The fact that you have to pay full-price for games AND rely on a cloud service makes this a nonstarter for me. The only way this could work is with a good subscription gaming model like Xbox Game Pass or PS Now. Or you give me a guarantee that I can take my games to another platform once Google inevitably shuts this down.
I can buy the game on Steam and play at my 4K laptop or stream it to my 4k TV. Am I missing something?
edit: sorry slowpoke here replying to himself: I get that you are "renting" a gaming hardware for that price, so you don't need to own a gaming computer. So at $120/y it is not bad, if the service is as promised. And then if they shut it down in 3 years then, you spent/lost $360 toward a gaming device. But what happens to the games you purchased? How about renting the games also, like an additional gaming subscription?
As your edit says, the whole point is for people who don't have computers that can run high end games. Also, once you purchase the game, you can play one any device (phone, laptop, chromecast, etc). It also has all the usual perks that comes with cloud games, such as seemlessly jumping from one device to another, instant launch into the game (no update/download time), etc.
It definitely has its pros and cons, and it all comes down to your specific gaming pattern and situation. If you already have a gaming pc or console, this may not be for you.
It fits in the niche of people who want to play AAA games, can’t afford a dedicated console and TV, and have a consistently fast internet connection.
Sarcasm aside, in the longer term there is probably a business model here where anyone who wants to play a subscription game like World of Warcraft signs up and gets a $100 tablet sent to them for free.
There also might be a model where very high performance rendering combined with ML does stuff where the consumer would otherwise have to pay thousands of dollars for. Not sure that would work in an AR-VR - competitive gaming future.
I saw a demo of Stadia in person a while ago. It was ok, but hardcore, competitive gamers aren’t going to accept the latency gap.
I play one "AAA" game: NHL. I buy a ps4 pro for $400 and then every 12 months I have to buy a $70 game and a $60 ps online membership. For this money I also need to wait 5+ minutes to get my ps4 out of sleep mode and into a multiplayer game. The service experiences pretty consistent downtime where I am locked out. The ps messages mobile app is terrible for trying to chat with a player. In game experience is even worse. I am also restricted to playing on my sofa at home when I spend a lot of time traveling for work with my laptop, iPad, etc. I would love to play NHL in my down time there.
If Stadia got EA Sports to publish NHL, I'm sold. The end to end product experience is just going to be miles better. I imagine certain games unlock Stadia for certain people.
Traveling with Stadia would be difficult imo. They already mentioned it's going to be pretty brutal experience on 4G while 5G should be good (but is barely available at all). However every hotel WiFi I have experienced is generally abysmal. So not sure how you are planning on streaming this service seamlessly on the go.
Still a no deal for me, if my purchases in Stadia cannot grant me access to the game on other platforms. Who knows when Google decides Stadia isn't worth it anymore?
Isn't the cold, heedless authority a trope of fiction? Doesn't it signify, "the authoritarian power that everyone agrees is bad, so can be used as a villain without offending anyone?"
Isn't that a trope of future dystopian Sci-fi? The cold, heartless, amoral mega-corporation, uninterested in any individual's plight, only in efficiency?
We no longer own our entertainment purchases. We no longer hold the data. We no longer own our communications with our friends, relatives, and coworkers. The very fabric of our relationships and our most intimate and valued expressions is now wholly contained on the servers of mega-corporations, to be traded and sold to other corporations, to be mined for information for profit.
Medieval peasants no longer owned the land they worked. There was another level of status in medieval England, the villein: a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land. The villein didn't own his land. He was a chattel accessory to the land.
I think the primary worry is that A. Google has a long history of shutting down products that seems erratic. and B. the economics of this seem precarious, thus pushing on A.
Where Steam has proven to be very profitable and Valve has a longer track record, and this is their primary business.
Tell me a mainstream (for Google scale) service that shut down. Offline Trips, Reader, Inbox, etc do not count. A couple of million users (at max) are just not enough. If bigger things shut down they either have a replacement or they are Google+. And no one complained when that was shut down.
Also Stadia has a subscription basis. Cloud gaming is just too important to let Microsoft win. Just like cloud in general.
Regarding the primary business argument. This is exactly what they are hedging against. Google knows ad revenue can‘t grow forever. Regulation might be coming. Cloud and stuff like this will have to take more and more of the load.
I believe there is a pretty big untapped market of gamers that are more than casual mobile gamers but not enough so to buy their own hardware. 120.- a year means you‘d have to play for 20 years until you reach the cost of top line gaming hardware. And a subscription doesn‘t depreciate.
Fiber is different I think because of shitty regulation that favors incumbents and the insane cost of financing a physical network.
Not quite. I can play steam games offline, I can share them with my friends/family and the most important part being - steam's platform has been reliable with top notch support since 90s while Google hasn't gotten that even in 2019.
You can only play them offline as long as it can check in to Steam every few days. If (once) Steam is turned off, it will no longer be able to do that.
Steam is Valve's only business, if Steam shuts down that mean whole company is in trouble or about to go bankrupt or bought out.
Google can shutdown Stadia because VP changed or Director got promoted to another part of business and nobody is there to sell this product internally - which means it gets shut down.
Except Valve could issue a final update that disables the DRM Check, and the game is still playable locally, right? More likely than Stadia developing a local client to sync game content/licenses to.
They actually do have the right to do this and a technical implementation. Essentially they've escrowed enough cash to run the drm for many years in the future even if they went out of business so they keep their agreements and their customers happy.
Also, having worked in game sales, it turns out that buying "drm free unlocks of long tail" games is not expensive. How do you think things like PS Plus Free Games works? Essentially game devs book revenue now for possibl future revenue lost. It's a smart trade for most games unless that game is say skyrim.
Doesn't that also apply to Netflix? If Netflix shuts down (and there is a real chance of that), what will happen? People will lose all those TV shows and Movies forever.
Maybe, but that wasn't the original argument I replied to.
To your argument I would say that Stadia is not the "Netflix for games". So I don't see why you expect to pay $10 and play any game you want like Netflix does.
Steam, one day, will disappear. Not tomorrow, but perhaps 100 years from now. On that day, you will no longer be able to download or even play those games for more than a few days.
That's a sad response. Video game preservation efforts are ongoing for games older than the NES right now, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case in the future for the current generation of consoles.
The cynical reply to this is also "Will I be alive to care?".
A more realistic reply might be "will any humans even be alive to inherit my game library?" or "will anyone even be able to run any of my games on the hardware and software available 100 years from now?"
If Steam truly shuts down, I doubt it will even take a full day before there's a conveniently-packaged crack that disables the DRM, with links spammed everywhere.
Nope. Depends on a fast, reliable, low-packet-loss network connection at all times. The game is running on a cloud instance and being streamed to you chromecast.
Not at all? You can (indeed, have to) download your purchases from Steam. Many of which are DRM free. Valve has also said they'll remove Valve DRM from the games that use it in the unlikely event they shut down.
There are, in other words, obvious contingency plans.
With this, the game you "own" lives and runs solely on Google's servers. If they decide to shut those servers down, you're fucked.
But good thing Google isn't known for suddenly EOLing popular products, right?
If you buy the game, do you actually own it though? Or do you lose it when Stadia shuts down? If I'm going to pay full price for a game, then I want to be able to play it 10 or 20 years from now.
To be fair, this is little different to buying a game on the PlayStation Store or Xbox Store. As soon as those go offline, you will no longer be able to download those games.
And so you'll be at the mercy of the lifespan of the hard drive. You won't be able to copy the games to another device as it won't be able to validate ownership.
An Xbox can play all games that have already been downloaded and all physical disks indefinitely, regardless of whether you have internet or whether Microsoft's servers are up.
While correct, that was not the point made in my comment. For downloaded games, once the service has gone offline, you are at the mercy of the lifespan of the hard drive.
If I had a physical disc, I could just buy another when it goes bad.
Not sure about Xbox because I haven't owned it in a while but PS4 lets you copy your system drive to a new drive pretty easily. The function is even built into the OS. I switched out the hard drive to an SSD using this technique.
This isn't being fair, this is projecting valid fears of a new service and comparing them to other platforms that haven't experienced said fears on any scale to make such a comparison valid to begin with.
We all know when MS or Sony get punched, they come back and swing harder. When Google gets punched, are they ready to dump another billion in to surviving or will they cancel and run? Google isn't known for long tail losess on new launches.
Nowadays it's very hard to own a game. Unless you buy on services like GOG, which offer DRM free installers. You don't really own your games on Steam or Origin and they can remove your access at any time without a warning.
The founder's edition is just to pre-order the countroller (and Chromecast + few more goodies), but at launch you'll be able to buy the subscription until the free tier becomes available
Is Stadia forbidden from changing this pricing model? Lets say I buy 6x $60 games. Is Google going to be able to flip a switch and change it so I need to pay a subscription to access previously purchases games? Am I prorated for downtime?
Wasn't this the concern with Amazon Kindle books? The mega-corporation would discontinue the service, and the media one had paid for would cease to be accessible?
Yes, indeed! However Google has historically shown that they are eager to shut down products, and the costs of distributing Stadia games far outweigh the costs of distributing Kindle books. Competition makes this also less likely to succeed.
I think the concern is fundamentally the same, but the chances feel much higher, which makes it a bigger worry.
the costs of distributing Stadia games far outweigh the costs
Games are just another form of media. YouTube costs Google a ton of money. But the control over media, virality, discovery, and advertisement is worth it to them. So has it been for video. So it shall be for games.
Google bought YouTube when it already dominated the video sharing market. Stadia might not dominate the gaming market in a couple years. Google likes to kill products that don't consume all, at least, that's what it looks like to me.
Stadia strikes me as an end-run around the competition of Twitch game streaming. One way to beat the competition is to reduce the friction around your own offering. The big draw of Stadia is the reduced friction between streaming and gaming.
YouTube is profitable and brought an estimated 15 billion in revenue for Google last year. It’s not operational because of some other motive, it’s operational because it’s successful.
The same can’t be said for this new business model. The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.
YouTube is profitable and brought an estimated 15 billion in revenue for Google last year.
Through ad revenue?
The entire point of the comment you’re replying to is that Google doesn’t have a good track record of letting products that don’t make them money live.
Not exactly. I thought the point of YouTube was to control media to control ad revenue. If Google is now directly makes ad revenue off of YouTube, that doesn't contradict my position. It means they're more successful and farther along than I was aware of.
You can create a backup of all your Kindle books, and continue to read them even if Amazon's service disappears. The only thing you won't be able to do is download them again from Amazon's servers.
Honestly? 4ish years of a stadia subscription will run any game released in that time period, and also the entire back catalog of PC gaming, minus some annoyingness around early 2000s games and permissions. My $500 PC runs VR at 1.7x supersampling with zero issues, and can 1080p60hz any game at all with zero trouble.
Four years of a subscription you can pay month-to-month (and cancel if you're not using it) is much more doable for many people than a $500+ upfront investment in a gaming rig. Presumably you also built this yourself at that price point, which is another thing other people are not as willing to do.
For me personally, I travel a lot so I like the idea of Stadia because obviously I'm not going to travel around with a gaming rig, and you can pry my 2015 Macbook Pro from my cold, dead hands.
This is great, I don't like subscription. I prefer to pay upfront price and play the game how long I want for free.
Last time I used a subscription bases streaming service for 6 months until I finished Witcher 3. When I saw how much I paid I started thinking that it would be better to create a gaming rig.
But with such proposition from Google I can't wait to have it available in my country.
I’m sorry, but the meme would not exist if it was not a reality. Google has a history of shutting down products that don’t reach a critical mass they find appropriate - regardless of how good the product is, or how essential it is to the users that adopted it. Inbox, anyone?
It is perfectly sensible to be mistrustful of Google services, especially new ones. It’s also pretty disingenuous to accuse someone of trolling when they clearly have been burnt in the past by Google’s practices of decommissioning good products all the time. I myself have used many products that Google arbitrarily decided to decommission. I do not trust any new services they create.
Saying Stadia will "inevitably" be shut down is an exaggeration and trolling regardless. It implies every single product Google launches shuts down, which is obviously completely incorrect.
Obviously it is exaggeration. Exaggeration is a common form of rhetoric used in normal conversation. Exaggeration, however, is not trolling.
And it often has a kernel of truth behind it. It makes perfect sense to be skeptical or hesitant to use a Google product, especially a new one, especially one with no guarantees made with regards to longevity. In fact, I think it would be reasonable for most users to err on the side of caution here.
> The fact that you have to pay full-price for games AND rely on a cloud service makes this a nonstarter for me.
I'd say it's not an issue. Why should cloud service equal subscription (renting)? Imagine a game that uses too much computational power to run on any local PC (a game using some complex AI that requires a cluster of servers for example). Cloud service is a good target for it. Why can't it be offered with "pay once, play as much as you want" approach? If it's just for pushing more pixels per second, then I agree - there is no need for cloud service for that.
What's the alternative, are you going to build your own cluster for such kind of things? As I said, for something your PC can manage, I don't see a need for such stuff. But for something more complex, it has interesting potential. The downside of course is that you can't just run it locally, unless you can match that computational power.
I think it provides potential for them. At least I see it as the main point, where it can differentiate. How it's used in practice is of course up to developers.
What's listed is indeed not a good example of how it can provide unique features. Most games are too focused on pushing graphics, instead of pushing complex simulation.
It's possible, but complex simulations have a lot of room to grow before they stop fitting on desktops. Go from one to ten threads and you still fit on a mid-high end CPU.
That's the point. If they are pushing it to the cloud, they can at least use it for something desktops can't handle. If they have a cluster, let them make some game with AI that can utilize it, instead of making it a replacement for something desktops can already do well.
What I mean is, they could vastly expand it and still not need a cloud. They would have to vastly vastly expand it, which is possible but much less likely.
And for AI you can already handle that in the cloud if you actually want to. The innovations you can get on Stadia are mostly tied to rendering capabilities.
> The innovations you can get on Stadia are mostly tied to rendering capabilities.
Which is my point exactly. They should have focused on innovations where cloud really can differentiate. Instead they run for "push pixels from the server, because your PC isn't strong enough" idea, which will be obsolete tomorrow, since PC hardware is getting better at pushing pixels every year.
