71–80 of 98 posts
Stadia actually worked very well for me. I got it for free basically, and didn't end up using it a lot, but the technology was pretty cool.
Just did this update on my controller. Pretty cool process, it recognized the controller didnt have enough battery to continue and denied the update. After it charged for a bit, it was all pretty straight forward. Now to find the other controllers I got around the house and get them done. Had to use Chrome to do all the updating though.
Google has become impressively good at killing their own products. It's just unfortunate they can't support things enough to get them off the ground in the first place.
I don’t think it’s all on Google. The customers get a say too. Most gamers said no, so the product failed.
In theory, cloud-only gaming would make it possible for low budget gamers to experience high budget gaming. To play games they normally can't run because they can't afford the hardware. That should be the entire point of moving heavy compute to the cloud.
That theory doesn't work out because the network requirements to make this playable correlate with people that are NOT on a budget. Plus, you still have to pay full price for individual games, so in any case it's not low budget gaming.
Which brings into view the more likely target audience: the convenience gamer or "dad gamer". Gamers constrained by time but not money.
When you game infrequently yet consistently, a console is still the superior deal. They are heavily subsidized hardware, don't have the network overhead for rendering, a very long lifecycle (7 years), a huge selection of games, additional functionality (a media center for your TV), supports fully offline games, and are backed by actual gaming companies rather than the erratic toddler named Google.
Why would you possibly go for Stadia? To experiment? To not want to commit to owning a console? Fine, all valid. But you can't seriously think that's a sizable market. Simple market research or basic common sense should have revealed this prior to this disaster.
I'm especially calling it a disaster because during launch, Google got roasted with questions about the platform being future-proof, given their questionable reputation. They promised to commit this time, for real. Just 14 months later their internal game studio got shutdown, and things started rolling from there.
Zero market research and just throwing things at the wall, business as usual. Any other company being this unreliable would have been out of business long ago, but Google's arrogance knows no bounds as it prints money with ads.
They should not be celebrated for a graceful shutdown. They should be thought of as an unserious business to avoid. Don't ever put anything of value (time, money, energy, emotion) into a Google product.
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The Stadia controller integrated wifi functionality to send input directly to the cloud. It wasn't meant to be used with a local device.
My router has a latency of 1ms. Why doesn't the controller send input to the PC like a regular controller, which can then send it to the cloud? That would add 2ms of latency.
The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has to be running Chrome 108+ (My out-of-support chromebook with 106 or whatever won't work). Can't be a Linux box with Chromium or Chrome (always fails with "Close other tabs using the controller Couldn’t connect to your controller because it’s currently being used by another tab or program."). I eventually passed it through to a Windows 10 VM with google-brand Chrome and got it to work, and that exposed some extra details.
Instructions and responses:
Hold "..." during plug in
press "..." + Assistant (the other button with 3 dots below it) + A + Y all at once
Re-enumerates as "NXP Semiconductors SP Blank RT family"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Freescale Semiconductor USB Composite Device"
[Server does something]
Re-enumerates as "Google LLC Stadia Controller rev. A"
... it looks like it's temporarily nudging the NXP (formerly Freescale) MIMXRT1061 processor into some kind of DFU-like firmware update mode via the button combos, loading a different bitstream so it can act as a USB composite device to expose the update mechanism of the BCM43458 (radio), flashing that, then rebooting the main CPU back into the USB HID controller mode.
You do lose the headphone jack, which is a bit of a shame because having it work as a Bluetooth audio device would make it even more useful - but at least it's a Bluetooth controller.
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They did, they always said that they would refund the games if the service shut down, but i guess they didn't make it clear enough, marketing was horrible and onboarding / interface was awful. It's crazy how amazing the service was, but how terrible they handled everything else.
> It's crazy how amazing the service was It wasn't amazing though. GeForce NOW is so much better, at least for me. Higher resolution, more responsive, better selection of titles. I'm an early adopter of cloud based GPUs. I've tried them all. Inn the last ~6 months GeForce NOW has finally made it so I can play AAA titles seamlessly. I can't tell the difference between local vs. cloud. Your experience may differ if you…
Great to see! Has anyone tried one of the controllers with a Nintendo switch?
I haven't, but I suspect it would work well on a Switch hacked up with homebrew firmware and would not work on a vanilla Switch. The Switch is not very accepting of controllers other than the ones designed specifically for the Switch, but the homebrew crowd has done a very good job of fixing that.
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I don’t think it’s all on Google. The customers get a say too. Most gamers said no, so the product failed.
It is all on Google as the lack of a market fit is absurdly obvious. In theory, cloud-only gaming would make it possible for low budget gamers to experience high budget gaming. To play games they normally can't run because they can't afford the hardware. That should be the entire point of moving heavy compute to the cloud. That theory doesn't work out because the network requirements to make this playable correlate w…
To be fair, any product that allows them to capture data about your habits and improve their ability to push Ads at you is generally good (e.g., Google Account, Gmail, Android).
But I completely agree with you. They used OR instead of AND in their market research.
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The gamers said no because it was a product where you didn't own the games, didn't own the hardware it ran on, and couldn't play the games without being within a few dozen miles of a Google datacenter (an exaggeration, but I'm certainly not close enough to play anything with a reflex check, and I'm on fiber in the lower 50 states). I can't blame them; the value proposition for most gamers was approximately zero.
> and couldn't play the games without being within a few dozen miles of a Google datacenter (an exaggeration, but I'm certainly not close enough to play anything with a reflex check, and I'm on fiber in the lower 50 states). Counterexample: I was happily playing Destiny (a "twitchy" FPS) on an iPad in AirBnBs by Lake Tahoe or in Washington. I was really impressed. In contrast, one of my friends who migrated to Geforc…
I disagree with the characterization of Destiny as twitchy. Maybe at higher skill tiers, but it feels Halo-y in that the combat is more methodical against larger targets. It feels controller-first design, which limits how precise and quick players need to be.