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

When will Google shut down Stadia?

stadiacountdown.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 662 posts

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#491

Post by joshuamorton »

monocasa wrote: post #353
sjs382 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will provide you with downloads your data for a lot of their projects: https://takeout.google.com/

But for stadia, where the game licenses, executables, and probably save games probably can't be exported legally, how does one provide a migration paths once Google inevitably says "servers are shutting down in three months. You will lose access to everything on that date. We will give you a month free or something that in no way makes up for the service shutting down and you losing everything"

Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months?

Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#492

Post by ShteiLoups »

marricks wrote: post #112
iamsb wrote: post #88

A good model will be to start working on a new startup with a competing product as soon as google launches something. In couple of years when they shut down, provide migration paths. Swim in $$$.

I wonder about the damage Google does to any potential start ups in a field. How much buzz can you get when everyone’s first thought is “how could this be any good? Google already tried that and failed...”

I (and plenty of other people) love and make use of services up until the second they are killed by Apple/Google/etc. Just because a big tech firm doesn't like the product doesn't mean it isn't viable as a smaller business.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#493

Post by jmccorm »

binthere wrote: post #445
modwilliam wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard of OnLive until there were comparisons to Stadia. On the other hand, Google is able to do some great first party advertising on YouTube.

OnLive was kind of a big deal when it was announced. A lot of poeple used it and tried it. They "gave" some games for you to play for free and test it out. Also, Sony did a few things similar on Playstation but was never a huge success because of the technical implications.

I remember playing an OnLive demo of a (then recent) Mass Effect title. I was picky about both image quality and lag, and I was not in a top-tier city. I was very impressed! Unfortunately, the problems with the business model remained.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#494

Post by closetohome »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #435
Waterluvian wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...it costs money, the service costs a monthly fee, and on top of it you have to buy the games." WHAT? I've been under a rock and I assumed that it was a service where you buy a controller, already own a streaming device (or maybe the controller has the device in it), and pay monthly for the whole service. You have to buy the games too? That is an immediate about-face for me. If they shut down the service then I j…

I agree, if they had launched a subscription service to a large catalog of games that would have been really something -- like how Netflix created an alternative to the buy/rent single titles model. I suspect they didn't have enough clout with development studios to create that pricing structure. As an example, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is $59.99 on Stadia ($39.99 with subscription for 4K). On Steam it's currently $5…

It's entirely possible this is just a licensing thing. The early days of legal movie and music downloads were an expensive mess too.

I'd expect after a few years of game streaming competition someone will try to undercut the market with a Netflix model.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#495

Post by pavel_lishin »

juped wrote: post #93
dopamean wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which the…

Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)

> - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing")

I would phrase it as "other search engines are catching up to Google's capabilities", myself.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#496

Post by sjs382 »

adambyrtek wrote: post #337
sjs382 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will provide you with downloads your data for a lot of their projects: https://takeout.google.com/

Sure but how would that work for Stadia?

With Stadia, this concept probably relates more to game saves more so than games. [0] It's just your data—finding something that can use the data is another story.

That's beside the point, though—my reply, it's parent and it's grandparent were discussing Google products generally, not Stadia specifically.

[0] I realize that Takeout doesn't support Stadia. Though, for two different Stadia titles (Destiny 2's "cross-play" and NBA2K20's "MyPlayer"), I was prompted to log into a publisher account where my data could be linked/stored or something.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#497

Post by closetohome »

NotATroll wrote: post #385
nilkn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could play high-end complex modern AAA games like RDR2 on my iPad Pro while traveling, I think there's a valuable proposition there. But ironically that's exactly the area where Stadia falls flat: internet connections are weak or nonexistent while traveling, and currently it's not even usable from an iPad.

This is the thing I don't get. Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console? But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video. So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook. + the cost of the games. How many people is this? Genuinely.

It's not entirely about cost. I don't want a gaming console or a gaming PC because they take up space and require maintenance. But I'd still like to play modern AAA games occasionally. If I can do that from my MacBook, I'm interested.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#498

Post by monocasa »

kingosticks wrote: post #489
monocasa wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of any other system like that which allows you to export licenses to games? AFAIK, that's unprecedented in the industry, and explicitly against the contracts I've seen. Edit: Steam will let you _import_ a CD key, but that's the closest I can think of, and there's no way to export once it's in steam.

When the Ultraviolet movie service shutdown they had some mechanism to prevent users losing their purchased content. I don't know how it worked exactly but ultimately it must have been some kind of license transfer. I don't think it's a huge stretch to imagine something similar being applied to video games.

Ultraviolet wasn't a service really AFAIK, it was a DRM scheme that brokered licenses to other services. those other services could continue running off of the cached licenses, but there's no way to re auth licenses for Ultraviolet works you have but haven't registered yet.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#499

Post by monocasa »

joshuamorton wrote: post #491
monocasa wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for stadia, where the game licenses, executables, and probably save games probably can't be exported legally, how does one provide a migration paths once Google inevitably says "servers are shutting down in three months. You will lose access to everything on that date. We will give you a month free or something that in no way makes up for the service shutting down and you losing everything"

Well, what will happen when Google Play Music (or Spotify or Apple Music's subscription store or...) inevitably announces a shutdown in 3 months? Spotify's been running strong for like 13 years, GPM is about to turn 10, etc. None of those people have been bitten yet, and there's literally hundreds of millions of them.

Google Play Music/Spotify/Apple Music is next to free to run, it's basically just a CDN on their end. There's almost no user data that didn't come from user machines originally.

Stadia has all the user data on the backend, _and_ is expensive to run since all the processing happens on their end too.

Re: When will Google shut down Stadia?

#500

Post by akhilcacharya »

earhart wrote: post #311
akhilcacharya wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's...probably not true at this moment. They're using AMD GPUs, which generally support the sorts of workloads folks need, and AFAIK they haven't opened up support for AMD GPU spot instances to users. The OpenCL ML ecosystem is really lacking at the moment.

PlaidML? (Disclaimer -- I'm one of the devs. Even though we were bought by Intel a year or so ago, we've been pretty good about keeping the AMD / OpenCL support intact.)

PlaidML is super cool, but it's not used by Google.
Post reply on HN