised, but still rather frustrated. We literally just signed a deal to bring Arctic Awakening to Stadia in the last few weeks, and I know a number of other devs had done the same. They never even gave it a chance. What did they expect, to take over the gaming market in a few short years with hardly any content?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#195

Post by danso »

How much of Stadia tech/innovations will we see in ongoing/future Google products? There was a lot of hype about how Stadia's (potential) input-lag-reduction tech, but how successful did that end up being?

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#197

Post by xxs »

minimaxir wrote: post #8

The real question here is why it took so long to shut down Stadia, especially from Google. It never had any traction at any point in its history.

>It never had any traction at any point in its history.

B/c it was from google - the company the launches stuff and stops carrying afterwards... and b/c it was marred with promises like "negative latency". But mostly it required to purchase the games on their platform, requesting a self-lock in.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#198

Post by dougmwne »

I am more entertained by this than I should be. Back when Stadia launched I was in a Reddit thread saying that the blatant double-dip business model of subscriptions + purchase stunk and that I had no faith in Google to not shut this storefront down shortly. I was immediately roasted by a flock of obvious astroturfers telling me that this was an absolutely serious move by Google to dominate the console games market and that the executive in charge was a big shot games industry person who was going to made this an unstoppable product. The paid astroturfing felt very weird coming from Google.

Then they started locking up game publishers into exclusive deals and getting games removed from other streaming services, a definite dick move. It was obvious that this special executive in charge was pretty consumer unfriendly.

Now this service is being shut down with little notice and while it’s great that they are refunding the purchases, there’s also the matter of the Stadia Pro claimed games that were part of the subscription benefits but will be lost. Along with no clear plan for taking out save data, this is a real FU to anyone who believed those astroturfers and went all in on the stadia console.

The icing on the cake is this statement that it didn’t “gain the traction with users that we expected.” Ha! This business model was dead on arrival. The competition was innovating while Stadia stood still. And instead of giving an inch off the starting line, they took their toys and went home. This is one of the most petulantly childish things I have ever seen from them.

This company is a bloated rotting carcass. The regulators should chop it up and feed it to the seagulls.

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#199

Post by faller_slive »

branon wrote: post #67

Refunds are nice and all, but gaming is a time investment too. Wonder if they will allow exporting savegames, or will people's progress be black-holed?

Yes, you can download them through Google Takeout.

https://9to5google.com/2021/02/02/how-to-export-download-gam...

Re: Google is shutting down Stadia

#200

Post by nobodyandproud »

scarmig wrote: post #99
jedberg wrote: post #40

Google'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.

It's a bit of a conundrum: every company is going to shut down products. What's the best way to launch new, risky things? Startups can simply go all in on the product, and if it fails, the company dissolves, though people rightly are hesitant to go with a fly by night startup for exactly that reason. I'm not even sure that Google has shut down more products than an equivalently sized company. But it's certainly shut…

Shutting down most product lines doesn’t mean said product is rendered unusable.

It does mean any further support is non-existent. With PaaS and SaaS, this implicit contract between buyer and seller no longer holds.

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